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Sunlight takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. That figure is well-known and accurate. The slightly less well-known part of the story is what happens before the eight-minute trip. The energy carried in any photon of sunlight currently reaching the Earth was generated by nuclear fusion in the Sun’s core, but it did not exit the Sun immediately afterwards. It spent somewhere between tens of thousands and a few hundred thousand years working its way outward through the Sun’s interior before reaching the surface and beginning its short trip across space. The eight-minute final leg is almost the only part of the journey that anyone tends to remember.

The standard short version of this fact, which appears in textbooks and on planetarium walls, is often phrased as “the photon you see today was born in the Sun’s core a hundred thousand years ago.” That is roughly right at the level of energy. It is not literally right at the level of photons. The distinction is worth making, because the actual story is more interesting than the simplified one.

What is happening inside the Sun

Energy is generated at the centre of the Sun by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium, releasing high-energy gamma-ray photons at a temperature of roughly 15 million kelvin. The core occupies the inner quarter of the Sun’s radius. Beyond the core, the next layer outward is the radiative zone, which extends from about 25% to about 70% of the Sun’s radius. According to NASA’s “Layers of the Sun” overview, this is the region in which energy from the core is transported outward by radiation, with the outer 30% of the Sun being dominated by convection instead.

The radiative zone is where the slow part of the journey happens. The photons created by core fusion zigzag outward through this region in what is sometimes described as a “drunken walk,” repeatedly absorbed by atoms and re-emitted in random directions. The reason for the slowness is geometry. Each photon travels only a short distance, on the order of a millimetre or less, before colliding with an electron or ion in the dense plasma, being absorbed, and being re-emitted in a new random direction. The radiative zone is so optically thick that this absorption-and-re-emission cycle happens an enormous number of times before a photon reaches the outer edge of the zone.

The classic calculation by Robert Mitalas and Kenneth Sills, published in The Astrophysical Journal in 1992, used a solar model to determine that the average free path of a photon between absorptions is about 0.9 millimetres, which gives a diffusion time from core to surface of roughly 170,000 years. Earlier estimates, using simpler assumptions about the Sun’s interior, had given figures ranging from a few thousand years up to many millions. According to Princeton University’s introductory astrophysics course notes, a simple random-walk estimate using a 1-cm step length gives a photon diffusion time of about 30,000 years, which is roughly the lower bound of credible figures. The 170,000-year figure from Mitalas and Sills is the most-cited modern estimate, but the range from tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand years is all within the spread of defensible answers depending on the assumed density profile.

The thing the photon is not

The detail that gets lost in the popular telling is that a photon does not actually retain its identity through the journey. Each time a photon in the radiative zone is absorbed by an atom, that photon ceases to exist. Some short interval later, the atom emits a new photon, in a new random direction. The new photon is not the old photon. It carries some of the original photon’s energy, but it is a different particle. Over the course of the journey from core to surface, this absorption-and-re-emission cycle occurs roughly 10²⁵ times. The energy is conserved through the chain. The particle identity is not.

The Sun might look yellow, but seen from space without an atmosphere filtering its light, the sun is actually white — and the yellow color we see from Earth is the result of our atmosphere scattering blue wavelengths away, in the same physics that makes the sky appear blue

This is why the standard phrasing “the photon you see now is 100,000 years old” is misleading. The photon you see now is a few microseconds old, emitted from the Sun’s outermost visible layer, the photosphere, after being processed through countless prior absorptions and re-emissions. The energy in that photon, however, was generated tens of thousands of years ago by fusion in the core, and has been migrating outward ever since through a long chain of intermediate photons. The original gamma-ray photon emitted by the fusion reaction has long since been absorbed and forgotten. What survives is the energy.

The frequency of the radiation also changes outward, not because individual photons are losing energy at each scattering, but because at each depth in the Sun the radiation field is in approximate local thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding plasma. Closer to the core, the plasma is hotter and the local population of photons peaks at gamma-ray frequencies. Closer to the surface, the plasma is cooler and the local population of photons peaks at visible-light frequencies. As energy migrates outward, the photon populations it occupies are thermalized to successively cooler local temperatures, and what arrives at the photosphere is a visible-light spectrum rather than the gamma-ray spectrum produced in the core.

An even longer timescale, when measured differently

There is one further refinement worth flagging, because it makes the article’s central editorial point sharper rather than softer. In 2003, the solar physicist Michael Stix pointed out in Solar Physics that the photon-diffusion timescale calculated by Mitalas and Sills is not the same as the time required for energy to migrate from the core to the surface. The reason is that most of the Sun’s thermal energy is not stored in its radiation field; it is stored in the thermal motions of the electrons and ions making up the plasma. The photons exchange energy continuously with that vastly larger thermal reservoir at every scattering. The relevant timescale for energy transport, Stix argued, is the Kelvin-Helmholtz timescale, of order 3 × 10⁷ years, about 100 times longer than the photon diffusion time. By this measure, the energy reaching Earth today was generated by fusion not tens of thousands but tens of millions of years ago, with the photons merely the carriers along the way.

The Sun might look yellow, but seen from space without an atmosphere filtering its light, the sun is actually white — and the yellow color we see from Earth is the result of our atmosphere scattering blue wavelengths away, in the same physics that makes the sky appear blue

The popular version of the story, which is the version this article opened with, picks the photon-diffusion timescale of tens of thousands of years because that is the quantity that most people think they are being told about. The strictly accurate version, taking the heat capacity of the plasma into account, is even more extreme. Either way, the underlying point holds: the eight-minute trip from the Sun’s surface to Earth is a tiny final coda to a journey through the solar interior that took thousands to millions of years.

What happens at the surface

Above the radiative zone, the mode of energy transport changes. The plasma in this region, called the convective zone, is no longer dense enough for radiation to be the efficient way to move heat. Instead, hot plasma rises in vast convective cells, releases its energy near the surface, and sinks back down to be reheated. This convective transport is much faster than the radiative diffusion through the deeper interior. According to Montana State University’s Solar Physics group, hot material can carry its energy through the entire convective zone in a little over a week, compared with the tens of thousands of years required for the radiative zone underneath.

At the top of the convective zone, the plasma finally becomes thin enough for photons to escape the Sun freely. This thin outer layer is the photosphere, only about 500 kilometres thick, with a temperature of roughly 5,800 kelvin. The photons emitted from this layer are the photons that reach Earth. They are, in the strict sense, freshly minted at the photosphere. They are also, in the broader sense, carrying energy that has been migrating outward through the Sun for a very long time.

What this changes

The figure most often quoted, and the one quoted in the title of this article, is the photon-diffusion time from core to surface, not the lifetime of any individual particle and not the longer thermal-energy-migration timescale. That diffusion time was estimated at roughly 170,000 years by Mitalas and Sills, with credible alternative figures spanning tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand years depending on the modelling assumptions. The energy itself, on Stix’s analysis, has an even older provenance than that, going back tens of millions of years.

It does not change anything practical. The Sun continues to deliver light at the same intensity it has for billions of years. What it changes is the mental picture. The blank distance between the Sun and the Earth, eight minutes wide at the speed of light, is by far the shortest part of the energy’s journey. The long part happened inside the Sun, and it ended before the photon you can see right now was emitted.

Space Daily Editorial Team

The Space Daily Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team’s collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer’s work. Space Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

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A Green Energy Project built into the Obama Spending Plan from the infamous 2008 Financial Stimulus is burning through money at an incredible pace.

“The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, a sprawling 3,500–acre facility in the Mojave Desert near the California–Nevada border, was built with federal support during the stimulus push under Barack Obama‘s first administration.

The power plant was meant to help revive the American economy after the 2008 financial crisis, while also expanding renewable energy.”

Both the Trump and, shockingly, the Biden Administration have been trying to shut down this monstrosity, but are being blocked by the California Energy Regulatory Agency.

The California Regulators say it will spike California Energy prices by $100 million per year.

This case screams for the use of Federal Supremacy Clause to shut down this disaster.

The Supremacy Clause, found in Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land”. It mandates that judges in state courts must follow federal law if it conflicts with state laws or constitutions.

Gavin Newsom has created so many disasters in California, shutting down this Green Energy money pit can only help pave the way for sanity and the use of American gas, oil, and nuclear.

First step is to get a new Governor.

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In April 2023, the Biden EPA proposed — and in 2024 finalized — what it called “multi-pollutant emission standards” for model year 2027 and later light-duty and medium-duty vehicles. The rules were designed to be so stringent that the only practical path to compliance was mass electrification of the vehicle fleet.

EPA’s own projections assumed electric vehicles would represent between 54 and 67% of new car sales by 2030-2032. That projection has not materialized. As of 2025, EVs account for less than 10% of new U.S. vehicle sales — well short of the trajectory the agency assumed when setting these standards.

The market verdict has been unambiguous. Major automakers have responded to weak consumer demand by pulling back from EV commitments at scale:

• General Motors announced a $4 billion investment to boost internal combustion engine vehicle production and a $6 billion restructuring to unwind earlier EV commitments.

• Ford canceled plans for a three-row electric SUV, delayed additional EV launches until 2028, and recorded a $19 billion write-down on its electric vehicle investments.

• Stellantis is scrapping its plug-in electric vehicle lineup, citing weak customer demand, and has taken a $26.5 billion charge against EV investments.

• Honda reduced EV spending by 30%.

• Hyundai halted electric vehicle production at its Alabama facility to shift focus toward vehicles consumers are actually purchasing.

These are not signs of an industry dragging its feet on innovation. They are signs of an industry responding honestly to what consumers want to buy. The Tier 4 standards — premised on a market that does not exist — would have forced manufacturers to comply with rules calibrated to a fantasy, raising vehicle prices and constraining consumer choice in the process.

What EPA Is Proposing

EPA’s proposal is structured in two parts:

• Part 1: provides a two-year delay. Manufacturers would continue complying with the current Tier 3 standards in model years 2027 and 2028, with Tier 4 standards — if retained — beginning no earlier than model year 2029. This initial step is subject to a 45-day public comment period.

• Part 2: will undertake a comprehensive reconsideration of the Tier 4 program for model year 2029 and beyond, including potential revisions to the standards themselves, implementation timelines, phase-in structures, and other program elements. EPA has indicated it intends to propose Part 2 this year.

It is worth noting that the Tier 3 standards currently in force are not lax. According to EPA, they deliver emission reductions of up to 80% compared to earlier standards. The argument for retaining the Biden-era Tier 4 standards was never about protecting air quality — Tier 3 already does that. It was about engineering consumer choice out of the equation.

IER’s Position

IER has consistently opposed the use of vehicle emission regulations as a backdoor EV mandate. In comments filed with EPA on the underlying 2023 proposed rule, IER argued that standards calibrated to force electrification — rather than to achieve attainable emission reductions — exceed the agency’s statutory authority and impose economic costs on consumers without commensurate environmental benefit.

The Congressional Review Act disapproval of California’s vehicle emission waivers and the vehicle provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have already begun dismantling the federal EV mandate architecture. EPA’s Tier 4 pause continues that correction.

IER urges all interested parties — including manufacturers, dealers, fleet operators, and individual consumers — to submit comments during the 45-day comment period on Part 1. IER further urges EPA to use the Part 2 rulemaking to replace the Biden Tier 4 framework with standards that are technology-neutral, achievable without mandating electrification, and respectful of the choices Americans make in the vehicle market.

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Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany. This view is looking into former East Berlin along Unter den Linden Strasse, which is lined by linden trees. The street had embassies, museums, and theaters, and led to the French Quarter.

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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phaseout a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany short of firm power that turned the Energiewende into the most expensive energy transition on the planet. This is an early marker for a developing worldwide retreat from policies that sidelined nuclear power and demonized coal, oil, and natural gas.

German and Japanese Nuclear Embarrassment
Germany stubbornly closed its last three functioning nuclear reactors in April 2023 right in the middle of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. As pragmatists predicted, German citizens now suffer under punishingly high electricity prices and remain heavily dependent on imported energy.

The green dream was sold as a route to “cheap” renewables, yet the reality for German households and factories has been record‑high electricity prices, complex subsidies for favored businesses and individuals who conform to the climate narrative, and a grid that struggles on windless days or under gray skies.

Japan made a remarkably similar error but is finally correcting course. After the Fukushima disaster, the government panicked and shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors. Today, Japan is slowly restarting those idle units.

The pattern is plain to see. Countries abandon dependable power sources under political pressure, then spend years rebuilding what they had demonized and dismantled.

Regret Over Abandoning Fossil Fuels

This is why I anticipate a cascade of similar reversals by national leaders who participated in a destructive campaign that stripped grids of dependable, affordable, and abundant coal, oil, and natural gas.

Politicians are already quietly hitting the brakes on their aggressive fossil fuel phaseouts when reality bites. The massive Groningen gas field was scheduled for permanent closure due to localized earthquake risks. Yet in 2024, the Dutch Senate delayed the final shutdown vote when lawmakers demanded guarantees that abandoning the domestic resource would not jeopardize energy security.

Within a week of the German chancellor’s admission of a nuclear energy fiasco, the country’s energy minister lamented at an oil and gas conference the push of net zero policies, indirectly referencing the abandonment of fossil fuels.

In the United States, President Donald Trump took executive actions aimed at preventing some coal plants from closing, including orders that kept aging facilities like the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan running to “avoid summer blackouts.”

South Africa’s Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe consistently fights international pressure to quickly abandon coal. “You don’t destroy what you have on the basis of hope that something better is coming,” he says. Mantashe rightly insists that protecting the ability of the state to supply energy must remain a priority.

India offers the most powerful example of this energy pragmatism. The country has signaled that coal will remain the backbone of the economy for decades, even as its diplomats make empty promises about reaching net-zero by 2070. Deputy Power Minister Shripad Naik recently revealed that India had added a massive 7.2 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the 2025–26 fiscal year alone and would add 307 gigawatts of total coal capacity by 2035.

A majority of Western countries, especially in Europe, utterly lack this basic foresight on energy security. Many countries have locked in policies that tear down coal, oil, gas, and nuclear plants before they have built credible alternatives. They chase targets for emissions reductions. They downplay the costs to their citizens.

Energy security has become more prominent in the news because of turmoil in the Middle East. Yet a war may not be needed to launch the next generation of energy crises. When the next prolonged cold spell, drought, or demand surge hits, the weakness of the anti-fossil fuel approach will show up in higher bills, rolling blackouts, and public anger.

Merz’s nuclear confession suggests that the political class cannot keep dodging reality forever.

Originally published on PJ Media on May 11, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

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Back in January 2025, during the confirmation process for President Trump’s Cabinet nominees, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso condemned the Biden Administration’s “regulatory rampage” that resulted in “painfully high prices for food and fuel.”

Barrasso called energy “the master resource” and linked control of energy production the key to controlling the nation’s future.

And then he said, “Governor Doug Burgum and Chris Wright will treat American energy as the God-given blessing it is.”

