There are many tech ideas that are always on the horizon, never actually here. Personal air travel (formerly known as "flying cars"), quantum computing, fusion energy, the commercial use of superconductivity. Another item for this list is surely "small nuclear reactors". Even in the heyday of the nuke/anti-nuke debates, after Three Mile Island, there was a theory on the pro-nuke side that the real problem was the endless delay that comes with bigness. Smaller ("modular") reactors could mean less expensive projects, a quicker licensing cycle, more expeditious actual building, and the gradual popular acceptance that would come with familiarity. "Okay, in my back yard, because it seems to be in just about everybody's back yard." That's the idea. More recently, the growing concern over climate change as THE great environmental issue, and on the burning of hydrocarbons as the great controllable cause there of, the politics of nuclear pow...