Holtec Nuclear Corporation is the antithesis of Hadron Energy.

As I reported here last month, Hadron Energy, a startup that aims to build a 10-megawatt light-water reactor, went public on May 26 via a SPAC merger. The IPO quickly made the company’s founder, Sam Gibson, a 25-year-old who graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in mechanical engineering in May of 2023, a centimillionaire, or at least it did on paper. The company’s website includes photos of Gibson on the university campus and informs us that he “brings midwestern values of putting others before himself.”

Gibson’s selfless attitude may be admirable, but Hadron isn’t a business; it’s little more than a business plan.

Hadron hasn’t begun serious regulatory engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it hasn’t begun fabricating a prototype reactor, and it’s approximately 2,432 miles behind the 41 other US companies that are trying to develop, license, and deploy small modular reactors. (The US now has eight publicly traded pure-play SMR companies that have a combined market capitalization of about $21 billion.)

But Hadron’s IPO — and Deep Fission’s on June 18 — provides yet another example of the froth and hype that are hallmarks of today’s SMR sector. Like many of their SMR competitors, Hadron and Deep Fission are riding the wave of AI-related excitement. On its website, Hadron says it aims to provide juice to “defense installations, AI and hyperscale data-center campuses” and “remote industrial sites and communities.”

Now compare Hadron to Holtec, which filed its S-1 with the SEC on July 10. If Hadron represents the hype, froth, and foam of the current moment, Holtec is the beer — a stout beer. While Hadron is a rank SMR startup that will soon be running out of cash and prospects, Holtec is a 40-year veteran of the nuclear sector that is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and boatloads of cash.

I’ve been digging into Holtec’s 400-page S-1. What I found was a successful company that is generating lots of cash — and, due to its strong balance sheet, huge backlog, and long-standing position in the nuclear sector — it could generate even more cash in the years ahead.

Let’s take a look.

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On Tuesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order banning the construction of large data centers for one year. It’s the first statewide ban in the US, and yet another example of the growing backlash against Big Tech and data centers. Hochul’s ban is the 179th rejection or restriction of data centers in the US in 2026. For comparison, there were 49 rejections in 2025 and just 9 in 2024. All of these are documented in the Data Center Rejection Database, which is the only free, online, searchable database of its kind.

In this 7-minute video, I discuss the New York moratorium and a report recently released by Milltown Partners that confirms what I’ve been saying for months: What we are seeing is a cultural backlash against Big Tech. As Milltown puts it, the backlash is being driven by “anti-tech sentiment more than NIMBYism or environmentalism.” Milltown’s findings are based on a survey of nearly 6,900 registered voters in five large states: Texas, Georgia, Michigan, California, and North Carolina. Rather than write an article about these developments, I decided to make this short video. I hope you like it. And if you do, please share it. Thanks.

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Of all the Enron executives, Lou Pai was one of the most arrogant and most flamboyant. Pai was also one of Jeff Skilling’s closest lieutenants. As I explained in my 2002 book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, And The Death of Enron, Pai had two passions in life: “Money and watching young women take their clothes off — but not necessarily in that order.”

Pai rose to the top at Enron because, as I wrote 24 years ago, he “had the intellectual firepower and focus needed to create the computer programs and systems that allowed Skilling to fulfill his vision of changing Enron into a quasi-investment bank.” And the more money Pai made for Enron, the more Pai was inclined to spend the company’s money. On one occasion in 1990, Pai submitted an expense report to the company that included a lunch at Rick’s, one of Houston’s most famous strip clubs. As one executive told me, the bill was “$757 for one lunch.”

Pai is also famous for his excellent timing. He left Enron in mid-2001, several months before the company collapsed in December 2001. That timing was fortuitous. He was never charged with any criminal wrongdoing at the company. But Pai didn’t leave empty-handed. In all, Pai sold $270 million of Enron stock, more than any other insider at the company. Enron CEO Ken Lay was the second-largest insider seller, with $184 million in sales.

Those Enron numbers come to mind because of what is happening at Oklo Inc., the SMR company that went public in May 2024. As I wrote on March 10, in “Oklo’s Other Enrichment Cycle,” the company has been a darling of Silicon Valley and its co-founders, Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, are among the most prominent faces of the new generation of nuclear entrepreneurs. Cochran, a photogenic graduate of MIT, has appeared at numerous high-profile events, including the Aspen Ideas Festival. DeWitte was part of a contingent that visited the White House last summer for a photo op with President Trump.

While Oklo (market cap: $8.6 billion) has received a metric ton of positive media coverage, the company is trying to commercialize its advanced reactor design in a fiercely competitive market. Oklo is one of 42 US companies now seeking to commercialize a small modular reactor. Dozens of foreign companies are trying to do the same thing. On May 12, the company reported a first-quarter operating loss of $51 million. In the same report, the company noted it has recorded an accumulated deficit of nearly $274 million.

One key difference between Enron and Oklo, of course, is that Enron was a profitable business for decades. For instance, in 1999, two years before it collapsed in one of the biggest bankruptcies in US history, Enron’s revenues totaled $40 billion, and its net income was $957 million. Meanwhile, Oklo, which was formed in 2013, still has not recorded any revenue or profit. Despite Oklo’s ongoing losses, Cochran and DeWitte are continuing to sell significant chunks of their Oklo stock. In fact, their stock sales are leaving Lou Pai in the shade.

