As the article mentions; these reactors are legally just as dangerous as a full-size installation; it'll take a lot of political legwork to make them feasible. Said politics would be a tad more difficult than usual; since your average voter will think of the following:
a) you're literally putting nuke plants in people's backyards. folk will worry about getting green suntans.
b) assuming they're meant to be autonomous; there's the issue of potential sabotage. they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)
PS: perhaps this design would be far more sensible as a cluster (housed like a normal nuke plant); theoretically the entire plant would be safer as the smaller reactors would be easier to control and contain if things went south.
I'm not a nuclear physicist but in what way is a nuclear reactor equivalent to a nuke ? AFAIK reactors can't actually reach the critical level that's required to create a nuclear explosion - it's a completely different design, different isotope concentration, so the biggest threat is exposure to radioactive materials and maybe heat/pressure explosion. And 4S has passive safety mechanisms so sabotage would have to be manual, chain sabotage would be impossible, especially if they were properly monitored.
The biggest safety concern I've heard is that you could use them to create small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, but I guess if you know how to do that you could get it in other ways.
They aren't; that's what people will think of them as though. It's taken us this long to actually build a new plant period; it'll be a while longer before people are convinced it's safe to live across the street from one.
This contradicts what you said in your first post: "they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)"
What is the issue? That they are dangerous or that people perceive them to be?
"Nuke", in this case, was being used as a shorter way to say "nuclear reactor". Nuclear reactors are, of course, completely different from nuclear bombs.
a) you're literally putting nuke plants in people's backyards. folk will worry about getting green suntans.
b) assuming they're meant to be autonomous; there's the issue of potential sabotage. they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)
PS: perhaps this design would be far more sensible as a cluster (housed like a normal nuke plant); theoretically the entire plant would be safer as the smaller reactors would be easier to control and contain if things went south.