The US must ensure policies support the standardisation of nuclear reactor designs and regulatory stability is maintained during construction if it is to avoid another cycle of spiralling costs for reactor deployment, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has said.

In a paper titled ‘Can America build nuclear again?’, senior fellow Roger Pielke at the Washington-based thinktank, argued that costs to build nuclear in the US did not have to escalate in the past, but were the result of policy choices.