Here are the details on Oklo, plus two other SMR items: Deep Fission’s IPO and why the July 4 criticality hurdle matters.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has never been known for his strong political convictions. His views on any given issue are, well, malleable.

For instance, on November 14, the three-term governor raved about Google’s plan to spend $40 billion on AI and data centers during a press event in Midlothian. Abbott declared that Google was helping make Texas “the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy...We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.”

Since that event, the political sentiment around AI and Big Tech has changed — and so have Abbott’s views.

This week, during a speech in the East Texas town of Bullard, Abbott announced he would pursue a ban on data centers in rural communities. “We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott declared. He continued, “Any AI data center even thinking about coming here — they got to bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse their own water and do it in a way that reduces the cost of electricity for residents across our state...We must eliminate the tax break they are getting.” Abbott’s about-face reflects the growing backlash against Big Tech, AI and data centers. And it’s a clear reflection of what he is seeing and hearing in Texas.

As Ted Gioia noted a few days ago, “Every demographic group is now opposed to AI — especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.”

Want some examples of the public’s concerns about data centers and AI? Look no further than Texas. Last month, county commissioners in Hays County voted unanimously to approve a moratorium on data center projects until the end of this year. Also last month, a planning commission in Hamilton, Ontario, rejected a data center project after “dozens of opponents of the proposal packed the public gallery and over a hundred waited in the halls.” According to CBC, prior to the meeting, chants of “f--k AI” filled Hamilton’s city council chambers. Need another example? On a single day last month, three counties in Florida issued moratoria on data centers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We are seeing an unprecedented cultural backlash against Big Tech and AI.

Here are several items, including an updated chart on data center rejections, a rundown on Google’s soaring electricity and water use, and a link to my recent appearance on Scott Tinker’s most-excellent energy and climate talk show on PBS, Energy Switch.

Let’s take a look.

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Construction cranes are everywhere in Saigon.

From our hotel room near the banks of the Saigon River, we could see more than two dozen of them. Construction is happening all over the town, which is properly known as Ho Chi Minh City.

Five decades after the US military left the country after an ignominious war, Vietnam has become an industrial powerhouse with one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. As one media outlet put it recently, Vietnam is “Transitioning from a developing frontier into a sophisticated, high-tech industrial giant.”

I wanted to visit Vietnam for many reasons. Among them: I wanted to see the place that’s making more and more of the stuff I buy. Last month, I bought a new laptop. It was made at a Foxconn factory northeast of Hanoi. A few days after the computer arrived, I went to Costco to get a few items and stopped to investigate the men’s clothing. Regardless of the brand, nearly all of it was from Vietnam. I went home and looked at my dress shirts. Vietnam. My spiffy new sneakers? Vietnam.

Yes, China is still the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods. But Vietnam is catching up, and fast. Last year, the country’s economy grew by 8%. That means its economy is doubling in size every nine years or so. And what’s fueling Vietnam’s ability to manufacture everything from laptops and semiconductors to shoes and shorts? Massive amounts of electricity — and that juice ain’t coming from solar panels and wind turbines.

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As seen above, more than half of Vietnam’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants. And Vietnam will be burning coal, and lots of it, for many years to come. Last year, the country set a new record for coal imports. In April, it inaugurated a new 1.3 gigawatt coal-fired power plant in north-central Vietnam. And according to Enerdata, over 6 GW of new coal plants are under construction, and another 3 GW of coal-fired capacity is in development.

I’ll be publishing more about Vietnam soon. We are heading to Singapore in the morning for some speaking engagements. (I’m talking about — what else? — booming electricity demand in Southeast Asia.) After that, I have another engagement in Kuala Lumpur.

I’m hoping this visit to Vietnam won’t be my last.

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In 2016, I interviewed Sanjay Kar Chowdury, a manager at the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation. Chowdury explained that his company was founded in 1879 and that Kolkata was the second city in the British Empire, after London, to be electrified. He was particularly proud that CESC had drastically reduced the number of blackouts affecting residents of the sprawling city of 4.5 million people. When I asked him about the importance of coal to the Indian electric grid, he did not hesitate.

Coal, Chowdury said, “is a lifeline. It is a lifeline of all the thermal power stations. Without coal, you cannot survive...It’s not possible to keep the lights on without coal.”

Nothing has changed since I did that interview. (Chowdury was featured in our 2019 documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World, which is available for free on YouTube.)

Over the past decade, India’s coal use has surged by more than 40%. Last month, during a heat wave, India’s thermal power stations, nearly all of them coal-fired, provided 62% of the country’s juice. Furthermore, according to the latest figures from Global Energy Monitor, India (population 1.4 billion) is building more than 23 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity.

Alas, these facts don’t matter to the richest anti-energy NGOs in the US.

Last month, the Sierra Club (2024 revenue: $169 million) and Earthjustice (2025 revenue: $207 million) issued a press release about their lawfare campaign to shutter coal plants in Michigan and Indiana. The release quoted a “beyond coal campaign organizer” as saying that the Trump administration is “propping up the coal industry” while consumers are “stuck shouldering the costs.” It also quoted a Sierra Club attorney who said that the administration was trying to throw “archaic coal plants” a lifeline.

Those statements show, yet again, that the anti-industry industry’s campaigners know nothing about the realities of the global energy market. Far from being “archaic,” coal plants around the world, including ones in India, Japan, South Korea, and Europe, are running full tilt.

