Vogtle is a jobs project, an odd, almost absurd artifact of the high costs. I have family members working on that site. The Summer units across the river were canceled. Vogtle barely survived. The loss of Vogtle would have caused too much unemployment in the region.

I'd bet money the others are jobs projects, too, presuming they're still ongoing. But they'll be the last such nuclear jobs projects.

I hope modular reactors work out. I just don't think they'll work out in the U.S. or most other democratic countries, not until they're so well established elsewhere that nuclear becomes boring again. Failure to appreciate this--to shift focus to applications and regions where they have a viable, near-term future--will only ensure the total death of nuclear.

I had the same criticism for Rolls-Royce marketing piece last week about starting a modular reactor project in the U.K. I hope it works out, but Rolls-Royce claimed they were going to install the reactors in the U.K., which I believe is highly unlikely--certainly much more unlikely than if they attempted to first install them somewhere with less organized political opposition.

My complaint is that popular science pieces such as this Wired article create the wrong expectations. Articles about modular reactors are formulaic and periodic, exactly like articles about flying cars many years ago.

So about the opposition in the uk. When people talk about modular nuclear there is an expectation that it would be built close to towns and cities. That you could have one pop up down the road. I think this is unlikely for now in the UK. It is just easier and more economical to cluster them together onto a single site close to a large grid connection. This would probably be an existing nuclear site or power station site. A lot of these sites in the UK are being decommissioned anyway and are looking for new opportunities. This is much less likely to cause opposition than a new site on green field land (like fracking). And an existing nuclear site will have a local population that are more comfortable with the technology.

Think of the term "Economies of Scale." In one sense, it means building a larger steel mill, oil refinery, aluminum smelter, etc. to lower production costs. Applied to nuclear reactors, you get large, one-of-a-kind designs, that have to go through a long approval process, complicated construction, with major financial risk, defeating any economies of scale they had (primarily higher temperatures leading to higher energy efficiency.)

Another way to look at economies of scale is to produce a lot of identical widgets, in this case modular reactors that can be manufactured in one factory and shipped on trucks to the site ready to be installed, with streamlined permitting and approval based on a proven track record with identical units.

One additional benefit is you can do the site permitting "on spec" submitting for multiple locations and then you have 10-20 years to decide where you want to build, only investing the money if it turns out the market is there.