" Small Modular Reactors may be the nuclear industry's answer to avoiding obscurity, sadly, and one cannot blame them (though I am starting to) for failing to e

" Small Modular Reactors may be the nuclear industry's answer to avoiding obscurity, sadly, and one cannot blame them (though I am starting to) for failing to exhibit the courage or desire to commit attention to molten salt research. Because what is being presented by default is a practical absurdity. What if someone promoting utility wind approaches you and claims that wind is the future? BUT in place of today's standard size 3MW turbines it absolutely must be a far greater number of 1MW turbines. You'd take a step back, confident that the reason must have little to do with technology. You'd feel dubious, imagine you were being 'played' in some way. Even a layman would sense something wrong with the proposal, given the overhead of placing units. I have the same reaction when hearing discussion of Small Modular Reactors. I see them as a high ticket luxury item that is being fronted as the 'stealth solution' to a most pressing problem, to design something faux environmentalists and radiophobes might fear and hate less, even though they could never launch the nuclear industry into a new renaissance. Utility scale electric is geared to multiple ~1GWe+ solutions per plant, the round number that could practically be multiplied into a feasible grid solution. Aside from industry desperation I also wonder if SMRs are being promoted by a few billionaires, not from a desire to supply lesser developed countries (all of whom should never go in for less than 1GWe), but to power their own offshore enclaves, their survival retreats in places like New Zealand. Call it my pet conspiracy theory. They wish to see the technology put to practice on our collective dime as soon as possible. Helping to stock the pantries of billionaires may be a tidy business some day but SMR fixation today represents a foolish diversion of attention away from what needs to be the principal goal --- attaining energy self-sufficiency for the grid with >=1GWe sources, less fuel volatility and less risk. This is an existential crisis. " (from my 2017 letter to Energy Secy Perry) https://archive.org/download/20170629EmailToEnergySecretaryPerrySC/20170629%20Email%20to%20Energy%20Secretary%20Perry%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20170629EmailToEnergySecretaryP... (2016 letter to Candidate Trump on Energy) https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20160422%20trump%20energy%20letter%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...