I'm not super excited about current SMR projects either, sadly. The economies of scale that they explicitly turn away from are very real. The economies of mass production that they rely on can't be achieved unless a lot of people are willing to buy the first N for high cost. But who will buy after the first few boondoggle a bit?
I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than SMRs and advanced reactors.
My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. This gives you economies of scale and economies of mass production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where Offshore Power Systems installed the world's largest gantry crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. [1]
Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