According to President Trump, he wanted Burgum for Energy Secretary until Burgum said, “You gotta get this guy Chris Wright…. I’m good, but he’s better.”

Burgum is the one who told Trump to hire Wright for the energy job, the president regularly says. “Doug said, ‘You gotta get this guy Chris Wright,’” Trump said in a January Cabinet meeting. Trump recalled telling Burgum, “But I want you to run energy.” Burgum said, “Well, I’m good at it, but he’s better.”

Burgum became Interior Secretary and Wright was approved as Energy Secretary. The President has praised both repeatedly, while adding EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to the team that is cutting regulations, opening lands and waters for exploration and development, and making deals left and right to stimulate the nation’s energy sector.

Immediately after his confirmation, Burgum signed a series of orders aimed at unleashing the full energy potential of public lands in Alaska and eliminating “harmful, coercive climate policies” from the Biden era.

By April 2025, Burgum was implementing Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy” in announcing alternative NEPA procedures with a review cap of 28 days to expedite approvals for essential energy infrastructure and critical minerals development.

At the same time, Interior revised its policy on offshore drilling to allow an increase in pressure differential from 200 psi to 1,500 psi – a move predicted to enable a 10% increase in oil production (an extra 100,000 barrels per day), and up to 61% more oil over a 30-year period.

Meanwhile, Wright’s first order directed the DOE to “unleash a golden era of American energy dominance.” One major step was authorizing or reauthorizing more than 17.6 billion cubic feet per day of LNG exports – more than 70% greater than the world’s second-largest LNG supplier.

To make that possible, Energy removed Biden regulatory orders blocking LNG exports, including one banning the use of LNG as a marine fuel to power vessels. That led to a June 2025 commitment by Japanese energy company JERA to procure up to 5.5 million metric tons per year of LNG, adding up to $200 billion to America’s GPD and supporting more than 50,000 American jobs per year.

In October, Burgum aides met with Alaska officials to announce Interior was reopening the Costal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing and completing right-of-way permits for the Ambler Road, projects stalled in the Biden era.

A January 2026 DOE fact sheet reported that U.S. crude oil production set an all-time record of 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025 and that natural gas production was expected to reach an all-time high of 109 billion cubic feet per day in 2026. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, significantly depleted in the Biden era as a brake on gasoline prices, was being refilled.

Then the U.S. and Israel determined it was necessary to cripple the Iranian regime, a move that eventually resulted in a double blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and crippled Iranian oil production. The move came shortly after the capture of Venezuelan dictator Maduro, which led to U.S. hegemony over Venezuela’s massive oil reserves.

Gasoline prices, which had fallen below $3 per gallon, roared about $4, and Politico declared that Trump’s “Tiger Team” (Burgum and Wright) appeared “flummoxed” by the surge in global oil prices – and, as Biden had done, Trump authorized releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. [Now he wants to suspend the federal gasoline tax for the duration of the Iran campaign.]

With the blockade continuing, and Iran’s fractured leadership remaining uncooperative, the fate of oil shipments through the Persian Gulf remains uncertain. But even that “blip” has led to increased demand for U.S. crude, to the delight especially of Gulf Coast refineries.

While Asian refineries were forced to cut production to circa 84% of capacity, U.S refinery utilization moved to 92% and Gulf Coast refineries jumped 5% to 95% of capacity in March – and still going strong.

Meanwhile, Burgum and Wright have kept pushing the envelope – even venturing into unfriendly territory to lower energy prices in the Northeast. On April 14, the Tiger Team was joined by Zeldin in a groundbreaking ceremony for the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline that will transport natural gas from Pennsylvania into New York City and Long Island.

To the consternation of climate activists, New York Governor Kathy Hochul reversed the state’s policy of banning pipeline construction (perhaps in return for Washington allowing an offshore wind project). Hochul would later soften the blow by repealing a rule that allowed gas utilities to charge ratepayers for pipeline expansions.

On April 28, Wright announced billions of dollars of private capital investment in the Central and Eastern European region, including the formal launch of the Trump Peace Pipelines Framework that is aimed at enabling construction of natural gas infrastructure to receive LNG from the U.S. The U.S. needs those markets, as it is now leading the world in LNG exports (so quickly after the Biden ban) and producing as much natural gas as Russia, China, and Iran combined.

Earlier this month, the DOE announced a $36 million grant to the University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental Research Center to advance commercial deployment of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies in the Bakken Shale formation. While the Bakken holds potential to unlock billions of barrels of oil, currently only about 10% of the oil in unconventional shale formations is recovered.

And on May 11, Burgum told Breitbart News that royalties from oil and gas and minerals production on federal lands help support conservation, wildlife, and national parks (whereas prior administrations fought against minerals development on federal lands).

Burgum, who doubles as Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, pointed to the Carlsbad district in New Mexico that had 5,600 unprocessed applications for drilling permits at the end of the Biden presidency despite federal laws requiring quarterly lease sales.

By knocking down 91% of these unprocessed permits, Interior has increased royalty payments and vastly improved its financial position after four years of declining revenues. Actions by Interior to increase production in the Gulf of America and on federal lands enable Interior to improve national parks, forests, and monuments.

By listening to Burgum and choosing Wright to lead the Energy Department, President Trump ensured that his Cabinet would work closely together toward his goal of energy dominance – a critical foundation for achieving Trump’s foreign and domestic policy goals.

But only if the Tiger Team’s work aids the Republican Party’s success in the November Congressional elections will the Trump energy revolution be able to continue unabated.

Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow *CFACT) who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

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Comment by John Shanahan:

The United States still doesn’t get their priorities for nuclear power development in the right order. The United States needs the right priorities for all energy sources, the right regulatory guidelines, government backed development of advanced nuclear power technologies, government approved nuclear waste processing and storage, and focus on the right uses for nuclear power. Russia and China have been doing this since the 1990s. France has been doing it well since the 1970s.

• Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are still unlikely to drive the energy transition because renewables, batteries, and grid flexibility attract far more investment, scale faster, and generate quicker returns.

• The main barrier is no longer just technology or timelines, but economics.

• While SMRs may find niche uses in industrial clusters or remote grids, offshore wind, solar, storage, and transmission upgrades are already delivering emissions cuts and energy security today

Small Modular Reactors still won’t shift the Energy Transition, but for a different reason

Last year, I argued that small modular reactors will not save the energy transition. The core reasoning was simple: timelines were too long, costs too uncertain, and grid issues too persistent for SMRs to meaningfully scale in the critical decade ahead. Today, as the UK’s flagship SMR programme unfolds and European policymakers cast fresh doubt on offshore wind targets by pointing to Rolls-Royce’s design, one thing is clear: SMRs remain promised, not delivered. But the missing piece in the debate is no longer just timing, it is market prioritisation and capital competition.

The energy transition is in a race against time. Technologies compete not only to be clean, but to be investable, scalable and system-relevant within the lifespan of existing assets. In that competition, SMRs face structural disadvantages that go far beyond technology readiness.

Why SMRs Compete in the Wrong Economy

In the early rhetoric around SMRs, the narrative was framed as a simple trade-off: renewables bring intermittency and grid stress, nuclear brings dispatchability and firm power. This framing obscured a deeper point. Energy systems are not zero-sum puzzles where one technology simply replaces another. They are investment ecosystems where capital flows to where returns are fastest, risks are lowest and policy support is stable.

Today, that ecosystem overwhelmingly favours renewables, storage and flexibility solutions. Wind and solar are not just cheaper on a levelised cost basis; they integrate more naturally with digital grids, modular financing, and hybrid infrastructure strategies that combine solar, wind, batteries, demand response and interconnection. SMRs, by contrast, are large engineering builds with long lead times and high upfront capital requirements.

The UK’s own SMR timeline underscores this mismatch. The first unit is now expected to be ready for testing around 2030–2032. That means commercial deployment could be a decade after that. In the same period, offshore wind capacity alone in Europe is projected to grow to tens of gigawatts, not hundreds, but enough to reshape grid dynamics, storage markets and decarbonisation pathways well before SMRs arrive.

When capital is scarce, investors do not wait for future returns; they bet on near-term cash flows. This helps explain why renewable projects, battery factories, transmission upgrades and hydrogen early markets are attracting orders of magnitude more private investment than SMRs. The market has already judged where returns are likeliest in the 2020s and early 2030s.

The Myth of Dispatchable Value

Proponents of SMRs argue that dispatchable power is valuable. This is true, but the value is context-dependent. The grid of 2026 already recognises firm capacity mainly through metrics tied to flexibility, not base load. Batteries, demand response, grid balancing markets and sector coupling (including green hydrogen and power-to-x) are all mechanisms that provide firm contribution without nuclear scale and risk.

More importantly, the value of dispatchable nuclear is increasingly decoupled from peak system needs. Today’s grids prioritise fast response, fine-grained balancing rather than slow, heavy baseload adjustments. In that environment, SMRs structurally deliver late, heavy, and rigid capacity rather than fast, flexible, adaptive capacity.Related: Europe’s Renewable-Plus-Battery Market Set to Quintuple by 2030

Economics, Not Engineering, Is the Real Barrier

When the UK and other European governments talk about SMRs, the discussion often centres on engineering and regulation. But the real barrier is economics. Nuclear economics are borne from a model built in an age of fully centralised grids and cost-plus financing. That model is misaligned with today’s competitive power markets, where value is increasingly derived from short-duration flexibility, spot pricing, and hybrid energy packages.

To put it bluntly: SMRs compete in an economy that no longer exists. Renewables and storage are not just low-carbon. They are modular economic units that can be deployed incrementally, financed through asset-level debt, and brought online quickly enough to generate early revenues. SMRs can generate low-carbon electricity. But they cannot generate early cash flows.

SMRs and Industrial Strategy

This is not to say SMRs have no future. In specific industrial contexts, heavy industrial clusters, remote non-interconnected grids, certain process heat applications, SMRs could be a useful tool. But that does not make them central to decarbonisation at scale.

Europe’s energy transition is not only about electricity. It is about electrification of heat, transport and industry, grid flexibility, and system integration. Offshore wind, for all its critics, delivers carbon-free electrons today. It creates entire industrial supply chains, workforce development pathways and export sectors. SMRs create jobs too, but only after a decade of development, regulation, licensing and capital deployment.

This mismatch is not trivial. Public budgets and political capital are finite. When policymakers debate whether to prioritise a gigawatt of wind or invest in a nuclear unit that might deliver in the next decade, the choice reflects not only technology readiness but opportunity cost.

Timelines Are Only the Surface Issue

Critics of SMRs often focus on schedule slippage. That is a real issue. But it is a symptom, not the fundamental problem. The deeper reality is that the global energy transition prioritises technologies that can deliver measurable impact within this decade. Market forces, investor preferences and policy frameworks all align with that priority. Expecting SMRs to become a backbone of the system without confronting that reality is wishful thinking, not strategic planning.

SMRs in the Broader Transition Narrative

This is not a nuclear versus renewables argument. It is a systems architecture argument. The energy transition is not about picking winners in isolation. It is about designing an energy ecosystem that meets climate, security, reliability and economic objectives simultaneously.

SMRs may have a role. But their structural characteristics, capital intensity, long lead times, regulatory complexity, and economic misalignment make them less suitable than renewables and storage for the transition horizon we actually have.

Looking Beyond 2035

Nothing about this analysis suggests abandoning nuclear research or innovation. Future breakthroughs, advanced reactors, novel fuels, and breakthroughs in modular fabrication could change the story long term. In a 2050 world with widespread hydrogen, ubiquitous storage and even hypothetical energy sources like fusion, SMRs might sit comfortably alongside other firm power options.

But energy policy is not written in the language of 2050. It is written in the language of this decade. Keeping the lights on, cutting emissions, and reducing dependency on fossil fuels from unstable partners are urgent tasks. Offshore wind, solar, grid upgrades, and flexibility services are delivering today. SMRs are a valuable research agenda. But they are not the missing lever in the energy transition, where it actually stands in 2026.

If we are serious about timelines, economics and systemic impact, then the real question is not whether SMRs could play a role someday. It is whether we should build an energy future that waits for them now.

For the transition that the world actually needs, the answer remains no.

By Leon Stille for Oilprice.com

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Leon Stille

Leon Stille has a background in energy sciences (MSc and BSc) and is pursuing a PhD in energy policy. He currently runs his own company,…

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California is the 4th largest economy in the world and an “ENERGY ISLAND that is isolated from the other 49 States by the Sierra Mountains. There are no pipelines over those majestic mountains to connect the State to the rest of the country. Thus, California’s in-State refineries have been producing ALL the transportation fuels demanded on the California “Energy Island”.

• Bunker fuel, about 1 million barrels ANNUALLY for the ships servicing three of the busiest Ports in America, located in California.

  • Port of Los Angeles had more than 1,800 vessel arrivals in 2024, which includes cruise and merchant ships.

  • Port of Long Beach handled over 9.6 million container units in 2024, indicating a very high volume of ship activity, plus cruise ships.

  • Port of Oakland, which also handles significant cargo volumes, contributes to the total number of cruise and merchant ships needing fuel.

• Jet fuel: California has over 2,400 airports and aviation facilities, including 9 international airports and 30 major military airports. The demand is 13 million gallons of aviation fuel DAILY. Several of those airports have direct pipelines to local refineries. In 2019, California consumed 16.7% of the national total of jet fuel, making it the largest consumer of jet fuel in America.

• Gasoline: For its 30 million vehicles, California is the second-largest consumer of motor gasoline among the 50 states, consuming 42 million gallons DAILY of gasoline, just behind Texas.

• Diesel: Diesel fuel is the second largest transportation fuel used in California, consuming 10 million gallons DAILY of diesel to support the state’s trucking of products from 3 of the busiest shipping ports in America

California’s regulatory environment has created a refining capacity vacuum that global markets are rushing to fill, as regional policy decisions are creating international market opportunities and reshaping geopolitical energy dynamics.

Liquid transportation fuels remain essential for sectors that are difficult to electrify. Aviation still depends on jet fuel, global shipping requires bunker fuel, heavy transport, construction, and the petrochemical industry continue to rely on refined petroleum products. Diesel and jet petrochemical feedstocks, will remain crucial for decades, even with reduced demand for gasoline from electric vehicles. If local refining capacity decreases in California while demand persists, markets will respond by seeking transportation fuels elsewhere.

It must be remembered that crude oil, by itself, is useless black tar unless you build a multi-billion-dollar refinery to break it down to produce various types of transportation fuels, and oil derivatives that are the basis of virtually all the products in our materialistic world.

California’s environmental regulations and aging infrastructure are inadvertently triggering a worldwide refinery construction boom. There will be economic consequences for California consumers as domestic refining capacity shrinks and import dependence grows. The paradox of California’s environmental policies and California’s emissions reductions may be increasing the global carbon footprints through longer supply chains.

