PJ Vogt

You can see pictures of them online.

They run the gamut.

Some just look like small factory buildings.

Others have swooping solar roofs.

Star Wars architecture.

The main thing here, though, is the size and the modular part of it all.

The theory is that by building the same thing over and over again to the same specifications in a factory setting, that eventually you can get costs to come down.

meaning small modular reactors are helpful because their design is standardized.

So in theory, you can build them more cheaply at scale in a factory.

In Wyoming right now, one relatively small nuclear reactor project has broken ground.

It's actually a project from Bill Gates' nuclear startup.

It's supposed to be online in 2030.

These small modular reactors, their size also means we can just slot them in to replace older non-nuclear power plants that we want to take offline.

Say, a coal-burning plant we want to decommission.

But there's another challenge people want to try to use nuclear energy for.

What about getting power to extremely remote parts of the world, like a tiny Alaskan village?

This brings us to our last category, micro-reactors.

Micro-reactors really are quite micro, small enough to be easily transported wherever they need to go.

Picture a rectangular box the size of the shipping container you'd see on the back of a truck, but sleeker.

Micro-reactors are designed for places that do not currently have grid access.