Amazingly, Joe Biden’s administration made a good decision. They are going to spend $6B to keep some nuclear plants current. There is only one reason that the US hasn’t seen the proliferation of nuclear plants to generate electrical power across the country. In the late 1970s, there was a movie called The China Syndrome that dramatized a nuclear meltdown. Soon after, a mishap occurred at 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the environmentalists seized the opportunity.
You might not know it, but the bulk of the environmental lobby doesn’t care about the environment. They are just another excuse for hard lefties to assault capitalism and freedom.
So, really the reason we don’t have a lot of nuclear power comes down to a dumb movie.
The funny thing is that when you don’t have nuclear plants, you have to have coal fired plants to generate enough electricity to power the grid!
If we want innovation and progress, we have to have a ton of electricity. An information economy can’t run without a constant supply of on-demand power.
I am not an expert on power but have friends that are. I met with scientists at Fermilab a number of years ago to learn about power. I was thinking of doing some angel investing in it and needed to understand.
What I do have a grasp of is economics, opportunity costs, and trade-offs. There is no free lunch.
You might, or might not agree with those that think the earth is warming due to the actions of man. But, hopefully, whichever side of the divide you find yourself on, you’d agree that we need to supply a lot of electrical power to people at the cheapest price we can with one constraint being to supply it to them in a way that hurts the environment the least. There are other constraints as well.
If you only tout solar and wind as a solution, my question to you is why do you hate and discriminate against poor people? Don’t they deserve to have electricity delivered to them at the cheapest price? Why aren’t you intellectually curious?
Solar and wind have environmental costs and other opportunity costs. I do think there is a place for them in a decentralized manner. Solar panels on a house to power certain things or to push power back into the grid for example. But, every time I drive from Vegas to LA and see that stupid solar field on the border in the desert, I get disgusted.
John Kerry is running point for the Biden Administration on global warming. That’s all you need to know. Kerry is a doofus. I met him and chatted with him on more than one occasion. He’s not smart.
Venture capital efforts to find solutions to global warming will largely fail because the solution is at our fingertips. However, VC efforts to invest in innovative ways to do things around the edges of the grid to make it significantly more efficient—without subsidies from the government to ensure profitability—will bear fruit.
Why is nuclear power so expensive and time-consuming to build? The stream of lawsuits and the regulations make it a very high hurdle to jump over.
The experts and elites that jet-set around the world to discuss serious solutions don’t have a clue about the middle class or poor people. They don’t care about them despite what they say. They go on television and put together sentences that make them seem concerned and empathetic, but really they just want to jet-set and seem important.
Smart people know you never consult the experts and industry leaders when you want to innovate to solve a problem.
Nuclear energy is the only way to solve for both political factions, and provide cheap power to the people who can least afford it.
Let’s start building it.
People on the left will come out and say that any program to solve climate change which doesn’t also destroy capitalism is not worth doing. From their perspective nuclear power is simply way to keep the current system going. It’s implicitly an admission that they don’t really believe that the earth is about to be destroyed by climate change. Climate change is a convenient issue to bring about the political change they want. The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution, even when the physical survival of the human species and the planet are supposedly at stake.
Both sides name call. But the thing that I like about you, is that when you do it, you're spot on. Not punitive -- it is what it is. This makes me feel less crazy and thank you.
Spot on with Nuclear. I cannot believe where we are with this issue. I'm hoping that the wokies stand down, but that's only hope.
Going to be a fun, game on, market Monday! Getting interesting!