Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency.

Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.

Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.

This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.

Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.

On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).

Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.

Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.

On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.

There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...

You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.

The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.

The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.

NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.

Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.

You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.

But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.

I think the most favorable context is China? the us is quite resistant to nuclear in comparison