Mass manufacturing has transformative potential for rapidly expanding the nascent nuclear energy industry. The aerospace, shipbuilding, and automobiles industries have demonstrated how shifting from site-based construction to factory production can dramatically improve quality, reduce costs, and enable rapid scaling.

For perspective, 90 million cars were manufactured globally in 2023,12 with engine capacity exceeding 6.7 TW.13 In these controlled factory environments, automated processes and rigorous testing at each production stage ensure consistent quality, while high-volume production drives improvement and cost reduction through accelerated learning.

The same transformation potential exists for advanced nuclear energy. The key innovation is the production of standardized advanced reactors in factories, where they can be fully licensed before leaving the facility. These reactors are specifically designed for volume manufacturing, incorporating features that enable efficient production, and quality control. This standardized approach is remarkably flexible—different power plant sizes can be achieved by combining multiple reactor units, much like how data centers scale computing power by adding standardized servers.

Moving nuclear component production to factories ensures the production volumes needed to deploy terawatts of clean energy capacity within decades, not centuries. Just as standardization and factory production revolutionized shipbuilding and aerospace, it can revolutionize how we deploy clean, reliable nuclear power.