[mrtracy]

How big are the commitments here? I’m having trouble finding actual dollar amounts. Does this actually represent an infusion of money into these SMR efforts, or are these “commitments” tied to so many missable targets that it’s actually meaningless?

Oklo in particular seems to be total vaporware, I can’t find a single technical picture anywhere of anything this company’s reactor is seeking to do. They seem to raise money based on a rendering of a ski lodge.

A huge, concrete investment in TerraPower would be more interesting, but as a molten salt SMR which has never been built, this also looks extremely non-committal.

SMRs in general seem like a dead end, we’ve heard about them for decades and they don’t seem to be any closer to making nuclear power buildouts less expensive.

Everything that makes proven nuclear power plant design expensive seems to revolve around the same drivers of expense for all long-term construction: large up front capital requirements, changing regulations, failure to predict setbacks, and pervasive lawsuits. SMRs purport to tackle a couple of these (shorter-term builds, fewer setbacks), at the cost of considerable efficiency, but so far this seems like an inferior alternative to “just get better at building proven nuclear plant designs”.

[colechristensen]

The thing which can make nuclear cheap is building a large number of the same plant design.

[jmyeet]

Nuclear is never getting cheap [1]. Nuclear reactors need to be large to scale [2]. As for why SMR persists? Because someone makes money selling the idea. That's it.

And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.

Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.

Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.

[1]: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/csiro-confirms-n...

[2]: https://spitfireresearch.com/scaling-example-1-small-modular...

[testing22321]

China are building dozens simultaneously, and even with their questionable workers rights, safety and environmental practices, they cost $7 Billion a pop.

[dalyons]

Cheap-er, not cheap. They’re still fundamentally massive complicated constructions. They will never be as amenable to mass production cost reductions as things like solar and battery