China are building dozens simultaneously, and even with their questionable workers rights, safety and environmental practices, they cost $7 Billion a pop.

Nuclear is never getting cheap [1]. Nuclear reactors need to be large to scale [2]. As for why SMR persists? Because someone makes money selling the idea. That's it.

And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.

Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.

Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.

[1]: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/csiro-confirms-n...

[2]: https://spitfireresearch.com/scaling-example-1-small-modular...

Cheap-er, not cheap. They’re still fundamentally massive complicated constructions. They will never be as amenable to mass production cost reductions as things like solar and battery