Catch 22 of Nuclear Economics

For Nuclear power plants to succeed in a competitive energy market, they must meet two key criteria:

1. They must generate low cost electricity (e.g. LCOE), compared to other baseload sources.

2. They must be "market investible", e.g. low(er) risk and an investment that is small enough to attract private capital.

Traditional Nuclear is about maximal capacity plants, and initial investments are well above 5B$. These usually are financed by governments, but if done right (see UEA Barakah project by KEPCO), produce cheap electricity.

On the other hand, Small Modular reactors entail a much lower investment which is private market "investible", but due to negative economies of scale, will probably generate expensive electricity.

Micro reactors are even more extreme, with current projects targeting defense applications and not commercial electricity customers.

For Nuclear energy to succeed, we must change radically our approach to Nuclear design.

We should not expect small capacity water reactors to conquer the energy market.