A low-power nuclear reactor designed for deployment in numbers and close to consumers, under a minimal liability cap.
The small modular reactor is a reactor below one hundred megawatts whose whole industrial logic rests on deployment in numbers and in proximity, beside data centers, industrial sites and towns. Yet the liability regime applies to it its lowest cap, a primary cover truncated at seventy-four million dollars for a six-reactor site, and an aggregate cap of 560 million unchanged since 1957. Population density does appear in the formula, which is actuarially correct, but the truncation renders it inoperative exactly where it matters most, applying the lowest cap to the densest and most correlated deployment.
A single policy of seventy-four million dollars covers all six small reactors at one site, whatever the surrounding population density.
SMR, petit réacteur