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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small. In Russia, they have a bunch of microreactors, they work fine, but very expensive to run and are kept only in remote places with no other way to power them. Niche thing at best.

How many microreactors do we need to replace all the world's final energy consumption (ok around 20% will be replaced by heat pumps net energy gain)? That's 11,000 GW of continuous power. A million 10 MW ones? How many people does that take to build and maintain across the entire value chain? Sounds like hundreds of millions people, easily 10 or maybe 20% of entire world's workforce. Not going to happen.

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> Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small.

Solar is cheap because it has hit the economy of scale. Hell, fences made of solar (sometimes, not even connected!) are now more cheaper than those made of wood (at least, in some countries).

While I would not bet my money on the economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors, I would like them to have a fair market trial. If they do succeed, we all win.

Small reactors have lost against GW-class facilities around 60 years ago. This is why they were no longer built. I find it strange to believe that the economy of scale somehow doesn't apply to nuclear power plants, even though history clearly shows it does.

You have economies of scale (size) squaring off against economies of scale (production).

For one-offs, the economies of size win, because then the economies of production don't actually get a chance to do their thing. So kick-starting is a problem. However, the problems with the EPR and the AP-1000 hint (do not prove) that we may be hitting size limitations.

The strategy that Rolls-Royce is pursuing seems promising: factory-built microreactors (so economies of production) that you can plop into existing coal-powered plants to upgrade them to nuclear. That way you reduce the issues with the non-factory-built parts.

And decommissioning promises to be more manageable and less expensive with microreactors. Individual microreactors can be swapped as they age out and decommissioned/refurbished elsewhere.

Really? I expect microreactors would create much more irradiated material than larger reactors, due to the higher surface area/volume ratio of tiny reactors. This also negatively affects their neutron economy.

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