[apendleton]

> The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products

But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.

[pfdietz]

Civil engineering involves adapting any design to the local geology. This has to be custom for each site.