Historically, reactors were sized like modern SMR concepts once. The issue was that they were even harder to secure and ratio of effort/benefit was worse than with fewer, larger reactors. Just like all nuclear projects, SMR construction will run behind schedule and outside of cost estimates, we've already seen that with the cancelled NuScale reactors in the US.

Governments need to stop throwing money at this deadbirth of a technology.

They won't evolve. Or at least not without massive subsidies.

Nuclear power is extremely expensive, even for SMRs, and most of the projections don't even account for the waste management, which will cost money for at least several decades (assuming you just dump it somewhere "safe").

There's simply no economic incentive, unless you hope to be subsidized forever and leverage the nuclear bros.

Article doesn't really specify which Rolls Royce it's referring to, and most people don't know there's two completely different companies called Rolls Royce, but im assuming this deal is being done with Rolls Royce Holdings; a major aeroplane engine /aerospace/defense company.

It has nothing to do with the car company; Rolls Royce Automoted Ltd.

Why build nuclear reactors when renewables are cheaper?

The idea seems to be to have small modular units of which multiple can be installed in the needed capacity at sites of existing fossil fuel plants, not to have a lot of single units spread all over the place.

They've been doing it in the UL for some time. Note that their SMRs there are relatively-large, getting up towards conventional reactors in size -- they're putting more emphasis on the "modular" and less on the "small".

I think we should wait and actually see the real time frame first. Regular reactors seem to take way over a decade to build now and eat up a lot of money.

A huge part of global CO2 emissions come from various industries, so they certainly have a lot to improve. We should definitely start with that instead of blaming regular consumers of everything.

Switching to completely renewable energy sources requires grid energy storage, which we don’t really have at the moment. While we’re building renewable energy plants and the facilities to balance out the mismatching nature of energy production and demand, we’re still going to need some sort of energy during the transition period, and that’s when nuclear energy comes in handy. The way I see it, it’s not a long term solution for everything, but a temporary tool for managing the transition period, which is apparently going to take decades.

The private sector does what’s economically attractive and viable, but policies dictate what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. Therefore, I think we should all vote for the local politicians who support renewable energy and grid energy storage.

Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that. Time will tell. Or maybe we need to make it more expensive to build and run fossil fuel plants, and politics would be the right tool for that.

Yepo, guess it's about using oil & coal is just worse.

Maybe soon we in the west will have "enough" of "stuff" (you can only eat that much every day right) and would transit to another less degrading system.

Or so I hope.