UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales

The chart has Hinkley Point as "being defuelled", while Hinkley Point C is still under construction.

To me, that's the real test of nuclear power: can it actually be switched on, on time, and on budget? Too many projects fail that.

At least building at the Wylfa site avoids the need for grid upgrades.

Small reactors are probably less likely to be delivered on time and on budget and work as expected than big ones.

Generally small projects work better than big ones, not just for nuclear power. Everything from IT systems to railways (the latter being particularly a sore point here in NE England)

Well we’re talking about SMRs here, so there are still questions like “when will a feasible design actually be ready for pilot testing” and “would electricity from SMRs ever be economically feasible against storage and renewables by the time they are ready for volume production?”

I’m glad people are still researching it, but it may turn out to be a dead end (or only be economic if heavily subsidised)

> Small reactors are probably less likely to be delivered on time

Do you mean the small reactors are more likely to be on time? I ask because you follow up with this and I'm not sure your position.

> Generally small projects work better than big ones

It's supposed to be in production by "mid 2030s" according to the article, which is ~10 years away, so this question may become rather acute! Or, most likely, it quietly faceplants and the 2030 UK government has to decide whether to HS2 it.

Yes, it was as stupid typo. They are more likely to be delivered on time and work as expected.

Someone posted a paper to HN that investigated the reasons for overruns quite thoroughly, from when the first reactors were built. Fifty pages or so. As I recall, none of the major reasons were related to reactor size.

There were issues such as having ignored the risk of an earthquake; when it became clear that earthquakes can damage reactors, the reactors that were being built needed late engineering changes that led to cost overruns. Things like that. But nothing related to reactor size.

(Note that this was about cost overruns. Not about the costs that stayed at the projected level.)