Nuclear Power’s Return Amid Energy Crunch

0:00Recently, nuclear power is back on the table, not as a nostalgia play. as a fix for the energy crunch we all feel coming. We're talking data centers, AI, manufacturing, electrified everything. We need steady power that doesn't choke the air. That's the case I'm making today. We're going to go deep and we're going to tie in today's news because there's very interesting nuclear news happening right now and this is going to give us some insights. Let's start with the simple truth. The more energy a country uses, the better off its people are. Cheap, reliable watts by prosperity. Nuclear used to be our favorite way to print reliable watts.

0:48At the U.S. peak, we turned on roughly three reactors a year, and it only took five years from first breaking ground to switching the factories on. Half a million homes were powered per unit. Then we stalled. But why did we stall? Fear and rules are the two reasons. Rules built on fear, I guess, is a better way to put it. Because in the 1970s, the rulebook exploded from hundreds of standards to thousands. A new requirement for every single day for years. And a phrase that changed everything. As low as is reasonably achievable. Or A-L-A-R-A. It sounds very careful. It became a blank check, however.

1:39If any theoretical reduction in radiation was possible, you had to do it, whether the risk was real or not. So, as low as reasonably achievable started to cause problems. That's because these changes and these rules didn't necessarily make things safer, they made things more expensive. Now, I'm all for safe energy, especially when it's nuclear energy. But as time stretched on, costs spiked and financing broke. Here's the plain math. Every month of delay on a large reactor can cost tens of millions in interest alone. You're paying debt before you sell a single watt. Stretch a five-year build into a 12-year build and you bury the project under carrying costs.

2:28Now, utility companies that were in charge of providing power saw this, and they walked. The supply chain atrophied. Then, engineers in the nuclear area retired, fabricators began to close, and by the time interest rates came back down, the talent had moved on. Nuclear didn't die because it was dangerous. It died because we made it impossible to build on time for the current interest rates. because of those two things the entire industry fell apart but safety let's talk about that radiation is a part of life it's in the ground it's in the air it's in every flight you take every time you climb to the Everest base camp and back down you're effectively taking a few years of sea level radiation in one season now I've never been but we do expose ourselves to radiation a little bit at a time, and it's not necessarily bad.

3:26Populations living at altitudes aren't dropping dead from it. The bodies adapt. It repairs. So when nuclear accidents did happen, the headlines were absolutely terrifying. But the long-term health impacts in places like Fukushima were far smaller than people assume. Chernobyl was very real. It was bad for first responders and was one of the most horrific accidents in the nuclear space in history. But even there, the broad population impacts looked nothing like the myths. Meanwhile, if you chart deaths per unit of electricity, nuclear sits at the safest end next to wind and solar. You really need to compare it.

4:06If you're to look at stuff like coal, that has an outsized impact on the environment causing actual deaths. Coal and oil are the biggest killers. Gas is much better than coal, but it's still not zero. So that's the baseline. All of a sudden, nuclear starts to look really appealing. So why are we talking about nuclear now? Well, that's because demand is about to surge, not for nuclear, but for electricity. AI is electricity hungry, and data centers want round-the-clock power, not just when the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining. So here's the week's news and why it matters, especially when it comes to nuclear.

4:47Saudi Arabia's crown prince flew in to talk about security, AI, and nuclear power. The U.S. wants a civil nuclear deal that would essentially bar enrichment and any reprocessing on Saudi soil. And the Saudis want U.S. technology, advanced chips, and credible guarantees. This is energy policy as foreign policy. If the deal lands, it expands American nuclear standards abroad and ties Gulf energy to U.S. industrial capacity. Next, the U.S. announced a massive nuclear push anchored by Westinghouse. We're talking large fleets, not one-offs. Tens of billions of dollars in projects. Interestingly, private capital is moving too.

