Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that “almost half of the US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or canceled” because developers can’t import enough transformers, switchgear, and batteries to build out the power infrastructure that every data center needs.

These parts, which China has primarily manufactured for US manufacturers “for decades,” used to take between 24 and 30 months to get delivered prior to 2020. Now, they can require wait times up to five years, Bloomberg reported. That lag could matter, since China is reportedly about five years behind the US in the AI race.

Rather than rely on China, Trump would prefer that the US manufacture its own equipment. However, currently, “US manufacturing capacity for these devices cannot keep up with demand,” Bloomberg reported.

At Three Mile Island, the NRC screwed up in just about every way possible.

1) Early on, they came up with an idiotically brazen lie to avoid admitting that there had been any release. This lie, signed off by at least three of the Commissioners, was quickly exposed, but only after turning the event into national news.

2) The next day they claimed that, if the hydrogen bubble in the top of the Reactor Pressure Vessel expanded too far, it would interfere with the reactor cooling. At best, this showed gross incompetence. The B&W reactor pressure vessel (RPV) has a ring of check valves near the top of the RPV which would vent the hydrogen to the RPV annulus if the bubble got down that far.

3) The following day on the basis of a calculation that was off by a actor of 100 and a misinterpreted measurement, and with no attempt to confirm either with the NRC guys on site, NRC-DC called Pennsylvania Governor Thornburgh and recommended evacuation up to 10 miles downwind. Harold Denton, the NRC employee who made the decision later said: ``my sole objective was to minimize the radiation exposure to the public. I did not give any weight to whatever hardship evacuation might cause”.\cite{walker-2004}[p 126] Fortunately, Thornburgh who was talking to the people at the plant did not follow Denton’s recommendation.1

4) Later in the day, the NRC said that a meltdown was unlikely, but possible. The reactor had melted down two days earlier.

5) That evening, when everything was calming down, and the hydrogen bubble in the RPV was expertly but slowly being squeezed down by the reactor operators, an NRC employee, almost certainly Dr. Roger Mattson, Director of Systems Safety, went to an AP reporter demanding anonymity, and told him the bubble in the the RPV could explode within two days. This bombshell sent seasoned war correspondents and over 100,000 locals into panicked evacuation. The local Bishop was so sure his flock was about to be annihilated he declared General Absolution.

An explosion in the RPV was impossible due to the lack of oxygen, which was obvious to any competent nuclear engineer. A Chicago Tribune reporter, who was part of the ‘night of terror’, later correctly called it a “a hoax, a fumbling miscalculation by one of the NRC’s masters of technology,”

Figure 1. The 2.5 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for just over 350 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That’s $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. They took about 6 years to build. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2 electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. Oconee’s average capacity factor over the last 5 years was 98.2%. All three of these reactors have been licensed into the 2050’s, a gift from the Greatest Generation. Oconee and its cooling pond Lake Keowee have turned a depressed part of western South Carolina into a second home and tourist magnet.

Nuclear power in the West is a disastrously expensive mess. Table 1 shows where we are. Current builds have capital costs that are more than ten times higher than Oconee and her sisters. Only the wealthiest nations can afford these kind of costs, and then only sporadically. The construction times are such that there is no way nuclear can put a dent in global warming, or anything else. And it keeps getting worse. If this is the way things must be, nuclear power is a dead end, and rightly so. //

Yet in 2015, the German utility RWE commissioned their Eemshaven plant in the northeast corner of Holland at a cost of 2.2 billion euros. This is a little under $1500/kW for a 2 by 800 MW plant, or just under $2000/kW in 2024 dollars. This is for the latest and greatest ultra-super-critical plant meeting stringent EU pollution limits, sited in one of the most expensive places to build on the planet. The rule of thumb is $500/kW for the turbine hall and switchgear. The rest is fuel handling, the boiler, and pollution control. //

Figure 4. Fuel for 1 GW plant for one day. The coal plant’s fuel requires a 70 car train. The nuclear plant’s fuel fits in a two gallon jug. Newcastle 6700 is a good coal. Most coal’s are worse. //