In the future, 181 new refinery units that are planned or announced in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be providing transportation fuels to California’s 9 international airports, 30 major military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports.

These modern refineries in other countries are designed to operate on a massive scale, process multiple types of crude oil, and export transportation fuels worldwide. Tanker transport allows refined transportation fuels to reach major consumption centers, including ports such as the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach, and the Port of Oakland.

As California’s refining capacity continues to decline, the California transportation fuel demands for its shipping ports, airports, cars and trucks are among the highest in the nation and will be increasingly imported from refineries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

California, the 4^th largest economy in the world, with growing dependence on transportation fuels made from refined crude oil at foreign refineries will be a national security risk for the entire country.

California has closed 2 refineries, and more closures are on the way as the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is tightening up the regulations on emissions that may drive the remaining 6 refineries in the State to EXIT to more business-friendly States.

The 4th largest economy in the world NEEDS new refineries to process crude oil, to be built IN CALIFORNIA.

Energy “REALITY” tells us that we need refineries to convert that useless black tar into usable transportation fuels and products:

• Planes, ships, trucks, and cars do not run on raw crude oil, they run on transportation fuels manufactured FROM crude oil by multi-billion-dollar refineries.

• With no pipelines over the Sierra Mountain, the new refinery in Brownsville in Texas will be useless to the California Energy Island that demands in-state refineries to provide transportation fuels for 30 major military locations, 9 international airports, 3 of the busiest ports in America, and fuels for the trucks that transport imported products to the rest of America.

• Wind turbines and solar panels ONLY generate electricity but CANNOT make any of the more than 6,000 products that are based on the oil derivatives manufactured out of raw crude oil, nor can wind and solar make any transportation fuels for the military, airports, merchant ships, automobiles and trucks.

• The world is not dependent on raw natural fossil fuels BUT has become dependent on the products and transportation fuels MADE FROM oil, the same products and transportation fuels that Wind and Solar CANNOT make!

• The world needs MORE REFINERIES to process that useless black tar into usable transportation fuels and products for life as we know it.

Collectively, closure of the Phillips refinery in Southern California and the Valero refinery in Northern California provided about 17% of the state’s crude oil processing capacity to provide transportation fuels demanded in California. Thus, transportation fuel shortages are imminent for California, and will be importing those transportation fuels from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The supply chain of fuels and products refined from raw crude oil will face severe imbalances, most likely leading to higher costs and shortages for future generations.

With 99.5% of the 8 billion people on this planet Earth living outside the borders of California, CARB is solidifying California’s 4th largest economy in the world as a national security risk for America as the State will be importing transportation fuels from foreign based refineries to run its 30 military airports and 9 international airports.

Be sure to watch and listen to the Epoch Times interview from April 4, 2026:

• The California Refinery Crisis: This author, Ronald Stein, addresses questions from the Chief Editor of The Epoch Times and TV Host of California Insider, Siyamak Khorrami.

Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.

Click this Link to Sign up for Energy Literacy from Ronald Stein

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Another Earth Day has come and gone – number 57, like Heinz steak sauce. Once again, the media, activists and international agencies fed us pablum, exaggeration and alarmism.

Our public lands, the Endangered Species Act, biodiversity and environmental justice are under threat, they raged. Oceans are filling with plastic waste. Big polluting corporations are getting away with “climate homicide” and “planetary ecocide.” The Arctic is melting, and polar bear cubs are drowning.

The United Nations took a short break from bashing Israel over “Palestinian genocide” and western nations for the “gravest crime” ever committed against humanity (trans-Atlantic slavery), to proclaim April 22 “International Mother Earth Day” and call for an end to “crimes” that “disrupt biodiversity.”

Activists held the “first multilateral conference” on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Their “Our Power, Our Planet” theme says further progress will require that communities and individuals pressure governments to accelerate the “clean” energy transition from “dirty” fossil fuels.

Forgive my skepticism. But I was a college organizer for very first Earth Day (1970), back when we had real, highly visible environmental problems: air pollution and toxic smog over cities, industrial water pollution that made it unsafe to swim, leaded gasoline, and more. We largely solved those problems.

Since then, greens have grown in domestic and foreign financing, power and influence, and the ability to conduct ideological campaigns and lawfare on issues of irrelevance to the vast majority of Americans, let alone families in the most energy-deprived, destitute, diseased and malnourished nations on our planet.

Any yet, for days leading up to Earth Day and afterward, virtually nothing was said by the UN, WHO, eco-activists, media screed-meisters or I-care-deeply politicians about these people … or even about people in their own developed countries who bear the brunt of climate-centric, anti-growth, net-zero, de-industrialization, lower-living-standards policies.

It’s as if people don’t exist, and don’t belong, on our planet. The herd must be culled.

In the developed world, most climate-focused countries and states have the most pseudo-clean energy mandates and subsidies … the highest electricity prices … the highest prices for goods and services. They’re destroying entire industries, leaving thousands unemployed.

They have the technologies to utilize their abundant carbon and nuclear energy, but ruling elites don’t want citizens to enjoy jobs and living standards based on that energy. Each year thousands die needlessly during frigid winters and summer heatwaves because families cannot afford or obtain proper heating and air conditioning.

The “climate crisis” is a Hollywood special effects disaster movie. The foundation for any “clean” energy transition is imaginary. Utopian energy is simply not clean, green, renewable or sustainable.

When wind turbines, solar panels, transformers, transmission lines and backup batteries or power plants are included, wind and solar energy require dozens of times more raw materials (and thus mining and pollution) and hundreds of times more land than just building a few nuclear or combined-cycle gas plants close to where electricity is needed – and forgetting about any pseudo-renewable systems.

For families in poor nations, the price tag is infinitely higher.

Worldwide, 730 million people still have no access to electricity. Billions more have minimal, sporadic access. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million have no electricity; hundreds of millions more have minimal, unpredictable electricity from small wind turbines and solar panels here and there. The situation in much of rural Asia and Latin America is little better. Ditto for vehicles and gasoline.

The result is entirely predictable. Almost no wage-earning jobs or mechanized farming, but abundant backbreaking work for parents and children in fields – and plenty of malnutrition, disease and death.

Over half the world’s people (more than four billion) still subsist on $10 a day.

More than 260 million suffer from critical food insecurity and malnutrition, and 35 million children are acutely malnourished, including 10 million with childhood wasting disease – leaving them with weak immune systems and vulnerable to developmental delays, disease and death

Malaria still infects 280,000,000 people annually and kills 610,000. Indoor air pollution from wood, dung, coal and kerosene cooking and heating fires kills nearly 3,000,000 people globally every year. Up to 3.5 million – mostly children – die annually due to inadequate safe water, sanitation and hygiene. Diseases modern western societies never even hear about sicken, disable or kill still more millions.

Do you think any of their grieving families gives a spotted owl hoot that your local temperature climbed a degree since the Little Ice Age ended, or a polar bear cub drowned halfway around the world?

A major reason is rampant corruption. The World Bank found that at least 7.5% (and as much as 15% or more) of total assistance to the most aid-dependent nations ends up in ruling elites’ foreign bank accounts. And yet the WB’s International Development Association received $94 billion for the 2022-2025 period. Multilateral development bank financing to top humanitarian recipients was $12 billion in 2020. Total worldwide Official Development Assistance reached a record $161.2 billion in 2020. Do the math.

Far worse, these banks, US and European foundations, and climate, agricultural and other activist groups work tirelessly to prevent these countries from acquiring or developing the electricity and other energy they need to emerge from squalor, starvation and disease. For decades these virtue-signaling banks have provided loans only for wind and solar projects – almost never for coal or gas power plants.

The result? Expensive, limited, unreliable electricity. No modern hospitals, schools, water purification, factories or shops. Continued pollution from wood and dung fuels. No jobs, improved living standards or reductions in killer diseases.

The same institutions – along with UN and other government agencies – oppose pesticides for eradicating locusts and malarial mosquitoes. They wage campaigns against biotech corn, soybeans, canola, and even hybrid seeds and life-saving Golden Rice. They pressure African governments to ban non-organic fertilizers and crop-saving pesticides that have been approved as safe in wealthy countries. Many even oppose tractors and other mechanized equipment.

To them, the only acceptable farming method is “agro-ecology” – la Via Campesina: the Peasant Way – aka, “traditional,” “organic,” backbreaking subsistence farming.

This, corruption, wars and food-deprivation as a weapon of war is why we still have malnutrition, starvation, disease and astronomical death tolls in African and other impoverished countries.

These global zealots want power over poor countries – not power for the countries’ destitute and desperate people. Their morally depraved policies and practices bring death to millions every year.

Developing countries should avoid doing what rich nations are doing now that they are rich. Instead, they should do what rich nations did to become rich. They should remember that wealthy industrialized countries did not have MDBs to help them; they created institutions to finance the power generation and factories that created jobs, middle classes, health, prosperity, new industries … and taxes to pay for more.

They must chart their own destiny – and take their rightful places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Decent, moral Westerners must help them end the corruption and make this happen.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

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Since the swearing-in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, climate alarmism and the political machinations in the public and private sector it spawned have experienced the death of a thousand cuts, described for centuries as a favorite torture method of the Chinese.

Trump’s actions as president represent the deepest stab wound to elite promoters of the climate “hoax” or climate “scam”—take your pick of descriptors used by Trump to describe the false-alarm narrative of catastrophic climate change. I have previously described here at CCW some of Trump’s actions that are draining the climate swamp of resources, supporters, spirit, and momentum. These include defunding climate boondoggles across federal agencies, pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing the United States from dozens of climate-monitoring and wealth-transfer organizations (most importantly the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), and rescinding the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. All these actions and more have left the progressive climate elite bereft and seeking solace and continued support, with said solace and support waning in both the public and private sectors in the United States and internationally. The cuts are coming fast and furious.

Evidence suggests that with America no longer playing the fool, cast as a villain in the climate scam, other countries and companies around the globe are increasingly refusing to do so. Some entities are withdrawing from their climate commitments entirely and reembracing fossil fuels. Others, while still embracing climate alarm to a degree, are reducing their emission reduction pledges, cutting funding for wind and solar, pushing out the timeline for net zero, acknowledging the continued necessity of fossil fuels for a while at least, or some combination of the above. Of course, they would be doing none of these things if they really believed the hype that the world faces a pending climate catastrophe that can be stopped by eschewing fossil fuels. They are tacitly admitting Trump is right and climate change is a scam or hoax, and acknowledging the need to find a new and different way to profit through fear.

Examples of the rapid decline of the climate alarm narrative are all around us. For example, the UN IPCC recently had its 64th meeting of the science committee, at which it failed, once again, to set a date for the production of the next IPCC Assessment report. It’s not just that they can’t agree on who will write the report or what its scope will be: they can’t even decide on a deadline for when to produce and publish it.

Climate modeler Jozef Pecho described how dangerous and discouraging this impasse is for him and the climate science community in general:

As a climate scientist whose work depends on IPCC assessments, I find what’s happening in Bangkok hard to watch.

The disagreement is framed as procedural. It isn’t. A coalition including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, India and Kenya wants the timeline pushed later. The practical effect is the same as if you delayed a medical diagnosis until after the surgery: the science arrives, but it can no longer guide the decision. UNEP [United Nations Environmental Program] warns the IPCC trust fund may run out before AR7 is even finished.

What we are watching is not a calendar dispute. It is a slow-motion erosion of the institution that translates climate science into political accountability—and it is happening at the moment that science is most needed.

Why would Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, India, Kenya, and other nations want the timeline extended if they really believed a climate crisis was in the offing? The answer is they wouldn’t, so they really don’t believe climate change poses an “existential threat” to humanity, in the words of former President Joe Biden. It is a tool to be wielded to gain geopolitical concessions, national advantage, and/or continued welfare money.

Another cut is described in one of the preeminent medical journals, The Lancet, in an article in which the researchers warn of public health consequences of the European Union truncating the reach and scope of its emission-reporting requirements. They describe the regulatory change thus:

On Dec 16, 2025, the European Parliament and the European Council reached a provisional deal on the Sustainability Omnibus Package of the European Commission in an effort to streamline and simplify the European regulatory landscape to promote the competitiveness of European undertakings. The proposed simplification exempts an estimated 80% of undertakings (organizations) that were within the previous scope of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The exemptions lead to lower or no data collection from indirect value chain partners, only requiring reporting from undertakings with a turnover exceeding €450 million generated within the EU or having more than 1000 employees (EU based).

Although modest in its environmental data requirements, the CSRD is considered one of the most comprehensive mandatory sustainability reporting initiatives in the world. However, the simplification of the Omnibus severely hampers the creation of an urgently needed data landscape to map and monitor corporate environmental impacts and might impede policies aimed at advancing planetary health.

Once again, researchers seem alarmed, but the governments not so much.

Then there is the case of Germany, where grim electoral prospects seem to be forcing the government to end its enforced adoption of certain green technologies and fuels, a mandate resulting from the country’s previous commitments to net-zero emission goals.

“In a shock move, the German government will allow citizens to use oil and gas to heat their homes again, even though this might increase global temperatures by a thousandth of a degree in 80 years time,” reports Jo Nova. “The government or rather, the taxpayers, will still be forced to subsidize 30 to 70% of the cost of a new heat pump, but won’t actually fine anyone or put them in jail if they buy an oil or gas heater. (Yay, ‘freedom’.)”

The response of the German left to this modest shift toward climate reality was entirely predictable, according to Euronews:

One critic has called the move “an unconditional fulfilment of all the wishes of the fossil fuel lobby”.

“This reform is a disaster,” Green Party parliamentary group co-leader Katharina Dröge told the German Press Agency (dpa).

“The CDU and SPD [Social Democratic Party] have today made it abundantly clear: climate protection is completely irrelevant to this coalition,” she added. “The federal government has abandoned the achievement of the climate targets.”

Moving on to the private sector, industries are quickly abandoning their emission-reduction commitments. As I have detailed in CCW, shortly after Trump was elected but before he took office, hundreds of banks and other companies began abandoning various UN-sanctioned or -endorsed climate groups setting reporting requirements for carbon dioxide emissions and goals for emission reductions. And by early in 2025, big tech companies, fearing a lack of energy for their AI hubs and server farms, began to cease lobbying for state governments and the federal government to embrace net-zero goals and ever-more wind and solar power. They began to embrace nuclear power, natural gas, and to a lesser extent even coal in some locations. They want whatever is needed to power the burgeoning AI industry and their tech reliably, climate concerns be damned.

