NRC issues first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 small modular reactor

Re:NRC issues first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 ... by mrngld on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:06AM (#49907706)

If the argument is, in part, about footprint then enough solar and battery capacity to output 300MW around the clock with the same uptime/reliability as a nuclear plant is surely going to cover a lot more ground.

I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.

There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).

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Re:NRC issues first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 ... by myrmidon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:48AM (#49908173)

Nuclear reactor uptime is gonna be 90% at most, which is rather easy (battery capacity for several days) to beat even with just solar + batteries (in equatorial and most mid-latitude regions, at least).

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Re:NRC issues first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 ... by roryirvine on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @11:09AM (#49910022)

And this BWRX design is based on ABWR which turned out to be only 70% in practice.

You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.

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