Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

hvb2

> but SMRs should be cheaper and easier to construct. The word should is doing some real heavy lifting there. Especially given the subject. I guess we'll know in 2030 when one should come online.

soco

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?

hn_submit

Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe. 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. 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."

jauntywundrkind

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. The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen. 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.

beardyw

"a supplement produced with financial support from Oklo Inc" "Oklo Corp. Logo Oklo is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy"

ck2

there is just one problem like everything else with the current US administration they deregulated nuclear safety * https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-... * https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-rad... any other administration even Republican I'd be willing to listen to why this administration will happily kill thousands or give them cancer if it means another million dollars in their pockets there is only one kind of nuclear reactor that should be built anymore and that is Thorium reactors, they "fail safe" (or at least safer) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ

testing22321

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. 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. This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.

hwillis

And a contrasting article from IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc... > 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. > 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. 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. 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: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

comrade1234

Seems like you'd end up with even more waste in the end. For example, the navy's nuclear reactor graveyard: https://interestingengineering.com/military/trench-94-the-ee... You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.

DanTheManPR

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. 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. 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.

neuroelectron

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. 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.

ZeroGravitas

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.

bell-cot

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 not quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better. 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. Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations. 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.

samizdis

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. [0] https://www.wired.com/2004/09/china-5/

CrzyLngPwd

Literaly, designed for datacenters

marcosdumay

Just worth remembering that the cost/W of steam generators decrease quickly (almost linearly) with size up to ~1GW. What in reverse also means it increases quickly with reduced size, down to the point you can order them 3D printed on the internet (what is around a couple of kW). And also that steam generators alone have a really hard time competing with solar nowadays.

arjie

It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few big rocks, I suppose. We lost half a century, but so it goes. Now we should be able to do large-scale solar and wind, and if it weren't for the Burning Man people we could have geothermal too, but we'll get there.

Animats

How are the fusion startups coming along? There are at least 21 of them.[1] The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars. Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet insight is that if you put a superconductor and a regular conductor in parallel, all the current flows through the superconductor. So you can plate a superconducting material on stainless steel tape, using stainless steel as an insulator. Winding a magnet out of stainless steel tape works fine. They demoed that back in 2021. But no fusion yet. Well funded, big operation, around 1000 people. Helion Energy. This is a strange magneto-inertial fusion system. It's vaguely like a free-piston internal combustion engine generator, except that the piston is a plasma. After seven rounds of increasingly large prototypes, they can get D-T fusion, but it's not self-sustaining, nor do they get power out. Prototypes have thus far underperformed claims. Around 500 people. TAE. Recently merged with Trump Media. Really. There are quite a few others. Many are working on some kind of pulsed fusion, like the Livermore National Ignition Facility. This is known to create fusion, but is hard to turn into a useful power source. They can get to a non-useful fusion demo by pumping a lot of energy into a small space, so it looks like progress. On the continuous fusion front, several startups are trying to revive 1950s Stellarator technology. For a few years back then, fusion energy looked close. Anyone have expertise in this area? Are any of these going to work? Or is the product the stock? [1] https://www.energystartups.org/top/fusion-energy/USA/

emsign

The future will be solar. Especially in underdeveloped regions without a centralized power grid, solar makes the most sense. And even in developed countries having solar panels on your roof and a battery in your cellar is the most cost effective way of getting all your electricity needs.

thinkcontext

There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam. Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.