America built the first civilian nuclear power reactor in the world in three years. We started on it in 1954 and were done by the end of 1957. Half a century later, just doing the paperwork to get a reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government body responsible for overseeing this process, took the company trying to build Georgia’s Vogtle reactors nearly four years. That means it took longer to finish the approval paperwork for nuclear power than it did to pioneer it. What happened? Regulatory bureaucracy throttled nuclear. But it’s a new day for the atom. If the Trump administration and a surprisingly bipartisan coalition in Congress have their way, a nuclear renaissance will begin.