More recently, the automobile and power industries have joined the stampede away from net zero. For example, MasterResource highlighted an article at Autoblog detailing 18 major automobile manufacturers’ decisions to scale back dramatically or abandon entire lines of electric vehicles. The Autoblog article states,

After years of rapid growth, the electric vehicle boom is hitting turbulence. With demand slowing and incentives fading, at least 18 automakers are now canceling, delaying, or scaling back EV plans in the U.S., including major brands like Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Volkswagen. …

After growing nearly eightfold between 2019 and 2023 [due to tax incentives and mandates], demand for battery-electric vehicles flattened out last year, then took a dive off a cliff after federal tax credits phased out at the end of September. That’s sent an array of automakers scrambling to rethink their EV programs and, by Autoblog’s count, at least 18 brands have now decided to drop existing models, scrap upcoming plans or, at the least, stretch their launches out, hoping to see demand rebound.

And it’s not just car companies. Oil companies (which never should have jumped on the suicidal climate-alarm bandwagon and instead should have been fighting it) and utilities are also reducing their emission-reduction goals. Seeking Alpha reports,

The world’s largest oil and gas companies ratcheted back investment in the energy transition in 2025, marking the first annual decline in eight years, according to BloombergNEF. Spending on low-carbon technologies by oil and gas majors fell by more than a third over the past year, to $25.7 billion from more than $38 billion in 2024, , according to a report published Wednesday.

Even with that reduction, the companies are spending $25.7 billion too much on unnecessary efforts to prematurely transition away from fossil fuels in a foolish and vain effort to fight climate change.

In the power sector, the retreat from net zero is even greater. Environment America has reported that as of March, 8.1 GW of coal capacity, consisting of 33 fossil fuel generating units across 15 power plants, that had been scheduled for closure by the end 2025 have been kept online to maintain grid reliability and power AI expansion. Most recently, it was announced in early April that the two largest coal-fueled power plants in Pennsylvania had agreed to stay in operation through 2032, four years beyond their planned retirement date, specifically to ensure grid stability in the face of growing AI data center demand. Even Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, approved of the plan to keep the plants open.

And academia has not been immune to the siren call of climate realism. While publicly maintaining its goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, Duke University announced it would no longer spend $4 million per year to achieve “short-term carbon neutrality,” nor would it dedicate staff time to figure out ways to offset ongoing carbon dioxide emissions.

In academia, government, and industry, climate alarm is in retreat. Net zero as an economic and political goal is not dead, but it is on life support, and The Heartland Institute will continue to advocate for pulling the plug.

Sources: The Lancet; Jo Nova; NorDotApp; MasterResource: Seeking Alpha (MSN.com); EnvironmentAmerica

Amid Moderate Warming, Hot and Cold Extremes Are Declining

A new study from John R. Christy, Ph.D., former Alabama State Climatologist, director of the Earth System Science Center, and distinguished professor of atmosphere and earth science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, undertook a long-term accounting of temperature trends. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, reports extreme temperatures, both extreme heat and extreme cold, have become less frequent and sustained across the continental United States since 1899.

Christy analyzed more than 40 million daily temperature readings from 1,211 weather stations. Where a weather station during that time discontinued operation or had incomplete records, Christy filled in data from nearby stations after filtering out possible sources of bias. Per the abstract,

Extreme temperature metrics for summer daily maximum temperatures and winter daily minimum temperatures were calculated. The general result is that metrics for extreme summer heat, e.g., hottest values, number of heatwave days, etc., show modest negative trends since 1899. Extreme cold temperature metrics also indicate a decline in their occurrences especially since the 1990s. In sum, instances of both hot and cold extreme metrics have declined since 1899.

“Knowledge of temperature extremes, and their potential changes within a climate system of increasing greenhouse gases, is of vital interest for humans and the infrastructure which supports them,” Christy writes in the study’s abstract, explaining the need for and importance of the study in the context of the scientific and public policy debate over climate change. “This dataset allows us to ask—and answer—questions about extreme heat and cold with more confidence, given the amount of data available now,” Christy writes in an article about the study.

“Understanding how extremes have changed over time is essential for interpreting (dispassionately) how today’s events actually compare with the past,” wrote Christy.

The data show the most intense heat events occurred between 1925 and 1954, particularly during the 1930s, the study states. Christy’s analysis found no long-term increase in extreme summer heat nationwide.

By contrast, periods of extreme cold have noticeably declined, especially since the 1990s, with fewer record-low temperatures and less-severe winter extremes. This is due to a modest warming at night during the winter, found in higher winter nighttime lows attributable in part to the urban heat island effect where development has taken place around urban, suburban, and even some poorly sited rural weather stations.

Because extremes of summer heat haven’t changed much and periods of extreme cold have declined, the study also found the difference between the hottest and coldest annual temperatures has narrowed by about six degrees over the full record, “suggesting less overall variability in temperature extremes,” as noted by Fox 54 Alabama’s report on the findings.

To demonstrate an application of this dataset, Christy compared the results produced by his analysis of the long-term data to claims made by U.S. Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment (NCA) that heatwaves have increased since the 1960s. These claims are not borne out by the comprehensive temperature data Christy analyzed. Instead, there has been a small, statistically insignificant change, primarily in parts of the Western United States where population growth has been rampant. When the temperature data is extended back to 1899, it shows heat extremes have actually declined nationwide, and the trend identified by the NCA disappears. There is no correlation to greenhouse gas emissions.

Sources: Fox 54; Theoretical and Applied Climatology; University of Alabama at Huntsville

CAN YOU PARK THIS CAR?

Auto China 2026, held in Beijing, spanned two extensive venues covering 380,000 square metres, offering a clear snapshot of the global automotive industry’s shifting center of gravity. Once perceived primarily as low-cost manufacturers, Chinese carmakers are now at the forefront of electrification and intelligent technology. This year’s show has become their global stage to showcase cutting-edge innovations: from hypercars with “wind-sculpted” teardrop aerodynamic designs to electric SUVs capable of fast charging in minutes and delivering nearly 1,000 kilometers of range on a single charge.

Gone are the days when foreign automakers dominated these exhibition halls with their high-profile global debuts. This year, Chinese brands including BYD, Geely, Xiaomi, and Chery commanded the bulk of attendee attention with world-premiere production vehicles and concept cars prioritizing intelligence, sustainability, and futuristic design. Discussions among attendees spanning European dealers and Middle Eastern importers no longer revolve solely around price, but focus instead on performance, technological innovation, and the fully integrated digital ecosystems offered by Chinese new energy vehicles (NEVs).

Shifting global perceptions

This reversal of the industry’s long-standing power dynamics is more than just a show-floor trend -- it signals a sweeping global shift in how Chinese automotive brands are perceived by consumers and industry peers alike.

The auto show has garnered widespread attention from media outlets both at home and abroad. A report from People’s Daily wrote that on the opening day of the show, a car dealer from the Middle East headed straight for Chinese brand booths, “Chinese new energy vehicles (NEVs) are facing explosive demand in the Middle East market,” and he had already shortlisted several promising brands to partner with during his visit.

Chinese automakers’ booths at the show attracted a large number of executives from leading international manufacturers, many of whom stopped to observe and gain a deeper understanding of the latest advances Chinese brands have made in intelligent driving technology.

To quantify this widespread perception shift, Georg Mrusek, a China automotive expert at management consultancy Horváth, said that one in two European consumers is now open to buying a Chinese brand car as their next vehicle.

Industry professionals at the show also stressed that Chinese firms are no longer just selling vehicles, but are offering fully integrated digital platforms. James Pearson, founder and CEO of advertising agency Lionheart Global, said that automotive manufacturing is no longer focused solely on the vehicle itself; instead, the car is evolving into a technology platform that connects every aspect of consumers’ daily lives.

He added that legacy automakers must keep pace with this trajectory, as Chinese brands rapidly integrate artificial intelligence, value-added services, and broader cross-scenario ecosystems into their products.

Strong market data backs up this rising momentum: China’s automobile production and sales have ranked first globally for 17 consecutive years. In the first quarter of 2026, China exported 2.226 million vehicles, up 56.7 percent year on year, of which NEV exports reached 954,000 units, a year-on-year jump of over 120 percent.

Innovation-driven industry transformation

Behind this growing global recognition is China’s unwavering investment in core automotive R&D, which has turned the country into a hotbed of next-generation mobility technologies. At Auto China 2026, the spotlight extended far beyond eye-catching new models to the underlying technologies redefining the capabilities of electric vehicles.

• Charging breakthroughs: BYD’s “flash charging” technology promises hundreds of kilometers of range in just minutes, addressing one of the biggest hurdles to NEV adoption. CATL’s newly unveiled “Shenxing” battery can charge from 10 percent to 98 percent in roughly six and a half minutes, while BYD demonstrated reliable charging even in temperatures as low as -30 degree Celsius.

• Intelligent driving: XPeng showcased an intelligent driving system that can detect driver fatigue or sudden medical emergencies, automatically pull the vehicle over to a safe spot, and alert first responders. Similarly, Huawei’s HarmonyOS-powered cockpits and Qiankun intelligent driving systems underscored the growing importance of seamless software integration as a key differentiator for new vehicles.

• Beyond traditional transportation: The show also offered glimpses of a more ambitious mobility future: humanoid robots for in-vehicle services, flying cars such as the eVTOL model developed by China’s First Automobile Works, and autonomous lounge-style cabins with rotating seats. These concepts demonstrate that Chinese automakers are looking well beyond basic transportation and seeking to redefine the very concept of mobility.

Racing enthusiasts familiar with the iconic racing video game Gran Turismo 7 (GT7) will not ignore the Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo (VGT), an all-electric hypercar concept designed exclusively for the game. As the first Chinese brand vehicle invited to participate in the long-running Gran Turismo VGT project, the Xiaomi VGT embodies the brand’s “ultimate dream” for both design and technological performance. Prior to this, Xiaomi’s SU7 Ultra became the first Chinese production car featured in the game franchise.

Since its debut in 1997, the game series has been hailed by car enthusiasts worldwide as the “Oscar of digital racing” for its vehicle physics accuracy and strict vehicle selection criteria. Its roster of featured vehicles has long been dominated by top-tier performance cars from Europe, the United States, and Japan, including Ferrari and Porsche. Inclusion in GT7 is widely regarded as an implicit global benchmark of automotive engineering excellence.

Strategies for a global stage

As Chinese brands gain both technological edge and cultural recognition, they are rolling out tailored, sustainable strategies to cement their position on the global stage.

Geopolitical headwinds including conflicts in the Middle East have driven fuel prices sharply higher, spurring surging global demand for electric vehicles, and Chinese automakers are stepping in to provide the global market with high-quality, viable alternatives.

In Europe, BYD’s NEV sales soared by 156 percent in the first quarter of 2026, while markets from Canada to Australia are eagerly awaiting the launch of new Chinese NEV models. The combination of highly efficient R&D systems, full vertical integration spanning from battery manufacturing to software development, and agile global market strategies has positioned Chinese automakers not as niche disruptors, but as industry pacesetters.

Collaborations with global automotive giants are also reshaping industry perceptions. Volkswagen co-develops NEVs with XPeng, BMW partners with CATL on next-generation battery technology, and Audi uses Huawei’s intelligent driving systems for its China-specific models. These partnerships underscore a broader industry trend: even Western legacy brands now increasingly look to Chinese firms for technological cooperation in electrification and smart mobility.

Beyond products and technology, China’s stable supply chain has become a rare source of “certainty” for the global automotive industry, according to a foreign dealer group leader attending the show.

As Auto China 2026 draws to a close, it is evident that China is no longer simply a vast consumer market or a low-cost manufacturing base; it has become the undisputed epicenter of global automotive innovation, strategy, and cross-border collaboration.

“China has become one of the fastest-moving markets for deploying and iterating new vehicle technologies, giving consumers early access to some of the most advanced features,” said Chris Liu, a senior analyst at research and advisory group Omdia.

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Nuclear Power Plant Leibstadt in Switzerland with a pure water cloud rising from the cooling tower. Beautiful energy for the modern world!

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Here’s the transcript of a discussion I had at Southern Methodist University with Jim Burke, the CEO of Vistra, and Ray Rothrock, a longtime nuclear investor and board member at Centrus Energy.

There’s no shortage of cheerleading about the future of nuclear energy in the US. That’s why I was pleased to sit down on April 9 at SMU’s Energy Outlook 2026 with Jim Burke and Ray Rothrock. (Sincere thanks to my friends at SMU, Xavier Tison, and Bruce Bullock at the Maguire Energy Institute for inviting me to participate in the symposium.) As you will see, Burke and Rothrock are extremely knowledgeable about the electricity business and both are very sober about the future prospects for nuclear energy in the US.

Here’s a transcript of our discussion. It’s about 7,000 words. And for an extra bonus, at the end of the panel, Ray and I did an a capella rendition of Reddy Kilowatt’s theme song.

This post is free for all readers. Enjoy.

Participants:

• Robert Bryce

• Jim Burke, CEO of Vistra Corp., one of the largest independent power producers in the US. He’s also the vice-chair of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

• Ray Rothrock, CEO of FiftySix Investments, a seed fund focused on cyber, energy, and climate entrepreneurs, and a board member at Centrus Energy, which supplies nuclear fuel to civilian reactors.

Bryce: We’re here to talk about nuclear, and. I don’t have to tell you all that nuclear is one of the hottest things going right now. Our caption for this session is: “Yes, nuclear – how much, how soon?” The Trump administration has set a goal of 4x nuclear, or 400 gigawatts by 2050. I’m going to put you on the spot right away.

Possible? Yes? No? If not, why not? Jim?

Burke: I think it’s possible. I think it’s really challenging. I don’t think we have a track record of adding 5 or 10 gigawatts successfully, realistically. So to get to that number, a lot of assumptions have to be made, Robert. I know you describe yourself as an optimist on nuclear, and of course we’ve leaned into nuclear as a company, but there’s a lot of complexity to that solution. We need a lot of things to line up, probably differently than they have so far, to be able to make it. But that’s a long horizon. In truth, it’s harder to hit the 2030 goals, because you have to be well underway already to hit some of these uprate challenges that we’re all working through.

Bryce: Let’s come back to uprates, because I want to talk about those, and also about how, as an independent power producer, you have a different view on the market.

Ray, 4x by 2050? Yes? No? Maybe?

Rothrock: No, it’s not possible. We built about 100 reactors between 1961 and 1985 – roughly 25 years. To do 400 now by 2050, and keep the 100 we have operating and build another 300, I just don’t see how it’s possible. You can build 75 or 80, I think. But 400? No.

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Bryce: Okay, I’ll come back to that. Jim, you’ve been in the power business now for a good long while — 25 years? Vistra’s been on a rocket-ship ride. I just looked before we came up here: the price-to-earnings ratio of Vistra is 74. You’re trading like a tech company.

Burke: Well, there’s GAAP accounting and mark-to-market…

Bryce: Careful now. My first book was on Enron, so we don’t want to talk about mark-to-market. I’ll leave that one. But what’s driven that? What’s driven your valuation? Your stock has roughly doubled in the last 24 months. Explain why that is, because I want to lay the groundwork for what’s happening in the power market, and you’ve had a front-row seat. What’s changed? Is it just data centers and AI?

