Is China slaying it on nuclear?

First off, I excerped a New York Times story, this morning by Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens. Why Brad misspells his name or can't install a faucet is anyone's guess.

The Trump administration wants to quadruple U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050, even as it ignores global warming, and it hopes to develop a new generation of reactor technology to power data centers at home and sell to energy-hungry countries overseas. Officials fear that if China dominates the nuclear export market, it could expand its global influence, since building nuclear plants abroad creates deep, decades-long relationships between countries.

Yet in the race for atomic energy, China has one clear advantage: It has figured out how to produce reactors relatively quickly and cheaply. The country now assembles reactors in just five to six years, twice as fast as Western nations.

While U.S. nuclear construction costs skyrocketed after the 1960s, they fell by half in China during the 2000s and have since stabilized, according to data published recently in Nature. (The only two U.S. reactors built this century, at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Waynesboro, Ga., took 11 years and cost $35 billion.)

“When we first got this data and saw that declining trend in China, it surprised me,” said Shangwei Liu, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who led the paper.

The big questions, Mr. Liu said, are how China got so good at nuclear power — and whether the United States can catch up.

In the United States, nuclear power is one of the rare types of energy that has support from Republican and Democratic politicians alike, especially as demand for electricity rises. Even environmentalists like Al Gore who once fretted about catastrophic accidents and radioactive waste are warming to the technology.

Yet the U.S. is pursuing a starkly different path to nuclear expansion, one that leans more heavily on private innovation than government backing.

Dozens of start-ups are working on a new generation of smaller reactors meant to be cheaper than the hulking plants of old. Tech companies like Google, Amazon and OpenAI are pouring billions into nuclear start-ups like Kairos Power, X-Energy and Oklo to help power their data centers for artificial intelligence. Early projects are underway in Wyoming, Texas and Tennessee, though few, if any, new reactors are expected before the 2030s.

The Trump administration wants to accelerate this work by reducing regulations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which certifies the safety of reactors before they are built. The agency’s critics say it has become too hidebound to handle advanced reactors that are less prone to meltdowns.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that the administration is betting that the private capital flowing into nuclear projects will spark American ingenuity and catapult the U.S. ahead of China. “Entrepreneurial capitalist competition is where the U.S. thrives, and I think it’s an advantage over China,” he said in an interview.

Yet some worry that the United States is betting too heavily on technological breakthroughs instead of focusing on the financing, skills and infrastructure needed to build plants, as China has. The U.S., for instance, has lost almost all of its heavy forging capacity to make large reactor components. A new generation of advanced reactors could also take years to perfect, leaving America behind.

“You look at the number of designs, particularly in the U.S., you think, Oh, God, help us,” said Philip Andrews-Speed, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “I would think narrowing down is the sensible thing to do.”

While the Trump administration has moved to speed up nuclear permitting and increase domestic supplies of nuclear fuel, some important government tools for advancing new reactors, such as the Energy Department’s loan office, have been hampered by staffing cuts. Efforts to slash safety regulations could be contentious. There is also a risk that interest by tech giants could fizzle if the A.I. boom slows.

“There’s no reason the United States couldn’t expand nuclear power,” said Stephen Ezell, vice president for global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “But are we just going to see a few small reactors power a few data centers, or are we going to see a serious whole government approach to bring back nuclear power as an essential source of electricity?”