> 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.
SMR is driven by funding, insurance, and regulation. China doesn't have these issues and builds conventional at a great price. China is building 37 reactors, only 4-5 are SMR-type units, and are larger at 600MW. The rest are standard PWR, and the 40+ in planning are dominating by standard PWR.
Regulatory risk is too high, building too infrequent to understand costs, funding for first-of-its-kind is too hard for nuclear in most countries. SMR makes it fundable. New designs give the hope that regulatory burdens can be lowered.
China's nuclear production is only growing in an absolute sense. As a share of production, it's dropping, from a very low level of 4%. China is building other power types far faster than nuclear.
This is an important point: in a lot of ways, SMRs are a strictly worse than 1000MW plant. The potential financial benefits come from all the other factors you mentioned. I would rather have a "worse" nuclear power plant that actually gets built.
> 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.
Some things would depend on the specific location and the grid around it:
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick may be 'overkill' because when it goes down every few years for inspections/retooling, there's little other redundancy available. SMRs would be useful for that regional grid: install 3-4 and one can go down with less fuss.
In (e.g.) Poland there were small/medium coal-fired generation stations near coal mines. If the mines are now empty (or retired for climate change), then the grid connections could be reused for SMRs on an existing generation site: less need to find a new site and build new power pylons, etc.
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.
Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
The biggest costs to nuclear are associated with each of them being unique snowflakes. They need to be standardized and mass produced to bring down costs.
So the dream is many big plants (eg starting 10+ per year), which is what France did and China does, but since we can’t seem to have that here, small reactors are an attempt to solve that.
NuScale infamously failed to get their reactor funded in Utah (UAMPS and the CFPP), it was just too expensive. Costs kept rising, large utilities declined to sign up, and in the end those utilities remaining were going to hit the contractual off ramp so it was just cancelled. I have some links to minutes of municipal utility meetings in Idaho Falls that showed the wheels coming off (even though there was great local support for the effort.)
Their design requires considerably more steel and concrete per MW(e) than a large conventional PWR power plant. You don't do civil construction in a factory, and that's where much of the cost is. Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nuclear expertise is important to the country's military.
But coal is still 49%. The whole point of nuclear in a carbon-free, mostly-renewable grid is to avoid needing enormous amounts of storage and overproduction. That's a need that doesn't come up when you're still half fossil.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I'm concerned lax physical security will allow miscreants to blow them up and spread nuclear materials over a wide area. The ensuing panic would totally destroy any goodwill nuclear power has gained over the last 20 years or so.
I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers playing the Good Samaritan with their claims of "Carbon Neutral Environmentally Friendly A.I."
Terrorists are only one piece of the issue. Corporations and "Responsible Adults" have done more to harm nuclear power in this country than any terrorist act has.
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
that they get price competitive with low quality gas turbines run by state subventioniere natural gas...
or the government actual enforces proper environmental protections so that they can't continue running gas turbines without proper filters (and this isn't even (mostly) about climate change, but air pollution harming people)
and from how it currently looks both things seem unlikely :/
Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.
Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.
Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).
The differences in deaths from (non-accident) nuclear and wind/solar are very small compared to the amount of energy produced. The effect of the statistical value of lives lost is tiny compared to direct differences in energy cost, and so shouldn't have any effect on which is chosen.
This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.
The cost for coal depends a lot on how the emissions are treated, and how deaths from CO2 are calculated. A general problem with the latter is these are global deaths, and foreign lives are valued far below domestic lives. Kind of horrible, but choices on spending illustrate this.
The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
Regardless, better that they're the ones who spend the money for these reactors, and better that they use nuclear instead of coal or gas plants.
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
Hmmmnnnn. I remember getting excited reading a Wired article "Let a thousand reactors bloom" [0] - but that was back in 2004. I'm still waiting for a "pizza-safe" pebble-bed reactor.
This Nature article dubs TRISO fuel as "accident-tolerant", which is just as well given the lamentable history of it in actual use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor for instance, which suffered so many accidents that it was known as the "Shipwreck". It ended up with TRISO pebbles getting stuck in the reactor vessel, the primary circuit being hopelessly contaminated with fission products, and is now impossible to safely decommission using current technology.
