All of the plans that I've seen for SMR 'farms' were hopelessly naive when it came to security, decommissioning and compliance costs. They were just a hair above that 'swimming turtle island' when it comes to design phase realism. I really see them more as a way to milk subsidies than something that will actually happen in the next 30 years or so, especially not given the rate at which we are putting up solar and stringing HVDC interconnects, which in my opinion are the answer to the storage problem.

The analogy is incorrect though.

There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.

You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.

A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.

SMR's have neither of those economics of scale. Ontario is building 4, and there's a couple others at similar scale. Nobody is contemplating the thousands you'd need for the scale necessary to make the switch from bespoke to assembly line worth it. So the worst of both worlds.

Nuclear plants were already operated pretty safely and the saty was constantly improving as people were learning more and research was progressive.

You do not achieve safety by hard-coding all regulation to a specific technology and make everything else practically impossible.

It works like this:

"Your computer needs a C compiler with good error messages otherwise you can't build this",

"Ok but we are building a LISP machine, there literally is no C".

"We hear you but your C compiler needs good error messages".

"Ok, could you maybe tell us who you would accept from, we can show you our LISP compiler will have amazing error messages"

"MMhh sure we can do that, give us a full specification, and then we get back to you, but its going to cost you for every 1h we invest in that. And at the end, will tell you what we will accept as an application"

"Ok, how long will that take and how much will it cost"

"We can not give you a time or a cost, you will just have to wait (implied it will take at least many years and at least 100s of millions of $ with no outcome certainty what so ever)"

That's just the tip of the iceberg. And then each individual country has their own version of something like this.

So we have a market that is ultra heavy capital that needs scale. But scale is basically impossible to achieve.

Thankfully the US government has finally made some steps into relaxing some of these and adopting a smarter approach, but its like turning the titanic, see GAIN for example.

I am not suggesting we hand out plutonium the everybody who asks for it.

In fact what I dislike, is that anybody who even suggest that regulatory form is part of the solution people instantly bring out 'we need some regulation' or 'new regulation wont be magic'. Both are true, and both are irrelevant.

The de/re-regulation of many other industries has had dramatic effects, think of airlines, trucking, software, the Bell System and so on and so on. The current regulatory regime was created at a high point in panic and anti-nuclear sentiment.

What I would like to see is something like what NASA did, for commercial cargo and commercial crew. You start with something achievable (commercial cargo). Create programs where the government want's to achieve something, and has multiple companies bid in a technology independent way. Start with some smaller things, nuclear reactor for space, medical isotope reactors, off-grid nuclear and then do SMR.

That fact that people can't even agree on what SMRs even are tells you everything. You advocate that they are essentially the same thing as a regular power plant, others say they are small boxes that can be put at any neighborhood corner.

But everything because they are going to scale magically. Nobody ever explained how that scalability is supposed to happen. A large portion of any nuclear reactor is still a steam turbine, we have built lots of these without seeing prices fall exponentially (like solar) why should adding a couple (really a miniscule) number of SMRs suddenly fundamentally change the way their price scaling?

> If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!

86% of generation added in China in 2024 is renewable.

I'm glad I'm not alone thinking this.

Much of the renewable price/cost calculation is plain wrong because we have offloaded the cost to other countries (who gladly still use fossil fuels).

On top of that there is the problem of maintaining a real economy inside the country, to benefit people actually living in said country. I believe most of HN don't care because they get paid to make stuff that is sold globally and they profit from that. They can't understand that not everybody can do that and you need to create value inside of the country so that they can share/benefit from that value creation.

I also have access to solar generation statistics in the middle of France and they make no sense without the generous subsidies and electricity generation purchase from the provider. But plenty are profiting from that so of couse they are happy about it.

>They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941)

Attempts are made regularly, and nuclear plants all over the world implemented additional security measures after 9/11.

"A foiled Chechen rebel assault on the Russian city of Nalchik in October 2005 would have involved an attempt to hijack and fly one of five aircraft into a nuclear power station. Papers released in the UK in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) revealed there were more than 40 cases of potential security breaches at UK civil nuclear sites from 2004 to 2005."

https://www.rusi.org/publication/countering-threats-nuclear-...

>why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours

It's complex but a simplified answer is that Italy pays what it actually costs, while the French leaves a lot of the cost to their children.

The children (of the people who built the french nuclear plants) recently had to pay over 50 bn euros to cover the debts of EDF, and will likely have to pay another ?? bn to cover lack of maintenance on the aging reactors. (Google it). For 50+ years, france sold nuclear electricity at a loss, mostly unknowingly.

Once they have paid the sins of the parents, the remaining costs to maintain the plants for another 20+ years again will likely be postponed to the next generation, since covering the cost today would make the electricity too expensive to sell.

Note that France is running their economy at a much larger deficit than Italy for the past few years. Nuclear power that is not paid by electricity consumers now, but instead by the government, is of course not the entire explanation but it's part of it.