Back to Nuclear

Suddenly Nuclear Energy seems to be back on the menu! After years to deeming it unsafe, how suddenly has it become safe?

In the 1950s Nuclear was billed to be the source of infinite abundant clean energy for the future. That did not come to be. The reason cited often is Nuclear disasters.

There have been 4 nuclear disasters:

• SL-1 in Idaho - Right next to the Idaho Indian Reservation, hence you would have never heard of it

• Chernobyl, Ukraine

• Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania

• And more recently Fukushima, Japan

There are 440 Operational Nuclear Reactors in the World and if you include the ones that have been closed, the number would go up to 500.

4 out of 500 is less than a 1% failure rate, I would call that a tremendous success. Also the total fatalities from all of the nuclear radiation-related accidents across the world total to less than 200. If you were to include secondary and tertiary deaths the number goes up to 1 million.

Let us just put that in context.

Globally there are about 1.2 million deaths due to motor vehicle accidents, EVERY YEAR. It is the leading cause of death for people aged between 5-29 according to the World Health Organisation.

Even if you include the wanton death caused by the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you are not even going to come close to touching distance of the number of lives traffic claims.

If we were as concerned about lives lost due to car accidents as we seem to have been with Nuclear Power, we may not even have climate change to deal with. All of us would be cycling around!

Power Play

The death of Nuclear power has more to do with Power than anything else. Not electricity, but the kind that weak men seek to provide solace to their ego.

The map below is the outcome of the 1976 elections that Jimmy Carter won.

1976 US Presidential Elections

Source: Wikipedia

The next map shows the major coal production belts inside the US.

It will not take a genius to put one and one together. We know who was bribing making “campaign contributions” to whom and how the election was won.

Source: Wikipedia

After Jimmy Carter was elected, 5 nuclear plants were built, and 4 broke ground within a year of his election. Invariably the planning and budget allocation for those were already done.

Out of the 130 nuclear plants that have been canceled in the US only 13 of them were cancelled before Jimmy Carter was elected. Safe to say, Carter pleased the people who put him in the office and like that we saw the Nuclear age come to an end. Also, America doubled down on thermal energy - Coal, Oil and Gas.

Source: Thunder Said Energy

The Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 became a comfortable bookend to the entire saga.

Breakthrough Energy

Prof Scott Galloway wrote a few weeks ago that all of the people who signed up for “The Giving Pledge” have managed to triple their wealth since they signed up. It should probably be called The Hoarding Pledge.

How did they manage it? Well, by investing under the garb of philanthropy.

One of those fronts is a company called the Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Bill Gates started it as a way to channel his “philanthropy” into energy startups. It now includes the likes of Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Meg Whitman, Richard Branson, Jack Ma and several other Silicon Valley who’s who.

Amongst other things, this fund has invested in Cold Fusion startups that want to build small nuclear reactors which can power a town.

Changing Geopolitics

The “Green Economy” was invented to save Capitalism.

Every source of renewable energy be it wind, solar or hydro has a terrible downside - often worse if not at par with using fossil fuels.

Solar Cells use rare earth metals that require intensive mining which front-loads the pollution not to mention, that the panels are not easily disposed of. Most of them are left to rot once they expire and leach into the soil and destroy the land.

Same with Windmills. Windmills are made of incredibly robust material which will not decompose or decay easily. It cannot be recycled either. These things are built to withstand gale-force winds so decommissioning is an issue. Alongside that, they often leave the land around them useless because there are gallons of oil used to lubricate these large structures and a lot of it leaks out into the surroundings. Also, they are amazing bird killers.

Hydropower plants destroy the ecology of the water body that they are built on. They often destroy fish spawning beds and plants in the US have been forced to decommission since they were leading to Salmon extinction in the region.

As an extension of this renewable push came the battery-powered everything. This requires even more rare earth metals.

China was strategic and cornered the entire market for rare earth metals. Also, they were the only ones willing to destroy their ecology to establish a strategic foothold in this space.

The US presumed that China would play second fiddle to them forever. The Chinese had different ideas. China wants to establish itself as a regional hegemon in Asia and then extend its influence overseas. Since almost all of the manufacturing had moved to Asia by the 2010s, the US felt a need to push back because they remembered what happened in the 1970s when Saudi decided to cut off the supply of Oil. If China holds singular sway over manufacturing companies/nations across Asia, they could be cut off from all kinds of supplies.

There is a snowball’s chance in hell that America will catch up to the raw material expertise, supply chain, production capacity and manpower requirements it will take to reach any kind of parity with China.

But when it comes to Nuclear, USA owns a lot of the technology required for it. Also, America has another rubber stamp organisation in the form of the IAEA which, much like the UN or the WTO will ratify anything that America wants in a heartbeat while condemning everything else.

The excessive push towards the Green Economy has left the Americans hopelessly dependent on China. Nuclear serves as a great way to move away from renewable as we know it.

Microsoft, AI and Three Mile Island

Microsoft has made huge investments in OpenAI which has been working hard to project itself as the flag bearer for the future. Bill Gates still happens to hold 100 million shares in Microsoft and way more sway than those shares would reflect.

Just think - If someone from Vanguard, which owns about 300 million shares in Microsoft, were to say that the company’s AI plans don’t seem coherent VS if Bill Gates were to say that; which would be more likely to move the market?

The move away from Fossil Fuels is a foregone conclusion. Now, there is no way to convince people to set up new thermal power plants. More renewable implies more dependence on China. This is a perfect segue to introduce Nuclear power right into the mix. How opportune of Bill Gates to make this play now.

The $1.6-billion plan would restart Unit 1 by 2028 to offset Microsoft’s data-center power consumption in the region. It is the latest deal between a technology company and a nuclear-power provider. In March, Talen Energy agreed to sell a data center to Amazon.com next to Talen’s nuclear plant, which operates elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

More nuclear contracts for data centers are in the works, power industry sources say. But each tech-nuclear deal is unique and comes with its own challenges.

Source: Fast Company

Now to the Elections

Mariana Mazzucato in her book ‘The Entrepreneurial State’ dispels the myth that Silicon Valley or any of its investors have anything to do with the rise of new technologies. Almost every technology that has made a difference in the world has been financed by governments who have borne the burden of development over decades only for a corporation to move in swiftly once the technology is ready for commercialisation.

Intel’s first contracts were all from NASA. The Japanese firms had stolen the march on DRAM chip productions. Without the NASA contracts, Intel would have reached the destination that it is at today - liquidation - much earlier. Texas Instruments exists today solely because of the DoD.

Under Obama, a new program called the ARPA-e was launched to support “Green” businesses and Solyndra, a failed solar startup that the government had backed is often brandished as a public failing of the government in backing winners. They don’t tell you the same fund also gave Tesla more than half a billion dollars!

The point Mazzucato makes is that the American public gets none of the upside of Tesla’s success.

This is how billionaires become billionaires! They distribute the losses while accumulating the gains.

You are going to see a wave of these in Nuclear in the coming decade. Silicon Valley will descend into the production of Nuclear Energy with its “Fail Fast” mantra. There will be failures and those who live in places where the technology is deployed will be left holding the bag. When they succeed, the New York Times will be there to write gushing 10-page profiles about the victory of an individual visionary over insurmountable odds.

It will be a great way to take technology and money out of the government (middle-class taxpayers) just like Space got privatised. All of the NASA technologies went towards creating SpaceX AND they received billions in contracts from NASA.

Whoever wins the current election cycle is going to be smack in the middle of this policy decision. Carter won the election on deals made on Coal

This election will be won on deals made on Nuclear. I am certain deals have already been made! At least now you know where those millions in donations are coming from.