> NuScale’s CEO said last November it had about $200 million in cash reserves but some of the funds are allocated to specific work for customers and can’t be used generally to revitalize the firm.
300 employees, plus unknown amounts of pre-allocated work, no chance of revenue before the runway runs out, and a terrible environment for high-risk capital, make this look extremely grim.
The 300 employees currently on the job market, it's not that grim for them. It's better to have some clarity, rather than live a half life. They can now focus on getting another job. My guess is that most of them won't have problems landing a new, and potentially better paying job. They participated in a project that resulted in the first NRC reactor certification in a very, very long time. Literally nobody else can put this on their resume. There are lots of nuclear startups out there, and they probably have troubles finding qualified people. They'll jump at the opportunity to get some ex-NuScale engineers.
As for NuScale itself, they'll be fine. Their most important asset is their reactor certification. They don't have experience actually delivering even a single operating reactor. But that certification is gold. For many other companies that want to get into the SMR game, it would probably be much easier to license the NuScale design than to go through the decade long process of getting their own design certified.
Why would some other company want to build it, if there aren't enough customers?
Not sure if that was intentional, but nice.
I didn't even know there could be such a thing as a nuclear startup. How do you think they will succeed if NuScale didn't/couldn't? Or was NuScale mismanaged?
The core of the business was executing on cheaper, more reliable buildouts. SMRs might even be more expensive per watt than larger reactors, and that could be OK as long as it was cheap enough, and led to project sizes that were smaller than $20B and had much smaller chance of project failure.
Certification is useless for a design that's too expensive, as that was half of the core value proposition. (With the other half of the value proposition being smaller risk.)
Right now it looks like a core gamble of the company has not paid off. It's unclear if they can learn any lessons from the cost increase that would let them come up with a cheaper second design. But I'd suspect that the founders were just wearing rose colored glasses for their first cost estimates, with the hope that some future innovation would let them meet unrealistic starting targets, and it hasn't happened yet.
I think the attitude of "we're being held back by public opinion, because the greens have convinced them nuclear is dangerous" did not do nuclear any good.
Just because A is better than B doesn’t mean both A and B can’t be grim.
> For many other companies that want to get into the SMR game, it would probably be much easier to license the NuScale design than to go through the decade long process of getting their own design certified.
Is anyone going to want to do that after watching NuScalr crash and burn?
Who's hiring nuclear reactor design engineers?
NuScale got too expensive even before they broke ground for the prototype. Who knows what it would have cost by the time it started up.
If you want nuclear in the near term, build more AP1000 reactors, like Vogtle. They work. If someone ordered ten of them, they would be much less expensive.
There's only a single "someone" who could put in a $150B order for electricity generation, but they also take the stance that they won't ever do that, since they are not in the business of picking winners and losers. That is, of course, the US government, and they do pick winners and losers all the time through tax policy, and they did incentivize nuclear quite a bit in the IRA. Still not enough.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/China-approves-c...
It is a pretty exciting time for that division, so if anyone is interested, definitely look into their openings.
https://jobs.gecareers.com/power/global/en/ge-hitachi-nuclea...
https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear/carbon-free-power/bwrx-300...