It’s time to rebuild America’s infrastructure and industrial base

If ever there was a question about the need to improve America’s infrastructure, it has certainly been dispelled, as the cost to the United States due to lost productivity continues to climb.

A study by the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that by 2025 the cost will reach $3.9 trillion in lost GDP and 2.5 million in lost jobs. On top of those costs, American families will lose upward of $3,400 in disposable income each year.

When searching for the roots of our predicament, we often overlook our country’s myopic neglect of our failing infrastructure — unsafe highways and structurally deficient bridges, obsolete port facilities, outdated freight rail, electrical grids, and wastewater systems.

Given the public’s desire for change, President-elect Joe Biden has a golden opportunity to push for major improvements in the nation’s infrastructure.

But rebuilding and modernizing our infrastructure will require an immense amount of material and the industrial base to provide and use it — an industrial base that has withered after decades of offshoring. Infrastructure reinvestment holds the keys to not only rebuilding and modernizing our roads and bridges but if it prioritizes using goods and materials made in America by American workers it can also spark an industrial renaissance.

Consider steel and the essential materials needed to produce it. Nearly every industry including energy, construction, transportation and equipment manufacturing requires steel. It largely comes from Appalachia’s mines — a region in need of good news — where the highquality metallurgical coal, the quality used to manufacture 70% of the world’s steel, is produced.

It’s past time to modernize

America’s infrastructure and it’s past time to reprioritize the industrial base and workers that will make it happen. Forrest J. Remick is emeritus professor of nuclear engineering and emeritus associate vice president for research at Pennsylvania State University; he is also a retired commissioner of the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.