“Nuclear takes too long to build” is one of the most common arguments against nuclear power. But does it really? How long does it take to build a nuclear reactor? That’s the question I want to answer in this post.

To do this I dug into the data on the construction times of nuclear reactors across the world since the 1950s. I did this from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) PRIS database, supplemented with additional reactor data from Wikipedia (which has an impressively curated list of more than 600 reactors).