We should be able to build these smaller safe reactors all around the country. Energy costs should decline over time, not rise.
Standardized designs would solve a lot of the cost overrun issues since all of these reactors were built with one-off designs.
When I worked as a pipefitter back in the 80’s on several nukes under construction, the twin designs, or multiples thereof, were the most efficient in terms of time to complete and cost savings.
This was due to finding and fixing all of the original design flaws in the first unit and applying those fixes to the twin.
Nuscale has an approved design, ready for someone to finance the construction. Oklo’s safety design has been approved, ready to build a proof of concept reactor in Utah, iirc. Hopefully SMRs will obviate the wasteful investments in unreliable wind and solar, and stop the spoliation of the environment in the process.
The cost is primarily in the people. The first nuclear plant were ran by 500-600 people and now its MINIMUM 2,000 and that doesn’t include specialized contractors. Its more efficient if there are 2-3 plants to manage as they can share a lot of the same staff as they stagger outages during the year.
A lot of utilities are hoping for the smaller, self contained unit as its less people cost and they already have the security in place for it and storage facilities for material.
There is nothing safer about smaller. Get real.
Nuclear is dead in the US until some real cleaning house at EPA and DoEnergy takes place. Too many lying treehuggers there.
Nuke was killed by commie trash politics. Only that. Can’t have baseload (or load following for that matter) nuclear as that shows that “renewable” is a load of horsepucky.