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WRT small modular nuclear reactors, Jigar Shah has made the perhaps-obvious-in-retrospect point that essential to cost reductions is *repeatability* (which enables learning), and that smallness / modularity are not the only path to repetition. From February:

"At Vogtle ... Unit 4 came in at a 30% discount to Unit 3. So if you just built Unit 4 again at Unit 5, right next door to Unit 4, it would come in at somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 a MWh, and you'd be able to do it in half the time. ... Because you have a trained workforce and all that stuff." [David Roberts:] You're confident in the learning curve if we standardize our design."

https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps

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