Why? The Iron Law of Electricity.

Five years ago, I coined the Iron Law of Electricity, which says, “People, businesses, and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.” I have seen the Iron Law at work with my own eyes. I’ve watched as people steal electricity (in India), pay the “generator mafia” in Lebanon) and run their own small generators (in Puerto Rico and Louisiana) to ensure they have the electricity they need to refrigerate their food, cook dinner, and heat (or cool) their homes.

Among the many impacts that the Iran War has had on the global economy -- including price spikes for everything from diesel fuel to fertilizer -- is its effect on power generation. Due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, global LNG prices have soared, leading electricity generators to reduce their natural gas consumption and increase their coal burn. My friend, John Hanekamp, who writes the excellent International Coal & Energy Summary here on Substack, recently told me he estimates global coal use is up about 6% from a year ago due to the war in Iran and other factors.

Here’s a fresh look at what’s happening in the global coal market. It includes seven new charts, one of which shows coal’s total dominance of China’s energy sector, as well as some remarkable new numbers on coal investment from the International Energy Agency.

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Last month, Heatmap News, a relentless cheerleader for the solar and wind sectors, ran an article headlined, “Trump Is Getting Away With Murdering an American Industry.” The article lamented that dozens of proposed wind projects with 30 gigawatts of generation capacity are now stranded because the Trump administration is deliberately slow-walking — or just ignoring — Big Wind’s permit applications.

The Federal Aviation Administration is doing the slow walking. The FAA is charged with assuring aviation safety. As such, it must provide a “no hazard” determination for any structure over 200 feet tall and ensure that those structures won’t interfere with civilian or military aviation. In previous administrations, the agency has routinely issued clearances for wind turbines, that can stand 500 feet tall or even taller. No longer.

Last month, the War (Defense) Department told a reporter from the Associated Press that it “intends to complete review” of all of the wind industry’s applications “efficiently without compromising the integrity of the review.” In other words, the Trump administration is telling Big Wind: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

The administration’s delay tactic is coming at a key moment. If wind developers can’t demonstrate that they are making significant progress on their projects by July 4, they are unlikely to qualify for the production tax credit, the federal subsidy that has been fueling wind energy development for decades. (Earlier this month, a federal court judge ruled that the Trump administration has to justify the halting of the subsidies. But that ruling can’t force the War Department to speed up its review.)

The Heatmap News article dutifully quoted an unnamed “energy lawyer” who whined that the Trump administration has created an “uninvestable climate.” Meanwhile, Jason Grumet, who heads the American Clean Power Association (2025 revenue: $67.5 million), moaned to the New York Times that it has become “impossible to build a new wind project” in the US.

Well, cry me a fucking river.

I’m a long-time critic of the wind industry, and proudly so. Over the past 16 years, I’ve watched Big Wind collect tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies while trying to bully individuals and rural communities across the US into accepting wind projects they don’t want. And now that Big Wind is getting shut down, I couldn’t be happier.

You should be happy, too.

Here are five reasons to cheer the garroting of Big Wind.

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On Friday, SpaceX will go public in the biggest IPO in history. The deal is expected to give the company a valuation of $1.8 trillion. SpaceX will raise about $75 billion in the transaction, and, due to his massive ownership stake in the company, Elon Musk will become the richest person in history, with an estimated net worth of $1.1 trillion.

Last week, CNBC’s Jim Cramer added to the hype when he said that SpaceX could “end up with a $5 trillion valuation on the day it comes public.”

Is SpaceX worth the $1.8 trillion? Or $5 trillion? Perhaps it is. As a friend, a longtime commodities trader, told me on the phone this morning, “The market is always right.” We both agreed that Musk is a modern-day Edison. We also agreed that the world of finance and investing has become increasingly perilous. (For the record, my pal likes US Treasury bonds.) As one media outlet noted today, the IPO is leaving common investors with “no choice but to bankroll Musk’s AI dream.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal said: “Investors’ acceptance of SpaceX’s mammoth valuation will likely hinge on whether they believe Musk can deliver on his ambitious ideas, which include colonizing Mars and launching data centers into space.”

I don’t own SpaceX stock and will not be buying it. But it’s also clear that this IPO marks a turning point in the US equities market. Sure, the market may always be right, and yes, Musk might (repeat, might) eventually build villages on the Moon and on Mars. But the IPO numbers are completely unmoored from traditional financial valuation metrics. I made the chart above to illustrate that point. As I explained on May 30, “At a valuation of $1.75 trillion, the company’s stock will be trading at 93 times current revenue.” Add in the fact that Musk will retain 85% of the company’s voting shares and that less than 5% of the company’s stock will actually be sold to the public, and the deal becomes even more incredible.

Perhaps SpaceX is worth trillions of dollars. But we live in the Age of Hype. Has the hype around SpaceX lost all contact with reality? We are about to find out.

Another Power Density Chart

Density is green. Whether we are talking about food or energy production, the goal should always be to have a small footprint. As I wrote back in 2012, “The real organizing principle for a green future is density, which not only provides the goods that we need to survive and prosper but also achieves the land-preservation goals of genuine environmentalists.”

On Sunday, I re-published a 2023 article on the Iron Law of Power Density. And since I’m mining the archives, I’m following up with the chart above, which I published in 2010 in my fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of The Future. As shown above, the power density of corn ethanol (and all biofuels) is pitifully low. Meanwhile, note the high power densities of natural gas and nuclear energy. Those numbers support my thesis, which hasn’t changed in nearly two decades: the best no-regrets energy policy is N2N, natural gas to nuclear.

