The Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, circa November 2025. Expanding US nuclear capacity will require reducing project risks and mobilizing private capital to compete with China’s growing nuclear industry. (Shutterstock/Matthew G Eddy)

How America Can Compete with China on Nuclear Energy

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The United States can close China’s nuclear advantage by reducing project risk and giving private capital the certainty to invest.

The United States and China are entering into an era of strategic competition for dominance over nuclear energy. Washington does not lack for resources, but the coordination it provides has proven unable to match Beijing’s pace or scale.

The fundamental problem is risk. Building nuclear infrastructure requires project developers to commit billions of dollars and thousands of man-hours years before a project generates any revenue, creating tremendous uncertainty on projects with timelines that can stretch over a decade.

China is able to mitigate this problem by relying on centralized state planning and deployment mechanisms. This centralized system allows China to standardize reactor design, licensing, procurement, and deployment cycles while coordinating the financing, workforce, infrastructure, and supply chains required to support them. The result is not only the rapid development of infrastructure, but the rapid accumulation of experience. Each project builds the industrial capacity, institutional knowledge, trained workforce, and supplier base needed for the next. By doing this, China marshals its resources to build not only nuclear power plants but a supporting ecosystem that compounds advantage over time, leading to accelerating deployments as the ecosystem matures.

While China relies on central planning, the United States must rely on incentives to unleash its main advantages. The United States already possesses a well-developed continuing-education system capable of producing skilled and specialized workers across the nuclear infrastructure lifecycle, from initial construction and quality assurance to operations, project management, and research. It possesses dynamic and sophisticated capital markets capable of financing the substantial upfront costs of nuclear deployment. It has a federal regulatory environment that has recently become more supportive of nuclear development, alongside........

© The National Interest