While this is an overall good development, and I wish the company luck. Its really not the solution.
While scale is what killed nuclear, the people who initially decided on scale, did so for good reason. You lose a huge amount if you scale down, specially with PWRs.
These small PWRs try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out. The advantage is the added flexibility. So I don't think that putting traditional PWR in a tube is really any kind of series solution to transform our energy system.
However there are good things coming out of this. For example, NuScale went threw a process managing multiple reactors from the same control room. That is the same thing that essentially all GenIV reactors want to do as well. Having managed to get that concept threw the regulator will make it massively easier for anybody that follows.
Its a damn shame that we don't have GenIV reactors since the 80s. We had the technology and every reason to use it. We could be living in a nuclear age right now, and I consider it the largest failure of humanity that we failed to do so. People in 100 years will look back and think we were insane that we did not use the technology we discovered.
While scale is what killed nuclear, the people who initially decided on scale, did so for good reason. You lose a huge amount if you scale down, specially with PWRs.
These small PWRs try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out. The advantage is the added flexibility. So I don't think that putting traditional PWR in a tube is really any kind of series solution to transform our energy system.
However there are good things coming out of this. For example, NuScale went threw a process managing multiple reactors from the same control room. That is the same thing that essentially all GenIV reactors want to do as well. Having managed to get that concept threw the regulator will make it massively easier for anybody that follows.
Its a damn shame that we don't have GenIV reactors since the 80s. We had the technology and every reason to use it. We could be living in a nuclear age right now, and I consider it the largest failure of humanity that we failed to do so. People in 100 years will look back and think we were insane that we did not use the technology we discovered.