alt Hacker NewsI think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.
Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.
We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief
Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!
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I think you have a misunderstanding of economies of scale.
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale:
1. make things bigger
2. make more of them
Making things bigger generally is more effective when n is small. You need fewer sites, fewer approvals, each of the steps in the process is done fewer times.
When n is large, you can build and optimize a factory for them and achieve economies of scale that way.
Nuclear plants got large to take advantage of economies of scale because n is small. Nobody's building millions or even thousands of SMR's.
>The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?
For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?