Forty years of nuclear stagnation in the West was sold as caution. Lovins, Caldicott, the post-Three Mile Island licensing freeze, NRC's Linear-No-Threshold consensus rounding every microsievert toward apocalypse. The actual mechanism was capital mispricing the cost of fear while the grid drifted into a lattice of natural-gas peakers propped up by storage that did not exist at scale.

The Atomausstieg is the proof. Germany shut Isar 2 and Emsland with Russian tanks in Kharkov, bought Texan LNG at five times the marginal cost of the kilowatt it had just turned off, called the result a transition.

Now the bill matures. NRC is closing in on the first commercial SMR construction permits this year. Holtec is restarting Palisades, a plant the same regulator had buried. TVA is breaking ground at Clinch River on a BWRX-300. Rolls-Royce is exporting prefabs to Wales and Bohemia. Washington has filed for four hundred gigawatts by 2050, which would put the United States back where it was scheduled to be in 1985 before Carter blinked.

Demand is doing the work the lobbyists could not. Training campuses need three to five gigawatts of firm baseload that no wind farm in any latitude can deliver, and the hyperscalers can count. Microsoft signed for Three Mile Island Unit 1. Amazon bought Talen's Susquehanna. Google contracted Kairos. The capital allocators have stopped consulting the Sierra Club.

The soft path was a luxury good. It expired the moment a model on a TPU pod needed a real watt.