I suppose a fast neutron design is out of the question since it has to be so compact?

Being able to ship the thing around for fuel reprocessing/maintenance is a huge advantage as well. This can presumably all be done at a central location, instead of having to build up infrastructure on site at each reactor.


But politics, as always, is going to be a huge problem. Land installations are taboo enough, so what mayor or governor wants to be seen approving a floating offshore nuclear barge?

Oh, also, are the barges themselves mobile? Having to lug these things around with CO2-belching tugs seems rather wasteful when there's 200MW of power on board, though I suppose they wouldn't necessarily be rated to run in rough seas...


Speaking of which, storms, hurricanes, and tsunamis are another big elephant in the room.

I hope he didn't actually say: "Hopefully, there will be a lot of accidents because we will have a lot of these reactors."

Regardless of whether compact reactors are put in shipping containers or on barge-ships, it truly is a shame all power development efforts are not going full force into the various safe compact reactor designs currently under development. Build them now.

Once gas, oil, and coal generation is shut down, something other than wind and solar is going to be required to charge all these EVs and do it in a distributed fashion.

There are other metals like tin, lead, etc that are not such a problem. Personally lead seems like the way to go as the most simple, safe.
Put in the center of heat storage, power can be taken off on demand making it much more valuable, more efficient.
While these are ok, it's hard to compete with home, building power at retail prices or heat/cold and EV with V2G near free storage and on demand generation. Or home solar, wind, CHP/CSP.
Why pay for nuke when you have that free one in the sky?
A good place for small inherently safe nukes would be powering larger ships.

what could go wrong! and how about all that nuclear waste? Why don't we just use the free abundant safe and clean mega scale nuclear reactor that is in the sky every day predictably and use solar cells to safely get that energy? Why keep polluting the planet with toxic radioactive waste when the best nuclear reactor is outside? My solar cells and Tesla battery power my entire home and 3 Teslas for the transportation of the entire family. No nuclear waste nothing!

So at what point do you get steam out of these things? Another loop with water cooling the sodium hydroxide? (And if they really do have all of the corrosion sources under control, that's pretty mind-boggling. Because there's also corrosion from the defects introduced when neutrons and other fragments slam into all your structure.)

I also wonder: does this "lava" weather and turn into sand and dust the way regular lava does?

I was going to ask what the downsides are considering they have been around for 50 years and made little Impact but the article spelt it out pretty tellingly. Hardly seems trivial and surely only a prototype running for years will prove they truly have solved the corrosion issues. It’s alright saying they can have thousands dotted around the world but proving their safety to potential users and the obvious issue of decommission after a relatively short period for a reactor seems to be serious and very costly hurdles to me. How much care post use even in ‘stable’ solid form as it states will it take. Present used fuel being stored in glass has been the aim as long as I can remember but has that actually been accomplished on a large scale as yet? Hey I see their timescale as supremely optimistic, we might even have early commercial fusion reactors by the time this will probably be capable of real impact which will kill it stone dead even IF they can get through all their e tensile technical and regulatory hurdles. I just don’t see public acceptance in most areas of the world.

What is the cost per KWh? If it's down around where natural gas and renewables and it is as safe as advertised then I could see placing them off the coast of California on a ship along with equipment to turn seawater into fresh.

This whole deployment scenario is utter nonsense designed to distract from the unsolved problems in molten salt reactors. Please just build a prototype demonstrating your new moderator and fuel enrichment cycle. If your modular reactors require economies derived from offshore deployment to be competitive, they are likely uninteresting in comparison to other technologies. Also, a PR filter might be a good thing for investment outlook going forward. Sincere best wishes.