Burke: No, it’s not just that. Let me rewind a little bit, because this looks like a very recent phenomenon, but the foundation was laid earlier. In 2018, we made a very big decision to acquire Dynegy. At that time, that doubled the size of the company. It was primarily a combined-cycle gas turbine fleet. Our company, Vistra, its heritage is TXU. We were only in the state of Texas up to that point. Texas is the 10th-largest power market in the world, but we wanted to expand. At that time, you could pick up combined-cycle gas turbine facilities at, say, 400 to 500 dollars per kilowatt, which meant they were out of favor.

From 2018 to today, you’re seeing the price of not only existing gas assets but new gas assets rise considerably. So we’re in a position where, if someone wanted to replace all those assets, the cost would be far higher than what we paid. That has nothing to do, at that point, with just what’s happening with AI.

We’re building too. We’re building gas. We’re doing some of the nuclear uprates. But I think the market is realizing dispatchable power has more value. Ten years ago, there was a view that wind, solar, and batteries—which obviously weren’t as big then as they are now—could run the electric system. I think folks are revisiting those assumptions.

We did other acquisitions since then as well, but there’s no doubt that the AI tailwind has been a pretty recent phenomenon. I’d say the foundation for what we’ve done was laid earlier.

On the valuation piece, we aren’t valued off P/E. That literally can move a tremendous amount because of accounting. Folks view us through the lens of: are you delivering a cash return when you invest? Ultimately, cash is king. That’s how we’re valued. That’s a much more stable valuation metric. Our earnings on a cash basis have been rising through time as power markets have tightened.

Bryce: So you were buying at $500 per kilowatt, and today to build it is $3,000 per kilowatt?

Burke: About $2,500 to $3,000, all-in cost, for a new combined-cycle gas turbine. That’s correct.

Bryce: Ray, you’ve been around investing for a long time. You’ve seen what’s happened with Vistra and more broadly in the market. How do you think about this as a long-time investor with Venrock and in the context of what’s happening with nuclear and power?

Rothrock: I’d say two big things have happened. First, until Trump came to office the second time, nuclear always played second fiddle. There were a lot of headlines that prevented it from getting a real launch, even though companies were starting and people like you were investing in startups.

What’s happened is that executive orders changed the game totally. They basically rewrote the book. Some of the ideas that came out of that are things many of us have been talking about for a decade—like opening up federal lands and facilities to allow new nuclear projects and related industrial activity.

Second, there’s been a huge surge in demand from things like data centers. A significant portion of that investment—call it 25 percent of the total—is essentially power demand. If you take a big AI and data-center build-out, hundreds of billions of dollars, 25 percent of that is power. That’s demand that companies like Vistra and others have to supply.

So now there’s a forward demand signal. That’s affecting stock prices. These companies are going to be the providers of that power. So what you’re seeing is really about supply and demand more than about some abstract price-earnings ratio. This uplift you see in the projections—it’s very real. There’s no way to meet it only with gas and solar and batteries. Those help in the meantime, but in the long haul, you’re going to need nuclear and other long-duration, firm resources as well. That’s what I think is affecting the outlook for nuclear power.

Bryce: Let’s go back to nuclear. Ray, what are the key bottlenecks? We’ve talked many times about regulations, capital, and fuel. Force-rank those, if you can. Is there one more than another that’s slowing the build-out of new nuclear?

Rothrock: Before last year, it was regulation. NuScale’s design certification took 61 months to get through the NRC. Sixty-one months for a pressurized water reactor. You’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve used pressurized water reactors for 60 years, and NuScale had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get through the process.

That’s going to change. The rules now say they’ve got to get a permit through in two years. The NRC now has a five-person commission that’s all-in on advanced nuclear, and the chairman is strongly pro-nuclear. I’ve met him; he’s said, “I’m not going to be a roadblock.” So that regulatory barrier is starting to come down.

The second bottleneck was capital. These plants are expensive, as we all know. Here’s a little rule I learned when I was a nuclear engineering student at Texas: about 80 percent of the cost of any capital plant—whether it’s a power plant, a gas plant, or a big industrial facility—is steel, copper, and concrete. About 80 percent. The rest is engineering, labor, and soft costs.

With regulatory uncertainty and no clear demand signal, investors said, “We’re going to wait.” That was a big factor. These projects also take a long time. If you look at the first generation of large reactors, it took around seven years on average to build them. Some took far longer; the plant I worked on ultimately took around 14 years from conception to completion. Vogtle is a recent example—decades from initial planning to completion.

We have to get those timelines down. One of the tailwinds now is that the NRC is changing, Wall Street is falling in love with nuclear again, you’re seeing big valuations for companies like Oklo and others, and there’s a lot of activity from new developers. Capital has started to show up. So as the regulator gets out of the way and the money shows up, the remaining bottleneck is physical: the supply chain and labor. You need hundreds of thousands of people trained in nuclear—not just operations, but construction, welding, quality assurance, everything. That’s a real constraint.

Bryce: Jim, how do you see it? You’re building gas plants. What’s preventing you, as the head of a company like Vistra, from saying, “We’re going to pull the trigger on new nuclear”? What are the bottlenecks from your vantage point?

Burke: What Ray hit on has been massively important in getting people excited about nuclear. But the conversations we’re in are framed by how our markets work.

Let me set the stage. Roughly half the country is in effectively competitive wholesale power markets. The other half is fully regulated. So you have two overarching market models. Everything we do is in competitive markets. We take different fuels—it doesn’t matter whether it’s sun, gas, coal, or nuclear—and convert them into the same finished product: electricity. The question is: is the market going to pay you for that finished product, or is a specific customer going to pay you?

Fortunately, for uprates at our three nuclear sites in PJM, Meta has said they’re willing to pay for the uprates. That’s a very clear example of a hyperscaler connecting the dots to a specific form of generation—and an expensive one like nuclear.

Bryce: Sorry to interrupt. So Meta has effectively written you a check to cover the cost of adding about 150 megawatts or…?

Burke: We’re going to add just over 400 megawatts, and we’ll do that over about an eight-year period. It takes time because you have to sequence the uprates with the regularly scheduled refueling outages at these sites.

They’re not paying with a check up front. They’re paying for the output over time. So yes, we have a long-term power purchase agreement for the additional output—for 20 years. The real question, and I referenced an earlier panel on this, is: does a specific customer pay, or is society in general instructed to pay?

Because if you get a quote from an EPC for a new nuclear project, the big question is: if there is a cost overrun, who bears that risk? As a competitive company, our shareholders would struggle to accept the kind of unbounded risk that’s been demonstrated in previous projects.

Uprates are different. There have been about 170 uprates across the country. It’s a fairly well-understood process. New builds have been much more unpredictable. So even if you gave me a permit today and I had the land and the technology picked, we’d still be talking about who wears what risk in bringing that plant to market.

In regulated markets, where you saw the two new units built at Vogtle in Georgia, there was a rate base. Since we don’t operate with a rate base, we have to be more careful about the risk we assume.

Bryce: “A bit more aware?” Nicely phrased. So you’re doing 400 megawatts of uprates. Give me a sense of the cost per megawatt, and how that compares to building new gas or new nuclear.

Burke: As a publicly traded company—my head of IR is sitting here in the audience—that specific cost is confidential. I can tell you it’s more cost-effective than building new nuclear, but it’s still a multi-billion-dollar project, Robert.

Bryce: I’m impressed. Is it more than building new gas?

Burke: It depends on where the latest quote for gas is. It’d be in the ballpark, but I’d say it’s probably still on the higher end of where the gas quotes are.

Because it’s a carbon-free product, and in this case Meta is willing to pay something for the carbon-free attribute. What I keep hearing from customers—and I’m sure anyone in this space hears the same thing—is that there are customers willing to pay a premium, but it needs to be reasonable. That’s when you start looking at what the cost of carbon would have to be to equalize the economics for new nuclear versus new gas. There’s still a pretty big gap to bridge.

But uprates are cost-effective, particularly if you have a customer willing to sign the PPA now.

Bryce: So you mentioned Vogtle already, and I’m glad you did. Under the current construct, can new nuclear work in unregulated markets?

Burke: Under the current construct, I think it would be very tough—unless the customer is willing to take a lot of the risk. Vogtle is part of Southern Company, and Georgia is a regulated market. They also got a big loan guarantee from the federal government.

We could probably get a lot of support from the federal government—low-interest loans to help finance the project, expedited permitting. We could get a lot of support. But even if the financing were in place and a permit were on our desk today, the ultimate risk is still an eight- to ten-year build cycle. What’s the ultimate cost, and who bears that risk?

So in a competitive market, you would need a collaboration with large customers who are willing to pay for that. There’s been discussion about multiple companies like ours joining with other developers to put together a coalition, so there’s a cumulative learning curve we can all benefit from. That’s a complex negotiation.

Remember, this is a market that partly deregulated because of nuclear cost overruns. I entered the industry after deregulation; I came from a consumer products background, so I never worked in this industry when it had a rate base. What the large industrial customers were saying then was: “Gas is cheap. I’m paying for cost overruns on nuclear. I have a better alternative that’s better, faster, cheaper. Give me a chance to choose that.”

Nuclear, under that framing, has not demonstrated that it’s faster or cheaper. “Better” is a debate around reliability, fuel security, and carbon-free attributes. I’d argue that’s in the eye of the beholder. That’s the challenge we have with any new nuclear build—regulated or competitive.

Bryce: Let’s talk about speed for a minute. You’re building new gas. How many gigawatts of new gas are you building now?

Burke: We’ve announced a West Texas plant. It’s going to be about a one-billion-dollar investment.

Bryce: And that’s 1,200 megawatts?

Burke: It’s 860 megawatts. So in your calculus, that project is public. It was attractively priced because we got into the turbine queue early enough, and we’re building at an existing Permian Basin power plant site. We’re tripling the output of that plant. Load growth in West Texas has been pretty strong. We anticipate that to continue.

We do not have a long-term contract for that plant, Robert. Our investors have effectively said, “We understand what you’re doing.” It’s a billion-dollar investment; West Texas is a load pocket; we like it. We’re also converting two coal plants, one in Texas and one in Ohio, from coal to gas. It’s still the same boiler structure, not combined-cycle, but these are good peaking plants. They’re plants the grid relies on for fewer hours of the year, but they’re important. All told, that’s going to be about 2,500 megawatts that we’ll have converted or online in just a couple of years.

Bryce: On the West Texas project, what county is that in?

Burke: It’s in Monahans… Let’s just say West Texas. [laughter]

Bryce: How long will it take you to build that?

Burke: It’ll be online in the spring of 2028.

Bryce: So two years?

Burke: About two years of major construction. We started some initial site work last year, but all of the heavy work is still in front of us. It’s a relatively straightforward project.

Bryce: I want to go back to capital, because both of you have talked about it. I moderated a nuclear panel at ARPA–E in San Diego a couple of days ago. Amy Roma, a regulatory lawyer who used to be at the NRC, said that about 60 percent of the all-in cost for nuclear plants today is capital cost—financing and the “time value” of money.

The way I heard that was: because the plants take so long, that capital component is one of the big obstacles. Is that your understanding, Jim? How do you see that?

Burke: If 60 percent is capital cost, that means the other 40 percent—soft costs, labor, engineering, contingencies—is where your overrun risk shows up. That 40 percent isn’t fixed capital; it can grow. That’s the unbounded part of these projects, as we see it.

Rothrock: At Vogtle, roughly 40 percent of the total cost ended up being interest during construction. Forty percent. And that project ended up costing on the order of 30-plus billion dollars.

Bryce: Ray, you’re on the board at Centrus. Centrus is an enrichment company and has been doing uranium enrichment for a long time, with operations in Ohio and elsewhere. I mentioned Amy Roma. She said one of the key roadblocks for new nuclear is enrichment—the fuel side of the challenge. Do you see it the same way? If so, why?

Rothrock: I completely see it the same way. Centrus is a US-traded company that came out of the original uranium enrichment activities the US government started decades ago. We effectively gave up our domestic enrichment capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, shut down plants in the US, and went overseas—to Russia, to Europe, to other suppliers.

Today, a very large fraction of the world’s enrichment capacity is Russian. I’ve seen numbers around 40 percent of US enrichment supply coming from Russia, directly or indirectly. That’s a strategic vulnerability. The US now has very little domestic enrichment capability. The current fleet—93 or 94 reactors—mostly has license extensions to operate for 60 or even 80 years. That’s fantastic, but it also means we have a long-term, locked-in demand for low-enriched uranium.

As new plants come on, we’ll create new demand. That demand really kicks in five, six, seven years after you start a project, because you don’t need fuel until construction is well along. Even if you put a plant in the ground today, you’re not going to demand uranium for five or six years. At Centrus, working with the government and others, we’re building a multi-billion-dollar enrichment plant in Ohio. It will provide just a fraction of what the US needs, but it’s a start. Other projects will be needed.

Bryce: The US oil and gas industry has grown effectively, in some cases in spite of government involvement, largely because of private ownership of mineral rights and what I call “the rights, the rednecks, and the rocks”—that unique mix of private ownership and technology.

To build that enrichment capacity and the broader nuclear supply chain, is the government going to have to be more involved throughout the nuclear value chain? Are we going to have to be more like Russia, South Korea, or France to get a big increase in nuclear capacity in the US?

Rothrock: I think the answer is yes, at least in terms of strategic direction. This is an important export situation, and this is sensitive material. The US government has to be deeply involved. I don’t necessarily believe they have to provide all the capital. They can provide loans and some subsidies, but private capital and Wall Street need to be part of it too. The enrichment equipment and facilities are not cheap. A lot of people and firms need to participate.

We’re trying to make this a truly American operation, which includes government support, but also private investment and a robust domestic supply chain.

Bryce: So your answer is: for the US to grow substantially in nuclear, if we’re talking about more than 100 gigawatts, 200 gigawatts of capacity, we have to emulate the mercantilist approach that the Chinese and the Russians are using?

Jim, do you agree with that?

Burke: No.

Bryce: “No,” says the independent power producer. Okay, tell me why.

Burke: It depends on what problem we’re trying to solve.

If the only goal is “more nuclear,” then I think what Ray is saying is probably accurate. Even in regulated markets you’re seeing regulated utilities say they would struggle to take a large new nuclear project forward to their public utility commissions right now. So it’s not just a competitive-market challenge. Even regulated markets are saying this is a risk they’re not sure their shareholders or their regulators are willing to take on.

Could the federal government, through, say, the Department of Defense or another federal entity, become a buyer of some nuclear output, and thereby incentivize technologies and fuel production? Absolutely. But if you take a government-sponsored power plant of any form—this is true of subsidies in general—you create interactions between subsidized resources and unsubsidized resources. We’re a markets-based company, and you’re going to have unintended consequences when one resource is heavily subsidized and another is not. In the world of “better, faster, cheaper,” does the consumer pay for power through their power bill and their taxes, or just through their power bill? We’re seeing a lot more intervention in various technologies, and then we sometimes have to pay again to undo those interventions.

