I think it's not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.

I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won't create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.

What's difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.

Yeah. Currently the center-right government here in Sweden are pushing nuclear, because the one thing they hate more than brown people is green people. But the industry actually tasked with building and running the plants have extracted both credit guarantees (== taxpayer money) and a legally mandated minimum price on electricity - remember, the entire populist narrative of nuclear is that it will bring cheap power! Plus they're unlikely to start building unless there's a stable parliamentary majority to cement the deal.

OK, so far, so good (nuclear policy in Sweden is colored by the fractious debate on ending nuclear power in the late 70s, but the principals of that debate (boomers) are finally dying off). But when the shovel hits the ground, you need a site to build it on. And the neighbors of said site are generally of the opinion that a fucking power pylon is an infringement on their god-given right to property resale price increase. Imagine a concrete box of eldrich power blocking the skyline, and imagine a population of people who know how to pull the levers of obstruction and have had decades of practice doing it. Fun times ahead.

Hell yeah.

Nuclear energy isnt a technical problem, it's a human problem. Specifically, the real expense in US nuclear construction is that there are only a handful of contractors who have the tribal knowledge to actually do nuclear construction e.g. pour concrete, install old-fashioned non-networked electrcal control systems, big switchgear, pipefitting, startup V&V, an so on.

They'll all gladly monkeywrench, slow walk, and re-work every step because they know there's no real competition for fleet-wide contracts, and no one from the CEOs to the craft on the ground want the job to end, so you get it decades late or not at all.

One more piece of evidence that prompt fondlers are not serious people.

Source: am person of nuclear

@frezik @dgerard but when did they ever even identify an actual problem?