[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
Look, friend: as much as I like nuclear energy and decentralization of the powder grid, per home reactors could never, ever work. For the simple reason that the majority of us filthy apes are complete idiots. Furthermore, nuclear works currently because it has oversight by educated, trained professionals in a setting where oversight can be effective. Even if you had some sort of travelling nuclear engineer that would check up on your garage reactor, if anything ever went wrong with it then the response time would be too long to adequately deal with the situation.
The only way a distributed network of reactors could work is if it either had massive overhead or if literally everyone had training on the maintenance of a nuclear reactor. And this isn’t even mentioning the possibility of adverse weather events potentially damaging the reactor or how the waste would be dealt with.
