The Trump administration just agreed to loan seventeen billion dollars to build ten nuclear reactors. That's five projects. Two reactors each. Math checks out for once.
Seventeen billion buys you the speed deployment of something that takes a decade to build if everything goes perfectly. Which it won't. Nuclear projects finish on time the same way your cousin finishes rehab. With optimism, a press release, and a relapse scheduled for eighteen months out.
The loan exists to speed things up. Speed. Nuclear reactor construction. Two concepts that go together like Jehovah's Witnesses and Halloween. These projects will break ground, hit a regulatory snag in year three, get delayed by supply chain issues in year five, and celebrate their ribbon cutting sometime after flying cars become standard.
But sure, let's call it an investment in American energy independence. Let's pretend this isn't a subsidy dressed up as a loan that'll get restructured twice before the concrete dries. The government backing nuclear projects with taxpayer money while your nephew trades leveraged ETFs on his lunch break. Both losing money. One gets a bailout.
Retail traders will see this headline and think nuclear stocks are the play. They'll buy some uranium miner that hasn't turned a profit since Carter wore cardigans. They'll hold through the first delay announcement. Then the second. Then they'll sell at a loss and tweet about how the market is rigged.
Five projects. Ten reactors. Seventeen billion dollars. Zero chance any of this finishes under budget or ahead of schedule. But at least we're doing something. That's what matters. Doing something. Preferably something that can be announced, photographed, and forgotten about until the cost overruns hit the news cycle in 2031.
The reactors will work great once they're done. Clean energy. Reliable baseload power. A genuine step forward. Shame about the part where we have to build them first.
Photo by Adam Michael Szuscik on Unsplash
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