Nuclear Energy's Greatest Challenge Is Standardization

November 6, 2026

Andrew Cottone, Ph.D., Visiting Fellow, Center of Energy & Environment

Caesar Rodney Institute, Policy Analysis

Read this article, Listen to the Podcast on the CRI website

America doesn't need to reinvent the nuclear reactor every time it builds a power plant. It needs to learn how to build proven designs repeatedly, safely, and affordably.

Delaware has an opportunity to learn from decades of costly nuclear construction experience documented by the U.S. Department of Energy as it considers its own nuclear energy future. The Delaware Nuclear Energy Feasibility Task Force, on which I served, recently concluded that nuclear power could play an important role in the state’s long-term energy future, but small modular reactors (SMRs) are not yet a near-term solution. Questions remain about construction timelines, costs, suitable locations, regulations, and public acceptance.

Rather than rushing into expensive, one-of-a-kind projects, Delaware should use this time to develop clear policies and identify potential sites while the nuclear industry demonstrates which reactor designs can be built reliably and affordably, again and again.

Standardization Is the Key to Affordable Nuclear Energy

Nuclear energy already produces vast amounts of reliable, low-carbon electricity. Yet its future in the United States may depend less on a scientific breakthrough than on a basic industrial principle: Build the same proven design repeatedly.

Standardization lowers costs because engineers, regulators, manufacturers, and construction crews can reuse what they have already learned. Constant customization does the opposite. We see this in daily life. Common charging cables reduce the need for adapters. Standard shipping containers move easily among ships, trains, and trucks. Credit cards, barcodes, traffic signals, and even the size of our printer paper work because users agree on basic formats. Shared standards simplify supply chains, expand competition, and make products easier to use. Why, then, has something as fundamental as nuclear energy developed so many variations? The United States has 94 operating nuclear reactors with a wide range of nameplate capacities – the maximum amount of electricity each reactor is designed to produce. By contrast, France has 57 nuclear reactors, nearly all built around pressurized-water technology, with most falling into three generating-capacity classes: 900 MW, 1300 MW, 1,450 MW.

The central economic problem is not operating nuclear plants. It is building new ones on time and on budget. Modern nuclear plants provide around-the-clock, baseload power. Their fuel is exceptionally energy-dense, and many U.S. reactors have operated reliably for decades. The U.S Department of Energy has documented how construction delays and escalating costs have challenged new nuclear projects.

The Cost of Customization: Too Many Reactor Designs Drive Up Costs

The United States pioneered commercial nuclear power, but electric power companies adopted many reactor designs and variations. Nuclear power plants were frequently tailored to different reactor designs, site conditions, and local utility requirements. That flexibility encouraged innovation, but it also multiplied engineering reviews, licensing work, training programs, spare-parts inventories, and construction plans. Lessons from one project could not always be transferred directly to the next because each plant was designed and built differently. It was like asking a builder to construct 50 houses, each with different plumbing, wiring, windows, and floor plans. Even a skilled workforce would struggle to gain speed or economies of scale.

What France Did Differently

France took a more coordinated approach to nuclear power beginning in the 1970s, standardizing much of its reactor fleet around a limited number of pressurized-water designs. Designs evolved, but the core systems remained similar. Repetition allowed construction teams to gain experience, operators to train on familiar equipment, regulators to review known systems, and suppliers to manufacture parts at greater scale. Standardization did not eliminate every cost or performance problem, but it helped France build a large fleet of nuclear reactors more quickly and consistently than a one-off approach would have allowed.

Nuclear power is often criticized as expensive, but the evidence suggests that the true challenge is not the technology itself, but how it is deployed. France built a world-leading nuclear fleet by standardizing around a handful of reactor designs, achieving construction costs of roughly €1.25 million per megawatt (MW), measured in 2010 euros, according to France’s national audit office. The United States, meanwhile, built dozens of reactor variants and saw its recently completed Vogtle Units 3 and 4 project in Georgia reach approximately $15 million per installed MW in 2024 dollars, excluding financing costs, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Adjusted for inflation and currency differences, France's historical cost was approximately $2.4 million per MW in 2024 dollars—less than one-sixth of Vogtle's cost.

Both nations have demonstrated that established nuclear plants can produce electricity at relatively low operating costs, but France's experience demonstrates that standardization, not innovation alone, is often the key to affordable nuclear energy. The lesson is simple: Repeatability can turn complex infrastructure from a custom project into a scalable product.

SpaceX offers a powerful example of the same industrial logic. Rather than treating each mission as a bespoke rocket program, it developed the Falcon 9 as a repeatable platform, standardized major systems, made components and operating procedures transferable across missions, and reused first-stage boosters. NASA compared published launch prices and found that the advertised price of reaching low Earth orbit fell from roughly $54,500 per kilogram on the Space Shuttle to about $2,720 per kilogram—a twentyfold decline. Just as important, repeat production and routine reuse allowed SpaceX to launch far more frequently, turning rockets from one-off projects into a scalable transportation service. Nuclear power needs the same shift: proven designs, common parts, repeatable construction and continuous learning across an entire fleet.

The SMR Test: Can New Reactor Designs Deliver on Their Promise?

SMRs are intended to be smaller, more flexible, and more factory-built than traditional nuclear plants. They could serve industrial sites, military installations, remote communities, and data centers. However, the field is fragmented. According to the Nuclear Energy Agency, developers are pursuing many competing concepts, including light-water, molten-salt, gas-cooled, sodium-cooled, and lead-cooled reactors. Only a small number of SMR projects are operating commercially.

That diversity also masks a deeper constraint: most SMR designs have little or no fleet-scale operating history —experience gained from operating multiple reactors of the same design over time. Unlike conventional light-water reactors, whose performance reflects decades of accumulated experience across hundreds of units, many new SMR technologies have not yet demonstrated long-term reliability, maintenance requirements, fuel performance, component life, staffing needs, or actual operating costs under commercial conditions. Engineering models and test facilities are essential, but they cannot fully substitute for years of real-world operation. The industry therefore needs disciplined first-of-a-kind demonstrations followed quickly by repeated deployment of the designs that perform best, so operating evidence and standardized learning can accumulate rather than being dispersed across dozens of unrelated concepts.

Competition is valuable during development. Yet if every SMR design requires its own licensing path, supply chain, workforce training, and manufacturing base, the industry may recreate the costly fragmentation of the past.

A Practical Path Forward: Standardize Proven Nuclear Designs

The answer is not to stop innovation or have the government choose a winner too early. Developers should continue testing new ideas, and regulators should demand strong evidence of safety and performance. Once designs have demonstrated their safety and reliability, policymakers, utilities, and investors should favor repeat deployments. Reusing approved designs and common components can shorten reviews, strengthen domestic supply chains, improve workforce skills, and give manufacturers the volume needed to lower costs.

Successful SMRs must become products, not perpetual demonstration projects. The goal should be to build a small number of proven designs many times, learning and improving with each deployment.

Nuclear power has the potential to provide reliable, around-the-clock electricity for generations. But technical promise alone will not make it affordable. The United States must pair innovation with industrial discipline. In nuclear energy, the breakthrough we need may be the willingness to stop reinventing the plant—and start building proven designs again and again.

Nuclear energy's biggest obstacle may be our inability to resist redesigning the toaster every time we want another slice of bread.