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Note: You can’t understand energy and power systems if you don’t understand power density. As I explained in the article below, published on August 20, 2023, here on Substack, power density is the most important and least understood metric in physics. I’m reposting it because it is just as relevant today as it was in 2023. It’s also heartening to see that the Trump Administration has adopted power density as a key metric for determining its approach to energy policy. Last summer, Interior Secretary Doug Burghum issued an order that underscored the importance of density and noted that an offshore wind project requires 5,500 times more area to produce the same amount of electricity as a modern nuclear plant.

Before going further, I must give credit where credit is due. Jesse Ausubel’s landmark 2007 essay, “Renewable and Nuclear Heresies,” changed the course of my career. In the very first sentence of the abstract, Ausubel boldly declares, “Renewables are not green.” His essay, along with various books and articles by Vaclav Smil, forced me to think more deeply about land use, land sparing, and material intensity. That, in turn, helped me forge the thesis for my 2010 book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and The Real Fuels of The Future. Power density has since become the north star for my thinking about energy and power, and it led me to coin the Iron Law of Power Density, which says the “lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity.”

Okay. That’s a long enough introduction. Here is the 2023 article again. Please note that I’m offering a 30% discount on annual subscriptions. To get the discount, please click here.

My August 13 article, “The Power Of Power Density,” is the second most popular article I have published here on Substack. The article struck a chord. Why? I suspect that lots of people want to have a better grasp of the physics that rule our energy and power systems.

As I explained last week, power density is perhaps the most important — and yet least understood — metric in physics. Indeed, many people who work in the energy and power sectors don’t understand it. In addition, the Iron Law of Power Density — which says the lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity — helps us understand why wind and solar energy cannot, will not, ever be able to power our society. In addition to their incurable intermittency and dependence on the weather, they require too much land and other resources.

Given the favorable response to last week’s posting, I am going to expand on it here. First, I’ll explore another key metric: energy return on energy invested or EROEI. Like power density, EROEI is a critical tool for understanding why our energy and power systems continue to be dominated by hydrocarbons and why we should be focusing our efforts on natural gas and nuclear energy.

In addition, I am publishing two new graphics. The first is an updated resource intensity graphic that looks at electricity generation capacity, measured in kilograms per megawatt. The second graphic looks at the resource intensity of electricity production by measuring it in kilograms per megawatt-hour of energy produced. Spoiler alert: the new graphic shows even more clearly why offshore wind is such a loser.

Before diving into EROEI, a quick refresher: power density is a measure of energy flow that can be harnessed from a given area, volume, or mass. Thus, power density can be measured in watts per square meter, per liter, or per kilogram. I largely focus on areal power density — measured in watts per square meter — because it is the key to understanding land use and why the paltry power density of wind and solar has led to land-use conflicts from Erie County, Ohio to the Golan Heights. If you want to dive into volumetric and gravimetric power density — measured in watts per liter or watts per kilogram, which are essential to understanding motors and engines — I suggest you read my fifth book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong.)

Now, EROEI. The importance of this metric is obvious: we want maximum return on the cash we put in the bank or the stock market. We also want maximum return on the energy we spend. Just as it takes money to make money, producing energy always requires using energy. Whether it’s chopping wood for the fireplace, the diesel fuel needed to run the generators that power a drilling rig, or the electricity needed to spin the centrifuges that enrich the uranium fuel that we put in our nuclear reactors, we have to spend energy to get energy. And the less we have to spend, the better.

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As can be seen in the graphic above, wind and solar have a woefully low EROEI of 3.5:1, that is, for every unit of energy put into wind and solar, you get 3.5 units of energy out. Meanwhile, nuclear has an EROEI of 100 to 1.

Many analysts and scientists have written about EROEI, but one of the best explorations of the topic was published last year by Leigh Goehring and Adam Rozencwajg. In their essay, “The Distortions of Cheap Energy,” which is the source of the numbers in the graphic, Goehring and Rozencwajg wrote that the explosion in global economic growth that has occurred over the past 140 years or so “was entirely driven by improving EROEI. The modern world we enjoy today is the direct result of efficient and abundant sources of energy.” (Adam Rozencwajg was on the Power Hungry Podcast on January 17 talking about EROEI and other topics.)

Goehring and Rozencwajg, who run a New York-based investment firm of the same name, regularly publish analyses on trends in energy and natural resources. They continued their essay by listing the enormous amount of stuff needed to make a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine: 235 tons of steel, 600 tons of concrete, 15 tons of carbon fiber, and nine tons of copper. They sum up the problem by concluding that it would take 10 wind turbines to replace the energy produced by a single oil well in the Permian Basin. They go on:

Much of Europe’s energy crisis today is related to their massive renewable investment, all of which sports an extremely low EROEI. The questions we get asked the most are: “How could renewables possibly have such poor EROEI without anyone realizing it, and how could so much renewable investment be made with so little recognition of the problem?”

