Small Modular Reactors – Rolls-Royce

Mixture of present and what I called "the implied conditional" future tense (conditional in as much as its "...if we secure funding and the road is smooth...")

RR are great engineers, and we THINK SMR work in principle because we've been running different small non-modular R for decades inside submarines, and so aspects of the small part of the design, the constraints to size, safety, reliability are not a blank field.

But commercial SMR, are a green field. RR want to own the field. They would love to be funded by governments to do so.

Words like "bringing to market" are all you need to see, to know they do not have ".. as demonstrated in the SMR deployment we did in <x> which has been running for the last 25 years..."

There's the Chinese Pebble-bed, There's the Russian stuff, and there maybe is one or two others. There are not a plethora of SMR out there.

So its "implied conditional" future tense for the forseeable. When RR get permission to build even ONE, as a demonstrator, I'd love to know: They seem to be building out their capacity to START a testbed .. production process.

SMR are intensely political. They have been used by competing forces in the Australian electoral landscape to try and end-run Renewables in an election -7 were formally proposed in the LNP platform for the last election, including specified candidate sites, and confirmation compulsory purchase and state government opposition would be overridden in federal planning law, if need be.

Oh yes: Merits of SMR aside, the LNP lost the election in a landslide.

I truly hope RR get to testbed/demonstrator/pilot: make one, run it 24/7/365, run it to produce load for commercial gain.