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NuScale is the most conservative of the small-nuclear programs trying to reach the market.

If a community, factory, or city needs an extra boost of nuclear power, they can just order another reactor. Many small reactors are designed with replicability in mind. Some small reactor designs incorporate fully passive safety and risk-management systems that rely on the steady, immutable laws of physics-like gravity or buoyancy-to perform safety functions rather than the actions of people or mechanical equipment. And while traditional nuclear plants need a 10-mile safety buffer in every direction in case of a meltdown, tiny reactors can operate in close quarters with much less risk. A 2019 small modular reactor design from Oregon startup NuScale is about 1 percent the size of a traditional power plant’s containment chamber, though it delivers 10 percent of a plant’s power output. Generally, tiny reactors have a few advantages over power plants. That’s where tiny nuclear hopes to prove itself a competitive alternative to the massive nuclear power plants we know. conceived of a floating nuclear plant in 1969-one that could be built off-site, towed to its final destination, and operated over water-there’s been a vein of thinking in nuclear that says smaller reactors are a suitable form of power for the future. Ever since engineer Richard Eckert of the New Jersey Public Service Electric & Gas Co. The ideal reactor by today’s standards emphasizes safety, cost-​effectiveness, and adaptability. Even nuclear-reactor designs owe some success to chance, convenience, and market whim. Just as HD DVDs fell to Blu-ray, so did experiments like the sodium reactor at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory and the gas-cooled Peach Bottom plant in Pennsylvania fall to the more commonplace light-water reactor. “At the beginning, we were trying all of them.” “All these different reactors were conceived at the same time,” Huff says. Argonne spearheaded a creative boom in nuclear energy. Fermi and the other engineers at Argonne proposed and designed many kinds of reactors, like commercial boiling-water reactors and experimental research reactors, says Katy Huff, nuclear engineer and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering (NPRE) program. The tenets of nuclear reactor design can be traced back to Enrico Fermi’s original 1942 reactor at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.