Will the small modular nuclear reactor community be able to find an optimized point on the physics vs modularity curve? I don't think so, and discussed it with Bent Flyvbjerg, global megaproject expert.
Wind and solar have plummeted in costs and grids with higher penetration of renewables are actually more reliable than coal, gas or nuclear heavy grids using industry standard metrics for outages per customer per year. Germany and Denmark, for example, see half or more of their annual electrical generation from renewables and have outages averaging around 13 minutes per customer per year, compared to over an hour for neighboring, nuclear-dominant France, two hours for the US and Canada, and four hours for coal-heavy Poland.
That’s not because renewables are magic, by the way, it’s just that forward thinking grid strategists and managers tend to favor renewables and also build reliable grids and markets that make them work well.
[...]
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
[...]
SMRs are intentionally going back to the smaller scales of the 1950s and 1960s, scales that were tried and abandoned because they weren’t economical at that scale even with standardized reactors from subs and carriers, without any safety regulation to speak of, with no Fukushimas or Chernobyls in the rearview mirror, and with a national strategy that focused on nuclear energy, aligned with the US’ nuclear weapons program.
And note that SMRs don’t do a thing for the absolute worst case of projects in Flyvbjerg’s data set — nuclear waste storage facilities.













