[yvdriess]

Having talked to a nuclear engineer about this: SMRs are being politically pushed because of their political and financing convenience, more than engineering reasons. Power output scales really well with reactor size, so it makes much more sense to build the one big expensive power plant than a multitude of smaller ones. SMRs do make sense for off-grid or on-site power, but not for grid electricity.

[Ericson2314]

The ideal case is that SMRs are not the end goal, but a way to rebuild the supply chain. As soon as we have SMRs in prod, rather than building more of them, we should attempt to increase the size of deployments with minimal falling back on in-situ construction.

SMRs take the supply chain metaphor a bit too literally: we do need practice but assembling prefabbed parts at a larger scale is fine too. There is a spectrum of options and we just need to avoid "special snowflake boondoggles".

Given the US's fucked NIMBY culture, it well may be that SMRs are the best route despite these inefficiencies. Just don't expect the "solar model" where we just shit out lots of lousy product and that's it.

[zbrozek]

From a thermal physics and material science perspective, yes, bigger is definitely better. But there's a lot to be said of the value of being able to mass-produce a product in a factory and ship it in nearly ready-to-use state to its destination.

There would also be a lot of value in turning off the ability of folks to NIMBY everything from new power plants to housing.

[petre]

Alvin Weinberg begs to differ, at least concerning PWRs and BWRs. The bigger plants are more efficient but less safe.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iW8yuyk3Ugw

One can scale the size by using several reactors, which is exactly what NuScale and others aim to do. One also doesn't have an unavailability problem having to shut down a large reactor in order to refuel it.