A 1 GW nuclear, Figure 5, plant will burn about 82 kg’s of fuel per day, producing the same amount of solid waste. That’s about 100,000 times less than a coal plant. The coal yard and the coal receiving terminal disappear, as do the dryers and pulverizers. The nuke’s Fission Island volume will be smaller than the coal plant’s boiler. The turbine hall will be slightly larger. There will no stack gas handling equipment, no massive Forced Draft and Induced Draft fans, no SCR, no baghouses, no scrubbers, no massive stack. The ash landfill and slurry pond will be replaced by less than an acre of 5.9m(19 ft) high by 3.5m(11 ft) diameter casks. The nuclear plant should be cheaper to build with far cheaper fuel costs. //

Figure 15. Coal should be easy to beat

The reason why it is not is a tragically misdirected, autocratic regulatory system. We give an omnipotent regulator final approval of any nuclear power plant, and judge him on his ability to prevent a release of radiation. He gets no credit for the cheap, pollution-free, CO2-free, on-demand, power generated by a successful plant, nor the avoided mortality and morbidity that would have resulted if the plant had not been built. But he owns any problems. The regulator responds accordingly; and, since he has the final say, it’s his incentives, not society’s, that determines what happens. NRC Chairman Hendrie put it succinctly “The NRC’s responsibility is [nuclear] safety without regard to economic and social costs.” [Joseph Hendrie, NRC Chairman, 1979] The NRC’s definition of nuclear safety is preventing a release.

Figure 16. Hinkley Point tombstone.
No. Human welfare is our overriding priority.

This auto-genocidal myopia produces technical stagnation, a demoralized workforce, lack of competition, and shoddy quality. The end result is nuclear power that costs five or more times what it should-cost and build times that are three or more times longer than they need be. This in turn means nuclear is replaced by far more harmful technologies. It means nuclear can never be cheaper than the competition, which means humanity is far poorer than it could be. The greatest health hazard of all is poverty.

The war on Iran revealed how dependent Israel’s Arab neighbours are on its gas exports, a dependency that could extend to Syria and Lebanon. //

Last year, Cairo signed a $35bn deal to import Israeli gas from Israel until 2040, boosting its previous supplies by another 2bcm (70.6 billion cubic feet) per year. //

Unlike Egypt, Jordan is not a major gas-producing country. Local production accounts for less than 5 percent of gas (PDF) needs. It imports the rest, about 3.6bcm (127 billion cubic feet) per year, mostly from Israel, but also Egypt and some LNG sources. //

The Arab Gas Pipeline—once a symbol of joint Arab development projects—has become the primary conduit for exporting Israeli gas to both Jordan and Egypt. Pipelines carrying gas from the Leviathan field off the coast of Haifa connect to the pipeline network in northern Jordan’s Mafraq governorate, from which gas flows southward towards the Egyptian border. //

Even when Israel is not the immediate supplier in a given transaction, the system itself depends structurally on Israeli gas. Once Israeli exports stop, the entire network falters. //

This is a clear example of how the Zionist settler-colonial project is expanding not only through military aggression but also through economic power and energy networks.

It advances through an infrastructure that appears mundane and technical, yet ultimately grips societies by the throat. Once embedded, disengaging from such systems becomes extraordinarily difficult, because they govern the essentials of everyday life: electricity, water and energy. //

Today, Syrian and Lebanese political leaders may be lured by the promise of quick and easy economic security and reliable living conditions. But such security would be illusory. Ultimate control would rest in the hands of a state whose capacity to cut supply – and to use that interruption as a tool of destruction, political coercion and colonial expansion – is already visible for all to see.

Damage to a critical Qatari facility is threatening to keep energy prices high around the world even if the war in Iran ends soon in what some analysts are calling an “Armageddon” situation.

Qatar’s Las Raffan plant supplies a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, which is used for electricity, heating and cooking – but Iranian strikes have damaged the facility, worsening what is already the largest-ever energy supply disruption. //

Qatar’s Las Raffan site is almost three times the size of Paris. It took three decades to build, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and chills enough gas to meet the annual demand of the UK and Italy combined.

