Small reactors have problems

This blog was jumping with my joy when I first heard we were to approve some modular fission-reactors, in the runup to Trump 1. Six years later, Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder, (now) sponsored by the IEEE, is delivering a report-card. For a third of the advertised gains.

She would be going short. - if she were allowed to invest, which journalists shouldn't be (I know, stop laughing).

So far the record shows that the main investors today, as they were in the 1950s, aren't plebs. In the past six years, when a nuclear company has sought non-government investments, the monies aren't enough to float payroll. If Amazon or other data-facilities be ordering these, they're subsidised. The 1990s called and are calling it corporate-welfare.

Her source is Marisol Garrouste, Brendan Kochunas, Max Vanatta & Michael T. Craig from August. As well-known, economies of scale apply to nuclear physics. Small reactors produce less energy per the waste generated; this isn't like stacking rocket-engines for additional thrust. And every reactor requires its own slate of safety and environmental reviews.

We might dodge some environmental concern by using reactors in the middle of Nevada, or the vast outbacks of Canada or of Australia, or isolated mining valleys. Such could bypass some of that since they sometimes figure that revenue and labour trump already-remote and -barren environments. "First-Nation" sovereign lands with their own laws might get in on this one.

Given the above, Garrouste's quartet actually consider/s SMR a good bet if they are only delivering high heat, directly. So they could be used in endothermic smelting near those mines. They also might be used in breaking hydrogen off of water, but that too is a government project dependent upon "green energy goals". Where they don't much help, at their small scale, is in electricity generation, even to supply the remote miners' towns.

To check in on SpaceNukes: they're selling to a prototype rocket and to a prototype waterbearer. It seems however that most of their income is coming out of DARPA.