Nobody in North America has a press that can make a vessel for a nuclear reactor without making it in pieces and welding them together (probably adding a year to the schedule if you don’t use a new welding technique just developed in the UK not to mention people being anxious over the welds)
There is a Canadian company that is gearing up to make small reactor vessels like the BWRX-300 but so far I haven’t seen a sign they aren’t Nuscale 2.0
I work in an EB shop doing everything from welding, engineering assistance, machine repairs, and complete machine rebuilds. It's quite an impressive process and Ive had parts in my hands that come from some of the biggest names you can think of in aerospace, semiconductor, military, medical and more.
Are they for prototypes? Or how do you service production runs for parts?
If for arguments sake it were a part for an AWACS or an aircraft carrier you might only need to make eight or a dozen. But even military aircraft tend to run into the hundreds.
We do production runs with the rare service run. Most parts are one time use as you might imagine. Service work is the rare mold repair.
We are part of a few companies just in time manufacturing so they pay for expedite processing on orders as small a one piece to a few dozen. And we can get production run orders in the tens of thousands.
That is, a vessel for a pressurized water reactor. A reactor operating at lower pressure (like one using molten salt as a coolant) wouldn't need such a vessel, as the salt would not become highly pressurized, even in accident conditions.
I saw a link from some government minister in Canada named Don Morgan who stated a BWRX-300 would cost $5B (CAN), which comes to about $3.6B (US). $12/W (US) is not the worst, but it isn't great. Not clear if that was all-in cost or just overnight cost.
There is a Canadian company that is gearing up to make small reactor vessels like the BWRX-300 but so far I haven’t seen a sign they aren’t Nuscale 2.0