A blogger, Destin, talked TVA into letting him film the refueling process at Browns Ferry in Alabama. Browns Ferry is a three unit boiling water reactor plant. The design is essentially the same as the reactors at Fukushima. The hour and 45 minute video is overly long; and Destin’s narration can be a little grating at times; but overall he does a great job. It’s worth your time.

We also get a pretty good feeling for the plant’s safety culture. //

much of the video is taken up by Destin’s going through various check points, each manned by 3 or 4 people sitting around watching screens. While there are scores of people on the refueling floor, only a handful seem to be actually doing something to the plant. The actual shifting of the fuel bundles is done by a three person team, and is largely automated. At one point, a lady berates Destin’s guide who outranks her for letting Destin walk down a stairs facing forward. The stairs were narrower and steeper than normal. The rule is you have to treat it like a ladder.

Destin is told not to step on the floor drains. The problem is the moisture might contaminate his shoes, and set off alarms. The radiation in the drain is not from the plant. It’s normal background, naturally occurring radon and daughters. Nuclear plants don’t produce radon. On the way out, Destin’s camera fails to clear a check. So they disassemble the camera and put each piece into the detector separately, to allow the pieces out of the plant. Once again the source is background radon. //

On a positive note, TVA should be congratulated for allowing this visit. It should be commonplace. If I were king of the world, I’d have a glassed in viewing gallery, high in every reactor’s refueling space. During outages, I would invite everybody to walk through and get a look at what’s going on. Most of the people will come out as enthusiastic about nuclear as Destin.

The second 1974 Power Engineering article that Nick Touran has uncovered is Senior Editor Olds’ discussion of the massive jumps in power plant capital costs between 1965 and 1974 Power Plant Capital Costs Going Out of Sight.

The AEC required plant owners to report their estimate of the capital cost of any nuclear plants under construction, and update those estimates annually. Olds’ article is largely based on that data. All his dollar figures are in nominal dollars, the dollar of that year.

Figure 2. USA fossil plant costs bottomed out in 1966.

The paper is graced by a number of hand drawn, beautifully lettered graphics. Figure 2 shows that prior to 1967 fossil plant capital costs were falling reaching a low of $100/kW in nominal dollars in 1966. But in 1967, the cost jumped nearly 20% to $118. Unfortunately, Old does not take the fossil figures any further forward. But if he did he would see that 20% per year escalation continue unabated through 1974, Figure 3. //

Thanks to nuclear’s factor of 100,000 advantage in energy density over fossil, a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, was working its way down a steep learning curve, and in 1967 was fully competitive with coal, when coal was as cheap as it ever was. Nuclear was insulated from both oil price and fossil pollution regulation.

But in 1967, a new omnipotent player emerged. In 1954, Congress had given the AEC complete and unfettered control over nuclear, both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. As Truman put it, atom power was “too important to be made the subject of profiteering”. The AEC had to both implement Mutually Assured Destruction, and promote and regulate nuclear power. The first responsibility included making sure everybody was petrified of the bomb.

bungalowbernard Ars Praetorian
5y
404

Each KG of coal produces about 8 KWh of electricity - to produce 8 MWh in a year is literally just Steve throwing a shovelful into the hopper once a day.

On Tuesday, March 10th, an EF-1 tornado destroyed the Dunns Bridge Solar I and II facilities owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The facilities, located outside of Wheaton, Indiana, had 2.4 million solar panels, totaling 700 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, and reportedly cost $1 billion to construct—a little over $1,400 per kilowatt (kW).

NIPSCO issued the following statement in the aftermath:

On the evening of March 10, while actively monitoring severe weather and responding to storm‑related outages across our service area, NIPSCO became aware of damage to its Dunns Bridge I and Dunns Bridge II solar facilities in Starke and Jasper counties. Our team was tracking the storm in real time and moved in to assess conditions and respond as soon as it was safe to do so. Debris from the damage could have been displaced, and we are working to safely secure the area, assess the damage and proactively communicate with the community.

