I'm kind of skeptical that there will be enough demand for production of SMRs to really introduce huge economies of scale. It's not like cars or something where you can build millions of them. Even something as simple as a house isn't any cheaper to build in a plant and then assemble on-site vs. building from scratch.
By their nature, SMRs are starting from behind because building one large thing is generally cheaper than building several small things to produce the same output. So they really need to create huge efficiencies to be viable, but it seems like that's mostly speculative at this point.
I don't know, maybe there are other examples of industries doing that, but I'm having trouble thinking of any. Like, would building 1,000 smaller ships in a factory be cheaper than building a 10 huge freighters in a shipyard per ton?
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