It seems to me working SMRs really would be valuable, particularly for off-grid applications or where process heat is needed alongside electricity generation.
But as someone who was, like you, taken in by the pebble bed hype last time around, I've now learned to be much more sceptical about new nuclear technologies until they've actually been proven in practice.
TRISO is also more expensive, both in fabrication and disposal. It looks to me like another case of nuclear mis-optimizing for the wrong metric (safety vs. cost).
I wish this subduction zone idea would just die. It's dumb. Things move so slowly it wouldn't help, and subduction zones have large amounts of volatiles coming back up via mud volcanoes and, later, actual molten rock volcanoes.
If you want to dispose of waste deep in the sea floor do it far away from subduction zones. Or just store it cheaply in dry casks and minimize the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste.
Short-term, subduction zones are deep, maximizing the difficulty for malicious actors trying to get their hands on the waste. The subduction itself is more a marketing feature, for folks who oppose putting the waste anywhere on the surface of the Earth.
Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes. Yes, millions of years in the future, some micro-percentage of the subducted material will re-emerge, hundreds of miles away, via volcanoes. So will vastly more natural radioactivity, whether or not we dispose of nuclear waste in the subduction zone.
"There are 10 active mud volcanoes in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc which can be found along a north to south trend, parallel to the Mariana trench.[43] The material erupted at these mud volcanoes consists primarily of blue and green serpentinite mud which contains fresh and serpentinized peridotite material from the subduction channel. Fluid from the descending Pacific Plate is released by dehydration and alteration of rocks and sediment."
(for description of how subduction zones create magmatic volcanoes)
Subducted material is very wet, and as it descends the volatiles ascend to melt the rock above, creating magma (water reduces the melting point of rocks just like it reduces the melting point of sugar.)
A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production.
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.
The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational.
I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.
We're looking specifically at new power plant builds. The majority of that is in Asia, with China and India being the bulk of it. But there is a lot of Asia outside of those two, and in particular Southeast Asia has a lot of potential. There is a lot of long distance transmission line connectivity already, and more planned, but you still want to product power close to where it's used so as to avoid losses in transmission. And the finances for a smaller country are just more straightforward if you're not spending multiple billions of dollars on one giant plant.
The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.
South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.
Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.
This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.
Even in Europe you can't necessarily bring online a 1200+ MW plant just anywhere, especially in the recent market where some PV production is curtailed in summer and brings the spot rates to zero.
In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.
Big reactors also need a lot of cooling, and we've just had a very dry summer in Europe which forced some nuclear power stations to dial down or shut down entirely.
I wish the article had more details on the cost to build these reactors, the cost to operate, refuel, dispose of fuel and then decommission. Details about how long they’re expected to operate, and how much power they will generate in their lifetime. Then we could get a projected cost per kWh for the power they will generate.
I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much they caused the cost of power to go up.
This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
Donald Trump does a lot of stupid evil stuff to further fossil fuels but getting all the tech nerds excited about even more expensive nuclear power is actually evil genius.
The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
Natural gas and hydro are firm power. You're correct that nuclear is not a good backup power source, but that's not the suggestion. The question is whether adding high-capacity-factor firm generation reduces total system cost. In regions where hydro and geothermal are unavailable, nuclear is the next best low-carbon option. I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 100% renewables, especially transmission capacity between regions.
I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 99.99% renewables and/or using it as a straw man against the highly inexpensive and achievable 95% renewables.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
>in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
> In March 2025, the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced US $900 million in grants to support the deployment of SMRs. One year later, the European Commission said it would invest up to €200 million (US $228 million) in the construction of SMRs.
Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
Land is cheap. Even in Europe, the cost of land onto which renewables are put is small compared to the cost of the renewable energy equipment itself. Here in the US, it's common for the land to be just a few percent of the project cost.
But batteries can be very distributed and stabilize and prop up the grid in ways a huge plant can't without building out distribution. (Situation dependent of course.)
