A Silicon Valley startup called Oklo is leading the charge to bring nuclear power back to the US with small reactors. Its backers have wealth and political connections that could undermine nuclear safety.
A Silicon Valley startup called Oklo is leading the charge to bring nuclear power back to the US with small reactors. Its backers have wealth and political connections that could undermine nuclear safety.
SMRs have been a thing long before Oklo. It’s the only way to build new nuclear quickly and without massive costs that can take decades to amortize. GE has been selling them. China already has them running, Canada has a few in construction.
I would be far more worried about the ageing nuclear plants in the USA, now 42 years old on average, and the military restarting bomb testing.
There are almost no active SMRs in the world besides a couple of very small test reactors in Russia and China.
No one is “selling them” in the sense of a working device, but rather they are all prototypes that have not been shown to work or live up to the hype. The top vendor in that artitice I posted from June, NuScale, is on the edge of bankruptcy and just churning staff. Its only existant on meme stock hype from “no detail” trade deals about nuclear investments, not on actual sales of its technology.