Power Generation
Inside the World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm
The Hornsey Far Shore complex off the Yorkshire coast now generates enough electricity for 4.2 million homes. A look at the engineering that makes it work — and what comes next.
The story of nuclear power's first act reads like a cautionary tale about the limits of industrial ambition. The Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, originally budgeted at $14 billion and scheduled to complete by 2016, eventually cost $35 billion and came online in 2023. The Hinkley Point C project in the UK has followed a similar trajectory of cost and schedule expansion.
The problems are structural, not accidental. Large nuclear plants are bespoke megaprojects, each effectively a prototype, built by workforces that must be trained from scratch for techniques specific to that single installation. Learning curves don't transfer. Economies of scale are swamped by coordination complexity.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are an attempt to break this pattern entirely.
The Factory Promise
An SMR is defined loosely as a nuclear reactor with less than 300 MW of electrical output — smaller than the ~1,000 MW typical of large light-water reactors. But the distinguishing feature isn't size; it's production method.
The economic logic is straightforward: shift work from construction sites to factories. A factory produces dozens of identical units, accumulating learning curve benefits with each one. Components are manufactured to tight tolerances in controlled conditions, shipped to site, and assembled rather than fabricated in place. The construction site becomes an assembly process rather than a manufacturing one.
NuScale Power's 77 MW module is the first SMR design to receive design approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The reactor is designed to be manufactured in a shop, shipped on a flatbed truck, installed in a below-grade water-filled pool, and operated without active cooling systems — gravity and natural convection handle decay heat removal even after shutdown.
The Natrium Design
TerraPower's Natrium reactor, backed by Bill Gates and developed in partnership with GE Hitachi, takes a different approach: a sodium-cooled fast reactor paired with a molten salt thermal storage system. The reactor produces 345 MW of thermal power; the storage system allows the facility's electrical output to swing between 240 MW and 500 MW, providing the kind of flexible dispatch that the solar-dominated western US grid urgently needs.
The first Natrium plant is under construction in Kemmerer, Wyoming — on the site of a retiring coal plant, using existing grid connection infrastructure. The decision to site it at a coal plant retirement isn't coincidental; it is a deliberate strategy to demonstrate that nuclear can step directly into the role coal played as reliable baseload power.
"We're not competing with new gas. We're competing with the absence of a firm power alternative to gas." — Chris Levesque, TerraPower CEO
Regulatory Reality
The Natrium timeline calls for commercial operation in 2030. Whether that date holds depends heavily on the regulatory process. The NRC has been investing in new review frameworks adapted to non-light-water reactor designs, but the institutional knowledge to review sodium-cooled fast reactors confidently doesn't exist at the same depth as for conventional PWR designs.
The licensing uncertainty is the most serious risk to the SMR timeline. Physics and manufacturing are understood; the regulatory path is not.
Economics: The Honest Assessment
SMR advocates project costs around $3,000–4,000 per kilowatt of installed capacity — substantially below the $10,000–12,000 per kilowatt of recent large nuclear projects, and competitive with offshore wind on a cost-per-kilowatt basis. Critics point out that these projections are based on factory-production economics that won't exist until substantial manufacturing scale exists, which won't exist until orders are placed, which won't happen without the cost projections being verified.
It is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. The honest answer is that SMR economics remain unproven at commercial scale. The first few plants will be expensive; learning curve reductions will arrive with subsequent units; the question is whether that learning curve slope is steep enough to reach competitive costs before utilities choose other alternatives.
The next five years will answer the question. Several lead projects are in active construction or advanced site preparation: Natrium in Wyoming, X-energy's Xe-100 in Texas, and NuScale deployments under discussion in Romania and Poland. The results will determine whether the second act of nuclear power is a genuine reinvention or a well-funded repetition of the first act's mistakes.