The article does not mention grid applications. In fact, it explicitly Alaska and Canada, and off-grid applications, like mines. So, don't think it's trying to promote the idea of cheap wholesale electricity in normal places, but, instead, reliable on-premise electricity in places where it's not so very easy to get.
Yep, absolutely. But there are plenty of other people, notably here on HN, who get very excited about grid-connected SMRs.
It's also worth noting that the majority of people living without access to grid electricity are in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, places with much better (and much less seasonal) solar resources, and far less capacity to safely manage nuclear power.
> and far less capacity to safely manage nuclear power.
A common point of design (or at least hope) for SMR is for the design itself to be sealed and fail-safe, no operators and no management, when fuel runs your you replace the reactor and send to to the factory for refurb.
The modularity of SMRs comes from being able to build the different modules in factories, but the SMR would still be assembled on-site inside a building/facility.
..maybe. For a given definition of malicious. The flip side of the eye-wateringly expensive and inefficient fuel they're proposing is it's very hard to get the radioactive stuff out of the SiC shell, even with explosives. And getting it to go into thermal runaway would require some exotic materials that can out-last the SiC as it melts.
Spreading tiny fuel pellets everywhere would still be horrible, but far more contained.
The dangers of this would be more diffuse. Large amounts of high level waste compared to a conventional reactor, double the mining, fuel fabrication facilities that are one hopper jam away from going chernobyl. If it were accepted, the industry would get complacent about cracked pellets and Kr-85 or other hard to contain fission byproducts would slowly accumulate everywhere and we'd have to spend 50 years fighting misinformation about how radiation is good for you while it builds up irreversibly.
