If MSRs ever get built they are not going to get built at a scale which will produce significant savings. Meaningful economies of scale do not occur at the dozens/hundreds level.

An LFTR need not achieve the economies of scale associated with the auto industry for mass production techniques to bring about an enormous reduction in cost.  Merely being able to build them on the sort of production lines associated with Boeing, Caterpillar, or Litton Ingalls could be sufficient to bring about an order of magnitude reduction.  

Please explain how this will work.

What we see right now with electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf is that initial production is very expensive. Nissan points out that with adequate manufacturing volume that cost will drop significantly.

Present Leaf volume is in the very low tens of thousands. That’s not enough to create economies of scale. Nissan states that the necessary volume needed to drastically lower prices is somewhere between 500,000 to 1,000,000 units per year.

Now, how can MSRs be made cheap from day one when cars can’t?

Let’s assume that they can’t (unless you can show otherwise) and let’s assume that governments might decide that is was worthwhile to buy some MSRs at a very high price in order to create volume (just like is now being done with EV subsidies).

How would it be possible for MSRs to reach significant volume at only a few
dozen or even few hundred units when it takes hundreds of thousands of
units for EVs?

On the operational end the reactor isn’t burning through an isotope that is somewhat less common than gold, and the fuel requires no fuel rod fabrication.  It doesn’t need to be taken offline to refuel, and it achieves a nearly complete burnup of the fertile fuel.  As was noted, GE doesn’t sell reactors, they sell the fuel for the reactor because that’s where the profit is in nuclear power.  Getting away from solid fuel will bring with it a tremendous reduction in cost.

But mostly whatever cost reductions can be attributed to LFTR or other MSR designs will come through economies of scale and assembly-line like production facilities for large numbers of small to medium sized reactors.  Modular reactors, particularly the nearly self-contained units FLiBe has proposed, with small, supercritical turbines can be built as drop-in, lower cost replacements for natural gas turbines, coal powerplants, and other GHG generating powerplants.  Instead of designing a gigawatt reactor and a 250MW reactor for two installations, just string four 250MW plants together and accept the slight hit in thermal efficiency as a trade against the lower cost an assembly line construction system brings to the process.  

If nuclear reactors were good investments then we’d have major corporations building them.

The Fukushima reactors that melted down were designed and supplied by GE.  It’s not like they are strangers to the business.

Ask yourself why very large corporations are not investing even a tiny percentage of their capital in reactors.  

If you answer yourself honestly you’ll admit to yourself that nuclear reactors are not a good investment.  Very high risk for something that will have great difficulty competing in a free market.

There’s a lot you don’t understand about economies of scale.  

Those were all opportunities for those who can build affordable reactors to show their stuff.  Yet the bids received were very much over the top and thus discarded.

I’m sorry, I’ve lived around nuclear reactors for many decades.  I’ve heard the hedged promises that have fallen flat over and over.

If reactors could be built cheaply don’t you think a company like GE would put <3% of their $230 Billion net worth on the line in order to demonstrate that they can produce for a reasonable price and open up a very lucrative income stream for themselves?

The reactor core is unpressurized. That means there’s no need for a pressure vessel capable of withstanding 75 or 150 atmospheres, nor for a huge containment structure to deal with a boiler explosion.

Since the fuel is liquid in normal operation, the reactor is incapable of a meltdown. In extremis, the fuel can simply be dumped, and allowed to cool at its own pace. That means there’s less need for multiply-redundant cooling systems.

Volatile fission products (xenon, krypton, iodine) are easily removed during ordinary operation. So in the event of an accident, they’ve already been dealt with.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm

China is already starting to move some of its low skilled labor manufacturing to other counties.  They apparently are taking Japan’s strategy of hanging on to the better paying higher skilled jobs and letting the low paying jobs leave.

China is also starting to install automated manufacturing, putting a lot of robots to work.  They should be able to keep producing large amounts of goods even with a decreasing labor pool.

China still has a huge portion of its population living in rural areas.  They won’t have quite the burden of supporting an aging urban population as they downsize their population.  The older folks in the countryside won’t retire, they’ll just farm/garden a bit slower.  And I doubt that China has created any expectation on the part of those folks that they’ll get much medical care in their later years.

I sure would love to read how the Chinese government is planning the transition to a lower population.  I’m betting they are actively planning while in the West we’re just letting things run their course….

As a result, it’s ‘getting old before it becomes rich.’ http://www.bit.ly/LSDjHZ

That said, no one has yet provided any ramp up/down times for a reactors.

My understanding is that reactors can be load-following to a degree.  You can cool things down a bit and lower output.  But if you totally shut down it can take days to come back to full output.

Nuclear power, regardless of the fuel, is the most expensive way to power our grid and takes far too long to implement.

A some point we simply have to recognize that the nuclear industry has made false promise after false promise.  We need to stop paying attention to their claims that “Next time electricity will be too cheap to meter.  Just trust us.”.