⚛ Nuclear power: Faster, please! But also cheaper, please!

A Quick Q&A with ... economist Lars Christensen on the possibility of a productivity boom thanks to AI and weight-loss drugs

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The Essay

⚛ Nuclear power: Faster, please! But also cheaper, please!

In a recent chat with Politico, David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, had some interesting comments about nuclear energy:

I’d also talk about reimagining nuclear energy policy and focusing on a new generation of reactors, both small and modular reactors, and large reactors. We want to be the country that has an electric vehicle advantage, an artificial intelligence advantage, we love the cloud infrastructure that powers our interconnected lives, and energy is needed for those things to keep us in that advantageous place — but our energy grid is super-brittle. Nuclear is a baseload power, meaning it works 24/7, it’s reliable and enduring, you don’t need the wind to be blowing, you don’t need the sun to be out, you don’t need to be able to constantly refuel like a coal plant or something like that. Nuclear checks all the boxes if we want it to, and what prevents us from taking nuclear seriously is a lack of real leadership and initiative.

Another thing that prevents us “prevents us from taking nuclear seriously” is all the problems that occur when we try to build nuclear power plants, both in America and around the world. From the Financial Times: “The International Energy Agency (IEA) says nuclear projects starting between 2010 and 2020 are on average three years late, even as it forecasts nuclear power generation will hit a record high next year and will need to more than double by 2050.”

This chart from that FT piece illustrates the demoralizing story, especially about the United States: