If they can be simpler, why not scale them to the size of a current reactor and reap all the benefits? What's in them that necessarily only works at the small scale?

SMRs are not simpler. They are reactors, the same as the large ones. They have all the same features. They are safer only in the sense that if they go bonkers, there is less to actually go defective. They are scalable in the same sense than larger reactors are. Most of the large ones are in plants with several of them, which means they were scaled. And the last one is unproven, as they are neither built nor deployed yet.

On the other hand, they have more surface which can catch stray neutrons for the same amount of power, because they are smaller, and you need more of them. That means more material gets contaminated and has to regularly get replaced because it degrades over time. If they operate at the same pressure, you need the same thickness of the walls, but with smaller diameter, you need more material per volume. They need the same amount of shielding per nuclear source to get the same protection level, but you need more of them, because you have more but smaller nuclear sources.

I've been to something which could be called an SMR. It was a scaled down nuclear reactor built in the 1970ies for studies and reactor experiments. It was 25 meters high, and it had a diameter of 6 meters. And its power output was 2 Watts. No. Not 2 kW or even 2 MW. 2 Watts. Enough to light a single LED lamp. Actually, it was designed to withstand 1000 Watts of power output, because that was the theoretical maximum the uranium-vinyl-pellets to feed the reactor could create when going critical. But even then... a 1 kW engine the size of a large grain silo.

This is the most important part. Right now, X-Energy is pure vaporware. And yes, I know, all reactor designs are essentially vaporware, because their task is to heat water to turn it into vapor. But this is vapor-vapor. The time line calls for 12 small reactors to be ready by 2039, each rated 80 MW. And the previous project, as mentioned, was already set up 2 years ago, and not a single foundation has been poured yet.

This is one of those incubator projects. Amazon is investing and probably betting on a 30% chance that this will ever bear fruit. Or a 10% chance. I don't know Amazon's calculation. But this project does not mean that any of those 16 reactors (4 previously, 12 now) will ever come into existence. But if they would, Amazon had an edge on powering data centers. So they think it's worth the risk.

Actually, Yandex just had to update their contracts to make bombardment a Force Majeure. Until the first data center was hit, Yandex did not expect to be a target in a war, despite Russia starting to bombard data centers in Ukraine.

After 1986? Seven. Ignalina 2, 3 and 4, Smolensk 3 and 4 and Kursk 3 and 4. You were saying?

Does not matter in this case, if they don't host an online version of it. My impression is that Siemens wants to shut down the project completely.

If Siemens does not re-distribute them, then Siemens does not violate any copyrights on them. Only if Siemens would continue to distribute binaries of OpenRadiuss to customers, they would be in violation.

Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.

While in general, I agree with your sentiment, you mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect is not appropriate here. Dunning and Kruger (1999) does not claim incompetent people would consider themselves above the experts. It's just that incompetent people do no consider themselves as incompetent as they really are, and competent people don't understand how far above the laymen their knowledge is. But both would agree, that the expert knows more about the topic than the layman, and both would sort themselves in the right categories.

You could consider the effect of Dunning and Kruger (1999) as a "mental regression to the mean".

When I am looking at the contracts my company has for our company phones, I doubt your promise. As an American company, it has decided that providing company phones to its employees is not a core competency of the company. So it outsourced the task to the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder has bought data plans for our phones which abruptly switch off everything above EDGE, as soon as the data allocation for the period has been exhausted. No warning. No graceful change. Just a hard cut-off. For everyone, including Field Service, who needs to have mobile internet connectivity to get and update trouble tickets.

No one who owns fine art ever needs to sell it. No one who owns vintage cars ever needs to sell them etc.pp.. Of course, you don't need to sell your bitcoins. As long as they are non-distinguishable from random bit patterns, they don't affect anything. But as soon as you selling bitcoins affects the real world, the real world notices and keeps putting up rules, may they be physical realities or legal requirements.

They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.

They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.

Donald Trump handed Iran the Strait of Hormuz to close at will. That was nuke enough for the Iranian regime to survive the next decade.

No, there is not. If you are not working in B and living in A, you are not generating demand for a daily commute between A and B. The demand only arises if you are actually moving to A and taking up a job in B. If for instance, house prices in A are too high for what a job pays in B, there is also no demand for a daily commute between A and B - completely independent how many lanes the highway between A and B has.

It does not.

As Google did, you can also do the math. Duane Arnold had a net power output of 581 MW or 14 GWh output per day. To store 14 GWh of electricity right now, you have to pay about US$560 Mio (or $40 per kWh). With the 1.9 billion dollar grant, you could build enough capacity for four days of continuous rain. And differently than a nuclear power plant, this battery capacity could do power arbitrage, charging when electricity is cheap and provide it when prices are high, generating revenue and at the same time damping electricity price pikes and stabilizing the grid.