5:33Valar Atomics raised nine figures to pursue a high-temperature gas reactor. Think heat for industry, hydrogen, and possibly data centers that want their own dedicated supply. This was massively supported by Lucky Palmer of the Andrill startup, which is seeing some huge success. And the Department of Energy's loan program office just said the quiet part out loud. Most of its firepower, aka its funds and its money and its energy, are headed to nuclear. And private equity is going to be developing and building out the systems to achieve their goals. So let's zoom out to the long-term forecast. Experts and analysts expect the U.S.

6:21generating capacity to rise sharply through the mid-century. Solar roars first, coal retires, storage helps, then nuclear carries the back half of the marathon. When we're talking storage, we're talking solar storage because the energy needs to be stored somewhere when the sun goes down. But why? Why is solar coming in to carry the back half of that marathon? Because when loads keep rising and you still want clean energy, you need firm. Nuclear is firm, it's constant, and it doesn't retire when the sun goes down. It shows up at 3 a.m. in August, it still shows up in January in the morning, and it doesn't care about the clouds.

7:05So what's different this time? Standardization, factory building, and fleet procurement are all going to be critical. And there also needs to be a willingness to say no to one-off bespoke projects that eat a decade of time. The Navy already proved that they could do this at sea, interestingly, with hundreds of reactors, millions of miles, with systems that are redundant, standard, and disciplined, with no accidents or fatalities. The civilian side looks ready to copy what worked for the military. Small modular reactors that can carry a big promise. They build the core in the factory and repeat the same design over and over, and then they plug these cores or pods into a bigger system.

7:52Following this modular system, let's say something breaks in pod 7, it can be easily repaired and taken offline. Not to mention every single unit, one through seven, would all look the same. So that's the future of nuclear. Not massive cores and big projects, but smaller, standardized systems. Now let's layer in the land and wildlife argument, honestly. Nuclear is dense as far as the amount of energy it provides for the footprint. And it does create emissions-free operations. Wind and solar are clean, but they do need land, transmission, cleaning, and careful sitting for birds and habitats. This sitting or babysitting can add an extra cost when managing these wildlife habitats.

8:45Now, none of this is a reason to stop building them, but it is a reason to admit that there are trade-offs depending on the type of energy you select. When the load is exploding, you're going to need everything that works. nuclear works hard on the fewest acres. And then, of course, another fear that people have is nuclear waste. Here's the straight talk. The volume of the nuclear waste is actually quite small. The containers are heavy and monitored. The fuel is hard to weaponize without industrial scale reprocessing, and there are tight controls on this nuclear waste. We should be building long-term repositories, recycle what's valuable, and stop acting like the canisters in guarded yards are a ticking time bomb if they are cared for properly.

9:33Because really, they're not ticking time bombs. They're very boring, and boring is very good when it comes to energy. Again, we can all recall accidents of the past where there has been some sort of a spill, a leak, and there has been damaged to human health. But when compared to coal or gas, that is actually a very small number and it is one of the safest energy forms. So how is the future of nuclear going to finance itself? Well, the loan office can anchor a project with very low cost debt. Every dollar of federal backstop can unlock multiple dollars of private capital because again, these are small venture capital firms.

10:15And when they see that dollars are coming in from the government, it makes it very easy to be willing to invest your own funds. That drives blended costs of capital down. When your interest rates drop two points on a multi-billion dollar plant, you can save hundreds of millions over the construction of the whole project. That alone can make or break viability for nuclear. Pair that with fleet buys, like we mentioned, and order five identical units instead of just one, and lock in steel forging valves and cable at volume and tell your suppliers you're serious. All of a sudden, they'll invest in the tooling, they'll train the welders, they'll hire the apprentices, and you get a real industrial base again.