They then talk about the factors that are now coming back to haunt the wind sector, and in particular, offshore wind:

Our modeling suggests that declining (and cheap) energy prices have distorted and partially hidden the true costs of wind and solar over the last decade. Now that energy costs have surged, the true cost of installing and operating renewables are obvious. The relationship between energy input costs and the cost to produce renewable electricity is based upon our propriety research. We have not seen this argument laid out anywhere before, but the more we study the issues the more we’re convinced we are correct... Amazingly, no one has connected declining energy costs and cheap capital with the proliferation over the last decade of energy-hungry, capital-intensive projects such as wind, solar, and lithium-ion battery manufacturing. We think the two are fundamentally linked. What will happen when energy prices normalize and interest rates rise — as is happening right now?

They continued, writing. “It is no coincidence that the proliferation of renewable energy occurred during a decade of abundant cheap energy and abundant cheap capital. As both resources become scarcer and more expensive, the inherent limitation of renewable energy (i.e., its significantly worse EROEI) will come to the fore.”

By now, it should be easy to see how the Iron Law of Power Density and EROEI fit together. Low power density sources like ethanol, biomass, wind, and solar, require more resources like steel, concrete, copper, and zinc. All of those resources require expending energy. Therefore, EROEI can be interpreted as a way to prove the Iron Law of Power Density. Why? The greater the resource intensity (read: energy-hungry ingredients) the worse the EROEI.

Goehring and Rozencwajg concluded their essay with a point that I have been making since 2008: we need to embrace nuclear energy. They wrote, “We have long argued that nuclear must be part of any energy future — green or otherwise. No other energy source offers superior energy return on energy investment…than nuclear power. Furthermore, no other energy source can dispatch the carbon free baseload power needed to run the modern world.”

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Now, to the graphics. I updated the graphic above, a version of which was published last week. As you can see, I added a call-out bubble to underscore the 13 times difference between offshore wind and natural gas-fired generation.

After getting some constructive criticism about that graphic, which uses a screen grab from this 2021 International Energy Agency report, I decided to take another stab at the resource intensity of electricity generation by calculating the amount of metals and minerals that are needed per unit of energy produced. I discussed this idea with my friend, Roger Pielke Jr. (who coined the Iron Law of Climate Change). Roger, who holds a degree in mathematics, agreed to combine the IEA’s numbers of resources with the capacity factors for those forms of electricity generation.

Capacity factor is another critical metric needed to understand our energy and power systems. Capacity factor measures how much energy is produced by a given power plant relative to how much it can produce at peak capacity. Solar plants have relatively low capacity factors because the sun doesn’t shine at night. Coal and nuclear plants generally have high capacity factors because they often provide baseload power and their output doesn’t depend on the weather. The capacity factors used in the graphic came from a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was authored by Natanael Bolson, Pedro Prieto, and Tadeusz Patzek.

As can be seen above, when you include capacity factors for the various forms of generation, offshore wind looks even worse than before, requiring about 27 times more metals and minerals per unit of energy produced than gas-fired generation and more than 10 times more than what’s needed for coal and nuclear plants. This helps explain why so many offshore projects are now in financial trouble.

In their paper, “Capacity factors for electrical power generation from renewable and nonrenewable sources,” Bolson and his co-authors write that “capacity factors are needed for an accurate quantification of the nominal generation capacity needed to replace and expand the current electricity infrastructure.” They looked at global capacity factors for “biomass, fossil fuels, geothermal heat, water, uranium, solar light, and wind over the period 2000–2017. Global and regional values are estimated to highlight the differences in the performance of different technologies. These average CF values are then used to calculate the required nominal capacity to be installed in the future for our unavoidable energy transition.”

Using the capacity factors from the PNAS paper, Roger made a couple of assumptions. The first: gas-fired generation requires one kilogram of metals and minerals per megawatt-hour. He also assumed 1,000 megawatts of capacity for each technology with the power plants operated for one year. The results are eye popping. Solar energy requires about 27 times more metals and minerals than gas and onshore wind requires about 19 times more. Even if these calculations overstate the differences among the different energy sources by 20% or 30%, they still show why solar and wind are the wrong way to go.

In summary, whether we are looking at our energy and power systems through the lens of EROEI, or material intensity of generation capacity, or material intensity of electricity production, the conclusions are irrefutable: the Iron Law of Power Density will not be repealed. If we are serious about cutting emissions, land sparing, preventing the industrialization of our oceans, saving the North Atlantic Right Whale, saving Bald and Golden Eagles, protecting bats, and reducing the amount of mining we have to do to produce the metals, minerals, and magnets needed for our energy and power systems, the way forward is now — and always will be — N2N: natural gas to nuclear.

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The SMR market isn’t just crowded, it’s overcrowded. As we’ve shown in SMR Intelligence US, there are now 42 companies trying to develop and commercialize small modular reactors in the United States. Dozens of foreign companies are trying to do the same thing.

But markets are brutally efficient. They always separate the weak players from the strong ones. And over the past two weeks, it has become clear that an increasing number of SMR contenders are desperate for capital. In fact, they’re so desperate that they are going public in the hope that doing so will help them stave off bankruptcy. These companies are accessing public markets because nuclear energy is suddenly cool again, and many startups are touting their reactors as a way to help meet the soaring power demand coming from AI and data centers.

In this, SMR Intelligence Update #7, we look at recent announcements from three SMR hopefuls, including Hadron Energy, which went public last week, Deep Fission, which has filed an S-1, and Paris-based SMR company Newcleo, which reached an agreement to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange through a merger ​and will begin trading in the second half of this year.

Counting these new entrants, there will soon be nine pure-play SMR companies trading on US exchanges. Here’s an unsentimental look at the newest additions.

