this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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They can call it whatever they want but PWR is an old design. They polished the design a bit, so what? It's still an overblown pressure cooker.
Industrial scale reactor designs take a ton of time and money and experience to research. Research reactors are only a step in the middle of the process, and nobody's been willing to take any new designs past that.
SMEs have potential not because they're particularly efficient or cost effective, but because stand a chance of pushing the state of the art. They offer a way around the whole "I'm not paying $40bn for an unproven design" problem.