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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.wired.com/2004/09/china-5/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2004/09/china-5/</a>
And a contrasting article from IEEE: <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...</a><p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power" rel="nofollow">https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...</a>
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.<p>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.
SMR proposals still use one plot of land. The plant is just built to house multiple reactors.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational.<p>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.
Although generally safe these reactors aren't <i>totally</i> safe.<p>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.<p>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."
"Miscreants" conjures in my mind an image of little British boys with dirty feet in Industrial Revolution era attire.
Well, gas and oil plants are actively emitting pollutants that kill thousands. And nuclear still is the safest energy sort available.
> I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers<p>Why is that a concern?
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.<p>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.<p>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
Seems like you'd end up with even more waste in the end. For example, the navy's nuclear reactor graveyard:
<a href="https://interestingengineering.com/military/trench-94-the-eerie-final-resting-place-of-us-navys-nuclear-submarines" rel="nofollow">https://interestingengineering.com/military/trench-94-the-ee...</a><p>You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.
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.<p>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.
> but SMRs should be cheaper and easier to construct.<p>The word should is doing some real heavy lifting there. Especially given the subject.<p>I guess we'll know in 2030 when one should come online.
"a supplement produced with financial support from Oklo Inc"<p>"Oklo Corp. Logo
Oklo is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy"
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.
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.<p>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.<p>This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
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.<p>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.
With solar and batteries getting cheaper and cheaper, is this still a topic? Or at least for the time being until that "cheaper" gets cheaper enough?
> 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.<p>Yes, it does seem to still be a topic.
there is just one problem<p>like everything else with the current US administration<p>they deregulated nuclear safety<p>* <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...</a><p>* <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-radiation-safety-rules-alara-update" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-rad...</a><p>any other administration even Republican I'd be willing to listen to why<p>this administration will happily kill thousands or give them cancer if it means another million dollars in their pockets<p>there is only one kind of nuclear reactor that should be built anymore<p>and that is Thorium reactors, they "fail safe" (or at least safer)<p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ</a>
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 <i>not</i> quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better.<p>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.<p>Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.<p>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.
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.<p>The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.<p>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.