The next stage of the process will see companies able to bid for Government contracts with successful bids from the six going to contract award stage next summer.

Next summer is soon

  • Contracts being awarded means that they can start planning construction. Building a pilot plant will still take several years, if everything goes very well. Then you need to commission and test the new system. That again will take a number of years in the best of circumstances. Then, if everything goes very well, you can start thinking about getting series production going. Which has never been done before for a technology like this so it’s again going to take a long time. You’re looking at several decades in the best case scenario for those things to make any kind of meaningful impact on world energy generation. Which is why anybody touting SMRs as a solution to climate change is either clueless, delusional or lying.