There’s a good briefing from Cheryl Rofer at Physics Today on how the United States came to lag so far behind other countries in the design of nuclear reactors. The short version is that we chose the research approaches that had the most immediate military applications.
I still have hopes for small, modular nuclear reactors, especially those that use thorium for fuel. They have all sorts of advantages over our present reactor designs not the least of which is security. However, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the reactors of the future were designed in India. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.
