It's worth noting that the nuclear power plants of the 1960s follow different scale economics to SMRs. Casey Handmer makes this point in his online interviews and debates. The 1960s plants get their scale benefits from their sheer size. Similar to building a few massive aircraft carriers or massive olympic stadiums, however inefficiently each one is built.

SMRs are more akin to mass manufactured widgets, where the scale benefits come solely from manufacturing efficiencies gained through volume. They'll have a learning rate that governs the price declines for each doubling in production volumes.

From a unit economics POV, it's probably more useful to think of SMRs as a solar/battery-like technology rather than a 1960s nuclear-like technology. The problem for SMR proponents is that solar/batteries have had 50 years of this feedback loop playing out, but SMRs are starting from no volume.

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jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

All of the plans that I've seen for SMR 'farms' were hopelessly naive when it came to security, decommissioning and compliance costs. They were just a hair above that 'swimming turtle island' when it comes to design phase realism. I really see them more as a way to milk subsidies than something that will actually happen in the next 30 years or so, especially not given the rate at which we are putting up solar and stringing HVDC interconnects, which in my opinion are the answer to the storage problem.

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energy123 3 days ago | parent [-]

> stringing HVDC interconnects

Agree that this solves many of the same problems as storage (as does overbuilding).

The PR problem with renewables is that the solutions are invariably cognitively complicated and multifactorial. The solution is going to be some kind of optimized result that mixes various storage forms, HVDC interconnects, overbuilding, and diversifying with solar and wind, and the exact nature of the solution is going to vary by geography.

It's just a hopelessly difficult communication challenge. If so many HN people can't grasp these concepts and jump to provably incorrect catchphrases like "storage is too expensive", then what hope is there for the general public.

	▲	jacquesm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		People on HN don't generally realize that energy has pretty much always been a mix and that adding new energy sources with different availability, slew rates (both up and down, and not necessarily symmetrical), cost, peak capability, base load capability and so on is a well understood problem that markets know perfectly well how to deal with. Then there is the 'cool' factor ascribed to some solutions, an element of hope that a favorite technology will one day power the planet and all kinds of unrealistic assumptions about what is and what isn't technically, socially and economically possible. You are right that this is a difficult communications challenge but the level at which the discourse takes place is well below the minimum standards for taking part in such a debate. We're talking about very simple basic and factual knowledge here we are still very far away from the complexity of say the 15 minute ahead market, balancing and long term cost projections of a particular technology, we are more in outright disinformation and denialism territory.

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_aavaa_ 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The analogy is incorrect though.

There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.

You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.

A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.

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bryanlarsen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SMR's have neither of those economics of scale. Ontario is building 4, and there's a couple others at similar scale. Nobody is contemplating the thousands you'd need for the scale necessary to make the switch from bespoke to assembly line worth it. So the worst of both worlds.

	▲	jacquesm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		And the risk with bespoke but still much higher numbers than regular plants is that you will need all of the overhead for a much smaller amount of output and you'll definitely not have the same QA budget that you have for a much larger plant. Prediction: many small failures. Hopefully not a 'small Chernobyl'.