Engineering360: "Will small modular reactors create new nuclear energy?"

This article fails to recognize the many problems that microreactors face:

1. They don't exist. They are still in the conceptual or development phase. We need alternative energy last decade, not next decade. The nuclear industry was already challenged to ramp up the number of reactors to substitute for fossil fuel. Huge government grants were offered and environmental and safety requirements were relaxed. The few reactors that resulted were way over budget and way late. Microreactor proponents are expecting the same grants and relaxed safety regulations for these new unproven designs, and have no examples to show that they will be more successful. Don't take my word for it, ask Greg Jaczko, previous Chair of the NRC. Climate change is upon us. We need to deploy known solutions now.

2. There is still no solution for long-term storage of the radioactive waste. Proposed novel fuel cycles are actually not novel, and come with additional known risks that have been avoided until now. Leaving a 10,000 year HLRW problem for future generations is irresponsible.

3. They're expensive. We need to devote our limited resourced to alternatives that are proven and ready, not divert significant fractions of it toward this wishful thinking.

We need serious solutions, and Microreactor proposals fall far short.

The 70's era demonisation of Nuclear Energy has resulted in large nuclear stations being imposibly expensive and subject to intolerable delays. Any quantitative analysis will show that without Nuclear as a substantial part of the mix, low carbon energy production is simply not possible. SMR's and novel fuel cycles drastically reduce the delays, the costs and the waste issues around deploying nuclear. These machines are all "inherently" or "walk-away" safe. They mostly require "exclusion zones" of 100 ft or less. The waste issue is also qualitatively different; even for "traditional" cycles, the amount of waste is far less. There is also the fact that MSR's offer the opportunity to actually use the "spent" fuel from traditional cycles as feed. This would reduce the amount, the lethality and the half-life of those residues by, again, orders of magnitude. Then there is Thorium which offers even more advantages. The bottom line is that Nuclear, no matter the flavour, kills and injurs fewer humans that ANY other method of making electricity already and the new technologies will make it even safer. Wind, Solar, Wave, Hydro & Geothermal all have roles to play but at the end of the day the economics of dispatchable 2/7/365 safe power dictate that Nuclear, in all it's forms, must be a large part of our future energy mix. Do the math, the renewables alone will not meet demand and humankind will not acdept reduced energy availability. So it is either fossil fuels or Nuclear and the inertial of Gigawatt sized BWR stations is simply too large.

"Microreactors are in competition with other technologies such as advanced batteries, fuel cells"

Batteries and fuel cells are not sources of energy generation. Batteries are a storage medium and fuel cells are a conversion engine. Both require upstream energy generation.

Whichever way you look at it, we need to increase all forms of zero-carbon energy *generation* massively to simply maintain our current standards of living if we are going to shut down fossil fuels.