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
That 12 day event was a regional event in Germany, there was still lots of wind in the North Sea. And sun & wind didn't drop to 0, it dropped below 10%.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
Hydrogen is one possibility for a 100% grid to cover Dunkelflauten and seasonal leveling (the former for wind, the latter for solar). To see the effects on overall cost per MWh, explore at https://model.energy/
This is a great temporary solution to continue developing AI up to a reliable state, then the ownership can be transferred to a particular state that is major global presence in cybersecurity, semiconductor design, and tech innovation, who is already well positioned with key stakeholders in most if not all American tech companies with strong grantees in government support.
Major technology companies have signed strategic agreements for SMR development, but regulatory approvals and supply-chain scaling place widespread commercial deployment in the late 2020s through the 2030s. Now that we are in astronomical debt, it's our responsibility to turn our nation into a wasteland in order to provide this particular nation a scalable, full spectrum and robust AI defense solution that will allow them to achieve their geopolitical goals safely without fear of reprisal while they continue to expand their influence in tech and the global economy, hopefully culminating in extracting taxes on ships going through key trade canals near their borders and beyond.
Nuclear regulation could genuinely do with a lot of reforms that would streamline the process without appreciably impacting safety. Everyone would benefit. And that's the huge problem with the administration's breaking of trust and naked corruption: we as a lay people, what should we think if they come out with a bunch of proposals eliminate a bunch of commercial licensing requirement and lowering radiation safety standards? Is that because the old rules are genuinely archaic and not serving their purpose... or because Trump's family and donors are personally financially invested in the very companies mentioned in this article.
Nuclear power's biggest problem is that it attracted, even back in the 1940's, a figurative army of techno-utopians - whose pie-in-the-sky promises of electric power too cheap meter, flying cars, and better-than-Santa's-sleigh safety were not quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better.
Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everything". Even as various accidents, leaking waste dumps, and regular warnings of deadly communist mushroom clouds made it damned obvious to the general public that they were being systematically lied to.
Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.
Yes, it'd be nice to see competently-done SMR's in regular use, for the use cases where they make sense. But if I was a policy maker with finite political capital and resources, I'd probably be winding down nuclear power - both to show the public that I wasn't too gullible to trust, and to show advocates for other technologies that lies and delusions would be carry harsh penalties.
The general public doesn't care about utopian-measuring contests between different groups of zealots. They want cheap electricity on demand, safety, and a sense of control. Solar does a pretty good job of offering that. Nuclear? Nope.
They're all ridiculously fuel inefficient and we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of thousands or tens of thousands of these reactors. Aside from that one that starts pre buried, where the plan is to just leave a spent nuclear reactor buried in a hole. A cost that will almost certainly be externalized to the taxpayers.
The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.
Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.
'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.
It sure is. If the world were nuclear powered (all energy, not just grid) with burner reactors, estimates of uranium resources (not reserves) at up to 3x the current price would last about five years.
A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
> 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...
Regulatory risk is too high, building too infrequent to understand costs, funding for first-of-its-kind is too hard for nuclear in most countries. SMR makes it fundable. New designs give the hope that regulatory burdens can be lowered.
Regulatory arbitration like this serves nothing?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see more nuclear, but bad nuclear is not in fact better than none.
Some things would depend on the specific location and the grid around it:
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick may be 'overkill' because when it goes down every few years for inspections/retooling, there's little other redundancy available. SMRs would be useful for that regional grid: install 3-4 and one can go down with less fuss.
In (e.g.) Poland there were small/medium coal-fired generation stations near coal mines. If the mines are now empty (or retired for climate change), then the grid connections could be reused for SMRs on an existing generation site: less need to find a new site and build new power pylons, etc.
That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.
Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.
The biggest costs to nuclear are associated with each of them being unique snowflakes. They need to be standardized and mass produced to bring down costs.
So the dream is many big plants (eg starting 10+ per year), which is what France did and China does, but since we can’t seem to have that here, small reactors are an attempt to solve that.
Their design requires considerably more steel and concrete per MW(e) than a large conventional PWR power plant. You don't do civil construction in a factory, and that's where much of the cost is. Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
It is already stupidly expensive when running at 100% 24/7. Now try running it only when renewables and storage doesn’t deliver.
