this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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There's been a lot of talk about SMR's over the years, it's nice to see one finally being built.

Even if it comes in over budget, getting the first one done will be a great learning experience and could lead to figuring out how to do future ones cheaper.

Assuming it's on time, completion in 2029, connected to grid in 2030.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

mass production efficiencies wouldn’t kick in until they’re building hundreds or thousands

Maybe if you are building laptops and dishwashers. These are small building crammed with plumbing and electrical work, making 4 or 5 of them in a dedicated factory will significantly reduce production costs. You can have one guy who is good at flanged stainless pipe, one guy who is a panel building wizard, and so on. The first project will take the normal amount of time, each subsequent one will go much faster because the team already has a process in place.

Source: I worked industrial construction for 6 years, jobs where more than one copy of the same machine was being built always came in under budget because each copy was built quicker than the last.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There's at least as many parts in a modern reactor as in a dishwasher, but leaving that aside the modular building thing also failed to take off the n times it's been tried, and for similar reasons. I fully believe there's a speedup if you do the same project multiple times, although you'd find it would plateau after a while. There's also a speedup associated with building something large and in place.

The big savings happen when you reach a production run where you can build or configure specialised tooling and run it until after it's earned itself back.