10:59That same industrial base that hemorrhaged when the industry slowed down previously. Second, they're going to need to build supply chain realism. You cannot snap your fingers and produce the largest reactor vessel in America next year. That's why the U.S.-Japan lane is critical. Japan is very known for their nuclear work. Bring in what we lack today while we rebuild domestic capacity and parallel path it. That means we're not going to wait. We're going to start now with the experience that's found in Japan. Third, we're going to need to attack permitting. This is going to talk about those rules, the ALARA.

11:42Remember that acronym for if there's a potential that something bad could happen, we need to mitigate the threat? Well, that turned very quickly into anything you can imagine that could ever happen, you must mitigate it. Now, that ALARA is not science. It's bureaucratic creep. The standards need to be safe enough with evidence and safer than the alternatives. If an imagined failure mode is a physical absurdity, it should not trigger a redesign. If a change doesn't reduce real-world risk, then we shouldn't do it. And that's how we can cut years without cutting safety. Next up, they're going to need the workforce.

12:22We need welders, pipe fitters, electricians, riggers, NDE techs, operators, and engineers for these small nuclear facilities. Six figures of jobs across a decade. These are well-paying jobs. If you want to rebuild the middle class, hand them a helmet and tell them that the next 20 years of their job are going to be guaranteed in nuclear. start apprenticeships now build partnerships with community colleges and get these credentials out fast train for the exact fleet you plan to build and don't train on a fantasy and of course foreign policy is important in all this deals like the one that's on the table with Saudi Arabia are not just about electrons they're about rules, trust and alignment no enrichment to create weapons and no reprocessing to create weapons We need to export the safest version of nuclear and the strictest version of oversight.

13:22You pull allies into your standards and all of a sudden those standards begin to grow and you have people who can enforce those standards and work off those standards all around the world, thus building up that worker base as we previously mentioned. You keep adversaries out of your black box and you sell the stuff that matters. The fuel, the services, the training, the software, and all of a sudden you have a booming industry and even with fluctuations inside your own country, you can still keep that talent. Of course, we also need transparency on the risk. There is no fairytale energy scenario.

13:57Nuclear does have real hazards, and so does every large energy system. So we manage them, we engineer them, and we don't pretend they don't exist. But we also don't pretend that background radiation is a boogeyman under the bed. We show the numbers, and we move on. Next is sequencing. we need to build where the grid can take it first. Near existing transmission, near cooling water with a plant that doesn't hammer local users, and we need to use brownfield sites. Retired coal plants come with switchboards and trained labor. So the question is could we reuse that? You just saved years by not starting in a cornfield.

14:39Next we need to keep in mind that there is a flywheel effect. unit one is always going to be the hardest and require the most investment unit two is faster and then by unit three you're on the rails and that's when costs start to drop for real don't rate nuclear by prototype rate it by the fifth copy the sixth copy the 30th that's how every serious industry works for example we see this in aviation in shipbuilding in semiconductors energy should really be no different don't focus on the cost of the first unit focus on the cost of the units that will come down the road. Tying this back to what's happening today, the loan office is pointing its fire hose at nuclear, unloading cash in the best way.

15:21Japan is bringing back the heavy parts. Private capital is taking risks in advanced designs, trying to develop them as quickly as possible. And the Saudis are talking about linking security AI and nuclear standards. The US forecast shows nuclear picking up the baton or the first renewable surge flattened. When the grid needs power, it's going to be nuclear. That's not a culture war. That is a plan to build energy. The way I see it, nuclear isn't a mascot. It is a machine. It's blue-collar workers like you and me creating a safe way to build an energy infrastructure. I see the future in the standardization of the parts, financing at scale, publishing the math on the dangers, and protecting the neighbors, and also telling the truth about the risks while telling the truth about the risks of other energy as well.

16:14Then we need to scale and build lots and lots and lots of these reactors in order for these economies of scales to kick in. I hope this gave you a deep dive into the world of nuclear, understanding how it worked, the ins and outs, and how it's interwoven with today's politics and news. This is the Let Freedom Podcast. Don't forget to rate us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a comment. I will see you in the next episode.