I would like to point out that the author of this article has practically based her entire life on being anti-nuclear... I'm not saying the article is worthless, but I don't know how interesting it can be to read the words of someone who starts from a conclusion and goes backwards to refute it and to bring arguments to her assumption.

Also, the article start in this way...

> In the past few years, investors, national governments, and the media have paid significant attention to small modular nuclear reactors as the solution to traditional nuclear energy’s cost and long build times and renewable’s space and aesthetic drawbacks, but behind the hype there is very little concrete technology to justify it.

This anti-research, anti-free-market, anti-technology rhetoric is terrible.... It's like those who 10 years thought artificial intelligence was useless.

Which technologies before being properly developed have been proven from the beginning to have no defects whatsoever? It is only through iteration and perseverance that something useful, cheap, etc. is created.

The "turning point" is something that happens through investment, research and competition. To pretend it doesn't exist by not investing in it because to some enlightened person it's a "useless" technology is a counter-sense.

Maybe so and it can't be really analogous but isn't one of the things that is still plaguing software people memory leaks?

How important is that?

And to what degree is that a problem which arose due to a little too much hastiness early on? And for how long afterward?

How much speculative investment has there been in software-related high-growth industries since, and if it was enough to put memory leaks in the rear-view mirror, when did that turning point finally occur?

With nuclear it seems a lot more is at stake, so people would want to know how long has the possibility of that kind of leakage been completely overcome before widespread deployment would be agreeable anywhere near living things.

Disregarding intentional diversion of non-leaking sources to be fair.

But I would estimate that malicious operators who are just after your money are more hand-wavy than it seems when it comes to leakage or security in the digital tech business for sure.

The NuScale project they mention as the only project that was approved got cancelled (due to the rising costs they cite) after this was published.

I want to see the nuclear industry maintained and to survive, but I wonder now if I’ve nearly fallen victim to his methods.

There's more, but I'm at work. Is this article actually a joke?

I would imagine there were no chapter titles to begin with and were added editorially in an almost random way.

It really would be good to see some comprehensive solution to the waste issue from someone who knows more and could not be considered amusing by anyone else.

Maybe the answer will come when not at work?

Until then I remain not amused.

Edit: not my downvote btw

I think that's just a mistake in placement of headers? The next chapter does talk about waste: "In fact, a recent U.S. National Academy of Science analysis noted that advanced reactors do not solve the problems of nuclear waste and may, in fact, exacerbate the problem."

A simple typo or editing mistake does not make an article a joke.

> "Not likely to help cut emissions" acknowledges that it would help cut emissions.

No it does not. It feels like you must have skimmed the article very fast.

"Certainly, existing nuclear power plants play a significant role in greenhouse gas reductions and will continue to do so."

Of course existing nuclear power plays a role. We should absolutely not shut them down if it can be avoided. Whether NEW SMR reactors will help more than just investing the same amount in renewables is an open question.

> HALEU fuel is needed to offset the smaller size of the reactor core, which results in increased neutron leakage: nope.

What a helpful comment /s

Care to elaborate?

> "Factory construction is a risk": compared to traditional, behemoth reactor construction? Really?

Uh yeah.. really.

I really don't get how SMR proponents just take it for granted that the huge cost downsides of going small can be fully offset by mass production. Especially considering that we're not really talking about all that huge volumes of production any time soon anyway.

Imagine if you tried to claim that you could make the MWh cost of wind power go down by building smaller wind turbines in larger volumes. You'd have a really hard time defending that position. The trend is clearly favoring going bigger and bigger, even if the challenges related to construction and transportation is huge.

The "behemoth reactor" construction model is well proven, and physical factors dictate that it's the solution with the lowest potential construction costs. So yeah, going for an unproven model that MIGHT make up for higher costs with efficiencies associated with factor construction is absolutely a huge risk.