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Re:Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor by Animats on Thursday May 04, 2023 @07:22PM (#35823412)
This seems to be a smaller version of the AP1000. Nice big containment vessel. That's a good thing. Fukushima had an undersized containment which failed, and Chernobyl didn't have much of one at all. Three Mile Island had a good containment vessel, and so their meltdown damage was contained.

Some of the "small modular nuclear reactor designs are built on the assumption that they don't need a full scale containment vessel because nothing can go that wrong. That may not be a good assumption. There's a lot to be said for large amounts of steel and concrete around reactors.

Re:Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor by evilos on Friday May 05, 2023 @07:40AM (#35827961)
Which SMRs don't have a full scale containment vessel?
Re:Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor by pfdietz on Friday May 05, 2023 @08:42AM (#35828478)
None, although I think some (NuScale?) save money by sharing pressurized containment volume among multiple reactors. Just hope you don't see multiple correlated meltdowns.

Containment vessels could also be made smaller if steam filtering were used instead of planning to just contain and condense it. I don't know if any SMRs plan to do this.

Re:Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor by Animats on Friday May 05, 2023 @02:41PM (#35833491)
NuScale's containment vessel is a metal cylinder around the reactor.[1] Each reactor has its own containment vessel. It's just slightly larger than the reactor, like Fukushima and Peach Bottom. Here's a good drawing.[2] No user-serviceable parts inside. The building is not a containment.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1535/ML15355A411.pdf

[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image.jpg?id=2557419...

Re:Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor by evilos on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:02PM (#35869008)
As other poster mentioned, each nuscale module is fully self contained. Not only that, but they've modeled every module having a simultaneous scram in a 12 module plant, and modeled that the water level was lower than nominal. Still walk away safe.