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credit_guyyesterday at 5:31 PM0 repliesview on HN

Some costs scale down more than linearly, some less. For example, because of the square-cube law, you lose more neutrons through the walls of the reactor, so you often times need a higher level of uranium enrichment, and you produce less energy per ton of fuel, all other things being equal. That’s bad news for SMRs. But many reactor components, being significantly smaller, become much cheaper to manufacture, at least that’s the theory. We don’t know yet. But China is planning to start operating its ACP100 SMR in the next few months, and we will probably hear soon how happy they are with it.