Removing pumps and relying on convection significantly reduces the volume and mass of items that have to be stored safely for 5000 years. However, it would be likely to decrease the responsiveness to increase/decrease power output. Great for base load, but not suitable for meeting peak demand. Greater use of fusion reactions and various storage mechanisms are likely to be more cost effective in the long run. After all the sun is hardly likely to run out of power any time soon.

Good news indeed, regulatory approval normally takes up to 10 years or so? A step in the right direction but still a PWR with high- level waste. Liquid fuels are the best because fuel fabrication costs are eliminated, for one thing.
I have no confidence that fusion will be realized commercially, based on cost- which is far above unaffordable existing reactors. WHY are they persisting with improbable technology? ITER is estimated to have final price of £20 Billion-& it won't even produce useable electricity!

Strange, there is no corium container Under the reactor ... And I do not see any protection against overheating the pool around the reactor. There should be at least a way to expulse "safely" the vapor outside the building with a chimney ...

This is still far too expensive within our lifetimes, and a deadly problem for all future life. Nuclear power is a fascinating idea, but the fission products tell us to keep it in the lab. I challenge these companies to offer examples of other industries where a similar change in scale has even been tried, let alone succeeded.

Seems like a great idea. It is too bad the approval process is so slow. What is really needed are small modular nuclear power plants like this that are breeder reactors so they can produce future fuel and not have as much radioactive waste

Conceptually, I hate that these are still "steam engines". We are making heat to create a pressure differential to move a mechanical device to move an electromagnetic device to create the movement of electrons in a wire.
I dream of some way of going more directly from atomic particle movement moving the electrons in a wire.
Dunno' how yet . . .

The fuel value of the used fuel elements is what makes them difficult to store. Beryllium fuel elements get around this somewhat by eliminating hot spots. B&W M-Power seems to be farther along than this. The Third World can't get these units fast enough. The ITER design has low temperature super conducting tape frozen into it. Existing high temperature tape could reduce the size by a factor of 3 or increase the Q from 1.1 to 10.

About time! I live in Ontario which gets over 60% of it's energy through old school reactors which are costing untold billions to refurbish.

highlandboy: Sorry,fusion will never be an economical power source: https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%e2%80%99re-cracked-be10699

This company is actually based in Oregon, USA. It started from a professor and group of students at Oregon State University. For those in the comments that said this is fusion. This is not fusion this is a fission reactor. It is walkaway safe and is a scaleable and modular which greatly reduces the complexity and cost. The reason that this is steam based is that the efficiency of a rankine cycle (~31%) is much better than direct thermoelectric materials (<12%). That is a big deal if there was a high efficiency thermoelectric material than that would be great but it has yet to be discovered despite a huge force of theoretical physicists, material scientists and chemists who are laboring tirelessly. What we really need to do is insist on power plants being located so that they can achieve combined heat and power which greatly boosts their effectiveness.