SMRs are a scam
There, I said it - they're snake oil, just like hydrogen or Drax are
SMRs aren't worth pursuing because the economics on the NON-nuclear side are all wrong
In short, steam turbines(*) need to be as large as possible to be economic and that means 1GW+ size power plants
SMR plants are TOO SMALL to be commercially viable and will end up as money pits if pursued
Regardless of the heat source(**) for thermal power plants, the fundamental requirements of the input to generators dictate how large a design needs to be. Nuclear power plants aren't 900-1200MW because that's as large as the reactors can be built, but because that's what the generators require
We absolutely and unconidtionally REQUIRE nuclear power, but SMRs are about the most expensive and inefficient way of achieving it I can think of - Over the next 20-30 years electrical demands in developed nations will increase by a factor of 6-8 as decarbonisation proceeds (we're already seeing the start of the domestic gas/oil heating phaseout in Europe) and demands in developing nations will increase to match ours (a factor of 20-30 times nigher than many nations are currently producing)
Water moderated nuclear power is problematic, not least of which because it's based on the unwanted waste products of the weaponsmaking process (Enriched uranium was kicking around taking up space and being a nuisance at 1950s separation plants until Alvin Weinberg came along. Depleted urankum is what's used to make plutonium at a ratio of 9kg to every 1kg of 3% "reactor grade" that's put into the civil program).
The late lamented Lester was a big fan of Thorium and LFTRs here in Vultureland back in the 2010s. China's currently testing a rebuild of the ORNL MSRE (TMSR-LF1) and have resumed where Alvin Weinberg left off at Oak Ridge in 1969 by testing directly thorium fuelled operation (the first 2 year run is a few months off completion and there appear to be no complications so far). Hopefully this is sucessful and scales without issue to GW size plants, as it divorces civil nuclear power entirely from its dependency on the weaponsmaking cycle in addition to being a couple of orders of magnitude safer than existing water based technology. At a projected 80% cost reduction over building and operating nuke plantsm, plus 99% less waste production AND the abliity to burn existing nuclear waste/depleted uranium, this would be cheaper than renewables and kickstart a new renaissance in energy availability, 60 years after Richard Nixon attempted to erase Molten Salt Liquid Fuelled systems form history
(*) At the end of the day, we still use steam to drive turbines to spin generators. Supercritical CO2 would be nice but it's not a commercial entity yet (TMSR-LF2 is slated to test a small 10-100MW S-CO2 turbine) and will probably be another couple of decades before it scales to useful sizes. Steam turbines are expensive to maintain and the relative cost of maintenance compared with income goes down as sizes go up - meaning the only current economic size is "as large as materials science enables them to be". That may change with S-CO2 as it's vastly less corrosive than water(***), but I doubt the economic fundamentals will be altered
(**) Coal, oil, gas, geothermal, nuclear, concentrated sunlight or magic unicorn poo - at the end of the day it's all about heat generation and extracting useful work from the difference between that heat energy and ambient temperatures
(***) Water at 350C and 20-100atm is extremely corrosive to the insides of nuclear reactors. "Wet Steam" is a major wear factor in nuclear power turbines - it's not hot enough to be dry and this is why most industry stopped planning around nuclear power since the 1960s - existing nuclear technology is more expensive than burning coal! Compared to water-moderated nuclear, the corrosion factors of molten salts are trivial to almost non-existent