We have plenty of small but commercially successful natural gas plants, so it doesn't seem to be a general principle. The only scaling law mentioned in your art

We have plenty of small but commercially successful natural gas plants, so it doesn't seem to be a general principle. The only scaling law mentioned in your article is this: > a 400-MW reactor requires less than twice the quantity of concrete and steel to construct as a 200-MW reactor, and it can be operated with fewer than twice as many people. Writing in Science in 1961, a senior member of the AEC worried that “competition [from fossil fuel plants] is indeed formidable” and suggested that “with current pressurized-water reactor technology, lower nuclear power costs can be achieved most readily with large plants.” Almost all the SMRs we've built have been water cooled reactors, which require a large amount of concrete and steel. Newer designs, such as molten salt reactors, can use a lot less, because they operate near atmospheric pressure, don't have to leave room for a high-pressure pipe break introducing a large volume of steam, and have nothing that can cause a chemical explosion. They're also inherently stable and adaptive to load, with little need for active control. A small modular MSR could well work out.