Tell me you didn’t read the link I shared without telling me you didn’t read the link I shared.

Oh I've read that thing many times, it gets linked everywhere...

> In truth, it's a labor and productivity problem.

Yes, and the gigantism of the projects does not help. Here's an example [1]. Last week they mounted the reactor dome at Hinkley. Here's a quote:

  > Using one of the world's largest cranes, known as Big Carl, the dome - with a diameter of almost 47 metres, height of 14 metres and weighing 245 tonnes - was lifted and then slowly lowered onto the 44-metre-high reactor building.

SMRs would address that. Every single thing about gigawatt scale reactors is extremely expensive. If you reduce the scale of the reactor by a factor of 10, then you won't need "Big Carl", you would not need a 245 ton dome, you wouldn't need containment vessels that can only be build by a handful of forges in the world [2] (none in the US).

You are absolutely right, this has nothing to do with the NRC. They have a job to do, and in a world where Fukushima can happen, you can't be too careful.

But can SMRs reduce construction costs? The anti-nuclear crowd is dancing in the streets for the failure of NuScale to keep the Utah project alive. But NuScale is a player with zero experience. There are numerous other players [3] that actually build reactors. For example one is BWXT, a company that makes nuclear reactors for the US Navy.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Hinkley-Point-C-...

[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

[3] https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf

"SMR" has been tried time and time again by both established players and startups since the 50s. It is what the industry tend to swing to when large scale designs once again prove too expensive. They've never panned out.

> The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors

> Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...

I read that article, and it's not that convincing. The article goes over some attempts made in the '50s and '60s. And that's it, the conclusion is SMRs can't work now. It completely ignores that naval nuclear reactors are nothing else but SMRs and they work just fine, and are not expensive compared to civilian reactors.

Of course, the article was published in 2015, so it could not predict that China would build and put in operation two fourth generation SMRs in 2023[1]. And that they would state they intend to build 6 more that would drive a single 650 MW turbine.

[1] https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newschinas-htr-pm-demonstra...

Naval nuclear reactors have the world's least price sensitive customers, run on highly enriched uranium, scuttling the vessel is deemed a safe outcome and military staffing is completely different from civilian.

That does not match reality on land.

China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor.

https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718

You also do the common misstake of always talking about future nuclear plans. They will be the savior, as long as the costs are marketing material and not real. Because we can't look at the existing batch of botched nuclear construction the past 20 years in the west, that would spoil the rosy image.

Better trust our future to Powerpoint reactors. Rather than competitors delivering day in and day out.

> China is barely building nuclear anymore.

That's a funny way to look at things. China built 40 GW worth of nuclear power plants in the last decade [1], which matches the best decade of France, and almost matches the best decade of the US. In 2022 they started work on 5 reactors (GW-sized), 2 more than the rest of the world combined.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

[2] https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/0156a8d7-01c6-42d9-97be-3...

They’ve also built way more coal plants and nuclear plants than anyone else. What’s your point? China is a massive country with massive electricity needs (they still use half per capita that the west does and they’re trying to close that gap).

Nuclear and coal is the plan for baseload because solar/wind doesn’t cut it for that use (coal I believe is intended to be a mechanism of last resort intended to never be run as long as other alternatives are available although I suspect reality will not be so kind).

> Naval nuclear reactors have the world's least price sensitive customers, run on highly enriched uranium, scuttling the vessel is deemed a safe outcome and military staffing is completely different from civilian. That does not match reality on land.

Congress is, in fact, very price sensitive about military procurement, and there are significantly greater engineering challenges in ship construction than in terrestrial construction. The difference is that the scale and regulatory environment around building naval ships is not completely dysfunctional.

The mass production aspect of SMRs should provide some economies of scale for construction costs. Needing a large crane doesn’t scale.