The looming insolvency of Toshiba has set off a chain reaction of events that threatens the existence of nuclear power in the West:

— Britain’s plan to build six new nuclear plants — based on four different plant designs — in order to phase out coal by 2025 is now up in the air.

— Britain’s turmoil creates uncertainty for the French and Chinese nuclear industries — as well as for another Japanese company, Hitachi — that had won contracts to build other British plants.

— In response to Toshiba’s failings, one of India’s leading nuclear policy experts is calling for the government to scrap existing plans with Areva, Westinghouse and Russia’s Rosatom, and "Make Nuclear Indian Again" by scaling up the country’s indigenous design.

— On Wednesday Mitsubishi’s CEO told the Financial Times that the company is not considering a merger with Toshiba. The reason? Toshiba's nuclear design "is a totally different technology" from Mitsubishi's.

— A proposal by Southern Company to build a third nuclear plant based on Toshiba’s Westinghouse AP1000 design in Georgia is increasingly unlikely.

The Japanese and French governments will be compelled to act for economic reasons — their nuclear industries are too important to their economies to fail. The Japanese government has always played a strong role in shaping the direction of its industries, including nuclear, while the French nuclear industry is entirely government-controlled.

Even though it lacks its own nuclear industry, Britain is emerging as the strongest of the three nations because it has a significant number of planned nuclear plants that involve Japanese and French companies, and is a big player in a buyer's market.

The new Conservative government of Theresa May has expressed more interest in industrial policy than prior Conservative governments, and has already begun talks with the Japanese government about the UK government coming in as an investor on two of its planned plants.

The question is whether anyone in the three governments will have the vision and strength to make the right choices. The right choices will be the most difficult ones because they will require standing up first to the nuclear industry and next to ideologues on the Left and the Right.

But crises bring opportunities and there are large ones for reformers within the industry and within governments to do what should have been done 40 years ago: standardize designs, reorganize and consolidate the industry, and implement a vision to scale up plants while bringing down costs.

But before doing any of that, policymakers and the public must understand why Toshiba and Areva failed.

Why Nuclear is Failing

1. Lack of Standardization and Scaling

“Everything you described in your article was true for nuclear plants built in the 1970s,” an industry veteran told me.

In my investigation, I described how Toshiba’s Westinghouse AP1000 design was radically new — it had never been tested and indeed wasn’t even complete before construction began.

And yet when it came time to build two of them in Georgia and South Carolina, all parties were afflicted with a kind of historical amnesia.

“No one involved seemed to fully appreciate just how difficult it would be to build new reactors, especially the AP1000 — a ‘first of a kind’ design,” reports the Financial Times.

It’s not unusual for big construction and manufacturing projects to go over time and budget.

Consider the San Francisco Bay Bridge. After an earthquake in 1989 caused part of it to collapse, California officials decided to replace the entire eastern span.

Construction started in 2002 and was supposed to cost $1.5 billion. The project was afflicted with challenges. In 2009, steel rods flew off the span and hit at least two cars. Faulty bolts were discovered. The problems delayed the opening by four years and cost $6.4 billion — four times more than what had been estimated.

Or consider the Boeing "Dreamliner" jet aircraft. The FOAK arrived three years late, in 2011. Immediately things went awry. Engines failed along with fuel pumps, computers and wings. Lithium batteries caught on fire. The problems were so bad that the Japanese government launched its own investigation.

Now consider that building a nuclear plant isn't like building a bridge or a jet plane — it's like building a bridge and a jet plane at the same time.

Except it's not. It’s much harder than that.

The reason has to do with scale. Where Boeing is making 10 aircraft per month — allowing everyone involved to become more efficient and produce planes faster — it takes nuclear plant construction companies up to 10 years to build one plant.

Boeing knows the importance of standardization. The company is losing money on every Dreamliner it makes, and says it hopes to make money after selling 1,100 of them. Thus, when faced with a rash of problems in 2012, Boeing didn't give up on the Dreamliner design — it fixed the problems.

The response from the nuclear industry to such problems would have been to invent yet another nuclear plant design complete with promises of greater safety and lower cost. And yet what makes nuclear plants safer and cheaper to build and operate is experience, not new designs.

Wrote Richard K. Lester and Mark J. McCabe:

In the United States, a sizable operating performance penalty has been paid both as a result of the diffusion of several types of LWR technology and because of the relative scarcity of multiunit sites caused by the fragmented structure of the electric utility industry. In France, by contrast, performance has benefited from the very high degree of plant design standardization and the prevalence of multiunit siting.

What the constant switching of designs does is deprive the people who build, operate and regulate nuclear plants of the experience they need to become more efficient.

Why then does the industry keep doing it?