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by crote 2 days ago
But they'll never be small enough to be truly portable. It'll be closer to another Akademik Lomonosov [0] than a truck-sized diesel generator, which severely limits its deployment options.

The additional per-site engineering required to reuse things like turbines and dynamos is almost certainly going to kill any savings it would have. If you're already shipping a building-sized reactor, what's one more turbine? Realistically the main reusable component is the grid hookup itself - but that would incentivize building a large-scale reactor on the site.

As would reusing the turbines, for that matter: you can't exactly power the turbines of a 100MW coal plant with a 10MW reactor, and shipping ten inefficient 10MW reactors to the site just so you can reuse the existing ancient turbine isn't exactly an attractive option either.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov