It is basicly what France did. Built a lot of nuclear power plants and due to economies of scale you can built them cheaply. Thats how France got a nearly no fossil fuel electricity grid. However cheap is relativ and a single nuclear power plant currently produces a lot of power, but is expensive. So the idea is to downscale and built a lot of smaller plants, which are cheaper and built even more of them to get economies of scale.
The idea is not bad, just the fact that nuclear is too expensive.
We already tried that. France had 61GW of nuclear. The US has 95GW, but that only makes up about 20% of US electricity. That hasn’t made nuclear any cheaper.
We might as well keep what we have, but building new will just be expensive and unnecessary.
It is basicly what France did. Built a lot of nuclear power plants and due to economies of scale you can built them cheaply. Thats how France got a nearly no fossil fuel electricity grid. However cheap is relativ and a single nuclear power plant currently produces a lot of power, but is expensive. So the idea is to downscale and built a lot of smaller plants, which are cheaper and built even more of them to get economies of scale.
The idea is not bad, just the fact that nuclear is too expensive.
Another problem is that small reactors increase the amount of waste produced and inefficiencies apparently too.
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/30/small-modular-reactors-produce-high-levels-nuclear-waste/
You also need to provide full security and such for them (so I’d be guessing more overheads)
We already tried that. France had 61GW of nuclear. The US has 95GW, but that only makes up about 20% of US electricity. That hasn’t made nuclear any cheaper.
We might as well keep what we have, but building new will just be expensive and unnecessary.