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Big reactors are gonna take decade+ time periods to get built no matter what the President says. There's definitely spaces on the margins to have impact -- President Obama's NRC Chair was hilariously bad, in particularly two-faced ways given the early Obama admin's pretense of creating nuclear jobs, and more subtly a number of pinch points in later construction are downstream of the US just not having the sort of large manufacturing capabilities outside of SpaceX. But the way the NRC works as an organization is built to make building big plants hard and slow, and like Ted Cruz or Rick Perry found facing the DOE, there's just not the political will. The EU is in a similar boat, maybe worse: the extent Germany has been taken over by complete anti-nuclear fever-dreams is hard to understate.
Actual small modular reactors... maybe. Even if the paperwork side can't be stripped down that much, the greater simplicity and lowered energy density should make them much faster to actually construct and to deploy. I'm not optimistic about the NRC recognizing pre-fab nuclear plants in my lifetime, but even getting it down to the level of something like an experimental kit aircraft would be a massive win. They won't be anywhere as efficient or showy as the big plants, but the distributed baseload capabilities actually have a lot of secondary benefits.
The tradeoff is that SMRs are a clusterfuck: a lot of the high-profile variants depend on new or novel technologies that may not survive first contact with the enemy, and a lot of the more boring technologies aren't getting enough of a time advantage to really focus resources on them.
I'm not an uncomplicated nuclear booster -- there are some genuine limitations to the technologies, and the early days of the US nuclear power world were Not Great Bob -- but it's been a culture war item for a long time, and it's tough to figure out why it broke down like it did. The Standard explanation for the United States is a combination of environmentalism, anti-war philosophy, and Soviet funding anchored it down among the Left, but these come across a little too pat: you don't see just the Soviet-suckers or hardcore environmentalists doing it, and people willing to buck them on other matters come crawling back to the roost when it comes to nuclear power. Instead, anti-nuclear power activists are bizarrely well-connected in specific ways that others from the same sketchy background aren't; we don't have people who fired rockets at pizza shops getting mid-level political appointments.
((Yet. Growth mindset.))
I think there's a lot of it's an accidents of history thing -- particularly successful anti-nuclear weapons activists pivoting through non-proliferation concerns into general anti-nuke power, Carter getting scared out of his gourd, the early atomic energy groups being particularly untrustworthy and caught in it. But that doesn't really help much.
Changing the rules so that the reactors can be build much quicker is possible and I'd like to see much more effort put into that, but the main issue is that elections still happen. A nuclear plant is a huge investment that will take decades to pay off, and at any point a Democrat who wants to make the green lobby happy (or just one who views nuclear as a Red issue and wants to stick it to their enemies) can come along and pass new regulations and mess everything up. You cannot build the reactors without investment, and you cannot get the investment if the whole thing can be wrecked next election. Even if they somehow got everything fast tracked instead of needlessly slowed down and you could go from zero to operational in 4 years (meaning you could get it done before the next election) changes to operating regulations would still be a major risk.
You'd need to get bipartisan support and I just don't see any path to getting Democrats on board. You'd think "nuclear is the only realistic way to replace carbon" would be a winning pitch, but the left never wants to compromise from its preferred vision, and its vision is solar and wind.
There's also an issue, post-Clinch River, where even if you can handle operating regulations changing, the feds can pull a license for any reason or no reason, and it doesn't count as a taking.
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Anti-nuclear was getting funding from the fossil fuel industry. This is a partial explanation for why generally rather ineffectual watermelons are so much more effective on this one topic.
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