I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!

There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.

I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like the idea of proliferation of nuclear reactors on every corner because I don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to handle that many reactors. I'm all on for huge ones but they have obvious issues.

Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.

Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.

I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.

> There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.

I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.

> Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!

And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.

And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...

I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.