The author of the article "M. V. Ramana" is long-time opponent of nuclear energy , mostly because of nuclear weapon proliferation concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._V._Ramana

See for example:

"Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion", 1999 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)

https://www.ippnw.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bombing-Bom...

"Costing plutonium: economics of reprocessing in India", M.V. Ramana, J.Y. Suchitra, 2007

https://www.geocities.ws/m_v_ramana/nucleararticles/IJGEI_Vo...

"India, Pakistan and the Bomb", Scientific American, 2001

https://nci.org/01/12/07-08.pdf

What I find interesting is how little the sales pitch seems to have changed. "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition" apparently sounded plausible in the 1950s too

Feels like there is a "too small" range where fixed costs make a reactor design uneconomic, and perhaps a "too big" range where they cost so much that they are rare strategic investments without the benefit of a production line.

Is there a happy medium? Some of the modern SMR proposals aren't all that small. There's a 470MW Rolls Royce unit, for example.

Look, I prefer nuclear over fossil fuel every day of the week. It's the great hope of the non-carbon electricity sources.

In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up. And that's before we add the risk of meltdowns.

Economically it makes no sense, not at the returns level, not at the timescale level, and certainly not at the political level. (If a US president can shutter an offshore wind farm unilaterally, imagine the risk to a nuclear plant that is 50% complete, and not yet fueled.)

There's a reason they're mostly run by govts. Govts are the only providers who don't have a money motive.

Personally I think research into storage, coupled with "wider" grids geographically, make solar and wind far more financially attractive.

Private capital has no appetite for nuclear, and few govts are left with both financial ability, and political will, for 30 year projects.

And if you think fission is expensive, wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...

Seems there's no mention of Russia in the article, but they seem to have a rich tradition of small reactors[0].

My understanding is there's still ongoing research/commercialization work but the fabled "many and cheap" production state hasn't been reached there either

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_small_nuclear_...

... cracks .... cracking ... cracked .. cracks..

there's a remarkable similarity to the life of these units.

They worked, until they didn't.

"ah, but we're much wiser now" is of course in this too.

Nuclear's great until you have a natural disaster or war. Then every single reactor is a potential Chernobyl. The less of those around, the better.

I always get touchy when someone compares the cost of nuclear MWh to the ones of solar and wind turbines, because they are essentially NOT the same MWh.

Nuclear works 24x7 on its own. Intermittent energies don't.

Intermittent energies need a whole infrastructure on their side (usually gas / coal power plants) to guarantee 24x7 electricity. This cost should be factored in.

If you are not convinced, think about your cell phone service: would you pay the same for a network that works only when it is sunny ? No. Not the same.

NB: don't even mention batteries, when the largest scale projects, very expensive, can only supply power for a few minutes at grid scale.