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Small Nuclear Power Reactors • There is revival of interest in small and simpler units for generating electricity from nuclear power, and for process heat. • The interest is driven both by a desire to reduce capital costs and to provide power away from large grid systems. • The technologies involved are very diverse. As nuclear power generation has become established since the 1950s, the size of reactor units has grown from 60 MWe to more than 1600 MWe, with corresponding economies of scale in operation. At the same time there have been many hundreds of smaller reactors built both for naval use (up to 190 MW thermal) and as neutron sources, yielding enormous expertise in the engineering of deliberately small units.
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