Comment by jmyeet

SMR makes no sense. It never did. It's a program to fuel academic empire-building and to siphon government money in the form of research grants and investment.

You see this pattern a lot in academia. Education is a great example. We know what works when, for example, it comes to teaching literacy. It's phonics. But over the past few decades we had a fad with "sight words". The evidence has come in that this has been a disaster. So why did it happen? Because nobody is going to get prestige in their education PhD by pushing an existing idea. They're incentivized to reinvent that wheel to shape themselves as an expert in the new wave.

That's exactly how SMR came about. It takes the idea of scaling by going small and repeating what you're doing rather than doing what you actually need to do and that is to standardize large designs. Larger reactors are just more efficient and that's physics.

I bet I could come back to HN in 10 years and SMR will still be exactly nowhere yet people will still be promising a bright future for it.