Historically, reactors were sized like modern SMR concepts once. The issue was that they were even harder to secure and ratio of effort/benefit was worse than with fewer, larger reactors. Just like all nuclear projects, SMR construction will run behind schedule and outside of cost estimates, we've already seen that with the cancelled NuScale reactors in the US.

Governments need to stop throwing money at this deadbirth of a technology.

They won't evolve. Or at least not without massive subsidies.

Nuclear power is extremely expensive, even for SMRs, and most of the projections don't even account for the waste management, which will cost money for at least several decades (assuming you just dump it somewhere "safe").

There's simply no economic incentive, unless you hope to be subsidized forever and leverage the nuclear bros.

Article doesn't really specify which Rolls Royce it's referring to, and most people don't know there's two completely different companies called Rolls Royce, but im assuming this deal is being done with Rolls Royce Holdings; a major aeroplane engine /aerospace/defense company.

It has nothing to do with the car company; Rolls Royce Automoted Ltd.

Why build nuclear reactors when renewables are cheaper?

The idea seems to be to have small modular units of which multiple can be installed in the needed capacity at sites of existing fossil fuel plants, not to have a lot of single units spread all over the place.

They've been doing it in the UL for some time. Note that their SMRs there are relatively-large, getting up towards conventional reactors in size -- they're putting more emphasis on the "modular" and less on the "small".

I think we should wait and actually see the real time frame first. Regular reactors seem to take way over a decade to build now and eat up a lot of money.