Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.

Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.

France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.

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SoftTalker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.

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jabl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We could have standardized the old reactors too.

Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.

Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.

	▲	teamonkey an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You can in theory build a SMR next to a data centre, so I guess we’ll find out

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icantevenhold 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Floating nuclear plants next to a city sound like a recipe for disaster

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cyberax 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer.

That's because French nuclear power plants are designed to be directly cooled by river water instead of using cooling towers.

The biggest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona) is cooled by evaporating the treated wastewater, in the desert.

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ViewTrick1002 4 hours ago | parent [-]

All these extra methods of preserving water adds cost, to a technology where paid off plants are struggling. Let alone ruinously expensive new builds.

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samus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.

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cyberax 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.

You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.

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ViewTrick1002 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.

	▲	cyberax 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Pretty much all the new thermal power plants are (including biomass-burning plants), except in places where cool water is not scarce. It's weird to glomp onto that idea, as if it's some kind of a fatal flaw of nuclear power.

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oofbey 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.

There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.

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bathtub365 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs

	▲	AngryData 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer. The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
	▲	oofbey 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.

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MengerSponge 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You absolutely can. Read up on the French nuclear reactor fleet!

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...

There are minor variances locally, but you can make enough components common to benefit massively from economies of scale.