Just watched a presentation about small modular reactors. One thing that thought of is that you'd get much more bang for your buck in a small community distributing heat instead of electricity. For something like a native community in the far north the electricity is often changed back to heat for homes and the like anyway. Apparently generators are only 33% efficient so instead of a 20MW electric generator you'd have something like a 60MW thermal generator, and that changes a lot.
I think you can also change the calculus in industrial plants as well. If you need to hear air or run a heat exchanger then there's no good reason to switch between them. Moreover you can store heat in a medium to help deal with changes in load so it doesn't shock the reactor.
Presumably the per btu cost of heating would go down since you're delivering more heat for less fuel and less mechanical stuff between you and the heat.
I think you can also change the calculus in industrial plants as well. If you need to hear air or run a heat exchanger then there's no good reason to switch between them. Moreover you can store heat in a medium to help deal with changes in load so it doesn't shock the reactor.
Presumably the per btu cost of heating would go down since you're delivering more heat for less fuel and less mechanical stuff between you and the heat.
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I read somewhere a long time ago that one of the SMR stratups envisioned welding one of their reactors shut after loading and dropping it in rural alaska to power remote villages.
The idea was that they would then no longer have to load up on diesel for winter.
The reactor would then last 20-25 years with the pre-loaded fuel, and would then be dismantled and recycled as far as possible.