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In 1964, Nikolai Kardashev published a paper called “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations.” In it, the Russian astrophysicist (1932-2019) detailed what has become known as the Kardashev scale, which classifies hypothetical civilizations by the amount of power they can harness: planetary, stellar, and galactic. The concept is obviously true: the more energy a society can harness, the more advanced it can become. Kardashev’s idea has since become one of the most-cited conceptual tools in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

There are three levels on Kardashev’s scale: Type I, II, and III. The first is a civilization that can use all the energy available on its home planet. For planet Earth, that figure is roughly the power of all the sunlight hitting our world, which is about 10¹⁶ watts. Type II societies can harness all of the energy output of their parent star, estimated at 10²⁶ watts in the case of the Sun. And Type III civilizations can harness the energy resources of an entire galaxy, estimated at 10³⁶ watts.

Among his myriad predilections, Elon Musk is obsessed with the Kardashev scale.

In 2024, he declared, “Once you understand Kardashev Scale, it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all energy generation will be solar.” He made a similar comment in 2025. In February, he cited the Kardashev scale again while on the Dwarkesh Podcast, saying if “you’re going to climb the Kardashev scale,” the only way to do it is “to go to space.”

Last week, SpaceX filed its Form S-1 in advance of its initial public offering. The 308-page document includes three mentions of the Kardashev scale. Including this one:

We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status — a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.

The S-1 is filled with lofty language about paradigm shifts, making life interplanetary, humanity’s future, and spacefaring. Indeed, SpaceX’s IPO is fueling exospheric hype along with serious questions about the company’s extraterrestrial valuations. The superlatives are many. The IPO could be the biggest in history and give SpaceX a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion. The company could also raise as much as $75 billion, another record. Upon going public, it would also become the sixth-most-valuable publicly traded company in the US.

But by traditional metrics, SpaceX’s valuation is nothing short of loony. SpaceX’s 2025 revenue was $18.7 billion. At a valuation of $1.75 trillion, the company’s stock will be trading at 93 times current revenue. Again, that’s a multiple of the company’s revenue, not its profit. And that’s another issue: In 2025, SpaceX recorded an operating loss of $2.6 billion.

For comparison, ExxonMobil has a price-to-revenue ratio of 2, and last year it reported operating income of $41 billion. Google/Alphabet has a price-to-revenue ratio of 11 and, in 2025, recorded an operating profit of $129 billion. The key difference in those comparisons, of course, is that Elon Musk doesn’t work at Exxon or Google. He works at SpaceX, and for many investors and analysts, the Musk factor alone justifies the stratospheric valuation.

But while reporters, podcasters, and equity analysts are gleefully adding to the intergalactic exuberance, and projecting when Musk might move significant amounts of AI capacity into space and build a “base on the Moon and cities on other planets,” very few people are focusing on the fuel that powers SpaceX.

Let’s drill into SpaceX’s business and its S-1, and while doing so, perhaps bring a tad of the hype back down to earth.

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Ted Gioia is a very successful writer on Substack. He has 290,000 subscribers and is ranked number one in the music category. While I dig his music writing, his cultural analysis may be even better. Last December, Gioia spotlighted the anger toward Big Tech and AI and predicted that the “Tech backlash might just be the biggest issue of 2026.” He continued, saying that in the past, Big Tech “simply ignored critics” and instead focused on lobbying politicians. “That’s unlikely to work in this supercharged environment. Sooner or later, the tech power brokers will need to engage with their critics.”

Gioia’s prediction was spot on.

Last Friday, he published “Anti-AI Laws Now Get Unanimous Support From Left & Right.” In that article, he noted that a bill, the GUARD Act, written by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and aimed at protecting children from harmful content produced by AI chatbots, was recently passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a unanimous vote. Indeed, the opposition to Big Tech is uniting some strange political bedfellows, including Hawley on the Right and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on the Left.

Gioia wrote that the AI backlash is now “a huge national issue.” He continued, writing:

Silicon Valley has totally lost public support, and now will get punished brutally with legislation. But litigation will be just as painful... They will deserve every spanking they get — because they are ruthlessly force-feeding AI on an unwilling public for financial gain. And this is now obvious to every impartial observer.

As I’ve stated many times, I’ve never seen anything like the public opposition to data centers. All across the country, people across the political spectrum are banding together to fight data centers. I’m documenting that backlash in the new — and free — Data Center Rejection Database. But the numbers in the database don’t fully reflect the opposition because many projects are being withdrawn before they can be rejected.

That’s what happened earlier this month in Gardner, Kansas, where Beale Infrastructure pulled its data center project after 100 people attended a Gardner City Council meeting, and “more than 30 people spoke against the proposal.”

And now, Pope Leo XIV is weighing in. Today, he released his first encyclical. It’s on AI, and it’s a doozy.

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Commencement speeches are forgettable. Speakers routinely resort to the same pantry of platitudes — dream big, embrace failure, work hard, study hard, pray hard, etc. — and audiences forget all of them before the salt kisses the rim of the first margarita glass.

Not this year.

On May 8, Gloria Caulfield, a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, was booed after she declared the rise of AI is “the next Industrial Revolution.” A week later, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed during his 13-minute commencement speech at the University of Arizona, particularly when he talked about AI.

