The trick is going to be doing this cheaply. The cost gap with renewables is close 2 orders of magnitude already and actually widening. Reducing the safety cost

The trick is going to be doing this cheaply. The cost gap with renewables is close 2 orders of magnitude already and actually widening. Reducing the safety cost is nice of course. Which is what this does. But is it enough? I don't think so. There are a lot of hidden cost with nuclear. One of them is security. You say micro reactor, I say dirty bomb waiting to happen. Nuclear reactors of any kind need expensive security. The most cost effective way to do that is to locate them in a handful of places that are easy to keep secured. So, the notion of distributing tens, or hundreds, of thousands of micro reactors all over the place kind of goes against that. It would be a security nightmare. From a cost point of view this is disastrous. And it only takes 1 incident for this whole industry to grind to a halt and get bogged down in lengthy and expensive security related bureaucracy and hassle. So, the more like scenario is that they start replacing conventional reactors as a somewhat cheaper alternative. Instead of hosting 1 or 2 of those, we'll have dozens/hundreds of them on a single site. But that site will still be a nuclear plant with all the security and safety procedures that come with those. And those won't be free. So, it will make building those sites more cost effective than they are right now. But it will still be expensive. It's very hard to compete with wind, solar, and batteries on cost. They need very little security and you can just install them wherever. Like in your house. There are now consumer grade products that allow you to more or less go off grid. It's cheap enough that people are starting to do this to reduce their overall cost. And cost keeps on dropping. Cheaper panels, cheaper batteries, less exotic materials, easier mass production, etc.