Again, I am not disagreeing with you, building nuclear plants on a conveyer belt would allow you to decrease the per unit price as you make more of it. My issue with the approach is that the prices for those first (100) units, even before the inevitable order of magnitude cost overruns, results in more expensive electricity than the one off projects they aim to replace. This is coupled by the twin problems of a) alternative tech which is constantly benefiting from wrights law, and b) a lot of competition in the field fighting over a small number of reactors.
Not much to do about a), so if this technology were to succeed, the government would have to play kingmaker and pick only one company such that they actually go through enough units to drop down the price curve. This might work domestically, but I foresee political difficulties when trying to convince other countries to abandon their homegrown tech in favour of yours.
You keep mentioning Wright's law, but SMRs are not about that. Changing the location of the manufacturing from on site to inside a factory will not have an impact of 10-20% on the cost, but rather a reduction by a factor of 10 or 20. Wright's law is about subsequent reductions.
Let me even grant you that it works that way in theory. By what factor has this project gone over budget, 10x? What’s the next project we can look at to see how it fares?
My other points still stand, especially the one about competition.
But, NuScale has no experience building anything. It's just a startup. It's a miracle they got their reactor design approved.
BWXT however is the company that builds the Navy's naval nuclear reactors. They are cooperating with GE and Hitachi [1] to build a 300 MWe SMR. All 3 of these companies have plenty of experience delivering on numerous types of projects, including nuclear ones. I do think they have a chance.
Not much to do about a), so if this technology were to succeed, the government would have to play kingmaker and pick only one company such that they actually go through enough units to drop down the price curve. This might work domestically, but I foresee political difficulties when trying to convince other countries to abandon their homegrown tech in favour of yours.