To meet climate policy goals, it will be necessary to deploy a series of low-carbon energy technologies, including nuclear power. The small modular reactor (SMR) can potentially support climate change mitigation and energy security issues. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are gaining popularity; however, one crucial debate is whether SMRs can compete economically with conventional nuclear reactors or not. From a commercial point of view, SMRs will be able to provide process heat in various industrial applications, replace older nuclear, natural gas, and coal power facilities, and serve smaller energy markets with less established infrastructure. Realizing these advantages would rely heavily on the near-term quick up-scaling of SMRs; this paper, then, examines and identifies some of the most hindering constraints and barriers for the quick deployment of SMR such as the technology choice, licensing, economy of scale and financing, public acceptance, supply chain, and proliferation. A clear identification of the evident and more hidden bottlenecks preventing a quick deployment is made putting in evidence areas in need of much deeper analysis than the one conducted by the SMR community so far.

During the last few years, nuclear energy has received great attention due to the increase in climate change awareness. According to the Paris agreement, global temperature is to be kept below 2 °C and preferably below 1.5 °C by 2050. This approach has been substantially confirmed in the recent COP 26 in Glasgow. This research investigates the effects of integrating SMR nuclear power plants (small modular reactors) into the Nordhaus Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model for reducing the CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere by substituting all existing fossil-fueled power plants (FPPP). The software is based on the VENSIM dynamic systems modeling platform. Simulations were carried out from the year 2019 to 2100 using 10-year increments. Several scenarios were thus simulated replacing roughly 70,000 FPPPs operating at this time in the world. Simulations indicate a CO₂ reduction of approximately 12.63% relative to the initial conditions used and using 87,830 SMR core units of 80 MWe electric each to meet such demand. The DICE model further predicts the cost of climate damage impacting the upper ocean and atmospheric temperatures, and the deep ocean temperature as USD 1.515 trillion (US Dollar; (US) trillion = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 × 10¹²)) by the end of this century. From a modified section of the model, a cost of USD 1.073 trillion is predicted as the toll on human health costs. This is thus equal to a USD 2.59 trillion loss in the economy.