Why Small Nations Are the Most Excited About Small Reactors
From Ghana to Romania, smaller countries aren't just curious about SMRs — they're signing deals, building training centers, and betting their energy futures on them.
There is a running joke in the nuclear industry: the countries most enthusiastic about small modular reactors are rarely the ones actually building them. The United States, the UK, France — they have the money, the engineers, and the regulatory frameworks. They are moving cautiously, as rich countries tend to do. But talk to an energy official from Ghana, Kenya, Romania, or Mongolia, and you hear something different. You hear urgency. You hear a specific kind of excitement that comes not from abstract techno-optimism, but from a very concrete problem: their countries need power, they need it soon, and the traditional nuclear playbook was never written for them.
This is not a niche observation. Since COP28 in late 2023, more than 25 countries have explicitly committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. A striking number of those are nations that have never operated a single reactor. The International Atomic Energy Agency is now coordinating SMR interest from countries including Algeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Jordan, Mongolia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan — a list that reads less like a nuclear club and more like a general assembly of economies that feel they have been left behind by the energy transition. The question worth asking is: why SMRs specifically? And is the excitement justified?
The gigawatt problem: when big power plants are too big
Here is the fundamental mismatch that almost never gets mentioned in Western SMR coverage. A conventional nuclear reactor produces somewhere between 1,000 and 1,700 megawatts of electricity. That is a lot of power. For France or the United States, dropping that kind of output onto a continental-scale grid is routine. For a country like Kenya, which has a total installed electricity capacity of roughly 3,000 MW across its entire national grid, connecting a single traditional reactor would mean managing a single plant that equals a third of your entire power system. One unexpected shutdown and you have a catastrophe. ⚡
The SIPRI analysis from 2024 put it well: 20th-century nuclear plants were, for the most part, enormous beasts that required sizable grids just to absorb their output. SMRs, by contrast, are designed to top out at 300 megawatts per module — about one-third the size of a conventional reactor. More practically, many designs come in even smaller increments. NuScale’s individual power modules, for example, each produce 77 MW, meaning a country can start with one, see how it goes, and add more as demand grows. That is a completely different risk profile than betting several billion dollars on a single monolithic plant.
This sizing logic explains something that pure economics does not. The appeal of SMRs to small-grid nations is not just about cost — it is about manageability. A power plant that can be built in stages, scaled up modularly, and physically sited in locations that would never work for a 1,000 MW behemoth is simply a different kind of technology. Whether the economics ultimately work out is a separate (and genuinely thorny) question. But the fit between SMR design philosophy and small-nation energy reality is not hype — it is structural.
The specific appeal breaks down like this:
Grid compatibility: Small grids cannot safely absorb a sudden loss of a gigawatt-scale reactor without blackouts; sub-300 MW units are far more manageable
Upfront capital: Lower per-unit cost means smaller financing ask, which is critical for countries with limited access to international capital markets
Modular expansion: Nations can add generating capacity incrementally as demand grows, rather than overbuilding from day one
Siting flexibility: Many SMR designs don’t require the massive water sources that traditional plants need, which matters enormously in arid or landlocked countries 🌍
Passive safety: Modern SMR designs rely on physics — gravity, natural circulation — rather than human intervention, which is relevant in countries still building out their nuclear workforce
Who is actually signing up
The skeptic’s response to SMR enthusiasm in small nations is: sure, everyone says they want one. Letters of intent are cheap. But look past the press releases and the picture is more substantive than the cynics suggest. 🔬
Ghana is the most concrete African example. In August 2024, at the U.S.-Africa Nuclear Energy Summit in Nairobi, Ghana signed a framework agreement with NuScale Power and Regnum Technology Group to deploy up to 12 NuScale VOYGR-12 SMR modules. Each module initially produces 50 MW, scalable to 77 MW, which means the full deployment would eventually reach nearly 924 MW — a major chunk of new capacity. Through U.S. government support, Ghana also launched the region’s first NuScale Energy Exploration Centre in Accra, a hands-on training facility for future operators. It is not a shovel in the ground, but it is well beyond a vague declaration.
Kenya is moving on a parallel track. The country officially aims to commission its first nuclear plant by 2034 and in May 2025 hosted Africa’s first IAEA-led SMR School — a regional training program for engineers and regulators across the continent. Kenya has launched feasibility studies for 100–300 MW SMR deployment and, perhaps more revealingly, signed an MoU with Russia in 2025 to begin constructing a nuclear plant by 2027. Kenya is not waiting for a single perfect option. It is hedging across partners.
Rwanda is exploring microreactors and SMRs through partnerships with U.S.-based NANO Nuclear Energy and Canada’s Dual Fluid. A demonstration reactor funded by Dual Fluid could, if it materializes, dramatically accelerate Rwanda’s timeline. Then there is Europe’s version of this story. Poland and Romania — both mid-sized economies with significant coal dependence and a strong desire to cut it — are advancing GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, a 300 MWe SMR designed explicitly as a coal plant replacement. GE Hitachi claims the BWRX-300 cuts capital costs by up to 60% per megawatt compared to traditional reactors, with a construction timeline of 24 to 36 months. Poland and Romania don’t have the nuclear infrastructure of France, but they have the grid scale and the political will. 🚀
What these countries share is instructive:
Electricity demand growing faster than their current supply
Limited options for large baseload power that isn’t coal or gas
Political and economic pressure to hit climate targets
Insufficient grid capacity for traditional-scale nuclear plants
Have you looked at what your own country’s energy plan looks like for 2035? The countries signing these SMR agreements are the ones that have, and found the answer unsatisfying.
