Years ago I flew to Beijing to teach. I stepped out of the hotel and the air was warm and sticky, and I could feel it on my skin. You looked up and there was no sky, only haze. By the time I reached the car, my throat hurt.

That is the problem nuclear power solves for China before it solves anything else. The coal that powers the country also hangs in the air over Beijing.

The smog is why China wants clean power.

This spring, on the coast of Zhejiang, a reactor reached full power just over 5 years after the first concrete went down. In Britain, Hinkley Point C has been under construction for the better part of a decade, and it still will not switch on until around 2030. What separates the two has almost nothing to do with the reactor itself.

When I put this in front of executives at IMD, the first thing they’d say is “authoritarianism.” I grew up in Hong Kong, so I understand the instinct.

Then I look at the record. France built 56 reactors in about 15 years, as a democracy. South Korea built its own standardized fleet more recently, also as a democracy. So I want to know what’s really so special about the Chinese build, to see what the rest of us could actually borrow, or steal.

Three things jump out.

One, an industrial policy that holds steady across decades. You cannot finish something that takes 10 years if the rules reset every 4.

Two, cheap and patient capital, moved through state banks into whatever the country decides matters most. Japan did it, South Korea did it, Taiwan did it. None of this is a Chinese secret.

Three is the one Western engineers find hardest to accept. China stopped trying to build a masterpiece every time. It took a design that was good enough, held the blueprint nearly constant, and improved it reactor after reactor. The crews repeat the same work, the suppliers sit close by, and approvals move fast because everyone already knows the design. Costs come down with every build.

This goes well beyond nuclear. China ran the same approach in high-speed rail, solar, wind, and electric cars. Take something that already works, keep it steady, and let the learning pile up.

In the West, we are in love with the engineering marvel, the thing that has to be first in class and new to the world. That instinct gave us Hinkley Point C and Vogtle in Georgia, where every reactor was a custom project that forgot what the last one learned. There is even a term for it, negative learning. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of building a reactor in America climbed over the decades, while in China it came down.

None of this is glamorous, which is probably why it never makes it into anyone’s headline. The advantage is mostly boring. You know… it is standardization, repetition, and the patience to do dull work for 20 years. It is the quiet leadership that cuts red tape, forces rival companies onto one standard, and gets no press release for any of it.

A fusion record does get a press release. China set one early last year, around 18 minutes of sustained plasma. France broke it a few weeks later. Either way, it means little until someone can scale it. The moonshot is the easy thing to celebrate. The boring base underneath it is the hard part, and the part nobody wants to pay for.

I have my own blind spot here. I was in Boston recently, defending Europe, when an American said the thing I had stopped seeing. “You have made it so hard to do business across your own countries that nothing on the continent can scale. Britain even feels like a whole ocean apart.” He was right. I live inside my own bubble, and I had stopped noticing it.

Two things are worth copying from China.

First, put scale and speed ahead of novelty. Once a design is proven safe, copy it and get moving. Resist the urge to invent a brand new national standard out of pride.

Second, and this one is harder, let yourself consolidate. America’s legacy carmakers are down to 2, General Motors and Ford. Europe has more than a dozen, and still wonders why it cannot move with force. We do not need China’s politics to borrow China’s discipline. France showed that 50 years ago. The UK choosing Rolls-Royce to standardize small reactors is the same idea, starting over.

None of this is out of reach. What I do not know is whether we have the patience to do the boring work long enough to get it back.

Here is my question to you, my dear readers.

What is the one thing in your industry that people keep rebuilding from scratch, when copying it would get them further?

I wrote about this build discipline, and why the reactor is the easy part, here: https://howardyu.substack.com/p/the-reactor-is-the-easy-part

– Howard Yu

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