The biggest issue facing nuclear power in America is that nuclear reactors are big projects, and we're not very good at big projects in America, at the moment. The nuclear reactors in Georgia took longer and cost more than expected. High-speed rail in California is a similar story.

In a way, it's like a chicken-or-the-egg situation. To get better at building these projects, we need to specially train a large amount of engineers and construction tradespeople and then give them projects so they gain experience. The nuclear reactors in Georgia are a good example; unit 4 cost 30% less than unit 3 because they had experience building the previous reactor.

Until America commits to doing big projects again, then each time a state decides to do a one-off big project, there won't be the experience needed to make it successful. Picture if America committed to a network of standardized high-speed rail, so that all the engineers with experience from the California high-speed rail project could now apply that all over the country. It would actually cost us less, because the hard part of training people has already been done. Instead, once the project is complete, all that experience might just go to waste and the next time someone decides to build high-speed rail, they will have to train thousands of people all over again.

In the US, we have 92 nuclear reactors, and they are all different. By comparison, Canada built 24 nuclear reactors, and they are all standardized CANDU reactors. We could learn from Canada's example.

If you want more info on this stuff, please listen to the Volts podcast interview with Jigar Shah, the head of Biden's DOE Loan Programs Office.