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They're aiming at niches where they won't be competing directly with more conventional power plants. Their web site claims [1] that it's intended "for remote and distributed generation where energy costs can exceed 30 cents/kWh, and power is needed 24/7".

[1] http://www.upowertech.com/p/technology.html

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Precisely right. Traditional utilities want something with a long operating track record, something hard for new designs to do off the bat. But going where the reactor is 5x cheaper than the next best option changes that. Plus many of these places want combined heat and power, so the design needs to be flexible on the thermal end.

there's definitely an opportunity in providing thermal at factories. lots of remote sites in India and China have their own purpose-built coal plants that could potentially use something like that...I have a harder time seeing the financing line up for serving remote villages that can't afford any power today. In those cases finance will always flow to smaller increment technologies, even if they're higher $/kWh, like solar + battery or diesel

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