The boo-fest in Tucson was a perfect example of the growing hostility in America to Big Tech and the Silicon Valley oligarchs. It also shows how clueless the Big Tech elites are about how the public perceives them and why the data center backlash across the US has been so fierce.

Indeed, the look on Eric Schmidt’s face when he got booed on Friday by students at the University of Arizona during his speech, when he talked about AI, was worth 1,000 words. Schmidt (net worth: $42 billion) was flustered and appeared genuinely bewildered that he — one of the titans of Silicon Valley — would get booed over anything. Further, he seemed hurt that the students who were there to hear his wisdom (“build a team”) were not down with his vision of AI as their virtual companion. At one point, he even pleaded with the boo-birds, “If you’d let me make this point, please...” (The full video of his speech is available here.)

Schmidt’s disastrous speech shows that young Americans, in particular, are pissed off. It also shows how Big Tech, including Google, which withdrew its plans for a big data center project in Indianapolis last year before Indy’s city council could reject it, is drawing more and more public anger.

That anger can be seen in the new and improved — and free — Data Center Rejection Database. It tracks data center rejections here in the US and around the world. A simple search of the database shows that 89 data centers have already been rejected or restricted in the US this year. For comparison, there were 49 rejections in the US in 2025, and just 9 rejections in 2024.

Jacob, Michael, and I have put a lot of work into the Data Center Rejection Database. It is the only free, online, searchable database of its kind. Please take a look and share it.

One of the latest rejections occurred in Pocatello, Idaho, where a hearing examiner denied a permit for a proposed AI data center. Last week, according to an article by Logan Ramsey of the East Idaho News, “hundreds of people” attended a hearing on the project at Pocatello’s City Hall. Ramsey reports that “Over 60 people spoke in opposition to the application, while only three spoke in favor.” That’s not a hearing. That’s a rout.

Another vivid example of the backlash occurred on May 4, when 900 people showed up at a county commission meeting in Box Elder County, Utah, to determine the fate of a 40,000-acre data center project called Stratos, being pushed by Kevin O’Leary, the mega-rich asshat from “Shark Tank.” As I wrote on May 6 in “Rage Against The Data Center,” the overwhelming majority of the audience was opposed to the project.

Since then, some 6,000 Utahns have signed a letter encouraging Gov. Spencer Cox to veto the project.

Last week, I talked to a friend of mine about the opposition to AI, Big Tech, and data centers. My pal is politically savvy and has watched many political fights during his career. But he was stumped by why so many people oppose data centers and what might be done to persuade opponents to understand that the US must continue its leadership in digital infrastructure and AI. I told him what I’ve said many times: The hostility to data centers and Big Tech is a cultural phenomenon, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen during my four decades of covering energy, politics, and land-use fights.

My friend expressed concern that the US cannot lose the AI race to China. That’s a common concern and a valid one. “What we are seeing is a real danger to America’s leadership,” he said. I reminded my pal that, despite the backlash, according to the latest data from Aterio, there are now 769 data centers under construction in the US with a combined power capacity of 58 gigawatts. Thus, while there have been 89 rejections this year, nearly 800 projects are being built. But — and this is key — as the number of projects grows, so does the opposition.

In fact, the rejections are piling up so quickly that we are struggling to keep up.

Before going further, let me be clear: I am not anti-AI. I use AI tools every day, and I’m amazed by how quickly they are improving. That said, I’ve seen the downside. Last year, my daughter lost an online writing job due to AI because the tools are getting so good. Further, it’s clear that technological progress is always fraught and often engenders deep-seated fears in the public.

Some of those fears are justified, and some are not. What can’t be argued is this: We are seeing an unprecedented backlash against Big Tech/AI/Silicon Valley and data centers.

That conversation I had with my friend spurred me to take a deep dive into the reasons communities are fighting data centers. Here are the top 10.

1. It’s a cultural revolt against the “lanyard class.”

The class divide, like the urban-rural divide, is real, and it is growing. Last year, The Spectator ran an article headlined, “Are the ‘lanyard class’ the new enemy?” That term was coined by Maurice Glasman, a member of the House of Lords, to describe the “modern professional-managerial elite.” Glasman told The Spectator that the public’s anger at the managerial class is part of a broad disaffection with the bureaucracy and experts. Last May, a writer in The Times of London picked up on the lanyard class concept and said that Britain’s Reform party is “surging because working-class people resent the professional cadre who dismiss them as stupid and racist.”

The result of that resentment was clear earlier this month when Nigel Farage’s Reform UK picked up more than 1,450 council seats across Britain. As the BBC reported on May 9, Reform made “big gains at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives in English council elections.”

The same disaffection with the elites in Britain is happening here in the US. People, particularly rural Americans, are tired of elites like O’Leary who are pushing projects that provide little benefit to local communities. In short, people are tired of being told what is good for them.

2. People can’t fight Big Tech online, so they are fighting it at the zoning board.

Privacy is dead. Amazon is killing the retail sector. Google has a near-monopoly on online searching and advertising. Facebook’s algorithms are designed to keep you glued to your devices. Microsoft’s software is ubiquitous and essential, but the company doesn’t provide customer support to home users. There is no 800 number to call; only chatbots to answer questions or explain in robot-speak, some version of “it sucks to be you.”

Although people can’t fight Big Tech online or take over the C-suites in Redmond, Seattle, or Mountain View, they can prevent the tech giants from putting their data centers in Coweta, Monroe, and Millville.

