swp - thanks for the summary I mostly agree with your...

swp - thanks for the summary I mostly agree with your conclusions. As you say they will be attempting to improve the efficiency (in terms of throughput, depletion/enrichment factors) but as with most nuclear projects a lot emphasis will be on reliability or "capacity factor". For reactors the major advance over the last few decades has been improvements in capacity factor going from ~60% to now 93%; this has been a process of continuous improvement (unfortunately building costs of reactors has gone the other way - up). I suspect GLE will initially be challenged by considerable "down time" for issues such as "preparation" (that was their problem in the 2010/13 period), maintenance times, feedstock/product flows, reliability. To improve "capacity factor" they may well have to introduce considerable "redundancy" into the TRL/6 process so as to get the "capacity factor" up to TRL/7 - to TRL/9 levels. The FID may well depend upon this "capacity factor" since the return on investment will be considerably impacted by an initially low outcome