A hopeless pursuit? National efforts to promote small modular nuclear reactors and revive nuclear power
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Nuclear power plant construction has historically been challenged by problems of high cost, cost escalation, and construction delays. The newest set of large reactor projects have also been overbudget and overtime. This has prompted interest in new reactor technologies that proponents claim would not suffer these problems, specifically small modular reactors (SMRs), a class that encompasses a wide range of technologies. This article examines national efforts in three countries, Canada, the UK, and the United States, which are pursuing SMRs vigorously and where the government has funded their development generously. We compare the different strategies and foci of these national strategies, analyzing the various forms of support offered by the separate agencies of the government, and the private companies that are trying to develop SMRs. We also offer an overview of the different types of reactor technologies being pursued in these different countries. Following these, we outline the main challenge confronting SMR technologies: their ability to generate electricity in an economically competitive manner, highlighting the problems resulting from economies of scale being lost. By examining the experience so far, we find that even designs based on well‐tested technology cannot be deployed till after 2030 and the more radical designs might never be. This article is categorized under: Policy and Economics > Research and Development Policy and Economics > Regional and International Strategies Energy and Power Systems > Energy Infrastructure
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it