The promise of factory efficiency in prefab housing is often erased by new costs. Modules must be over-engineered to survive road transport—a primary design constraint—and then require complex, costly on-site work to connect, negating initial savings.

Unlike lightweight goods, heavy housing modules are uneconomical to ship more than a day's drive. This physical constraint prevents the creation of massive, centralized factories, forcing a model of smaller, distributed plants that cannot achieve the same economies of scale.

The primary flaw in nuclear energy economics is that every plant is a unique, bespoke construction project, leading to massive cost overruns. The solution is to treat nuclear power plants as standardized, factory-produced products, much like cars, to achieve predictability, speed, and cost reduction through scale.

Facing immense electricity needs for AI, tech giants like Amazon are now directly investing in nuclear power, particularly small modular reactors (SMRs). This infusion of venture capital is revitalizing a sector that has historically relied on slow-moving government funding, imbuing it with a Silicon Valley spirit.

The 40-year plateau in nuclear power wasn't driven by public fear after incidents like Chernobyl, but by the soaring costs of building massive, one-off reactors. The modern push for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) aims to solve this fundamental economic problem through factory-based production.

In the 1970s, France built 57 reactors in 15 years through its government-led utility, which repeatedly built the same design. In contrast, the US's fragmented private utility system, with each company building different designs, failed to achieve similar cost reductions and scale.

After massive cost overruns on traditional nuclear projects, no utility will build a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) alone. The only viable path forward is for a tech giant to provide both a purchase agreement for the power and direct equity investment in the SMR manufacturer to fund capital expenditures.

The high costs of Georgia's recent Vogtle nuclear plant are often blamed on regulation. However, the primary drivers were project management and supply chain failures, like ordering the wrong rebar, which caused year-long delays due to a loss of institutional knowledge.

Unlike traditional nuclear power which involves building massive, site-specific projects, Radiant is treating reactors as mass-producible products. Their focus on smaller, mobile 1MW units prioritizes rapid deployability and mobility over raw power scale, enabling them to serve off-grid and remote use cases.