I'm concerned lax physical security will allow miscreants to blow them up and spread nuclear materials over a wide area. The ensuing panic would totally destroy any goodwill nuclear power has gained over the last 20 years or so.
I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers playing the Good Samaritan with their claims of "Carbon Neutral Environmentally Friendly A.I."
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
I wouldn't be so sure about that (in the US).
Like usage in A.I. data-centers assumes
that they get price competitive with low quality gas turbines run by state subventioniere natural gas...
or the government actual enforces proper environmental protections so that they can't continue running gas turbines without proper filters (and this isn't even (mostly) about climate change, but air pollution harming people)
and from how it currently looks both things seem unlikely :/
Surely solar is orders of magnitude safer.
Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.
Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.
Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).
This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.
And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
Why is that a concern?
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
The word should is doing some real heavy lifting there. Especially given the subject.
I guess we'll know in 2030 when one should come online.
To make the figure at least palatable for public funding the project assumes enormous learning effects for subsequent reactors.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2004/09/china-5/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor for instance, which suffered so many accidents that it was known as the "Shipwreck". It ended up with TRISO pebbles getting stuck in the reactor vessel, the primary circuit being hopelessly contaminated with fission products, and is now impossible to safely decommission using current technology.
It seems to me working SMRs really would be valuable, particularly for off-grid applications or where process heat is needed alongside electricity generation.
But as someone who was, like you, taken in by the pebble bed hype last time around, I've now learned to be much more sceptical about new nuclear technologies until they've actually been proven in practice.
You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.
If you want to dispose of waste deep in the sea floor do it far away from subduction zones. Or just store it cheaply in dry casks and minimize the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste.
Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes. Yes, millions of years in the future, some micro-percentage of the subducted material will re-emerge, hundreds of miles away, via volcanoes. So will vastly more natural radioactivity, whether or not we dispose of nuclear waste in the subduction zone.
That's simply not true. Yes, there are volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges, but subduction zones also have plenty of activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_volcano
"There are 10 active mud volcanoes in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc which can be found along a north to south trend, parallel to the Mariana trench.[43] The material erupted at these mud volcanoes consists primarily of blue and green serpentinite mud which contains fresh and serpentinized peridotite material from the subduction channel. Fluid from the descending Pacific Plate is released by dehydration and alteration of rocks and sediment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_arc
(for description of how subduction zones create magmatic volcanoes)
Subducted material is very wet, and as it descends the volatiles ascend to melt the rock above, creating magma (water reduces the melting point of rocks just like it reduces the melting point of sugar.)
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 should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.
The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.
South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.
Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.
This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.
In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.
"Oklo Corp. Logo Oklo is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy"
I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much they caused the cost of power to go up.
This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250507123042/https://docs.nrel...
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
From this article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
Yes, it does seem to still be a topic.
If this is the goal, they're failing spectacularly.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
Major technology companies have signed strategic agreements for SMR development, but regulatory approvals and supply-chain scaling place widespread commercial deployment in the late 2020s through the 2030s. Now that we are in astronomical debt, it's our responsibility to turn our nation into a wasteland in order to provide this particular nation a scalable, full spectrum and robust AI defense solution that will allow them to achieve their geopolitical goals safely without fear of reprisal while they continue to expand their influence in tech and the global economy, hopefully culminating in extracting taxes on ships going through key trade canals near their borders and beyond.
like everything else with the current US administration
they deregulated nuclear safety
* https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...
* https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-rad...
any other administration even Republican I'd be willing to listen to why
this administration will happily kill thousands or give them cancer if it means another million dollars in their pockets
there is only one kind of nuclear reactor that should be built anymore
and that is Thorium reactors, they "fail safe" (or at least safer)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ
Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everything". Even as various accidents, leaking waste dumps, and regular warnings of deadly communist mushroom clouds made it damned obvious to the general public that they were being systematically lied to.
Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.
Yes, it'd be nice to see competently-done SMR's in regular use, for the use cases where they make sense. But if I was a policy maker with finite political capital and resources, I'd probably be winding down nuclear power - both to show the public that I wasn't too gullible to trust, and to show advocates for other technologies that lies and delusions would be carry harsh penalties.
The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.
Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.
A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.