Small modular reactors

A conventional nuclear plant is a one-off construction project: thousands of workers, a decade of on-site civil engineering, a reactor producing a gigawatt or more. An SMR swaps that model — the reactor module is small enough (typically under 300 MW) to be fabricated in a controlled factory, shipped by rail or road, and assembled on site. The theory is that factory repetition drives down cost and schedule the same way it did for aircraft. The hard part is that no SMR design has yet completed construction and reached commercial operation, so the cost curve is still a forecast, not a fact.