NuScale

A panoramic charcoal sketch showing the financial trajectory of SMR projects worldwide. From left to right, a canceled U.S. build, Russia’s barge-mounted reactors, and China’s HTR-PM stand as markers of escalating costs, with overlaid bars and numbers highlighting overruns that climb from 75% to 200%

Small Modular Reactors and the Big Questions of Cost & Waste

The publication of Kim and Macfarlane’s 2026 study on small modular reactors is a moment worth pausing over. Nuclear energy sits at the margins of most serious decarbonization pathways today, but SMRs have been marketed as the technology that could change that. They are advertised as cheaper, safer, faster to … [continued]

ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image depicting an abandoned coal power plant with an illusory overlay of small modular nuclear reactors floating above it

What Drives This Madness On Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?

A few months ago, a STEM and economics literate global decarbonization executive for a $4 billion annual revenue logistics business operating in most of the major trading companies of the world asked me “What drives this madness on hydrogen?” They were being peppered with irrational proposals for the molecule and … [continued]

Small Modular Nuclear Reactors – A Big Part of America’s Energy Future?

America’s nuclear power renaissance has been just around the corner for years, it seems. Even though 20 percent of all U.S. electricity is generated by nuclear power plants, without any greenhouse gas emissions, safety and cost concerns mean no new plants have been built in decades.

But a new breed of nuclear reactor could unlock the power of the atom in a safe, affordable way. energyNOW! correspondent Daniel Sieberg explores the promise of small modular reactors (SMR) – simple enough to be scalable, powerful enough to power a whole town, and safe enough to be buried underground.