Can SMRs Save the Global Energy Grid
The last nuclear plant completed in America took 16 years and went $35 billion over budget. Vogtle in Georgia was meant to cost $14 billion. It cost $35 billion. Meanwhile, coal plants are shutting down across the Western world faster than anything can replace them. The grid needs always-on baseload power, electricity that flows when the sun isn’t shining, and the wind isn’t blowing. Batteries cannot do it. Solar cannot do it.
The answer may be a completely different kind of nuclear reactor, one built in a factory, shipped to site on a truck, and assembled like LEGO bricks. Small Modular Reactors flip the entire model: 90 percent factory-built, standardized, tested before shipping, and scalable by simply adding more modules.
NuScale’s reactor cools itself for seven full days using nothing but gravity and natural convection — no pumps, no electricity, no human action. X-energy’s TRISO fuel physically cannot melt at 1,600 degrees Celsius. TerraPower’s Natrium reactor pairs with molten salt storage to surge from 345 megawatts to 500 megawatts on demand, a nuclear reactor that behaves like a battery.
In June 2024, TerraPower broke ground in Kemmerer Wyoming, the first advanced reactor in construction in the Western Hemisphere. In April 2025, Canada issued its first SMR construction licence for the BWRX-300 at Darlington. In May 2025, NuScale received its second NRC design approval ahead of schedule. In June 2025, Rolls-Royce was selected as the UK’s preferred SMR design, a 470-megawatt plant equivalent to 150 wind turbines, powering a million homes for 60 years, 90 percent factory-built.
But the honest problem remains. NuScale’s UAMPS project was canceled when first-of-a-kind costs rose 75 percent above estimates. The question is not whether SMRs work- they do. The question is whether they can survive long enough to build enough units for costs to fall. The Boeing 737 argument applies: the first plane was expensive, the 500th was routine. SMRs need to reach their 500th unit. The coal plants closing this decade cannot wait.
