Economic assessment of a given NHES architecture should involve a number of inputs, including market size, profitability, total capital investment, operations and maintenance costs, and manufacturing costs (which include fuel and other fixed or variable costs). The overall system economics vary when additional revenue-producing subsystems are integrated with the SMR. Economic analysis becomes particularly complex when considering the time variability in the cost of electricity, which is also dependent on the production source (taking into account grid priority and feed-in tariffs for renewables), variability in electricity demand, potential future carbon taxes, and revenue from non-electricity products (e. g. methanol).

Private industry requires sound economic analysis and reasonable assurance of value — both present and future — before adopting and implementing innovative energy generation and dissemination strategies. Achieving a low uncertainty estimation on the economic return of hybridized SMRs requires additional research and development activities for some of the proposed subsystems (e. g. advanced, non-water-cooled reactor designs), but more specifically for the functional integration of those subsystems, system monitoring technology, and control system architecture. Even in the case of a hybrid system architecture that employs off-the-shelf subsystems with demonstrated performance history the integration of those subsystems is a departure from the known operational space that introduces economic uncertainty and risk. Some of the considered subsystems operate on very different timescales and with very different characteristics, requiring demonstration of system interaction under transient conditions to verify that the physical interfaces (hardware coupling), control system hierarchy, and control implementation are functional across the range of operating conditions.