We recognize there may be questions and concerns about potential environmental impacts related to the damage at the solar farm. Solar panel leaching concerns have been thoroughly evaluated in industry-leading research, which shows that the risk is extremely low. Overall, the available evidence demonstrates that both crystalline silicon and thin-film PV (i.e., photovoltaic) modules do not pose a meaningful risk of environmental or human exposure from leaching, even when damaged. //

While the solar panels were damaged by the tornado, we are not aware of any reports of damage at the nearby R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, a 950 MW coal facility that NIPSCO was planning to retire at the end of 2025. However, it is still running thanks to a 202(C) order issued by the U.S. Department of Energy requiring the plant to continue operations. //

Let’s be incredibly uncharitable and look at the anticipated levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar facility over its projected 25-year useful lifetime, and its actual, tornado-truncated lifetime.

Dunns Bridge I began generating power in June of 2023, producing a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) up until December of 2025, the most recent month for which data are available. Dunns Bridge II began generating power in January of 2025, and through December, it produced 812,439 MW of power, which is good for a 21.3 percent capacity factor.

We calculated the LCOE over two time periods: a 25-year lifecycle, a standard assumption in the industry, and a 2-year lifecycle to account for the facility being destroyed very early in its lifecycle. The results are about what we would expect. Our estimated subsidized costs over 25 years are approximately equal to S&P Global’s reported PPA cost for the facilities, including subsidies.

Because the LCOE is like calculating the cost of driving your car over the number of miles driven, if your car dies after two years when you expected to drive it for 10, the cost per mile obviously increases. This is why the cost of electricity from the Dunns Bridge I & II facilities skyrockets in this analysis, reaching a subsidized cost of $289.61 per MWh, and an unsubsidized cost of $405.09 per MWh. [Compared to $63.87/MWh subsidized over 25 years, or $82.61/MWh unsubsidized over 25 yrs] //

In our upcoming LCOE study for Reliable Energy Inc. in Indiana, we found that the R.M. Schahfer plant was the most expensive coal plant in the state, due primarily to very high delivered fuel costs at the plant ($50 per MWh).

However, the December 2025 data from S&P Global, the most recent available, show the delivered fuel cost was about $27 per MWh, which substantially improves the economics of the plant, although this could possibly be the result of the company assuming the plant would retire at the end of the year, rather than being required to stay open.

At $70 per MWh, the Schahfer plant is competitive with subsidized solar over a 25-year lifespan, cheaper than the unsubsidized cost over 25 years, and a bargain compared with our admittedly uncharitable comparison to the facility’s actual 2-year lifespan. //

For our part, we would encourage those in the surrounding areas not to worry too much about chemicals leaching from the panels into the soil or water. Photovoltaic panels are made mostly of glass, and the small amounts of toxic materials, such as lead used in soldering, are not a significant concern because they are present in small quantities and there is probably no realistic exposure pathway for humans. //

The storm likely blew debris well beyond the solar site, which could create issues for nearby farmers, especially if they are growing root crops.

Anecdotally, we’ve heard that large potato buyers won’t purchase potatoes from growers located within a mile of a glass recycling facility for precisely this reason. In other words, the real concern here isn’t chemical contamination, it’s debris.

Currently, by far the best Free World reactor is the Korean APR1400. The Korean’s can build an APR1400 for less than $3000/kW in Korea and have built four in the UAE for around $4500/kW. The APR1400 was our best, maybe only, hope for leading Western nuclear out of a prohibitively expensive regulatory morass.

The APR1400 is based on the Combustion Engineering (CE) System 80+ design, the best of the American PWR’s. In 1997, Kepco licensed that design. The Koreans demanded and got a Total Technology Transfer Agreement. No strings attached. They could use the IP anyway they wanted. CE’s back was against the wall. The tort lawyers had embroiled CE in an asbestos suit and they were going bankrupt. The cash from the Koreans kept CE alive for another couple of years. In 2000, Westinghouse acquired CE and became the licensor.

