In Finland they’ve been developing small scale reactors about the size of a shipping container but they’re not intented to produce electricity but instead just heat water and then push it into the district heating grid. This way the powerplant would also be much simplier to produce and maintain as well as safer due to the lower pressures and temperatures it operates at. Basically a nuclear powered kettle.

SMRs (or small-scale nuclear plants in general) solve some problems with nuclear power. If you were to build a single design very often, the principles of economies at scale would apply and drive down costs.

I like the theory. But in practice there’s a couple problems that so far I’ve not seen addressed very often. First is the issue that not all costs of building a nuclear power plant can be brought down by simply having more of them. Particularly infrastructure costs can rise significantly, because instead of building one large plant with a connection to the grid, necessary buildings for operational control, infrastructure for the coolant water, roads, security etc… you have to build several instead, which multiplies the costs of these.

Then there’s the issue of personnel. You need people to operate and maintain the plant, security, management, etc… Per reactor you may need less people, but because you have so many reactors you end up needing more people overall. Most countries have a hard enough time as it is to get enough qualified staff, you’d also need to heavily invest in education for the next generation of nuclear engineers.

You also have these container-sized reactor concepts that basically promise to run themselves, requiring almost no maintenance other than the occasional refueling. But those are very much still in the concept-stage and also need to address the security issue. An unmanned container with nuclear fuel and expensive equipment inside could very well make a worthwhile target for criminals.

I like the utopian vision that nuclear promises but I worry the path to get there is full of pitfalls. I also don’t see the cost of nuclear coming down any time soon, and if we want to remain competitive in manufacturing for example, cheap energy is absolutely key.

Personally, I prefer investments in renewables and battery tech. Particularly battery tech I’m hopeful about. In theory there’s so much to gain still on that front, and it has the potential to improve so much other technology, from phones to drones to pacemakers to reliable, decentralised power. Nuclear tech is cool, but it only really promises to result in more nuclear power, rather than improvements in other areas as well. Fusion is interesting (and almost worth investing in just for the cool “it can be done”-factor) but at the same time still so far away. Too risky to rely on for now.

Especially since a lot of states turn the land surrounding the power plant into wildlife sanctuaries since nothing can be built in the safety zone anyway.

It’s like bird watching heaven at the power plant near me. I guess I just really like the idea of a power source that also incidentally protects forested areas.

Haha, I can see why that makes you more inclined to support nuclear! Though it does make me a little sad that in order to protect our forests and wildlife we first need to build a nuclear reactor next to it. Can’t we just designate them wildlife sanctuaries regardless of that power plant being there or not?