Been advocating for “SMR grid” and nimble “SMR’s” for over 40 years, not dissimilar to those on an aircraft carrier or submarine.
And yes, emergency mobile versions. Wipe out a station, roll in another. Malfunction, roll in another. Portions of the grid are taken out, go around the area.
We should also have led the way in recycling spent fuel/fuel rods.
But the leftist totalitarian FAKE “environmentalists/climate change” lobby bribes politicians so heavily, they would rather go along with mass global depopulation and a totalitarian one world government model.
As well, such energy independence would crush market prices for most commodities.
We should still do it.
Nuc plant designs of the megascale in the USA are essentially a one off custom design when you look at the overall facility. Yes, I know that the reactor and the generating equipment are more or less fixed in design but the overall facility is a one off custom design.
Detail designing starting with a blank piece of paper is expensive. It's especially expensive when process design engineers like myself have a minor role in the process to do the initial ID of major issues and options to produce an outline of how things will be put together and work together. This means detail engineers in massive amounts of man hours within their individual narrow specialties are doing a lot of trial and error work. Big $$$. Each change has a cascading effect on other disciplines. Think cost overruns. You want detail engineering to work in a straight line and not excessively go off chasing rabbits.
Oops…. Detailed design is not perfect, not that anything is. A $100 million here and another there and before long you have some billions of $$$ of cost overruns. I'm acquainted with one canceled nuc plant that spent a couple of billion $$$ before the owners canceled the project because of $$$ overruns and delays.
The final straw that broke the project was an engineering oops. The civil and mechanical groups had a communications breakdown. Two major sections had to be built on separate floating foundations because of soil constraints and weight distribution. Fine, not uncommon. However, the information was not communicated to the piping designers and they had not made provision for piping movements. Lots of piping detail had to be redesigned plus equipment and construction budgets increased.
A nuc plant issue I crossed paths with had to do with construction quality control. Quality control inspectors and cohorts in their office were under immense pressure to not slow down construction. Fraudulent inspection reports were produced for inspections not done or nonconforming work passed as okay. Eventually, auditors caught onto the scam halfway through construction of the first unit.
IIRC, this involved three individual nuc units at about 1500 megawatt each. People in on the fraud were fired. No one went to jail. Construction company fired. Mass construction layoffs. New engineering construction company hired. Quality inspections repeated. Problems fixed.
The small nuc plant concepts I've seen are very intriguing. Factory built package plants with preapproved designs. Short field construction timeline. Controllable costs. Controllable schedule. Nice.