We also have an abundant natural gas system in this country that China doesn’t have. We have natural resources that can work alongside nuclear.

So again, if the only goal is nuclear, then a mercantilist, state-led approach might make sense. If the goal is a reliable, secure system that’s cost-effective, you have to ask whether that’s the best energy strategy.

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Bryce: As independent power producers, you’re not necessarily going to welcome a lot of government intervention that puts a heavy thumb on the scale for a particular technology.

Burke: I think markets allocate capital. That’s the whole point of capital markets, and that’s what independent power producers do: we allocate capital.

The question is: if someone who doesn’t have the same kind of accountability to shareholders and stakeholders decides to deploy taxpayer money in a specific way, could that accelerate retirements of older plants that still have system value? The answer is probably yes. Then you’re potentially subsidizing new generation to dig a hole and fill a hole—retiring plants and then paying to replace the capacity at higher cost. We also don’t know the true demand profile yet. We’ve actually been more conservative than some of the load-growth assumptions being discussed.

We think Texas is growing fast. Historically it’s been 2 to 3% annual load growth. We think it could be 4 to 5%, maybe as high as 6% per year.

Bryce: Nationwide?

Burke: No, that’s Texas. PJM, which has been relatively flat historically, we think will grow in the 2 to 3% range.

So the question our industry—regulators, transmission and distribution utilities, and generators—has to answer is: what load forecast are we being authorized to build to On the T&D side, that’s rate-based. On our side, our shareholders are effectively underwriting our assumptions. If there’s a risk of overbuild, in competitive markets the shareholder takes that risk. In regulated markets, the remaining ratepayers take that risk, and the cost gets spread over a smaller base if demand doesn’t show up.

There are real consequences to using inflated load forecasts, and then allocating capital based on them. We need to be aware of that.

Bryce: I’ll let you finish that thought, then I want to get Ray back in.

Burke: Just to close that loop, how we meet load growth is going to matter. We need to be disciplined, because both underbuilding and overbuilding have serious consequences.

Bryce: Ray, one quick question before I go back to you. Jim, how many power plants does Vistra have?

Burke: Currently about 50, and we’re adding about 10 more with the pending Coherent/Constellation-type acquisitions and conversions.

Bryce: Total capacity?

Burke: Currently around 44,000 megawatts. We’ll be at about 50,000 megawatts—50 gigawatts—within a couple of years, depending on when our next deal closes.

Bryce: As Jim was talking, what struck me is that it’s easy to think about the US electric grid as one thing. In reality, it’s incredibly fragmented. There are over 3,300 electricity providers. There are more than 800 co-ops, around 2,000 municipally owned utilities, about 180 investor-owned utilities, and then federal entities like TVA and Bonneville. It’s an incredibly complicated sector.

We’ve been dividing it into “regulated” and “deregulated,” but behind that, the complexities are huge.

Burke: That’s right. For example, when we try to acquire assets, we’re now approaching about 5% of the nameplate capacity of dispatchable generation in the country. Take roughly 50 gigawatts divided by maybe 1,000 gigawatts of dispatchable capacity—not counting intermittent resources.

When we try to get a little larger, a lot of antitrust and market-power questions arise. We’re roughly a $50 billion market-cap company. If an AP1000 unit costs roughly $10 billion per reactor, how does a $50 billion market-cap company underwrite a $20 billion two-unit build? Most people believe two units at a site are smarter than one, because of learning and economies of scale.

The short answer is: you don’t. You can’t responsibly take that kind of balance-sheet risk as a single company under current rules.

If no one is allowed to get bigger—because of antitrust constraints—then who fills that void? That’s why SMRs and smaller reactors are on the table. They’re smaller bets. They may or may not be the cheapest bets, but they’re not “break the company” bets. That’s part of the challenge.

Rothrock: That’s a very good point. An AP1000 is a $10 billion project. There are only a handful of companies in America’s power business that can even contemplate that kind of risk.

Which brings us back to how much government involvement is it going to take. I’m not saying government should write all the checks, but we’re going to need someone to take risk capital. That could be partly companies like Vistra, partly large customers, and I think the government, so far, doesn’t want to be the check-writer of last resort. That’s how it’s been positioned to us.

I tend to agree that there ought to be skin in the game. Risk capital should be rationed in a methodical way, not just socialized. There are groups in Washington lobbying for taxpayer-backed insurance schemes to backstop nuclear construction risk. I find that interesting and important, but I’d rather see some of that flipped to incentives: bonuses for building on time and on budget. The Korean EPCs use that model. Incentives can be powerful. And risking your own capital is a powerful incentive by itself.

Burke: I’m vice chair of the Nuclear Energy Institute, so I’m involved with NEI. It’s our job to make sure nuclear is first and foremost safe and reliable, and our goal is to grow nuclear.

At the same time, this country is blessed with many different ways to make electricity. We should keep that in mind as we set public policy because there can be unintended consequences if we pick winners too aggressively.

I want to see all the dozens of SMR technologies and large-scale designs compete. Don’t just pick a winner and repeat it. Let them compete. May the best technology win. That’s how fracking evolved; that’s how many consumer innovations evolved. I think the same can happen in nuclear.

Bryce: Let me follow up on that. On our Substack project, “SMR Intelligence US,” we’re now tracking 41 different US-based companies working on small modular reactors, with 47 different designs. TerraPower, I’d argue, is one of the horses to beat right now. Speaking of the NRC, they recently got a construction permit for their Natrium advanced reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Ray, I’ll put you on the spot: with 41 different SMR companies—gas-cooled, sodium-cooled, light water, and more—if you had to handicap which reactor chemistry and what size is most likely to win in the market that Jim is describing, what would you pick?

Rothrock: At the end of the day, it will be about economics, reliability, and how well the technology fits into the existing supply chain. The US grid is about 1,200 gigawatts. One percent of that is 12 gigawatts, five% is 60 gigawatts. Those are the kinds of numbers we’re talking about if you want SMRs to be material.

We have a lot of experience with small reactors already. Early commercial plants like Yankee Rowe were relatively small by today’s standards. The Navy has been operating small reactors on ships and submarines for decades. So “small” isn’t new; what’s new is trying to do it economically at scale in the civilian market.

If I had to pick a category with an advantage, I’d say water-cooled, light-water SMRs—technologies that use LEU in fairly conventional fuel forms. There’s a lot of inherent labor, experience, and supply-chain capability around water-cooled reactors. People understand them, from operators to regulators to fabricators. That’s a big advantage.

Companies like Kairos and TerraPower have wonderful ideas with molten salts and advanced coolants. These concepts were tested back in the 1950s and 1960s at the national reactor testing stations, and now we’re applying new materials and methods to try to make them cheaper and more reliable. I hope they succeed.

But at the end of the day, economics will rule. Gas-cooled reactors have been tried—we had a commercial one at Fort St. Vrain in Colorado. It worked for about a dozen years but had issues, including gas leaks and complexity. Maybe the new players like X-energy and others will overcome those problems. I hope they do.

One more point: fuel. We’re also seeing a shift from traditional rods and bundles to TRISO fuel—coated fuel particles packed into pebbles or other forms. That’s very interesting, but not yet fully proven at commercial scale. You’re introducing new operational, construction, and fuel-supply risks. Will people be willing to finance that? That remains to be seen, and it will likely narrow the field to a few proven approaches.

Interestingly, I know of at least two startups that designed their reactors on paper, then went to the supply chain and asked, “Can you build this?” The answer was, “Sure—in five, six, seven, eight years after we qualify everything.” So they redesigned their reactors to fit what the supply chain can realistically deliver. That tells you something about how supply-chain reality will shape the winners.

Bryce: Let’s follow up on the fuel piece. Vistra operates Comanche Peak, a light-water reactor. You use low-enriched uranium in standard fuel bundles. That supply chain is well established.

Ray, can you walk us quickly through LEU, HALEU, TRISO, and the other varieties of fuel now being discussed for the SMR market? It sounds like if you’re saying “water moderated,” you’re also implicitly saying LEU as a fuel has an advantage over designs that need different fuel cocktails.

Rothrock: The world fleet today—roughly 460 reactors—operates on LEU: low-enriched uranium, typically about 3 to 5% enrichment, sometimes a bit higher. Natural uranium is about 0.7 percent U-235, so we have to enrich it. The US essentially invented enrichment during World War II, and we dominated it for decades.

That LEU supply chain is what feeds the existing reactors worldwide. It’s proven and well-understood. If you enrich higher, up to 19.9%—HALEU—you can make reactors physically smaller or achieve longer cycles. You don’t want to go beyond 20 percent because above that you’re into high-enriched uranium, with much tighter proliferation controls, and we have a strong policy against that in this country.

Getting from 5 percent to 19.9% is not cheap. It increases fuel cost, but it can shrink capital cost by enabling smaller cores and longer refueling intervals. Some SMR developers talk about four-, five-, or even seven-year fuel cycles.

However, refueling every 12 to 18 months in today’s light-water fleet isn’t such a bad thing. We know how to do it efficiently. Again, it comes back to economics: higher enrichment and more complex fuels might lower operating costs or capital costs in some dimensions but raise them in others. We will see.

TRISO fuel—tiny coated fuel particles—is another important development. It offers strong safety characteristics, but it requires a brand-new fuel manufacturing industry. You’re shifting from rods and bundles to fuel pebbles or compacts. That’s a huge change. So yes, designs that can use conventional LEU, conventional fuel fabrication, and existing supply chains have a meaningful advantage in terms of deployment risk and financing.

Bryce: I’m glad we have the nuclear engineer on this panel. I would not have given a concise answer to that. Let me turn to a few audience questions.

One asks: “Thoughts on thorium?”

Quick take, Ray—we’ve talked about all these other fuels. Thorium has long been discussed. Any thoughts?

Rothrock: We’ve been talking about thorium for decades. It has interesting properties, but the world has built a trillion-dollar infrastructure around uranium. To pivot that entire infrastructure to thorium would be a massive undertaking. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I don’t see it as the near-term winner.

Bryce: Another question: “How many micro-nuclear plants are really operating and up and running in the US.?” If we counted the Navy, that would be several dozen, right?

Rothrock: Oh my gosh, yes—on the order of a hundred if you count all the ships and submarines. Then there are 20 or 30 TRIGA-type research reactors at universities and labs. So there are a lot of small reactors operating, just not in the commercial power sector.

Bryce: Another question: if the Navy can do it, why can’t we make that happen more broadly in the civilian market? You’ve talked about the enrichment part of that. The Navy has an integrated supply chain and they’re taken care of.

Rothrock: Right. The Navy’s reactors are fueled with much higher enrichment—on the order of 90 percent. They fuel a reactor for the life of the ship, because it’s very hard to change the reactor once it’s in the hull. You fuel it once and that’s it.

They also have very different operational requirements. If the ship has to move, you can’t wait three or four hours to fire up turbines. You have to go to full power within seconds. That’s why they use such high enrichment and very robust designs. It’s a completely different use case and policy framework.

Bryce: Jim, here’s a question for you: FERC is scrutinizing co-location deals right now. Do you think direct hyperscaler-to-plant contracts are good for the grid?

Burke: I’m thrilled to get that question, because co-location came up in the previous panel as well. Two things matter: speed to power, which is the primary objective for large customers, and system efficiency. There are two things we need to do.

First, we need to recognize the excess capacity that’s currently on the system for about 99 percent of the hours in a year. That’s today’s combined-cycle gas turbine fleet. Across the country, the combined-cycle fleet—regulated and competitive—runs at only about 50 to 55 percent utilization.

So when people say “we’re out of capacity,” I think that’s a misdirection. The assumption seems to be that to hook up a data center, someone has to go build a brand-new plant. That’s not where we are today.

By 2030 and beyond, we will need new plants. But in the interim, what needs to happen is we place data centers as close as possible to existing or new generation to minimize the amount of new transmission that has to be built. Put load and resource as close together as possible. If we do that, we’ll better utilize the existing combined-cycle fleet across the country. You could move average utilization from 50 percent to 70 percent and support on the order of 50 gigawatts of data-center load by 2030.

There’s one thing data centers have to do, and it’s important. In that one percent of the hours—the super peaks—they have to be willing to curtail some percentage of their load. Not 100 percent, but enough to relieve stress. They can slow compute, move workloads geographically, or use their backup generation. They’re bringing one-for-one backup generation already. Most of the time, that’s diesel or natural gas.

We’ve conflated “the grid occasionally gets tight” with “we can’t connect data centers.” The math does not support that. The lowest-cost way is better utilization and targeted curtailment, rather than assuming you must build a brand-new plant for every new data center immediately.

Bryce: So peak shaving and better utilization of existing capacity would be the better option for everyone?

Burke: From now until about 2030, yes. After that, if we actually see the load show up and persist, we’ll need new builds. I still think there’s some uncertainty. The hyperscalers we work with want the option to grow, but they don’t always want to make 20- or 30-year commitments to lock in a gigawatt at a very expensive price. Better utilization gives us time to see how demand really develops over the next two or three years.

We will need new builds, but we don’t need to stop connecting data centers today while we wait for new plants. That day is coming, but it’s not here yet.

Bryce: Bottom line, you’re saying we need better utilization of what we have.

Burke: 100%.

Bryce: At ARPA–E, Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, raised this very idea—that AI itself might be used to do better grid management and optimization for exactly this purpose.

We have about a minute and forty-five seconds left. Another audience question: “If you had to pick one country as a model for nuclear energy, which would it be? France, China, or another?”

Ray, one country for the US to follow—who would it be?

Rothrock: I’m not sure the US has to “follow” anyone. France actually followed us. They standardized around a small set of designs and built a lot of them. That’s the lesson: standardization and repetition work.

Bryce: So that’s a model: standardize around one or a few designs, build a bunch, and focus on repetition.

Jim?

Burke: I think people in the US would have to ask themselves how much state-owned, state-controlled, state-backed investment they really want. That’s the fundamental question.

Energy is one of those sectors where this question always comes up, just like in health care and other areas. I actually think the innovation and sharpness that our capital markets demand will make us the long-term winner.

In the short term, yes, you can push more projects through if you have strong central government backing like China does. But I don’t think that means they’re going to be the long-term “winner” in nuclear. I think this country can be.

Bryce: Blue-sky question to close. 2050 is too far away—I’ll be dead by then. So let’s say 2035. How much new nuclear capacity will be online in the US by 2035? I’m talking about new nuclear, not restarts at Palisades or Three Mile Island—new reactors. Ray?

Rothrock: If there are three reactors connected to the grid by then, that’ll be a great day. Three reactors of any size or type—I don’t care.

Bryce: Three reactors, so less than three gigawatts?

Rothrock: Three or four gigawatts, roughly.

Bryce: Jim?

