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Comment by Atheros | Hacker News Reader

> idea that mass manufacturing wouldn't lower the price of something seems kinda ridiculous

The "something" to be manufactured isn't nuclear power plants.

If we made a few 5 MW plants at a certain price but then decided to scale that up and produce huge amounts of 5 MW plants then we could obviously produce those plants at a significantly lower per-unit cost. Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.

So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

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>The "something" to be manufactured isn't nuclear power plants.

Wrong, actually. Whenever multiple nuclear plants for submarines in a given class are manufactured, the fact that multiples are being built does lower the cost, although most of that is just from having a complete design to use rather than any kind of mass production. Navy reactors aren't really SMRs since they're also old technology, but they're a good example of how much easier/cheaper/greener it is to build small reactors instead of large ones.

> It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

Small modular reactors typically run up to 300MW in size. There are very few applications for a 5GW reactor. Besides, the costs of the small reactors in terms of time, money, operating expense, security and other things are so much less than for the large plants that the math really doesn't work anyway, even for your extreme example of 1000 5MW reactors.

> So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

It's not 1000 5MW plants vs 1 5GW plant, each SMR plant would have dozens of smaller cores. Most of the plans I see are in the 300MW - 1100MW range.

> Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.

If the goal is to create carbon free electricity then making as many carbon free power plants is exactly how you'd get more watt-hours.

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