Westinghouse’s offering is the AP1000. The AP1000 is a cramped, nearly unmaintainable reactor which will cost you somewhere around $15,000/kW. Westinghouse knows it can’t compete with the APR1400. So Westinghouse has colluded with the DOE to prevent the Koreans from exporting the APR1400 from Korea. Westinghouse may have lousy engineers but they’ve got great lawyers.

China is indeed churning out solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries that flood global markets — proof, advocates say, of an inevitable green transition.

Yet these supposed marvels are forged amid overwhelming and surging use of fossil fuels, particularly coal.

Its real energy achievements — dramatic energy ramp-ups to fuel prosperity, and advances in nuclear power — remain overlooked. //

Crucially, China’s solar-panel production depends on coal: Every one of its silicon smelters requires its own coal-fired power station. //

While China added unprecedented solar and wind capacity in 2025, it also planned an unprecedented number of new coal power plants.

China remains the world’s top coal consumer, with fossil fuels supplying over 87% of its primary energy.

Renewables’ share was 40% in 1971 when China was poor, but plummeted to 7.5% in 2011 — and has risen slowly over the next 13 years, to just over 10% in 2024. //

Second, China is surging ahead in technologies that could truly decarbonize the planet at scale: nuclear fission and fusion.

In the West, traditional nuclear has grown prohibitively expensive, with US construction costs tripling since the mid-1980s.

The US has built only three new nuclear plants this century, at enormous cost and with 11-year timelines.

Contrast this with China, where reactors are completed in five years and costs have halved since 2000.

China has expanded from three reactors in 2000 to 60 today, with 37 under construction (nearly half the global total), 42 planned and 146 proposed. //

This isn’t renewables redux; it’s a race for abundant energy.

And the West risks awakening to a world powered by Beijing’s reactors, not its own ingenuity.

Green China is a sham — but it’s time for the West to emulate Beijing’s real playbook, by ramping up energy use and investing in nuclear R&D.

On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. That company is most widely recognized as being financially backed by Bill Gates, but it’s attempting to build a radically new reactor, one that is sodium-cooled and incorporates energy storage as part of its design.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will gain approval to operate the reactor, but it’s a critical step for the company.

The TerraPower design, which it calls Natrium and has been developed jointly with GE Hitachi, has several novel features. Probably the most notable of these is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. This allows the primary coolant to circulate at far lower pressure, avoiding any of the challenges posed by the high-pressure water or steam used in water-cooled reactors. But it carries the risk that sodium is highly reactive when exposed to air or water. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, which could allow it to consume some isotopes that would otherwise end up as radioactive waste in more traditional reactor designs.

The reactor is also relatively small compared to most current nuclear plants (345 megawatts versus roughly 1 gigawatt), and incorporates energy storage. Rather than using the heat extracted by the sodium to boil water, the plant will put the heat into a salt-based storage material that can either be used to generate electricity or stored for later use. This will allow the plant to operate around renewable power, which would otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system will also allow it to temporarily output up to 500 MW of electricity. //

1Zach1 Ars Praefectus
8y
3,745
Subscriptor
bumppo said:
It sounds like a mechanism to avoid selling power during the point in the day that solar has driven the price down (potentially into negative territory), while preserving the ability to sell most of that power later.

It would be interesting to know how long the storage is designed to sustain that elevated, up-to-500 MW output.
Here are their plans detailed https://www.terrapower.com/downloads/Natrium-Technology.pdf

Power Output – EnergyStorage System100-500 MWe+ for 5.5+ hours, power ramping at 10% per minute

Why clean power is about people, not sacrifice //

We tend to talk about energy as if it’s a niche technical problem; something for engineers, utilities, and climate wonks to argue about at conferences. I’ve been guilty of this myself, spending time discussing reactor designs when I should have been talking about the people and institutions that actually do the reacting. Megawatts, grids, emissions targets, and levelised costs all matter, but they’re not the whole story, and simply not part of the broader story that appeals to most people. Energy isn’t just an input into the economy; it’s the thing that sets everything else in motion. It’s the backbone of civilisation. It’s the foundation of modern human flourishing. Hence, energy is life.

