Though SMRs have the backing of people like Bill Gates, as far as I can tell every progressive environmental group is dead-set against nuclear energy of any kind. And BS arguments made against SMRs get me shaking my head every time I read one. For example, this one I've chosen randomly:
Small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, are designed to generate less than 300 megawatts of electricity – several times less than typical reactors, which have a range of 1,000 to 1,600 MW. While the individual standardized modules would be small, plans typically call for several modules to be...
www.ewg.org
The authors foolishly use Boeing's manufacturing quality problems with the 737 and 787 aircraft to argue that common design manufacturing in a factory won't improve field reliability and may propagate design flaws. Don't these esteemed authors know that the 737 and 787 didn't suffer from design problems, they are manufacturing problems? (The 737-MAX MCAS issue was a software issue built to purposeful design specs to avoid pilot retraining from the previous generation 737NG planes, not a hardware design problem.) And they go on to discuss problems that might be encountered in large-scale manufacturing, though neither of the authors have any manufacturing experience, or commercial nuclear experience at all. And their reference list is completely self-referencing? Very unimpressive. If any of the semiconductor experts here saw similar nonsense in chip fabrication articles there would be long threads about it.
Over the past several months I'm becoming convinced that the environmental lobbies will try to block any nuclear development in favor of wind and solar, two technologies which have very significant environmental problems themselves, and require equal amounts of back-up power for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. And they can't be distributed due to geographic and meteorological considerations like nuclear plants can, so you need ultrahigh voltage transmission lines for power distribution to population centers, and there are endless challenges in the US and other western countries to building unsightly and land-hungry transmission lines too.
I think it's going to take an Elon Musk-style do-whatever-it-takes character to push a company to defy the political odds to get a commercial SMR in production. I don't follow the nuclear industry very closely, but I haven't noticed anyone like that appear yet.