What small nations actually want — and what they think they’re getting
When researchers Friederike Friess, Maha Siddiqui, and M.V. Ramana analyzed presentations from national representatives at IAEA conferences for their February 2026 paper in PNAS Nexus, they identified three consistent expectations from developing-country officials considering SMRs:
Low cost electricity — specifically cheaper than what they’re currently paying for diesel or imported gas
Demonstrated technology — proof that the design works somewhere before they stake their national energy policy on it
Local manufacturing — the idea that the nuclear project would bring industrial jobs and technology transfer, not just a foreign-built box
These are rational things to want. They are also, unfortunately, things that SMRs currently struggle to promise. The paper is skeptical about all three. ⚡ On cost, the researchers point out that SMRs sacrifice economies of scale by design — smaller output means higher cost per unit of electricity, not lower. On demonstrated technology, only two commercial SMRs are actually operating today: one in Russia (the floating Akademik Lomonosov, operational since 2020) and one in China (the HTR-PM pebble-bed reactor, which came online commercially in December 2023, though at reduced capacity). Every other design is still on paper or in early licensing. And on local manufacturing, the economic model that makes SMRs potentially cheaper — factory mass-production of standardized modules — directly conflicts with local manufacturing. You cannot simultaneously build in a central factory for economies of scale and also build locally in 30 different countries.
None of this means the excitement is irrational. TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, has been explicit that its Natrium reactor targets “nations that don’t even have nuclear today: nations in sub-Saharan Africa, where there’s tremendous population growth, or in Indonesia where we think Gen IV technology will be ideal.” That is a genuine long-term vision, not a charity pitch. And a Nature Energy study from 2024 found that, technically, micro and small modular reactors could serve 70.9% of the world’s unelectrified population. The physics work. What does not automatically work is the economics, governance, and financing — and those are the pieces that most of the enthusiasm papers over.
The hard math that no press release mentions
It is worth being specific about the economic tension here, because the gap between promise and reality is real and the people signing agreements deserve to understand it. 💡
The PNAS Nexus researchers calculated that even with significant projected cost declines — around 40% between now and 2050 — electricity from SMRs could still run US$180 to US$305 per megawatt-hour. That is two to five times the projected cost of a 90%-renewable energy grid by the end of this decade. For a developing country choosing between those two paths, that premium is not trivial. It is the difference between a viable national energy plan and a budget crisis.
The construction timeline problem compounds this. The IAEA’s own guidance suggests a 7 to 10 year timeline for a first-of-a-kind SMR in a newcomer country. That is the optimistic case. China’s HTR-PM started construction in December 2012 and was not declared commercially operational until December 2023 — 108 months, nearly triple the original estimate. NuScale’s UAMPS project in Idaho, which was supposed to be the landmark American deployment, was canceled in 2024 after costs ballooned. These are not obscure data points. They are the two most prominent recent examples.
The skeptical view is that small nations are being sold a promise calibrated around 2030s or 2040s technology at a price point that has not yet been demonstrated anywhere. The optimistic view is that the first-of-a-kind cost and schedule problem is a real but solvable engineering and manufacturing challenge — and that the countries getting their regulatory frameworks, workforces, and financing structures ready now will be first in line when the technology matures. Both views can be correct simultaneously.
What should a developing country’s energy minister actually do with this tension? Probably something like what Kenya is doing: explore multiple partners, invest in human capital and regulatory capacity, commission feasibility studies, and make no irreversible commitments until at least one design with comparable grid needs has been built somewhere and operated reliably for a few years.
The geopolitical layer that makes this more complicated
Here is a dimension of the small-nations-and-SMRs story that rarely gets the attention it deserves: this is not just an energy question. It is a geopolitical contest being played out through reactor deals. 🌍
Russia’s Rosatom and China’s state nuclear enterprises are not building reactors in Africa and the Middle East purely for commercial reasons. Nuclear power plants create decades-long dependencies — on fuel supply, on maintenance expertise, on technical assistance, on regulatory frameworks modeled on the supplier’s approach. A country that builds its first reactor with Russian help tends to buy its second one from Russia too. The same logic applies to American, French, South Korean, and Chinese vendors. Every SMR agreement signed is also a statement about which bloc a country’s energy infrastructure will align with for the next half-century.
This explains why the U.S.-Africa Nuclear Energy Summit was held in Nairobi with the U.S. Department of Energy’s direct involvement when NuScale signed the Ghana deal. The ITIF’s 2025 analysis puts it plainly: SMR markets will be global, and the U.S. and its allies need to align their regulatory regimes specifically to counter competition from Chinese and Russian state-backed enterprises that can offer financing, construction, and operation as a single package.
For small nations navigating this, it creates leverage as well as risk. Multiple powers actively want to sell you a reactor. That is unusual. Historically, energy infrastructure in developing countries arrived largely on the terms of whoever was willing to finance it. The current competitive landscape — with the U.S., Russia, China, France, South Korea, and Canada all pushing reactor exports — means a country like Kenya or Indonesia can, in principle, shop around. They can demand better financing terms, more technology transfer, and more local content. Whether they have the institutional capacity to negotiate that effectively is a different question. But the leverage is real.
The countries getting in early are not being naive. They are placing considered bets on a technology that, if it matures as its proponents expect, will give them energy options that large plants never could. The bet may not pay off. The technology could stay expensive. The timelines could slip again. But if you are running a grid that adds a million new electricity users every year and you have exhausted the easy renewable sites, the calculus looks different from a ministry in Nairobi than it does from a think tank in Washington. So: is your country’s energy plan accounting for what happens if SMRs actually work at scale — or only for what happens if they don’t?