It seems to me there's a lot more 'mass production' efficiency still to be found for small reactors. The whole article is just comparing historical costs.
Large reactors are highly bespoke, and therefore increasingly expensive, and the whole idea of small reactors is that they can be produced identically from an assembly line, and so you get the same kind of learning-curve price reductions as for solar panels or whatever.
I don't think that's the case, yet, though, so the argument might be compared to criticisms of solar in the 1980s and anyway this article seems to be a simple attack on nuclear in favor of 'renewables', which have already experience a learning curve.
You can produce significant fractions of a large modular reactor (e.g. AP1000) in a factory.
There are arguments that for a small modular reactor the civil works that happen onsite (e.g. foundations) could make up a larger proportion of the costs than for a large modular reactor!
Large reactors are highly bespoke, and therefore increasingly expensive, and the whole idea of small reactors is that they can be produced identically from an assembly line, and so you get the same kind of learning-curve price reductions as for solar panels or whatever.
I don't think that's the case, yet, though, so the argument might be compared to criticisms of solar in the 1980s and anyway this article seems to be a simple attack on nuclear in favor of 'renewables', which have already experience a learning curve.