> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
Unless building a nuke plant is a common thing where the crew that built a plant in Georgia can then go build one just like it in Alabama then one in Tennessee, then in Ohio, etc, then I don't see how building two plants with identical layouts can leverage economies of scale. For example: Wolf Creek NGS in Kansas and Calloway NGS in Missouri were apparently the first two plants in the US to be built using the same blueprints. If two more plants were built today with those same blueprints but by different construction crews who don't have any of the tribal knowledge from the construction of Wolf Creek and Calloway then what you have are four essentially bespoke plants that just happen to use the same blueprints.
Unless building a nuke plant is a common thing where the crew that built a plant in Georgia can then go build one just like it in Alabama then one in Tennessee, then in Ohio, etc, then I don't see how building two plants with identical layouts can leverage economies of scale. For example: Wolf Creek NGS in Kansas and Calloway NGS in Missouri were apparently the first two plants in the US to be built using the same blueprints. If two more plants were built today with those same blueprints but by different construction crews who don't have any of the tribal knowledge from the construction of Wolf Creek and Calloway then what you have are four essentially bespoke plants that just happen to use the same blueprints.