Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

One option is to also mandatorily lock the powerplants to the municipal grid, and provide rebates to data center operators via net metering instead of simply giving them cash back.

But yes, the lax security and the laissez-faire don't give a shit attitude of the current admin far outweighs any of these benefits

> Samuel B. Morris, the general manager and chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, traveled all the way to Geneva in 1955 to attend the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. There, he made a case for small reactors, arguing that because the “number of small units…is many times the number of large units,” there could be “economy in development and repetitive manufacture” of the small units.

> But nothing in the history of small nuclear reactors suggests that they would be more economical than full-size ones. In fact, the record is pretty clear: Without exception, small reactors cost too much for the little electricity they produced, the result of both their low output and their poor performance.

For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many. Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers. Costs that you can ignore while you're just building a prototype.

If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors. Thing is the nuclear reactor part is only 10-15% of the plants full cost: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.

But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's frankly too big for most markets. Only very large electric markets can can easily digest a new always-on 1000 megawatts of electricity, and you need to be building multiple plants at a time for this all to be economical. That's why the nuclear power rollout of the 60s through 80s worked, and why China and to a lesser extent India's nuclear industry is thriving presently.

With an SMRs smaller scale, there are just way more available projects where nuclear is feasible, and so a more consistent workload can keep everyone employed and subcontractor's backlogs filled. The flexibility in scaling lets you reclaim the benefits of having an experienced workforce and that knows how to build nuclear power plants, something we lost in the west when we stopped building them.

Why is that a concern?