Allison Macfarlane, who was Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from 2012-2014, has been looking at Small Modular Reactors in the USA and elsewhere. She thinks they are likely to be uneconomic, much like the their larger brethren, which, as she describes, have recently been doing very poorly in the USA. Indeed, just like the EPR story in the EU, it makes for a sorry saga: ‘The two units under construction in South Carolina were abandoned in 2017, after an investment of US$9 billion. The two AP-1000 units in Georgia were to start in 2016/2017 for a price of US$14 billion. One unit started in April, 2023, the second unit promises to start later in 2023. The total cost is now over US$30 billion.’ Big reactors do look increasingly hard to fund and build on time and budget, while it is argued that smaller ones could be mass produced in factories at lower unit costs and finished units installed on site more rapidly. However, that would mean foregoing conventional economies
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