Please Sir, I want SMR!

General Discussion
1

An article by Marcois on American Greatness today says data centers can be powered by Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and they really ARE small and compact, and don’t need huge pools for cooling.
So what are we waiting for?

I was disappointed when I heard JD Vance say he thought the opposition to data centers was, er, powered mainly by people’s concern that they would drive up energy costs. Oh JD, turn in your hillbilly overalls! Higher energy costs is just what desperate opponents mention to enlist people who don’t live too near a proposed data center site. In a rural (or formerly rural) area such as mine, people’s main concern is the destruction of the natural environment, the clear-cutting of hundreds of acres of forest. It’s the ugliness and the noise. Devastation of the huntin’ and the fishin’,Thats not what we moved here, or stayed here, for.

So dear Polymaths, COULD data centers be powered by a unit no bigger than a railroad car? And if so, would that mean they can just be put in areas presently zoned Industrial, instead of in areas zoned Conservation or Open Space? Or why not in skyscrapers in cities?

The article makes it sound like we already have SMRs, but if that’s the case , why are whatever companies build data centers challenging zoning ordinances and taking over forests, despite the frantic pleas of nearby residents?

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

3 Likes
2

Only a tiny one.

A large one would roughly consume the output of a full size reactor. Thus, Microsoft:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-regulator-grants-waiver-three-mile-island-restart-2026-06-02/

3 Likes
3

Oh. Well, in all knowledge there is comfort. Or so they say. Thanks @CTLaw !

2 Likes
4

There is an argument that the Small Modular Reactor is really driven by the search to somehow cut through the Gordian knot of bureaucratic over-lawyered constipation which renders the building of a more efficient normal-sized nuclear reactor in the US either uneconomic or impossible – the kind of normal-sized nuclear reactors being built in places as diverse as China and Saudi Arabia. If we had a representative Congress, the people’s representatives might ask why the Land of the Free is so much more bureaucratic than a Communist one-party state or a traditional Arab monarchy?

A large nuclear power plant would need a lot less land than an equivalent field of windmills or solar panels. But the same people who gave us the ClimateScam and the CovidScam cut their teeth on “Nuclear is Too Dangerous”. They have pushed that line, even though most of us – if we were sentenced to spend the rest of our lives in either Democrat-run Detroit or nuclear-bombed Nagasaki – would chose Nagasaki.

3 Likes
5

Information:

From the World Nuclear website: Small Modular Reactors - World Nuclear Association

On the other hand…

1 Like