Small Modular Reactors

“What was missing is that people did not realize that you're going to have to pursue that model through hardware iteration. And that's where really where Valor is unique is that Yes, we believe in SMRs. We believe in reactors that are manufactured. But we also …”

“By the time, like any of these SMRs actually get near production, the TCO of solar will be like, 10 or 12 dollars per megawatt hour, and it will be 80% of all the power generation.”

“Many of the SMRs are still science experiments.”

“And so if gigawatt scale is for the grid and megawatt scale is for remote communities or, you know, government installations, then the middle scale, I think is going to find its niche behind the meter with data centers over the next five to 10 years.”

“I worry that there's going to be a falling out in the industry. There's probably too many SMR companies and it would be better if the industry can kind of coalesce around three or four different technologies and focus the resources there.”

“We're actually hoping to energize the first AI, AI factory powered by an SMR in twenty-twenty-seven.”

“By the time that they deliver working SMRs at scale, the problem is that the marginal cost of electricity will effectively be zero, and it'll have gone to zero because of a combination of solar and storage, as well as coal and oil.”

“It seems pretty clear to me, I think two years ago, I've got a blog post on this saying that, like, we're going to have to go to solar and batteries for AI data centers at scale and back then everyone was still talking about, like, oh, we're going to build SMR…”

“There just can't be a Cambrian explosion of new reactors. The, Industrial logic of the nuclear industry just doesn't lend itself to that. I think best case scenario, it's bad for the industry if you end up with, you know, four or five competing reactor designs…”

“But the reality is the only countries that have functioning civilian small modular reactors are Russia and China.”

“We will have new next generation small modular reactors critical next year. Our goal is by July fourth, and I think we will beat that.”

“Ah, probably 10 years. 10 years. Because it's just a learning curve. With the small modular reactors, you gotta build up the supply chain, you gotta build up and build them in volume. The cost can come down dramatically.”

“We all talk about SMRs, small modular reactors. The reality is that if you get everything permitted and you believe the technology can be de-risked, you're still in a 20, 35 plus timeframe. You're a decade away.”

“I saw yesterday the Tennessee Valley Authority filed the first ever application for a small modular reactor.”

“And when you have multiples at a site and multiples in a deployment, you can get down those cost curves both in the factory and in the field more readily than you could with a large reactor.”

“The smaller plant sizes, the small modular reactors you're looking at for Google, can probably fit about a hundred acres or so or less.”

“Texas and Utah that are suing the NRC to try and get regulatory control over small modular reactors.”

“The challenge there is that between permitting and technology development that needs to happen, you're probably talking about, you know, mid 20 thirties before you see that become a real play.”

“There's, I think there's a good chance that this, that Pam Bondi and the attorney general settle that case, in which case states could then stand up their own licensing boards.”

“We have a partnership with a, with an NGO called Terra Praxis. And with Terra Praxis, we are identifying coal power sites for repowering to nuclear and SMR, so small modular reactors.”

“I think as everything becomes like easier to make from AI to SMRs, like brand ends up playing a big role.”

“We do think that you know, over the next probably starting somewhere in, in 20, 30 and beyond these small modular reactors, which is what X-energy builds, are gonna be a huge component of this.”

“I just don't think your typical community wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard, and I don't think it matters that much if it's a small modular one either.”

“These SMRs, they don't work. Oh, that's, just to be clear, SMRs don't work yet. We have theoretical ways in which we can profile and model that they work. But we don't have a functional one that people can look at and inspect.”

“There are SMRs operating in China, Russia, and India today. And there's about 65 being built at this moment, right?”

“We basically have a hundred floating SMRs in our naval fleet.”

“The reason to make it IP free, Is to get everyone working on the same platform, to remove single source dependency risk, and to get the utilities confidence that this thing's gonna be successful, and gonna go forward, and to get everyone behind it. So do the L…”

“Building de novo facilities to power either clusters or giga sites for massive data centers, I think is going to be much, much harder, and they're going to try with small modular reactors, that's a ten-year kind of process, but doing it with geothermal, I thin…”

“Ok, so the point is that my hope is around this generation four reactors, which, again, there is a hope element to that, but they should be getting online by the end of this decade, and they are more smaller than the big power plant.”

“Small reactors, SMRs, are a nuclear engineering solution to a financial problem. We need a financial solution to this financial problem. Small modular reactors are a nuclear engineering, engineering solution to a PR problem. We need a PR solution to that, not …”

“On the expensive side, you can look at the cost overruns that have hit basically every recent reactor development in the United States and in some other countries, whether traditional reactor types or so-called small modular reactors.”

“So one is Wilson et al. 20 20 and Swartz et al. 20 20, but they both look at the size of energy technologies and their learning rates, and they find that across all sorts of energy technologies, batteries, generators, the smaller they are, the faster they lear…”

“If you talk to the people at the DOE, the loans office, they'll tell you what needs to be replicated and done the same way over and over again is not necessarily the hardware, the chunks of hardware, it's construction practices. It's the construction sub parts…”

“What I don't want is the sort of generalized hype around SMRs to translate into just yet another round of a large and historically Corrupt and incompetent industry getting another giant round of subsidies dumped on its head for ultimately nothing, which is wha…”

“Small modular reactors which will address some of the issues of the costs involved in building nuclear plants, the timelines associated with building nuclear plants. Small modular actors can actually reuse existing nuclear waste as their energy source.”

“Most of them that are thought of as the SMRs in this generation are neither small, some of them are bigger than the original reactors, and they're not modular. Like, they are using traditional construction techniques that maybe have, like, a little bitty bit o…”

“The industry started with small being like 200 or 300 megawatts, which is only slightly smaller than the original fleet of reactors that we built out, which was 506 hundred megawatts. And now those very models have climbed up to 405 107 hundred megawatts, and …”

“One of the main reasons I'm so excited about SMRs is that we actually aren't waiting on any new scientific breakthroughs, and these things are getting slated to be built in the near term.”