Burke: And you’re excluding uprates—you’re talking about new units, either on new sites or new reactors on existing sites?

Bryce: Correct. New reactors.

Burke: I’d say certainly less than five gigawatts. I’m with Ray: probably in the two- to three-gigawatt range.

Bryce: I’ve said ten, so I’m going to stick with ten, because I’m an optimist.

Now, you all don’t know this, but we’re going to end with a song. Ray is actually a musician—a bass player—and he’s wearing his Reddy Kilowatt pin. If you don’t know Reddy Kilowatt, he was a cartoon character from the 1920s on, created when the industry was making more power than the public was using.

Utilities went on radio and then television with ads featuring Reddy to encourage women in particular to use more power in the home. Reddy was a cartoon character selling the promise of abundant electricity. So here we go:

“I wash and dry your clothes, play your radios,

I can heat your coffee pot.

I am always there, with lots of power to spare,

Because I’m Reddy… Kilowatt.

Remember, just plug in—I’m Reddy…”

[Audience laughter and applause.]

Jim, you can join in next time.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Jim Burke from Vistra and Ray Rothrock.

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Still on vacation, but taking a brief vacation from the vacation to catch up on news and weigh in on something that is more important than Trump’s ballroom: the ongoing consequences of America’s disastrous war with Iran.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Iran has made a proposal for reopening, but Trump, according to the New York Times, is “dissatisfied” with the plan, among other things because “accepting it could appear to deny Mr. Trump a victory.” Indeed: Claiming victory tends to be hard when you’ve lost, badly.

How long will it take before Trump accepts the reality that he doesn’t have the cards, that in the end his Iran venture will be resolved in a way that leaves Iran stronger and America weaker than before the war? Markets are growing increasingly pessimistic. Here’s the price of Brent crude:

The price drop after the ceasefire was announced has been almost completely reversed. And the longer reality denial lasts, the worse it will get.

As I argued a week ago, ultimately the energy crisis is physical: if the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf remains deeply depressed, at some point there has to be enough “demand destruction” to bring consumption down to match the reduced supply.

That process has barely begun. According to a recent note from Goldman Sachs (no link), here’s what is going on with world oil supply and demand:

Extreme inventory draws. We estimate that 14.5mb/d of Persian Gulf crude production losses are driving global oil inventories to draw at a record 11-12mb/d pace in April.

Translation: So far, despite much higher oil prices, demand for oil has fallen by only a fraction of the loss of supply. Instead, the world economy is running by taking oil out of storage. Since there’s only so much oil in the tanks, this can’t go on. So if the Strait doesn’t reopen, prices will have to soar high enough — and inflict sufficient economic damage — to destroy another 11 or more million barrels a day of demand. That’s a lot.

But Trump is talking about his ballroom.

This may seem weird, but it makes sense if you view it psychologically. Trump is clearly dissociating. His fragile sense of self-worth depends on constantly believing that he’s a winner while others are losers. Now he’s faced with the reality that he, more or less single-handedly, led America to humiliating strategic defeat.

He’s losing on other fronts, too. The fall of Viktor Orban was a big defeat for Trump. So, I’d argue, is the survival of Ukraine, which appears to be gradually gaining the upper hand over Putin’s Russia despite Trump’s attempt to betray our erstwhile ally.

So Trump is coping by tuning out the war he started, focusing on a grandiose, ego-boosting project that lets him assert dominance over servile Republicans and businesses that are footing the bill.

But while he may be done with his war, the war isn’t done with him — or with the world economy. And the longer his fugue state lasts, the worse the damage will get.

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The initiation of a controlled nuclear fission chain reaction at the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor sees India move into the second stage of a three-stage nuclear programme which ultimately aims to achieve a closed fuel cycle using the country's abundant thorium.

The 500 MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalkpakkam in Tamil Nadu attained first criticality on 6 April at 08:25 pm, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) announced, with the milestone marking "a significant step toward strengthening India's long-term energy security and advancing its indigenous nuclear technology capabilities."

The PFBR technology was designed and developed by the DAE’s Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR). The reactor was built and commissioned by Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Ltd (BHAVINI), a government enterprise under the DAE. Construction began in 2004, with an original expected completion date of 2010. India’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board officially granted permission for the First Approach to Criticality - including the loading of fuel into the reactor core and the start of low power physics experiments - in mid-2024. Last August, Minister of State Jitendra Singh told India’s parliament that delays in completion of the project had been mainly due to “first-of-a-kind technological issues” during the commissioning process.

The attainment of first criticality “follows the successful completion of all stipulated safety requirements, with clearance granted by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) after rigorous review,” BHAVINI said.

“Today, India takes a defining step in its civil nuclear journey, advancing the second stage of its nuclear programme,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on social media, adding that the PFBR “reflects the depth of our scientific capability and the strength of our engineering enterprise. It is a decisive step towards harnessing our vast thorium reserves in the third stage of the programme. A proud moment for India.”

The PFBR uses uranium-plutonium mixed oxide, or MOX, fuel surrounded by a ‘blanket’ of uranium-238, which, through neutron absorption, is converted into fissile plutonium-239. This enables the reactor to generate more fuel than it consumes - it ‘breeds’ fuel. The PFBR is also designed to use thorium-232 in the blanket, which can be transmuted into fissile uranium-233.

“This unique capability significantly enhances the utilisation of nuclear fuel resources and enables the country to extract far greater energy from its limited uranium reserves while also preparing for large-scale use of thorium in the future,” BHAVINI said. The fast breeder programme “strengthens strategic capabilities in nuclear fuel cycle technologies, advanced materials, reactor physics and large-scale engineering,” and the knowledge and infrastructure developed through the programme “will support future reactor designs and next-generation nuclear technologies”.

Fast breeder reactors form the second stage of India’s three-stage nuclear programme, using plutonium recovered from the reprocessing of used fuel from the pressurised heavy water and light water reactors that form the first stage of the programme. The third stage envisages using advanced heavy water reactors to burn thorium-plutonium fuels and breed fissile uranium-233, achieving a thorium-based closed nuclear fuel cycle.

According to World Nuclear Association information, some 20 fast neutron reactors, including some that have supplied electricity commercially, have operated around the world since the 1950s - although not all have been breeders.

India currently has about 7,900 MW of nuclear generation from 24 operable nuclear power plants, and is planning a large expansion of its nuclear capacity. The country says that 17 nuclear power reactors with a total of 13,100 MW capacity are either under construction (7) or under pre-project activities (10). It is aiming to reach a nuclear energy capacity of about 100 GW by 2047 as part of its Viksit Bharat development strategy.

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Kairos Power Hermes 2 commercial-scale demonstration plant. The first electricity-producing Gen IV reactor to receive an NRC construction permit.

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At this critical moment for U.S. energy, we’re accelerating innovation to meet the challenge head on. The work is complex, but our objectives are clear: proving a new model for nuclear energy deployment, delivering with certainty, and making a positive impact on humans and the environment.

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Over the last year or so, the idea of nuclear power has been surging in popularity. Sadly, over the last couple of decades, the anti-nuclear activists have generated such an anti-nuclear scare amongst the general public that many people now have a totally false and distorted idea of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is the future; there is no doubt about it. You can easily carry in your car enough enriched uranium to power your entire suburb for half a century. You certainly can’t do that with coal, gas, or oil.

So, one should be thankful that the future of nuclear power is now shining like a rising sun breaking through thick cloud cover. But we still need to break up much of the cloud cover, which is obscuring the truth.

As much as the science and engineering of solar panels and wind turbines have undoubtedly advanced over recent years, so has the technology of nuclear reactors. A modern nuclear reactor is very far advanced, in comparison to the scary images created in the public mind of a Chernobyl or Fukushima.

However, we are also finding that the philosophy of nuclear power is altering the concept of electricity generation. A coal-fired power station has to be built near where the coal is for economic reasons. In the case of oil and gas, long pipelines have to be built to carry the fuels from delivery points to points of use. In contrast, a large nuclear power station can have its entire annual supply of nuclear fuel delivered in one truck, once. So, in principle, you can put a nuclear power station wherever you like. It does not have to be near the fuel supply point. Generally, however, there has been one significant limitation for new large nuclear power stations, and that is water for cooling. Large nuclear power stations have tended to be built on a coastline, or on the banks of very large lakes.

As a rule of thumb, a factory to produce canned beans, bags of sugar, or containers of milk, is built as large as economically possible, because profitability goes up with the economy of scale. Nuclear power has followed the same principle. Until now. Realization has now dawned that for electricity production, bigger plants are not always better. This is largely because of the very small amount of fuel required. The electricity generation philosophy is changing, to allow planners to distribute many smaller nuclear power stations to where the consumers are. This approach minimizes the need for long expensive electricity transmission lines. Such small nuclear stations are now being called Small Modular Reactors. In addition, some of them are being designed to be cooled using helium gas, and not water. So, with a gas cooled reactor, the water availability constraint evaporates like the dawn mist.

A modern large reactor is typically around 1200 MW in size, or larger.

An SMR is defined as being less than 300 MW in size, with some being as small as 10 or 20 MW. So, it is possible to imagine a factory, mine, or town, owning its own nuclear reactor. In fact, a facility such as one of these can even have its own electricity grid, which is not connected into a national grid, and need only be half a dozen kilometers in diameter…or smaller.

The ‘modular’ in the name implies the goal of building most of the nuclear reactor indoors, like motor cars are made on a production line. Then one merely transports the SMR in easily transportable subassemblies to the site, where they are essentially bolted altogether, thereby getting rid of many difficult processes such as cutting and welding outdoors on site.

So, this modular approach leads one to the obvious conclusion that SMR systems will be inexpensive to build and will drop in cost as their versatility catches on.

SMR’s can be owned by private companies at their respective points of consumption. Clearly, one would expect them to proliferate across the country, so it would be logical to ask, “How will we control them from technical and legal perspectives?” In parallel, we are seeing an explosion of internet use, linked to the incredible prospects for Artificial Intelligence, universally now just called AI. So, we link numbers of SMR’s together, and to a monitoring station, using the internet. Reactors can be in different states or even different countries. In the monitoring stations. technicians would watch pressures, temperatures, flow rates, and much more. Any minor deviation in any reactor would cause a warning to signal in the monitoring station. Operators would then direct various responses. The station would also monitor stores of spare parts and where they are located, so that each reactor does not have to hold its own stock.

Another interesting point is that some SMR systems operate at high temperatures, in the hundreds of degrees, which allows for another interesting option. The heat can be used directly without the need to make electricity. If the reactor is at a chemicals processing facility, then just take the heat straight into the chemicals plant in the form of hot steam.

Undoubtedly, in the nuclear power world, the future is not what it used to be.

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From Erosion to Lightning the Offshore Turbine Blade Faces It All

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In my new open letter to Ed Ballard, I respond to his recent WSJ article claiming that green energy “makes more sense with each new [oil] price shock.” I explain why the opposite is actually true: the fundamental problems of intermittency, massive hidden costs, and grid instability remain unchanged regardless of fossil fuel prices.

For example, a 1 GW wind farm operating at ~35% capacity factor still requires 7–10 times more installed capacity, enormous new transmission lines, and constant fossil or nuclear backup to match the reliable output of a single combined-cycle gas turbine — costs never reflected in the misleading LCOE numbers.

Even worse, while solar and wind are advertised with an LCOE of roughly $40 per MWh, making them reliable, durable, and available on demand pushes the real system cost to 10–20 times higher, in the range of $400–$800 per MWh.

Read the full letter here: https://www.academia.edu/165641404/Open_Letter_to_Ed_Ballard_Re_Why_Green_Energy_Makes_More_Sense_With_Each_Price_Shock_WSJ_April_9_2026

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According to a report from the South China Morning Post, China now possesses the capability to construct as many as 50 nuclear reactors at the same time. The China Nuclear Energy Association released the findings, which detail an ability to manage numerous projects across their entire development timeline. The report indicates that China's position in nuclear technology has advanced from following others to matching them and now leading in certain aspects. This expansion forms part of a broader national strategy to lower carbon emissions and decrease dependence on fossil fuels. China's goal is to establish itself as a dominant force in nuclear power by the year 2030, aiming to exceed the United States in total installed capacity. The country currently operates 60 commercial nuclear reactors and is building 36 more, a figure that constitutes over half of the world's reactors currently under construction. Authorities have also granted approval for 16 additional reactors. The report states that upon completion of all these projects, the nation's installed nuclear power capacity will hit 125 gigawatts. A CNEA official projected that by 2040, China's installed capacity could reach 200 gigawatts. Please mention the Source: https://www.indexbox.io/blog/china-can-now-build-50-nuclear-reactors-concurrently-aims-for-global-leadership-by-2030/

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The United States is running short on the equipment that keeps its lights on. The components supporting our grid are difficult to procure, increasingly costly, and, for certain equipment, largely imported. That strain will only grow as electricity demand surges from AI data centers, electrification, and domestic manufacturing.

Luckily, a template to solve the problem already exists.

In February, the Trump administration announced Project Vault—a $12 billion initiative to build America’s first strategic reserve of critical minerals for civilian industry, backed by a $10 billion Export-Import Bank (EXIM) loan. Project Vault is still in its early stages, and important questions remain about its implementation. But the model it established—an EXIM-backed, demand-driven, public-private reserve that protects American competitiveness—has already demonstrated that the federal government can move quickly and at scale.

The next use for this model is obvious. America’s grid equipment shortage the reliability of the electric power system along with the economic growth and national security that depend on it. Call it Project SURGE—the Strategic U.S. Reserve for Grid Equipment.

The U.S. grid is under more pressure than at any point in modern history. Nearly one third of transmission infrastructure and one half of distribution infrastructure is near or past its intended lifespan. Electricity demand is skyrocketing, requiring new grid infrastructure. At the same time, extreme weather events are damaging existing infrastructure more frequently. Together, these factors have resulted in record grid equipment demand.

American supply chains have not kept pace. The equipment underpinning the electric system is increasingly expensive and hard to get. Prices for key components like transformers have quadrupled. Lead times have doubled, in part because of a yawning dependency on imports and uncertain supply chains. About 80% of large power transformers and 50% of distribution transformers are imported, and even domestically manufactured grid equipment relies heavily on imported inputs like laminations, stacked cores, and electrical steel.

These constraints have real consequences. Grid equipment shortages have delayed clean energy projects, limiting electricity supply while costs skyrocket, and caused data centers to sit empty waiting for power. Dwindling reserves of spare equipment leave utilities less able to restore service after disruptions, prolonging outages that already cost the economy over $120 billion a year.

The private sector and government have taken steps to address the shortage, but not at the necessary scale or speed. Manufacturers have committed nearly $2 billion to North American transformer manufacturing expansions since 2023. It will take years for all these facilities to come online, however, and many manufacturers are reliant on imported inputs. Industry operates vital stockpile programs—such as the Edison Electric Institute’s Spare Transformer Equipment Program and the Grid Assurance program—but these are generally limited to providing emergency backstops of specific components to large utilities and transmission owners. Electric cooperatives, public power utilities, and commercial and industrial customers are largely left out, as are domestic manufacturers who depend on imported inputs.

