> live a half life
Not sure if that was intentional, but nice.
I didn't even know there could be such a thing as a nuclear startup. How do you think they will succeed if NuScale didn't/couldn't? Or was NuScale mismanaged?
Not sure if that was intentional, but nice.
I didn't even know there could be such a thing as a nuclear startup. How do you think they will succeed if NuScale didn't/couldn't? Or was NuScale mismanaged?
The core of the business was executing on cheaper, more reliable buildouts. SMRs might even be more expensive per watt than larger reactors, and that could be OK as long as it was cheap enough, and led to project sizes that were smaller than $20B and had much smaller chance of project failure.
Certification is useless for a design that's too expensive, as that was half of the core value proposition. (With the other half of the value proposition being smaller risk.)
Right now it looks like a core gamble of the company has not paid off. It's unclear if they can learn any lessons from the cost increase that would let them come up with a cheaper second design. But I'd suspect that the founders were just wearing rose colored glasses for their first cost estimates, with the hope that some future innovation would let them meet unrealistic starting targets, and it hasn't happened yet.
I think the attitude of "we're being held back by public opinion, because the greens have convinced them nuclear is dangerous" did not do nuclear any good.