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I don’t understand what makes small reactors desirable. Don’t you loose economies of scales, not only production, but also demand (ie if you have small local so

• jobu 6y ago
  When I first heard about these small scale reactors 10+ years ago I remember the goals were to build them to be maintenance-free and disposable. They build a self contained unit that needs minimal labor to run, is highly failsafe, and pumps out ~50Mw for roughly 20 years. When it's done they drop the whole unit (roughly the size of a train car) into a concrete grave onsite and plug in a replacement. I'm not sure if the goals for this project are the same, or if the goal of a low-maintenance reactor are even possible, but it sounded pretty cool.
• credit_guy 6y ago
  > Don’t you loose economies of scales On the contrary, you gain economies of scale. The way the economies of scale work is if you build n identical widgets, it costs you less than n times the cost of building one single widgets. In other words the unit cost of a widget goes down as the number of produced widgets increases. If you want to produce a bigger widget though, you generally have diseconomies of scale. For example the Saturn V rocket was about 20 times bigger than the Titan 2 rocket (from which it was derived) but cost about 60 times more. So, if a Gigawatt-size nuclear power plant is too expensive to build, you build 20 plants of 50 MW each. This is how you achieve economies of scale.