It's a very good question because it's almost impossible to answer. The problem is that all of the companies that are doing this are keeping their cards very close to their chests. For several years now I've been going to conferences and I see wonderful three-dimensional graphics that my students could do in a day. That's all they want to show you. They do not want to show you the actual cost. That's what it's going to come down to. Can they be built? Yes. I have no problem believing that they can actually be constructed. I do believe that, technically, they will work and function. It comes down to what the capital cost is going to be, and more importantly, how much staff we would need to operate one of these units, because that's going to affect the capital costs and the profitability of them. That's what we need to start getting the focus on. If we can get them to focus on what that cost will be, then we can answer that question as to how close it is.
New Scale is one of the leads in the United States. It's quite likely that they're targeting the aircraft carrier market with their design. Therefore, they're probably quite well advanced, but again, they don't want to tell anybody just how far advanced.
In Canada, probably the most lead-interesting unit will be Terrestrial Energy's molten salt concept. They're putting a huge amount of effort into it, and they certainly have some very intriguing, new ideas on how it can be used and implemented, which are quite fascinating. But, again, what's the cost going to be, etc.?
I think they could get a design completed maybe within five years and get some nice cost figures, but we're not going to have one ready for construction before 10 years, in my opinion, based upon what I see right now. It gets back to what I meant with focus. Now we have a lot of NRCan money being spent towards the supercritical water reactor. If that money was converted and redirected to SMRs, maybe we can actually push that along a bit. But we have to pick an SMR design. I think there are something like 30 options out there in the world right now, and that's somewhat ridiculous. We have to pick one.