But there is another more important reason that should give the Saudis pause in betting their nuclear future on the US… The US experience in building nuclear plants is a shambles.
In the pine barrens of eastern Georgia, two hulking concrete domes finally began splitting atoms last year, two decades after they were first imagined. The Vogtle nuclear plant’s Units 3 and 4 cost more than $30 billion, ran seven years late, and nearly bankrupted their builder. They are, by most technical measures, engineering triumphs. They are also a tombstone.
Vogtle is the first new American nuclear reactor project to cross the finish line in more than thirty years. In that same span, China built sixty. Russia built a global empire. And the United States— the nation that lit the first commercial reactor in 1957, that perfected the light-water design the world still uses, that once dominated the atom the way it dominated the microchip—has forgotten how to pour the concrete, bend the steel, and balance the books.
The nuclear age is entering a new chapter. As climate deadlines loom and energy security rattles Western capitals, the countries that can actually build nuclear plants are discovering that atomic power is no longer just electricity. It is leverage. And right now, the United States is sitting on the sidelines with a stack of brilliant blueprints it cannot afford to construct.
The Lab Coat vs. The Hard Hat
Walk through the halls of the Idaho National Laboratory or the offices of any dozen nuclear startups in Silicon Valley, and American supremacy is unmistakable. The US is designing reactors that float, reactors that fit on trucks, reactors that run on spent fuel. The Department of Energy is funding advanced demonstrations from Wyoming to Washington State. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission remains the global gold standard for safety—copied, respected, and feared.
But innovation without a construction yard is just a patent filing.
The Geopolitical Reactor
This is not merely a commercial story. It is a strategic one.
Nuclear power plants are not wind farms. They are sixty-year commitments. They require fuel, spare parts, technical support, and diplomatic stability across generations. The nation that builds a reactor on foreign soil is not selling electricity; it is planting a flag. Russia understood this early. China is learning fast. The United States, despite its vast security interests in stable, low-carbon energy markets, has effectively ceded the field.
Washington is belatedly trying to reverse course. Billions in new federal funding are flowing to advanced reactor demonstrations. A push is underway to rebuild domestic uranium enrichment, after policymakers belatedly realized that Russian fuel was keeping American reactors humming. Startups with names like TerraPower and NuScale promise a future where reactors are small, modular, and factory-built—bypassing the construction demons that devoured Vogtle.
But hope is not a strategy. And blueprints do not generate diplomatic influence.
The uncomfortable truth is that the next two decades of global nuclear expansion will be written largely in Cyrillic and Mandarin unless the United States figures out how to translate laboratory brilliance into bulldozer hours. It is not enough to invent the reactor of the future. Someone still has to pour the foundation, and pour it twice, and pour it cheaply enough that a foreign finance minister says yes instead of taking Moscow’s call.
The atom was born in America. Whether it stays American may depend less on physicists than on pipefitters, project managers, and a political system willing to treat nuclear construction as national infrastructure rather than a Wall Street gamble.
Right now, the concrete is curing in Russia and China. The U.S. is still waiting for the permit.
Unless Trump is offering to install free gold toilets as part of the deal the Saudis may want to have a sit down with the Russians or the Chinese and entertain a deal that does not require them to genuflect before Bibi Netanyahu.
