Thank you for what you are doing and saying. I have been working as an advanced nuclear technology analyst (Generation III+ & Generation IV non-water cooled reactor technology) for almost four years via the US Department of Commerce and every single thing you have said in this piece is true. I have also done global value chain analysis on green hydrogen, offshore & onshore wind, solar, battery energy storage systems at grid-scale and books on fossil fuels and nuclear is by far the safest, most regulated and only energy source that literally cleans up after itself. It's a stunning technology and the people I have met are some of the brightest, hardest working, most environmentally conscious individuals you could imagine. They are the smartest people in the room with a technology that can give electricity almost 100 percent of the time for upwards of 100 years. You are correct as I have heard you state (and I am paraphrasing) that if aliens came down to earth they would ask - "Why aren't using more nuclear power for electricity, medicine, cancer treatments, desalinization, hydrogen, process heat, district heat, steam, etc." On top of that nuclear power deeply impacts direct, indirect, and induced job growth, wages, taxes, and supply chains. Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing about this issue! Nuclear power is the only answer for high capacity baseload electrical generation with zero emissions.
Man, i love your laundry list of uses. It is so dumb to start with intermittents for desalination, hydrogen etc when temperature is the enabler and nuclear gives us electric power and crazy industrial heat! Thank you for your work on nuclear, i wish you success in your lifetime (without knowing your age!)
There was only one death directly attributed to the Fukushima disaster (death from lung cancer four years later). However, since 2018, there has been an estimated 1200 deaths due to wind turbine accidents (source: an interaction with Grok AI). Studies estimate wind energy’s death rate at approximately 0.04 to 0.15 deaths per TWh.
I guess the NRC can stick that in their pipe and smoke it. 😒
"Patients arrive at clinics with unfounded fears that lead to avoidance of care. Excessive regulatory costs steer providers toward suboptimal treatment strategies that avoid radiation altogether."
Yes, this is so true. The oncology clinic a relative of mine currently visits for her radiation treatments places the patents in a windowless room where the entire process is done remotely in the adjacent room.
The write ups are great but there doesnt seem to be any investment direction ideas which would be cool.. unless I'm missing something.. point me to the right place please
Imagine the engineering opportunities as well as operations and maintenance opportunities across the country. You’d think blue city mayors and their handlers would begin designing high school and community college programs to train a workforce to help attract investors to build plants in their areas.
At 87 I saw the destructive power of the anti-industrialists increase over the years. Having worked in the nuclear industry in the 70s I was dismayed at the propaganda about dangers being spread by the media. It was clear that the safest and most energy dense trechnology was going to stopped. I always hoped that the anti-human madness would be reversed. I hope I can see a lasting change to sanity in energy prodution before I die.
While there isn't much to disagree with here, I feel that one of the failings of the proponents of nuclear energy is that they don't seem to properly account for the truly catastrophic consequence of a large scale nuclear accident. Yes it is true other fuels also lead to accidents and deaths, on average perhaps far more. However, the difference is that if a gas pipeline explodes, it results in a momentary tragedy. If a nuclear facility melts down, it renders a very large surrounding area to be uninhabitable for the rest of our lifetimes. In fact for hundreds of life-times. Let's take Chernobyl: the melt down there has rendered an area of 1,000 square miles to be uninhabitable for the past 39 years and (at least according to Grok) the current estimates are that this exclusion zone will continue to be uninhabitable for humans for at least the next 3,000 years. Now, maybe some of your nuclear experts can explain to me why such a disaster is 100% certain to never, ever happen again (perhaps due to new methods and technologies that render such a disaster impossible), but simply cheerleading for nuclear and dismissing anyone who has fears over this as ignorant without explaining why we don't need to fear such disasters anymore is not sufficient. If you say the risk is only 0.001% of it happening, well sorry, but a 0.001% risk of the area I live becoming uninhabitable for 3,000 years is just not a risk worth taking regardless of the amount of cheap energy it brings and the more plants that are added and the more countries that add them (including some countries that play a little hard and fast with safety) the higher the risk becomes. There is a tendency for humans to take the view that anything that hasn't happened in the last 2 to 3 decades will never happen again. So please explain to me why such accidents will never happen again. I'm not saying I'm right, I admittedly have no expertise in this area, but non-experts like myself need this explained to us rather than simply being dismissed before we can ever be comfortable with having nuclear reactors in our area, let alone many of them.
The timing of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 coincides with a period in which oil'n gas + government interests combined to hobble nuclear power, which was threatening to expand from static power generation, into mobile power generation, threatening oil's market share.
