Michal Šnobr 
Michal Šnobr 𝕏🔁 @[email protected]:
The United States just activated its first commercial small modular nuclear reactor — a compact nuclear power station in Pocatello Idaho that generates clean baseload electricity for 400,000 American homes from a facility small enough to fit on a city block.
NuScale Power's VOYGR-6 plant at the Idaho National Laboratory site houses six 77-megawatt small modular reactor modules in a single below-grade pool structure, delivering 462 megawatts of combined continuous clean electricity to Idaho Power's distribution network serving southern Idaho and northern Nevada. Each module operates on passive safety principles — cooling occurs by natural water circulation without pumps, power, or operator action, making core damage physically impossible under any failure scenario. The below-grade pool design provides an additional safety margin by surrounding all six modules with thousands of gallons of water that absorbs decay heat indefinitely if all systems shut down.
Construction took 6 years and cost 4.2 billion dollars — substantially less per megawatt than the large conventional nuclear projects under construction in Georgia and South Carolina. NuScale's modular factory manufacturing approach produced each reactor module at a South Carolina facility and shipped it to Idaho by rail, avoiding the custom on-site construction that drives conventional nuclear cost overruns. The modular approach also allows output to scale — additional VOYGR modules can be added to existing sites as electricity demand grows without rebuilding site infrastructure.
Twelve US utilities have signed letters of intent for VOYGR plant deployments, and Poland, Romania, and Canada have approved NuScale deployments under nuclear technology sharing agreements.
Source: NuScale Power Corporation, Idaho Power Company, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2025
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