In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized. Thus, pivoting to SMR is unnecessary, since they produce significantly less energy.
> In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized.
Related: UAE had zero nuclear power plants before the Barakah nuclear power plant[1] opened starting in 2020. They built 4x Korean APR-1400s for only 32B USD. That seems incredibly cheap. How did they do it? I assume (near) slave labour prices for construction workers, like most other stuff built in that country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Higher lending rates can easily double the final cost and they multiply with any time delays.
That particular build had government finance from both the host and the building government.
> How you raise finance is incredibly important for nuclear costs.
No, I'm answering your question as to why their build costs are surprisingly low. They didn't finance at the rate that other builds did and finance related costs can be 2/3rds of the total cost of a nuclear plant.