[epistasis]

Up until recently the "economy of scale" meant massive reactors when it came to nuclear, and small modular reactors were abandoned because people didn't think they could be economical.

We have radically different construction skill sets now than we did in the 1970s, so the economics may be different now, and it could have been that the planners were wrong before.

But I'm any case, until a few of these have shipped, I'm not sure we'll know the true cost.

These are manufactured like airplanes, a few at a time. Whereas solar has massive plants with hundreds of thousands of the same part assembled and shipped. I'm hopeful that they will provide another tool in the fight against climate change, but not super optimistic. There are many many technologies that are at a similar stage of development that could be used instead, such as cheap hydrogen electrolyzers, long-duration storage flow batteries, etc. And if these other techs succeed, they will also help SMR nuclear, assuming SMR nuclear can compete with renewables on cost!

[theptip]

Given the general cost disease affecting large construction projects, I think that massive reactors are an unviable proposition in western countries at this point. While the reactor core designs seem to be templatized, the projects to build them are not, and so there is huge inefficiency. E.g. see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro....

If NuScale can build hundreds or thousands of these small reactors, they should be able to perfect a turnkey installation playbook that would hopefully reduce costs significantly, and perhaps more importantly, reduce variance on project spend/timelines. I think an unpredictable total cost of ownership is one of the things hurting nuclear projects.

The big question in my mind is whether they can deploy enough of these to get to that scale, given that there's a fairly universal NIMBYism against nuclear power, even where this would be displacing CO2-emitting sources.