The unattended plant is an evidence problem before it is an autonomy problem.
Portable nuclear is the first energy technology that ships to its load rather than tethering the load to a grid, and the dependency runs both ways: a plant too small to carry a round-the-clock crew needs physical AI as its crew, not as its customer. A four-region sweep in native vocabulary found that half already being built. What this review did not locate is work on the layer that lets an unattended plant demonstrate what it did to someone who was not there.
You are the regulator. You cannot visit the plant and you cannot trust its software, but you hold a deterministic twin that will re-run the same commanded sequence. Against an independent meter, an undeclared derate shows up as six flagged hours and a 1.30 MWh discrepancy. Switch the log source to the plant's own software and the same hidden derate gives zero flags and perfect agreement, because the plant files exactly what the twin expects. The check is void, and that is why a generation receipt cannot simply extend a computation receipt.
The other half of the topic, and the Hiner Lab's. A reactor wants to run flat; a fleet does not draw flat. Bare, the boundary wastes 12.43 MWh and still leaves 4.01 MWh unserved. Add sinks alone and curtailment goes to zero while the unserved demand does not move; add storage alone and the reverse happens. Curtailment is a capacity problem and unmet demand is a timing problem, they need different instruments, and most people reach for storage first.
Underneath all of it sits one comparison you can run yourself. A battery you carry gets heavier the longer you must run; a decay source does not. Where does chemistry stop winning?
A four-region sweep in native vocabulary overturned this study's own starting assumption, which is the best thing a survey can do. Korea runs an autonomous-SMR research centre and China's regulator publishes on reduced-staffing operation, so the autonomy half is already being built. What is still unclaimed is the evidence layer: what an authority can check, rather than trust, about a plant with nobody on site. That is a smaller and more buildable thing than the autonomy everyone is racing for.
One of eight, and only one of them is physics. How we read a frontier →