To support record-high demand, serve all consumers, and enable domestic manufacturing, a grid equipment reserve requires both a significant infusion of capital and coordination with a broad cross-section of industry. Building on the Project Vault model, EXIM can provide the capital to facilitate a large-scale grid equipment reserve designed around the actual needs of grid equipment consumers and manufacturers. Critically, SURGE can be executed within EXIM’s current authorities and requires no new money from Congress.

EXIM would provide a direct loan to an independent corporation—let’s say SURGE Co.—to purchase and store critical equipment and inputs needed for domestic equipment manufacturing. The government would not dictate what SURGE Co. stockpiles. Instead, it would bring together participants—utilities, power producers, data centers, other consumers, and domestic grid equipment manufacturers—to work with SURGE Co. to identify what goes into the reserve, mirroring Project Vault’s approach and avoiding duplication with existing private sector stockpiles. Like Vault, participants would pay a commitment fee for guaranteed access, which would fund loan repayment, storage, and other costs.

Participants would draw from the reserve in emergencies like supply disruptions, foreign export restrictions, natural disasters, or attacks. They could also draw for routine use, provided they replenish the reserve—like Vault. This inventory rotation smooths demand, prevents technological obsolescence, and keeps the reserve fresh.

The stable demand pull created by SURGE can also act as a tool to bolster U.S. domestic manufacturing. While statutory limitations may require SURGE Co. to initially purchase imported equipment, replenishments could be sourced from domestic manufacturers to boost production at home. And by stockpiling critical inputs, SURGE can give domestic manufacturers the supply chain certainty they need to invest in expansion.

Project Vault proved the federal government can move decisively to protect vulnerable supply chains. The grid equipment shortage is a version of the same problem. EXIM should work with industry and agencies like the Department of Energy to launch SURGE before the next crisis forces the issue.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

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Dear Mr. Ballard,

cc: ed.ballard@wsj.com

I have sent you several detailed emails over the past few years outlining the engineering and economic realities of integrating variable renewable energy (VRE). You have never replied. Your latest column—celebrating the Iran/Hormuz crisis as yet another “proof” that solar-plus-battery is now the rational choice—is the latest example of journalistic cheerleading that substitutes press-release optimism for rigorous system-level analysis. As a power-plant design engineer with decades of hands-on experience specifying dispatchable generation, I write this open letter to correct the record, not in theory, but in the hard language of capital costs, ancillary services, capacity factors, and ecological externalities that your piece airbrushes away.

Your star exhibit is the Philippines’ MTerra Solar project: 3.5 GW solar + 4.5 GWh battery storage, fast-tracked amid LNG shortages, now supposedly delivering 13 hours of power “marginally below” LNG cost. You quote Actis investor Rahul Agrawal: “This is not theory. This is actually happening on the ground now.” Indeed, it is—but the ground truth is far uglier than your narrative admits.

1. Intermittency is not a rounding error; it is the dominant cost driver. Even with batteries, MTerra is engineered for ~12–13 hours of mid-merit output. The remaining 11–12 hours (and any multi-day typhoon-induced lull) still require dispatchable backup. My own peer-reviewed analysis of ancillary-service burdens shows that adding solar and wind to a reliable grid inflates total system costs by 135–235 % once frequency regulation, inertia, voltage support, and ramping are properly valued. The raw LCOE of ~$40/MWh becomes a delivered cost of ~$500/MWh.

See: Terigi Ciccone, “A Narrow Lens on Ancillary Services: Overlooking the Full Costs and Ecological Damage of Solar and Wind Integration” https://www.academia.edu/164800695/A_Narrow_Lens_on_Ancillary_Services_Overlooking_the_Full_Costs_and_Ecological_Damage_of_Solar_and_Wind_Integration_docx

2. The “phenomenal” price drop in Chinese panels and batteries is a geopolitical trap, not progress. You correctly note falling panel costs, but you fail to mention that China controls ~85% of solar manufacturing and ~80% of the battery supply chain. Swapping Middle-East oil dependence for Beijing’s critical-mineral monopoly and state-subsidized overcapacity is not energy security; it is energy servitude. When those subsidies or export policies shift, the “cheap” becomes expensive overnight.

3. Full-system costing reveals multipliers your LCOE ignores. Economist Bjørn Lomborg has repeatedly documented the same reality using Value-Adjusted LCOE (VALCOE). A peer-reviewed study he cites shows that once reliability and backup are included, wind power becomes 11–12× and solar up to 38–42× more expensive than combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT).

Bjørn Lomborg, “Why solar and wind power aren’t winning,” Financial Post, 17 April 2024 https://financialpost.com/opinion/why-solar-wind-power-arent-winning

(Identical findings appear in Lomborg’s “The True Cost of Wind and Solar Energy,” NH Journal, 20 May 2024.)

My own comparison of 1 GW reliable output at 99.9 % uptime reaches the same conclusion: onshore wind requires 5.6× and offshore wind 7.2× the capital investment of a CCGT, once overbuild, storage, transmission, and peaker plants are added.

See: Terigi Ciccone, “The Well Hidden and Distorted Costs of Renewables: A Comprehensive Comparison of Wind Power and Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Plant” https://www.academia.edu/144742450/The_Well_Hidden_and_Distorted_Costs_of_Renewables_A_Comprehensive_Comparison_of_Wind_Power_and_Combined_Cycle_Gas_Turbine_Plant

4. Academic “System LCOE” literature confirms the same directional truth— Falko Ueckerdt, Lion Hirth, and colleagues introduced System LCOE precisely because standard LCOE is misleading at high VRE penetrations. Their 2013 analysis (and subsequent updates) shows integration/profile costs can equal or exceed generation costs themselves once wind shares exceed ~20 %. At the levels now being forced, those costs become an economic barrier.

Ueckerdt et al., “System LCOE: What are the costs of variable renewables?” Energy 63 (2013) 61–75 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544213009390

5. Ecological and material externalities are catastrophic. Your column is silent on land use (10× that of nuclear or gas for equivalent firm power), avian/bat mortality, 78 million tons of non-recyclable solar waste projected by 2050, and the concrete-steel-copper footprint of batteries that must be replaced every 8–12 years. My third paper tallies these hidden costs in full.

See: Terigi Ciccone, “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again” https://www.academia.edu/145161070/Revised_Lets_Make_Electricity_Affordable_Again_Terigi_Ciccone_Revised

Moreover, the raw-material demands are staggering. Utility-scale solar and wind installations consume vastly greater quantities of concrete, steel, copper, silver, rare-earth elements, and other minerals per unit of firm, reliable electricity than any dispatchable source. This triggers massive mining operations with severe habitat destruction, water contamination, and toxic tailings. Manufacturing these components remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for the energy-intensive processes of silicon purification, steel smelting, and mineral extraction. In full life-cycle terms, many VRE systems may never recover the total primary energy invested in their construction, installation, maintenance, and eventual replacement—rendering the entire enterprise an energy and cost sink rather than a net contributor.

6. Real-world stress tests expose the fantasy. Philippine typhoons shred solar farms; Florida hurricanes do the same. After every major storm, we see acres of twisted panels and batteries that cannot survive Category 4 winds. Yet the same voices warning about climate risk keep prescribing an energy system that collapses precisely when the weather turns ugly.

7. Ultimately, we are inflicting these enormous costs for no good reason. The entire policy edifice rests on the assumption that anthropogenic CO₂ is the primary driver of dangerous warming. In reality, CO₂’s greenhouse effect is already near saturation in its principal absorption bands; additional emissions yield only minuscule marginal forcing. The true temperature powerhouses on Earth are gravitational auto-compression (the dry adiabatic lapse rate driven by atmospheric mass and pressure) and the dominant water-vapor/latent-heat cycle, which together govern the vast majority of Earth’s energy balance. We are dismantling reliable, dispatchable power systems, subsidizing foreign supply chains, and covering productive land in fragile panels—all to chase a trace-gas tail that cannot wag the climatic dog.

8. Increased atmospheric CO₂ is demonstrably greening the planet. NASA satellite data confirm that rising CO₂ has driven substantial global greening over recent decades. The increase in leaf area is equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States, with CO₂ fertilization responsible for approximately 70 % of this greening across 25–50 % of vegetated lands. Far from harming the biosphere, higher CO₂ levels are enhancing vegetation growth, boosting agricultural yields, and expanding natural habitats worldwide.

9. Humans are not the sole source of rising atmospheric CO₂. As I document in detail in “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again,” natural sources—including volcanic activity, oceanic degassing, and other geological processes—play a far more significant role in the global carbon cycle than the prevailing narrative acknowledges. Attributing nearly all recent increases to human emissions oversimplifies complex geophysical realities and ignores the “Volcanic Vibes” that have shaped atmospheric CO₂ long before industrial civilization.

Mr. Ballard, energy crises do not “hammer home” the virtues of green energy. They expose its fatal engineering defects: zero inertia, negative correlation with demand, dependence on foreign supply chains, and an energy return that fails even basic life-cycle scrutiny. The rational response is an all-of-the-above portfolio anchored by dispatchable, high-capacity-factor sources—modern CCGT, nuclear (including SMRs), and geothermal—with targeted renewables only where they demonstrably lower system cost without compromising reliability.

Your repeated refusal to engage with the peer-reviewed literature or practicing engineers suggests a commitment to narrative over evidence. I invite you, once again, to reply—publicly or privately—and defend your claim that solar-plus-battery “makes more sense with each price shock” once full system costs, ecological and material realities, geopolitical risks, and the actual physics and benefits of atmospheric CO₂ are included. Until then, this open letter stands as the record of your April 9 column that you omitted. Let’s bury the narrative. 🔥

Respectfully but firmly,

Terigi Ciccone Ret. Gas Turbine Engineer for power generation and aviation, an independent researcher on climate, Sarasota, Florida, USA

Additional Sources and Suggested Readings

1. A SIMPLIFIED EXPLANATION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE FOR POLICYMAKERS AND HIGH SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY-LEVEL SCIENCE STUDENTS https://www.academia.edu/125804621/A_SIMPLIFIED_EXPLANATION_OF_CLIMATE_SCIENCE_FOR_POLICYMAKERS_AND_HIGH_SCHOOL_AND_UNIVERSITY_LEVEL_SCIENCE_STUDENTS

2. Game Over: Grok 3-Beta Drops the Climate Bombshell https://www.academia.edu/165490622/Game_Over_Grok_3_Beta_Drops_the_Climate_Bombshell

3. Revised, the benefits of increased CO2 and warmer temperatures, Part 1 https://www.academia.edu/125517925/Revised_the_benefits_of_increased_CO2_and_warmer_temperatures_Part

4. Volcanic Vibes – 18 July 2025 (1).pdf https://www.academia.edu/143317902/Volcanic_Vibes_18July2025_1_pdf

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The Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea

The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz reveals a truth that many European policymakers have ignored: Humanity remains structurally dependent on oil. This reality, first highlighted during the 1973 oil shortage and reinforced by the 1979 version – triggered by Iran – continues to be neglected, even openly dismissed, by certain political elites.

A half century later, energy insecurity persists with undiminished intensity. Yet as early as 2000, the European Commission emphasized the imperative for the European Union to ensure the security of energy supplies. Those warnings, however, were not heeded, as priority was given instead to reducing CO₂ emissions and promoting “renewable” energy.

As a former official in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy for 36 years, I have witnessed relentless efforts to promote so-called alternatives to hydrocarbons and their disastrous results. Yet, in the face of the current crisis, the EU refuses to recognize its desperate need for fossil fuels.

In May 2023, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, declared that the fossil-fuel-based growth model is “simply obsolete.” The partial blockade of the Strait of Hormuz starkly exposes the irony of that statement.

Nevertheless, most political leaders continue to claim simplistically that expansion of wind and solar power will free us from dependence on the Strait.

This view is not only naïve but also mistaken, as it stems from a fundamental confusion between electricity and energy. Wind turbines and solar panels produce electricity, but they do not generate heat – the essential driver of industrial processes, transportation and heating. Today, roughly 75% of the primary energy consumed in the European Union comes from fossil fuels, while the global share remains about 87%. It is illusory to believe that “renewable” electricity can meet basic needs.

Beyond being unable to fill overall energy demand, wind and solar also impose exorbitant – and well-documented – costs on consumers and businesses. Instead of pursuing inadequate alternatives, the EU should acknowledge that oil will remain indispensable for a very long time and abandon its delusional “green” credo.

The EU must produce the hydrocarbons it needs rather than continue relying on imports. For now, such production is constrained by legislative bans and political choices that are disconnected from geopolitical realities. In France, for example, the Hulot law prohibits the exploitation of hydrocarbons, despite the country’s significant potential in this area.

The Equatorial Margin of South America, stretching from northern Brazil to Venezuela, is rich in hydrocarbons. Guyana, located east of Venezuela, is establishing itself – thanks to U.S. companies – as an oil Eldorado of impressive proportions.

Aware of this windfall, Brazilian President Lula da Silva decided to begin exploration of the Equatorial Margin in open contradiction to Brazil’s own climate-governance rhetoric.

Meanwhile, French Guiana, although in the heart of this highly promising zone, remains paralyzed by legislative prohibitions. A French minister recently attempted to reopen the question, but President Emmanuel Macron rebuked him.

French intransigence to reality contrasts with Asian pragmatism that pursues domestic energy development in a variety of forms and displays geopolitical savvy. China, India, and Japan have already secured assurances from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to protect their navigation in the Persian Gulf.

The EU must recognize that the world has entered a new era of energy geopolitics, shaped by the abundance of fossil fuels, the determination of new players asserting themselves in this evolving landscape, and, above all, the resolve of emerging countries to secure their future through abundant and affordable energy. This is the true lesson of the Strait of Hormuz.

In this context, the so‑called energy transition to wind and solar power is exposed as a political illusion specific to an EU under pressure on all fronts. At the March European Council, several member states called for abandoning the carbon tax – disguised under the label of the Emissions Trading System – and obtained a revision of this mechanism in the hope of ending economic self‑sabotage.

Domestic oil and gas production could, at the very least, substantially replace hydrocarbons that the EU imports from the Persian Gulf. It is time to move beyond simplistic rhetoric and adopt a realistic, balanced approach. If the European Union is to meet the challenges of the 21st century, it must make judicious use of its own hydrocarbons and abandon its futile quest for decarbonization.

Originally published in Washington Examiner on March 30, 2026.

Dr. Samuel Furfari is a professor of energy geopolitics in Brussels and London, a former senior official with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy and a member of the CO₂ Coalition. He is author of the paper, “Energy Addition, Not Transition,” and 18 books, including “Energy Insecurity: The organised destruction of the EU’s competitiveness.”