ARBOK LONGBATTERY vs Small Modular Reactors — Behind-the-Meter Power for a 300 MW Industrial Load
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: A techno-economic assessment published in Nature Communications in August 2026 concludes that small modular reactors (SMRs) are uncompetitive in the US power sector and that their viable market is on-site supply of heat, electricity and hydrogen to industrial facilities, conditional on the hydrogen production tax credit. Without that credit, profitable first-wave deployment across the United States is limited to about 4 GWe; with it, to about 91 GWe. This paper accepts the architectural premise of that study — generation placed beside the consumer, with no transmission line, interconnection queue or grid harmonisation — and compares two technologies built on it for the same duty: a 300 MW, round-the-clock industrial load. The first is a single SMR-300 unit. The second is ARBOK LONGBATTERY (ALB), a containerised, water-fed distributed generator supplied under a build-own-operate-maintain (BOOM) model with a power purchase agreement. The comparison covers capital burden and its allocation, cost of electricity relative to market prices, time to first power, licensing and siting, land use, staffing, waste and decommissioning, fuel supply, and physical security. Both technologies are at a pre-commercial stage, which makes the comparison one of architectures rather than of track records.
Authors: Vischmidt, Michael, Ponomarenko, Dmitry
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear Energy and Engineering
Field: Energy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214068735