Imagine sweeping through green fields, floating five feet above ground, sun on your face as you slide by on track to your destination, not a car in the world, as you simply lean back.

And before you know it, you're there.

This is how travel should feel, and on our trains, it does.

Avanti West Coast, feel good travel.

Squash courts are carefully designed.

The walls need to be flat and even.

The floor should be of a solid durable wood that has enough grip to stop players slipping, and the walls need to be high.

In this last detail that, in late 1942, meant a squash court in Chicago became the improbable birthplace of the atomic age.

Enrico Fermi needed a last minute sight test his nuclear reactor after workers at the original location went on strike.

The Chicago Pile 1 reactor, so called because it was essentially heat graphite and uranium, was 6 meters tall.

An abandoned squash court underneath the bleachers of the Stagg Field Stadium became a makeshift lab.

On December the 2nd, Fermi and his team looked on from the court's viewing balcony as the control rods were removed, and the world's first nuclear reactor went into operation.

Just a few years later, this technology was used to kill over 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now America is wondering whether it needs more nuclear energy to help save lives in the fight against climate change.

This is Chex and Balance.

I'm John Prado, the economist's US editor, each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth.

Today, should America reconsider nuclear power?

Nuclear is responsible for nearly 20% for America's power generation and about half of its clean energy.

It's greener than fossil fuels and more reliable than renewables.

Yet safety fears remain and plants are being closed down.

What role will nuclear play as the US strives to reach its net zero emissions target?

With me as ever to discuss all of this are Charlotte Howard, the economist's New York bureau chief and energy expert and John Fasman, the US digital editor.

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