Re: Money for old rope
> I ask the same question of why building new 'normal' size nukes is seemingly such a difficult, time-consuming and hugely expensive task, despite the world having decades of experience building them already - see EDF and Hinkley, etc.
One reason (amongst many) is alluded to in the article:
"prefabricated units of SMRs can be manufactured and then shipped and installed on-site, making them more affordable to build than large power reactors, which are often custom-designed for a particular location, sometimes leading to construction delays.
Even though a series of reactors may be built to "Reactor Type X" plan, each individual reactor is essentially custom hand-built on site. As well as the expense in hand-building these things, since they are each effectively a custom unit, each one has to be certified separately that it is actually built to the common plan for Type X, and that any deviations are verified, and so on. This makes them incredibly expensive individually, as you need skilled (nuclear reactor skilled) workers on site, custom fabrications, running into unexpected issues which leads to delays which means more costs, the potential for cost blowouts goes on and on. Big-bang custom software project billion-dollar blowouts have nothing on nuclear reactor delays and blowouts.
So instead of hand-building a custom 3600MW reactor on site, the idea is to mass-produce smaller reactors, so you can plonk 12 of these mass-produced, identical, needing only quality-control-type testing/certification that any mass-produced but complex machine is, down on the same site to create your 3600MW plant. And since you have 12 of them, they can be independantly controlled, maintained, refueled/replaced without taking down the entire 3500MW reactor. They can also be expanded or decommissioned more gradually. Add another 300MW reactor if want to make the site provide more power, take them out one-by-one to decommission them. Build smaller sites so you don't need a single 3600MW plant. Able to ship them to remote sites (e.g. Shetlands, Fiji, middle of Amazon) to establish smaller, local power infrastructure without having to run submarine/overland transmission infrastructure, etc.
If you are going to go nuclear for low-emissions power (as opposed to solar/wind/hydro/geothermal etc.) then SMRs seem a better way to do it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
