America Knows Nukes. It Just Can’t Build Them Anymore. Tell that to the Saudis

Chinese Nuclear Power Plant

Donald Trump made news briefly this week by proposing civil nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia that includes support for building nuclear reactors using US technology. This is not actually a new development. Discussions between the US and Saudi Arabia on a formal civil nuclear cooperation agreement (known as a “123 Agreement” under the U.S. Atomic Energy Act) have been ongoing for years. What makes Trump’s announcement new (and curious) is that he is insisting that the Saudis must sign on to the Abraham Accords in order to seal the deal. And that will be the deal killer if the Saudis hold to their position that there must be a Palestinian state before they accept the Abraham Accords.

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.

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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 Vogtle disaster illustrates the rot. What was meant to be a rebirth—the Westinghouse AP1000, a safer, simpler Generation III+ design—became a bleeding wound. Contractors failed. Blueprints arrived incomplete. The heavy-forge capacity to shape reactor vessels had migrated abroad decades earlier. Skilled welders and pipefitters had retired, and no one had trained their replacements. Every problem spawned a delay; every delay ballooned the budget. By the time the first new watt finally flowed, the price tag had doubled, Westinghouse had declared bankruptcy, and any utility executive watching had quietly deleted “nuclear” from their vocabulary.

The US can design a marvel, but it cannot build two of the same thing without treating each as a bespoke science project.

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Russia’s Reactor Racket

While America was arguing with itself, Moscow built something simpler: a sales machine.

Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear giant, does not merely sell reactors. It sells a relationship. Need a power plant? Rosatom will design it, finance it, build it, fuel it, train your operators, and haul away the waste. The package comes wrapped in low-interest loans from Russian state banks and a geopolitical wink: we will be your energy partner for sixty years. Just sign here.

The product itself—the VVER-1200—is not revolutionary. It is a sturdy, evolutionary pressurized water reactor that Rosatom has learned to build efficiently at home and replicate abroad. What makes it irresistible to buyers from Turkey to Egypt to Bangladesh is the certainty Moscow offers in a field where certainty is rare. No messy private shareholders. No NRC-style labyrinth. No utility board sweating quarterly earnings while concrete cures.

The results speak for themselves. Rosatom currently controls roughly 70 percent of the global reactor export market. Its foreign order book stretches across four continents. And because Russia also enriches nearly half the world’s reactor fuel, its customers quickly discover that buying the plant was only the beginning of the dependency.

It is, in essence, a racket—one that the United States helped invent, then abandoned.

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China’s Factory Floor

If Russia plays chess, China plays mass production.

Beijing’s nuclear program began as a technology importer, a student copying homework from the French, the Russians, and the Americans. Today, it is the world’s largest classroom—and the teacher. No country has built more reactors this century. No country has more under construction right now.

The engine is the Hualong One, an indigenous Generation III+ design born from years of patient reverse-engineering and state-led integration. Because China’s reactor builders, regulators, banks, and steel mills all ultimately answer to the same Communist Party headquarters, the country can enforce standardization with a ruthlessness impossible in fragmented Western markets. When China builds a Hualong One, it builds the same Hualong One, again and again. The learning curve is steep, the timelines are predictable—roughly five to six years from ditch to grid—and the costs are among the lowest on Earth.

Now Beijing is exporting the model. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese policy banks are replicating the Rosatom playbook, offering turnkey plants and tied financing to Pakistan, Argentina, and prospectively Saudi Arabia and much of Central Asia. The American nuclear industry, starved of export financing and hobbled by three decades of domestic dormancy, has no equivalent offer to make.

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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.

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Garland Nixon and I discussed three of my latest articles:

Nima and I discussed the impending US massive attack on Iran:

Not as much bombing by the US on Thursday… Mario and I discussed the calm before the impending storm:

Sulaiman was quite concerned about the B-1 Bombers heading to Iran: