Oklo planning nuclear micro-reactors that run off nuclear waste

The amount of front-loading in artwork and "maybe" in this stuff in general is depressing. You could run a book on the likelihood of different SMR projects taking off.

They have good chops for skills in the field. I think the likelihood of an unsupervised prebuild deployment being permitted by any federal/state/local authority without a NIMBY attack is really low.

I am mutedly pro-nuke but the LCOE doesn't look good for the static deployments. If you can show this has low enough LCOE as-is, its worth getting that into the mix. If not, by the time ONE of these achieves certification deployment and attachment, There will be 10x to 100x the energy output from PV, Wind and Batteries in the same use-case at a reducing cost of deployment from purely engineering improvements in the pipe.

Want to want this, struggling to say it has good rationalised chances of coming into fruition.

What it does have is better non-profliferation outcomes maybe, than other SMR proposals. So, for field deployment to challenging power-hungry locations, could be interesting. or for power supply stability, to act as a source of MAh to supplement other sources and be the "base load" (broken concept, I know) equivalent, maybe?

But "we have a beautiful A Frame designed by an Architect" is really depressing me. I have a book called "the architect in the nuclear age" [1] about the design aesthetic of power stations, and I'm not seeing anything new here.

[1] The architect in the nuclear age : design of buildings to house radioactivity / J.F. Munce. 1964