For someone like me, who believes the problem is not regulatory approval but the difficulty and cost of the build, I'm no more hopeful than pre-approval. But I have never questioned whether a good design could be conceived and approved.
But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope!
The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.
This is a design that is meant to be mass produced in an assembly line factory, then shipped to its destination and plugged into the grid. It definitely had the potential for economies of scale in manufacturing.
Maybe? It all depends on execution and costs. And that's where most nuclear firms and proponents have been wearing rose-colored glasses for decades.
The preliminary estimates of numbers for cost were not terribly impressive, so I hope that they became wise and are under-promising. But only time will tell.
But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope!
The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.