{"id":441453,"date":"2026-04-26T06:55:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T13:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=441453"},"modified":"2026-04-26T06:55:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T13:55:21","slug":"small-nuclear-is-advancing-rapidly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=441453","title":{"rendered":"Small nuclear is advancing rapidly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Businessman holding light bulb with brain inside, Creative and innovation inspiration, Science innovation with network connection, Idea and imagination, Concept of innovative technology presentation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From CFACT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Kelvin Kemm<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last year or so, the idea of nuclear power has been surging in popularity. Sadly, over the last couple of decades, the anti-nuclear activists have generated such an anti-nuclear scare amongst the general public that many people now have a totally false and distorted idea of nuclear power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nuclear power is the future; there is no doubt about it. You can easily carry in your car enough enriched uranium to power your entire suburb for half a century. You certainly can\u2019t do that with coal, gas, or oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, one should be thankful that the future of nuclear power is now shining like a rising sun breaking through thick cloud cover. But we still need to break up much of the cloud cover, which is obscuring the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As much as the science and engineering of solar panels and wind turbines have undoubtedly advanced over recent years, so has the technology of nuclear reactors. A modern nuclear reactor is very far advanced, in comparison to the scary images created in the public mind of a Chernobyl or Fukushima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, we are also finding that the philosophy of nuclear power is altering the concept of electricity generation. A coal-fired power station has to be built near where the coal is for economic reasons. In the case of oil and gas, long pipelines have to be built to carry the fuels from delivery points to points of use. In contrast, a large nuclear power station can have its entire annual supply of nuclear fuel delivered in one truck, once. So, in principle, you can put a nuclear power station wherever you like. It does not have to be near the fuel supply point. Generally, however, there has been one significant limitation for new large nuclear power stations, and that is water for cooling. Large nuclear power stations have tended to be built on a coastline, or on the banks of very large lakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a rule of thumb, a factory to produce canned beans, bags of sugar, or containers of milk, is built as large as economically possible, because profitability goes up with the economy of scale. Nuclear power has followed the same principle. Until now. Realization has now dawned that for electricity production, bigger plants are not always better. This is largely because of the very small amount of fuel required. The electricity generation philosophy is changing, to allow planners to distribute many smaller nuclear power stations to where the consumers are. This approach minimizes the need for long expensive electricity transmission lines. Such small nuclear stations are now being called Small Modular Reactors. In addition, some of them are being designed to be cooled using helium gas, and not water. So, with a gas cooled reactor, the water availability constraint evaporates like the dawn mist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A modern large reactor is typically around 1200 MW in size, or larger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An SMR is defined as being less than 300 MW in size, with some being as small as 10 or 20 MW. So, it is possible to imagine a factory, mine, or town, owning its own nuclear reactor. In fact, a facility such as one of these can even have its own electricity grid, which is not connected into a national grid, and need only be half a dozen kilometers in diameter\u2026or smaller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018modular\u2019 in the name implies the goal of building most of the nuclear reactor indoors, like motor cars are made on a production line. Then one merely transports the SMR in easily transportable subassemblies to the site, where they are essentially bolted altogether, thereby getting rid of many difficult processes such as cutting and welding outdoors on site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, this modular approach leads one to the obvious conclusion that SMR systems will be inexpensive to build and will drop in cost as their versatility catches on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMR\u2019s can be owned by private companies at their respective points of consumption. Clearly, one would expect them to proliferate across the country, so it would be logical to ask, \u201cHow will we control them from technical and legal perspectives?\u201d In parallel, we are seeing an explosion of internet use, linked to the incredible prospects for Artificial Intelligence, universally now just called AI. So, we link numbers of SMR\u2019s together, and to a monitoring station, using the internet. Reactors can be in different states or even different countries. In the monitoring stations. technicians would watch pressures, temperatures, flow rates, and much more. Any minor deviation in any reactor would cause a warning to signal in the monitoring station. Operators would then direct various responses. The station would also monitor stores of spare parts and where they are located, so that each reactor does not have to hold its own stock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another interesting point is that some SMR systems operate at high temperatures, in the hundreds of degrees, which allows for another interesting option. The heat can be used directly without the need to make electricity. If the reactor is at a chemicals processing facility, then just take the heat straight into the chemicals plant in the form of hot steam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undoubtedly, in the nuclear power world, the future is not what it used to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

_____________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kelvin Kemm<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Kelvin Kemm is a South African nuclear physicist and has been a CFACT Senior Advisor for over two decades. He is Chairman of Stratek Holdings, a nuclear project management company, and is past Chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa).He has given both Congressional and Senate briefings in Washington DC. He has been guest speaker at over 20 US universities, and most recently gave a guest presentation in New York City. He has presented evidence to the Legislature of the State of Maine concerning nuclear power.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last year or so, the idea of nuclear power has been surging in popularity. Sadly, over the last couple of decades, the anti-nuclear activists have generated such an anti-nuclear scare amongst the general public that many people now have a totally false and distorted idea of nuclear power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":441454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691832766,691818206,691833658,691831287],"class_list":{"0":"post-441453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-electricity-generation","9":"tag-nuclear-power","10":"tag-small-modular-reactors-smrs-2","11":"tag-solar-panels-and-wind-turbines","13":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/0Atomic-lightbul-hand-nuclear-scaled-1.jpg?fit=2560%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1QQd","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":317411,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=317411","url_meta":{"origin":441453,"position":0},"title":"Oil and Gas Breakthroughs (Continual Improvement)","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"04\/11\/2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Hydraulic Fracturing, Horizontal Drilling, Supercomputers, Seismic Imaging, Smart PIGS, Drones and Robots, Water Recycling, Cloud Computing, Gas Imaging\/VR, and Mobile Data\/Internet of Things. 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