[hooli42]

>I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small

Nuclear can't get small because of social and political reasons, not technical or economics reasons.

If you could put a small nuclear reactor in your backyard and it was assured to be safe, would you?

[philipkglass]

It's also due to technical and economic reasons. Tiny reactors require highly enriched fuel and have worse neutron economy and thermal efficiency. You can't use the same low-enriched fuel in a tiny reactor that you can in a typical (hundreds of megawatts or larger) commercial power reactor.

In a big commercial power reactor, fuel costs are tiny relative to the total system costs. If you used a tiny reactor like the Kilopower [1] to power a single home, the cost of the highly enriched fuel alone (upward of $50,000 per kilogram, 28 kg in a unit) would be orders of magnitude more expensive than grid-supplied electricity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower

[epistasis]

I've never heard that before. I don't think politics would stop a fleet of small 50-100MW replacing a 1GW reactor, and that's certainly not the opposition to SMRs now.

It's actually both economic and technical: the technical side makes smaller reactors less economic in terms of efficiency. Thermal generation benefits massively from being really really big.

[themaninthedark]

Yes, especially if I could get heating(winter + hot water) out of the exchange loop.