Making things small is actually not that big a challenge in nuclear. The challenge are safety, cost, and proliferation. There are a lot of reasons this shouldn'

Making things small is actually not that big a challenge in nuclear. The challenge are safety, cost, and proliferation. There are a lot of reasons this shouldn't be produced at scale. - at 10 kW, it produces power for about 5 American homes. You'd need 60 M of these for the US. - Proliferation. Kilopower uses high enriched fuel (92%). This is bomb material from the get go. They could probably build a lower enrichment core. But they haven't. shame. In any case, if there were lots of these cores around, it would lower the barrier to access and process spent nuclear fuel. - This is for space and NASA. Not the right type of innovation for terrestrial and mass produced. They went small, high performance. We need safe and low cost. - It's a heat pipe cooled reactor and heat pipes have the worst heat transfer characteristics (compared to water, gas, molten salts) and will have a new set of accident scenarios like what happens if a heat pipe bursts and you get a sodium fire. - You don't really want nuclear systems to be too small or mobile mobile devices or to travel much. You want to build em and know they're not going to move. You don't want to give the reactor more kinetic energy that it can use to break itself apart and release fission products. During a launch to space, this isn't so big a problem because the reactor has not yet been turned on and contains no fission products, so failed launch is not so bad.