This is the idea behind the “small modular” part of SMR. Current nuclear projects are huge, largely bespoke efforts that require a bunch of contract firms working together on different parts of the project. The idea of SMR is to push most of the necessary parts one after another from a factory. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is comparing how the Japanese built planes in WWII (in small batches done by craftsmen) to how the US did (with an assembly line following a documented process). I buy the conceptual argument, but there are a lot of details to work out.

▲

ViewTrick1002 3 days ago | parent [-]

We’ve been trying to build ”SMR”s since the 1950s and a bunch has been built throughout the decades.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...

The problem is also: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?

	▲	johncolanduoni 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I guess the answer might be hyperscalers that want cheap electricity to run LLM inference. They’re already throwing tens of billions at AI, what’s a few billion more to have a chance at super cheap energy for their new data centers?