This becomes obvious the moment you look at the data. Wherever reliable electricity shows up, a familiar pattern follows, of higher literacy, lower child mortality, higher incomes, better health outcomes, and more education for women. That’s not ideology, but correlation after correlation, across countries and decades. Energy access doesn’t always guarantee prosperity, but the absence of it certainly guarantees poverty.

It’s also worth remembering something that news headlines rarely emphasise: by almost every measurable metric, including life expectancy, child survival, poverty reduction, and education, the world is far better than it was a century ago. That progress didn’t happen by accident, but because we learned how to produce vast amounts of cheap, reliable energy, and because human societies reacted by building everything else on top of it. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Energy powers clean water systems, hospitals, vaccines, heating, lighting, refrigeration, agriculture, and the internet. Take energy away, and modern life quickly starts to fall apart.

And yet. Hundreds of millions of people still have no access to electricity at all. Billions cook with solid fuels that damage their lungs. Even in rich countries, people die every winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly. These aren’t lifestyle choices, but the consequence of political choices that enable energy shortages.

Psychologists have known for decades that humans are bad at judging risk. We overestimate dramatic, low-probability dangers and underestimate slow, high-probability harms, through a mix of availability bias and negativity bias. This bias has real consequences. Nuclear accidents loom large in the public imagination, even though, measured per unit of electricity produced, nuclear energy is far safer the alternatives.

As I have said before, the uncomfortable consequence is that fear of nuclear energy has often caused more harm than nuclear energy itself.

The front cover is a shot of the 2.55 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for 356 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That is $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2, electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. These plants and their sisters have operated for over 60 years, harming exactly nobody from radiation. They are licensed to operate intothe 2050’s.

Between 1970 and 2025, technological progress should have reduced the real cost of nuclear power. Instead the current cost of nuclear plants in Europe and North America is more than $15,000/kW, more than 13 times the cost of Oconee. Thanks to its insane energy density, nuclear power should consume far less of the planet’s precious resources than any other source of electricty while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2. Instead nuclear is a prohibitively expensive flop.

This little book explains why this auto-genocidal tragedy happened, and what we can do about it. Nuclear’s problems are entirely man-made. What is man-made can be man-unmade. If we adopt the regulatory reforms that this book lays out, the providers of nuclear power will be forced to compete with each other and new entrants on a level playing field, in which case the inherent cheapness of fission power combined with technological advances will push the cost of nuclear electricity back down to its should-cost.

To store heat for days, weeks, or months, you need to trap the energy in the bonds of a molecule that can later release heat on demand. The approach to this particular chemistry problem is called molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage. While it has been the next big thing for decades, it never really took off. //

Molecular batteries, in principle, are extremely good at storing energy. Heating oil, arguably the most popular molecular battery we use for heating, is essentially ancient solar energy stored in chemical bonds. Its energy density stands at around 40 Megajoules per kilo. To put that in perspective, Li-ion batteries usually pack less than one MJ/kg. One of the problems with heating oil, though, is that it is single-use only—it gets burnt when you use it. What Nguyen and her colleagues aimed to achieve with their DNA-inspired substance is essentially a reusable fuel. //

The researchers achieved an energy storage density of 1.65 MJ/kg—nearly double the capacity of Li-ion batteries and substantially higher than any previous MOST material. //

One of the biggest fears with chemical storage is thermal reversion—the fuel spontaneously discharges because it got a little too warm in the storage tank. But the Dewar isomers of the pyrimidones are incredibly stable. The researchers calculated a half-life of up to 481 days at room temperature for some derivatives. This means the fuel could be charged in the heat of July, and it would remain fully charged when you need to heat your home in January. The degradation figures also look decent for a MOST energy storage. The team ran the system through 20 charge-discharge cycles with negligible decay. //

Still, we’re rather far away using MOST systems for heating actual homes. To get there, we’re going to need molecules that absorb far more of the light spectrum and convert to the activated state with a higher efficiency. We’re just not there yet.

