>commercially operating

And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.

>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?

Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.

Or solar.

And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?

Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.

Have you read the comments?

One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.

Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.

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Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.

Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.

SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.

You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.

Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical. A bigger nuclear reactor will always undercut your price per watt.

The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.

Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.

>the entire US Navy uses them

Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?

You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.