The US was forced to break the gold standard in 1971, and was worried about ongoing support of the USD... No big buyer of US debt existed so there's a theory the US created one... Not 12months after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the US had done a deal with the Saudi's to oil trade oil in USD and also invest 60-70% of Saudi's new found wealth, due to euphoric oil price, into US government bonds. With a large new buyer of US bonds in place US deficits increased dramatically after this point.
The continued rise and advancement of nuclear power would have threatened this solution for US government funding.
For those that haven't read it: "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" - steps through this period.
Probably the old goat on the topic, but imho the issue with Ike was he needed a pathway out of the nuclear military into civilian life so as to make good use of the training. Additionally having a ready source of weapons grade plutonium was a big plus. key here is weapons grade thus the ignoring of Thorium. with that said (again precise, concise, and condensed) the NRC was formed so as to make sure the oil, coal and gas lobby (makers and consumers) was made happy; especially the oil fired boilers on the east coast. Big Rock Point Power Plant comes to mind where in one of the safest power plants ever built was decommissioned due to "costs" - - - meaning the lobby folks got to them. time for a beer
LNT is a massive problem and mistake. But don't forget the related idiot principle of ALARA -- as low as reasonably achievable. This means that every time someone improves safety, the bar is raised higher. (Even though it is already far too high.)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- let me fix that for you: Bulletin of Anti-Atomic Scientists and Anti-Nuclear Activists.
but he also gets some things not just wrong but catastrophically wrong. I suspect his legacy will be primarily defined by those things. C’est la vie I guess
My younger daughter is in grade 10, a math and science whiz, she is currently fascinated with sharks and talks about becoming a marine biologist which is fine on its surface. To do that she will need good marks to get into university and those marks will allow her to take another direction. I remind her occasionally that nuclear physicist is going to be a massively in demand STEM job basically forever.
Thank you for what you are doing and saying. I have been working as an advanced nuclear technology analyst (Generation III+ & Generation IV non-water cooled reactor technology) for almost four years via the US Department of Commerce and every single thing you have said in this piece is true. I have also done global value chain analysis on green hydrogen, offshore & onshore wind, solar, battery energy storage systems at grid-scale and books on fossil fuels and nuclear is by far the safest, most regulated and only energy source that literally cleans up after itself. It's a stunning technology and the people I have met are some of the brightest, hardest working, most environmentally conscious individuals you could imagine. They are the smartest people in the room with a technology that can give electricity almost 100 percent of the time for upwards of 100 years. You are correct as I have heard you state (and I am paraphrasing) that if aliens came down to earth they would ask - "Why aren't using more nuclear power for electricity, medicine, cancer treatments, desalinization, hydrogen, process heat, district heat, steam, etc." On top of that nuclear power deeply impacts direct, indirect, and induced job growth, wages, taxes, and supply chains. Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing about this issue! Nuclear power is the only answer for high capacity baseload electrical generation with zero emissions.
Exciting possibilities!
Man, i love your laundry list of uses. It is so dumb to start with intermittents for desalination, hydrogen etc when temperature is the enabler and nuclear gives us electric power and crazy industrial heat! Thank you for your work on nuclear, i wish you success in your lifetime (without knowing your age!)
I agree with you, Todd.
There was only one death directly attributed to the Fukushima disaster (death from lung cancer four years later). However, since 2018, there has been an estimated 1200 deaths due to wind turbine accidents (source: an interaction with Grok AI). Studies estimate wind energy’s death rate at approximately 0.04 to 0.15 deaths per TWh.
I guess the NRC can stick that in their pipe and smoke it. 😒
Gonna pin this comment
"Patients arrive at clinics with unfounded fears that lead to avoidance of care. Excessive regulatory costs steer providers toward suboptimal treatment strategies that avoid radiation altogether."
Yes, this is so true. The oncology clinic a relative of mine currently visits for her radiation treatments places the patents in a windowless room where the entire process is done remotely in the adjacent room.
Does this mean nuclear, natural gas and AI are the best investments for this decade ?
crickets....too bad. I was wondering too. Anyone?
The write ups are great but there doesnt seem to be any investment direction ideas which would be cool.. unless I'm missing something.. point me to the right place please
Pretty sure, Doomie never gives investment advice or doesn’t invest in the companies they write about. But I was hoping a commentor might.
Is there a military base or DeptEnergy facility in downtown Berkeley?
Imagine the engineering opportunities as well as operations and maintenance opportunities across the country. You’d think blue city mayors and their handlers would begin designing high school and community college programs to train a workforce to help attract investors to build plants in their areas.