“We estimate there is enough dissolved lithium present in that region to replace US imports of lithium and more.”
.

Tucked beneath the pine forests and farm fields of southwest Arkansas, drillers have stumbled upon a critical mineral jackpot: lithium in the region’s ancient saltwater formations.

The GKG Twin Blessing course comprises 8 lectures, although the last is optional, and the first may not be needed for some audiences. It could be given in a single day seminar, or, in an academic environment, in 7 or 8 separate lectures.

New nuclear capacity won’t show up until around 2030

Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters.

Facebook's parent company says it has inked agreements with three outfits - TerraPower and Oklo are developing new reactor technology or building fresh sites, while Vistra is supporting existing nuclear plants. All three will deliver electricity into the grid rather than straight to Meta's own facilities.

I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro. The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector. //

In 2025, Louisiana had the third-lowest electricity rates in the United States. The reasons are simple—73% of Louisiana’s electricity is generated by natural gas and unlike California or New York, Louisiana has not attempted to implement carbon dioxide or renewable energy goals through its electricity generation system. //

em
2 days ago · 0 Likes

Can you please boil this analysis down to a soundbite? Voters already believe renewables are cheaper, so that soundbite should include something that slays that belief.

Richard Greene
7 hours ago · 0 Likes

Free electricity with windmills and solar panels.
At night, when there is no wind, you will not pay for electricity.

The hidden costs of powering civilization //

I want to ask you a question we don’t usually think about when we flip a light switch or fill up a tank…and that is, where does the energy actually come from?

Sure, sunlight, wind, and even coal and gas are technically free, they are energy sources just sitting there in nature to be used… some facing more limitations than others. But turning them into power we can actually use to run Santa Claus’ chocolate factory or light our christmas trees? That’s a whole different story.

This is where the idea of primary energy comes in. It’s actually not about the electricity we see listed on our bills, but is really about all the raw energy we have to pull from nature, to process, convert, and deliver before we get anything useful, such as 24/7/365 electricity, every single second we need it. And once you start looking at energy this way, things get a lot clearer.

We often hear that solar and wind energy is “clean” and basically “free” and it does not have thermal losses like a nuclear or gas-fired power plant. But to make this wind and solar energy usable and reliable in the real world, we have to build enormous support systems, mine rare minerals, manufacture components, build storage, upgrade the grid, maintain everything, and then, eventually, dispose of it. It’s not just about a solar panel and a little breeze blowing over a turbine blade.

Now compare that to conventional fuels like coal or gas or oil… they might lose more energy during combustion in power plants or engines, but the upfront infrastructure is simpler, and the systems last much longer, with the average coal or gas plant running for a good 30-60 years, nuclear usually far longer. That is not nothing and this should be considered when speaking of “free” energy.

Understanding primary energy helps cut through the feel-good stats and get down to the physics. It assists in showing us the full cost of electricity (FCOE), time, money and materials used in making any source truly usable…and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

That is why looking at the real problem with the “Primary Energy Fallacy” often used by supporters of grid-scale wind and solar, is worth it! //

The “Primary Energy Fallacy” a term coined eloquently by many, is the idea that all primary energy from fossil fuels must be replaced by an equivalent amount of “renewable” energy. However, those people say, this would not be necessary because more than two-thirds of primary energy is lost as wasted heat during the conversion processes.

The misunderstanding occurs in the belief that wind and solar generate electricity without any losses (a secondary or tertiary form of energy) while coal, gas, uranium may have a high energy content but have “thermal losses” ~60-70% during processing. This PE fallacy argument is used for power generation and also for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) in a slightly adjusted form.

• Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 1: “The conversion of gas and coal to power results in a loss of around 60%. This means that one unit of primary energy from wind or solar, replaces two units of that of gas/coal”
• Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 2: “The conversion losses during end use in internal combustions engines ICE are also high. Electric motors are much more efficient. Most car engines ‘lose’ 70% of fuel energy, which means that one final energy unit of electricity replaces three units of gasoline/diesel”