> The U.S. spends $500 billion a year on electricity

But the American energy industry has negative net margins [0], which makes buildouts difficult without significant state support as the American energy industry is operating at a loss after operations cost are included.

> $2 trillion dollars worth of bonds to lower the price per kWh is modest

Land and Liability.

The upfront cost to build is significantly higher in the US because land is privately owned. On the other hand, India's federal and state governments are subsidizing land purchases for nuclear reactors as part of the SHANTI Act. The only other large economy doing something similar is China.

Furthermore, liability has remained a major issue in the US. India [1] and China [2] both gave nuclear operators a broad liability shield which externalizes the cost of a nuclear accident, especially for SMRs as they cap out in the $30-50 million range in India and China.

If the US can provide a similar liability shield beyond what is already on the books, buildout would be much faster, but this is politically untenable as can be seen with the data center buildout. Imagine the attack ads - "Trump"/"Newsom"/"Vance"/"Pritzker" are poisoning innocent Americans while in the pocket of Wall Street and BigTech. A growing number of Americans view any kind of infrastructure buildout as a subsidy for rich people, almost as if there was an ongoing social media campaign for years that has solidified this sentiment amongst Americans [3].

The big capital players at this point in this space are the US, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, and France. All the other 6 (even Russia) have blocked Chinese access to initiatives and subsidizes for domestic nuclear buildouts, and Russia is also blocked from 4 of them.

That said, the US has quietly started similar initatives as well, like the $80 Billion SMR buildout [4] but HN will never give Trump a win.

[0] - https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...

[1] - https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...

[2] - https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubccommun...

[3] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/westinghouse-megadea...