At 87 I saw the destructive power of the anti-industrialists increase over the years. Having worked in the nuclear industry in the 70s I was dismayed at the propaganda about dangers being spread by the media. It was clear that the safest and most energy dense trechnology was going to stopped. I always hoped that the anti-human madness would be reversed. I hope I can see a lasting change to sanity in energy prodution before I die.
While there isn't much to disagree with here, I feel that one of the failings of the proponents of nuclear energy is that they don't seem to properly account for the truly catastrophic consequence of a large scale nuclear accident. Yes it is true other fuels also lead to accidents and deaths, on average perhaps far more. However, the difference is that if a gas pipeline explodes, it results in a momentary tragedy. If a nuclear facility melts down, it renders a very large surrounding area to be uninhabitable for the rest of our lifetimes. In fact for hundreds of life-times. Let's take Chernobyl: the melt down there has rendered an area of 1,000 square miles to be uninhabitable for the past 39 years and (at least according to Grok) the current estimates are that this exclusion zone will continue to be uninhabitable for humans for at least the next 3,000 years. Now, maybe some of your nuclear experts can explain to me why such a disaster is 100% certain to never, ever happen again (perhaps due to new methods and technologies that render such a disaster impossible), but simply cheerleading for nuclear and dismissing anyone who has fears over this as ignorant without explaining why we don't need to fear such disasters anymore is not sufficient. If you say the risk is only 0.001% of it happening, well sorry, but a 0.001% risk of the area I live becoming uninhabitable for 3,000 years is just not a risk worth taking regardless of the amount of cheap energy it brings and the more plants that are added and the more countries that add them (including some countries that play a little hard and fast with safety) the higher the risk becomes. There is a tendency for humans to take the view that anything that hasn't happened in the last 2 to 3 decades will never happen again. So please explain to me why such accidents will never happen again. I'm not saying I'm right, I admittedly have no expertise in this area, but non-experts like myself need this explained to us rather than simply being dismissed before we can ever be comfortable with having nuclear reactors in our area, let alone many of them.
crickets....hmmmmm.
The timing of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 coincides with a period in which oil'n gas + government interests combined to hobble nuclear power, which was threatening to expand from static power generation, into mobile power generation, threatening oil's market share.
The US was forced to break the gold standard in 1971, and was worried about ongoing support of the USD... No big buyer of US debt existed so there's a theory the US created one... Not 12months after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the US had done a deal with the Saudi's to oil trade oil in USD and also invest 60-70% of Saudi's new found wealth, due to euphoric oil price, into US government bonds. With a large new buyer of US bonds in place US deficits increased dramatically after this point.
The continued rise and advancement of nuclear power would have threatened this solution for US government funding.
For those that haven't read it: "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" - steps through this period.
Probably the old goat on the topic, but imho the issue with Ike was he needed a pathway out of the nuclear military into civilian life so as to make good use of the training. Additionally having a ready source of weapons grade plutonium was a big plus. key here is weapons grade thus the ignoring of Thorium. with that said (again precise, concise, and condensed) the NRC was formed so as to make sure the oil, coal and gas lobby (makers and consumers) was made happy; especially the oil fired boilers on the east coast. Big Rock Point Power Plant comes to mind where in one of the safest power plants ever built was decommissioned due to "costs" - - - meaning the lobby folks got to them. time for a beer
“Competent experts” if that isn’t a tell I don’t know what is!
This is such great news for our economy, our environment and our country! I pray that all this may come to pass. 🙏
So who is the mole in the White House? There seems to be a lot of leaks recently. On purpose or do they need to bring in the exterminators?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ordering-the-reform-of-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission/
20250523
LNT is a massive problem and mistake. But don't forget the related idiot principle of ALARA -- as low as reasonably achievable. This means that every time someone improves safety, the bar is raised higher. (Even though it is already far too high.)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- let me fix that for you: Bulletin of Anti-Atomic Scientists and Anti-Nuclear Activists.
Nice to know there’s at least one thing he’s not screwing up
He gets a fair bit right
Yeah to be fair, that is true,
but he also gets some things not just wrong but catastrophically wrong. I suspect his legacy will be primarily defined by those things. C’est la vie I guess
My younger daughter is in grade 10, a math and science whiz, she is currently fascinated with sharks and talks about becoming a marine biologist which is fine on its surface. To do that she will need good marks to get into university and those marks will allow her to take another direction. I remind her occasionally that nuclear physicist is going to be a massively in demand STEM job basically forever.