I work on nuclear micro reactors (specifically this one: www.usnc.com/mmr) and there is big promise here to make many reactors soon and cheap. Their size of 15 MWe is too small to fully power human civilization which requires 20 TW of primary energy. For reactors with a 60 year life, that would require a population of 300,000 reactors sustained by a production cadence of 5000 reactors per year. That's actually comparable to the production rate of wide body aircraft. Even if such production rates are not acheived, these small reactors do not suffer xenon poisoning and can use thermal storage to produce dispatch power. It's like a zero carbon natural gas peaker, and can provide the needed backbone for intermittent renewables. The optimal mixes for many locations around the US are something like 10% dispatch nuke, and there rest wind and solar. It's one of the few energy solutions that looks a lot like a fossil fuel source, by virtue of it's high temperature heat, the fact it can be used on demand, can be located anywhere where it is needed, etc.
In terms of production capacity and industrial capability, it is mostly there. As an example, the recently unopened nord stream pipeline produced 200,000 pipe sections with similar dimensions and mass to the Micro Modular Reactor pressure vessel - in just a few years. Nuclear fuel costs are dirt cheap and production rates can be ramped pretty quickly - it's the magic of nuclear energy density.the reactor tech is more or less fifty years old with some design to build changes. Culturally, the zero-carbon push, volatile and political fossil markets, and perhaps an end in sight to the shale boom - it's completely changed the customer conversation compared to just a few years ago. Ultimately, energy scarcity is going to be the push for full market deployments. And we may be approaching that. All the delays and waddling will dissolve in the face of cold hard necessity.
If we were to run with this design to completely power civilization, is there enough helium supply? If not, could it be adapted to either argon or some other inert gas?
Could the fuel get recycled at end of life if regulatory approval were given?
