Kilopower Reactor

[Anomalocaris]

Also giving each house a device containing several kilograms of uranium and a plumbing system full of liquid sodium seems to promise countless exciting challenges for DHS and FEMA, to say nothing of EPA.

Well I didn't mean every house would have one, but rather if one could eventually be made to give off make megawatts of power then you could put few together and power many districts if not whole towns. I mean if they claim that these small thing could make megawatts then their development should be number one priority.

And when it comes to cost competitiveness with conventional means, just remember how much oil and coal really costs us overall. It is the most expensive thing we could use. I mean just in Delhi it was recently reported how toxic air is there that airplanes can't land and you can imagine how that affects human health.

Department of energy is developing small modular nuclear reactors of 50 MW.  

The problem with nuclear reactors is precisely that the security and safety requirements around a 1 MW, a 50 MW or a 1000 MW reactor doesn’t differ by much.   But a 1000 MW reactor can prorate the fixed cost of safety and security over 1000 MWs.   An isolated 1 MW reactor by comparison would be stuck with fixed cost hundreds of times greater on a per MW basis.

This is why DOE decided the only way 50MW modular reactors could even pretend to make sense is to put 12 of them on a single site, inside a single containment building, thus effectively making it a single, but exceptionally complicated, 600 MW reactor.

This is why nuclear reactors for power generation keeps getting bigger, not smaller. The current generation of nuclear reactors are pushing 1500 MW each. Nuclear power does best as centralized bases loaded generation resources on large centralized power grids. Nuclear power is unlikely to be even remotely competitive as distributed generation on micro-grids.