The pitch made sense to me. Stop building one-off nuclear cathedrals, manufacture reactors like products. Same workforce, same supply chain, twenty units in a row, by unit ten you've got a learning curve working for you. That's how airplanes and semiconductors escaped their cost spirals.
But NuScale just collapsed because costs doubled from initial estimates. HTR-PM in China came in over budget and underperforming. Darlington broke ground in Ontario, one unit by now under constructuon. One unit is just an expensive prototype.
The learning curve only works if you build sequentially, with a supply chain that doesn't atrophy between projects. Nuclear has historically been terrible at that.
So is the economics case still alive, or are we just rationalizing sunk costs at this point?
The whole point of SMRs was that they'd get cheaper over time. So why hasn't that happened?
byu/projectschema inenergy
Posted by projectschema
3 Comments
Too cheap to meter is not a business strategy?
Well you need a supply chain, that means 100 year build guarantees. Realistically only China and India have that much need for energy to sustain a pace of several plants a year.
Forgetting about the high operational costs to run as well. Economies of scale don’t kick in at that scale either.