3. Data centers don’t produce many jobs.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that while about 1,500 workers are building the first data center at OpenAI’s Stargate project in Abilene, once the building is finished, it will have only about 100 full-time employees. The paper explained that “That total is a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same one million square feet if it were an office park, factory, or warehouse. A 286,500-square-foot cheese-packaging plant that broke ground in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people.” It went on to quote an industry official who admitted that data center projects have “rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities.”

Or consider the recent investigation by Colin Kinniburgh of New York Focus, who reported last month on a JPMorgan Chase data center in Orangeburg that received nearly $77 million in tax breaks to create “exactly one permanent job.” He noted that another data center in Genesee County, where the per-job subsidy was going to be “more than $11 million.”

4. People are concerned about AI destroying their jobs, and rightly so.

In January, Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, said that due to AI, the US could see GDP growth of 5% to 10%, while unemployment could surge to 10%. Last week, Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, a hedge fund with $67 billion in assets under management, said “There has been a step-change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit,” and that “work that we would usually do with people with master’s and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months [is] being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.” Those results, he said, left him “depressed.”

If Amodei and Griffin are expressing concern about future jobs, it should be no surprise that ordinary Americans are worried as well. Meanwhile, Facebook/Meta is laying off 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of its workforce — and replacing them with AI. As the New York Post explained yesterday, tech industry workers are concerned that “AI is steadily hollowing out white-collar jobs across Silicon Valley.”

5. People are concerned about water.

Of all the issues that opponents use to fight data centers, the water issue is the most sensitive and perhaps the most successful. Everyone, everywhere, cares about their water.

Last week, the city of Tucson, Arizona, revoked a construction water meter for a controversial data center called “Project Blue,” after discovering that its contractor had used 2 acre-feet of city water without authorization.

To be clear, data center operators are recognizing the water issue and are working to slash their consumption. Last month, Microsoft announced that it would expand its data center operations near Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the announcement, the company said it will “minimize its water use and replenish more water than what is used.” The company also said the new data center designs will, “in some cases,” eliminate the need for “ongoing access to water for cooling after an initial fill.”

I am still getting up to speed on the water-use issue at data centers. The consumption issue may be (or may not be) exaggerated. But in politics, perception is reality.

6. The public doesn’t trust Big Tech.

A Gallup poll from mid-2025 found that 30% of respondents had “very little” confidence in big technology companies and only 15% had “quite a lot” of confidence in Big Tech. In fact, of the 18 institutions included in the poll, which included small business, the military, police, higher education, banks, and other entities, only five institutions — newspapers, the criminal justice system, Big Business, TV news, and Congress — ranked below Big Tech when it came to public confidence. As Gallup noted, “Americans’ confidence in major US institutions remains near a record low.”

If the public doesn’t trust you, it’s hard to get your message across and get your data centers built.

7. The noise pollution problem is real.

In Texas, residents in Hood County have been fighting a data center used for cryptocurrency mining due to the noise pollution from the facility’s cooling system. Last year, one news outlet reported residents “compare it to a plane that never lands, or a lawnmower that never turns off. A county commissioner said it’s like ‘sleeping with a leaf blower under your pillow.’ No matter the comparison, there’s one common thread — it’s relentless.”

In March, NBC4 TV in Washington, DC, reported on a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, that, according to neighbors, “sounds like a helicopter is about to land.” A reporter from the station measured the noise from the data center, owned by CloudHQ, at 93 decibels. The station also said that neighbors from as far as five miles away had complained about the noise. To put that 93 decibels in perspective, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends wearing protection for any noise averaging 85 dB or higher, regardless of exposure duration.

Last month, residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, began lodging complaints about the noise from a Microsoft data center. One resident said, “It’s a nightmare. I’ve lived there five years. I want to leave. It’s no longer fun,” she said. “I’ve got headaches. We’ve got box fans running in order to cover the sound at night.”

This isn’t a new problem. In 2014, residents of Chandler, Arizona, began complaining about noise pollution from a data center, which, as one news report said, was “constant humming noise coming from the facility that never stopped, even at night.” Last December, the Chandler City Council rejected a permit for a proposed AI data center. According to Fox Business, “Cheers and applause erupted after the unanimous vote outcome was announced.”

I have a personal history with the noise pollution caused by large HVAC systems. And I can tell you that the sleeplessness and health problems caused by noise pollution are real. Big Tech better pay attention to this issue.

8. Fair or not, people believe data centers are raising their power bills.

Over the past few months, numerous reports and news articles have been published about electricity prices and data centers. In March, The Economist published an article titled, “Americans’ electricity bills are up. Don’t blame AI.” A recent report from the Institute for Energy Research reached the same conclusion, saying that although data centers are increasing electricity demand, this does “not explain why electricity prices have risen significantly in some parts of the country.” And a study released this week by E3, commissioned by the Data Center Coalition, found “no historical evidence of cost shifting from data centers to other utility customers.”

Those studies may be accurate. And they may not matter. Yes, that sounds crass. But, as with the water-use issue, many opponents of data centers are convinced that these mega projects will cost them money. And right or wrong, the perception that data centers are driving electricity rates higher will persist.

Big Tech can produce piles of studies showing that data centers don’t result in higher rates, but one of the oldest axioms in politics is: If you are explaining, you’re losing. Right now, Big Tech is doing a lot of explaining.

9. People don’t like big, and they don’t like successful.

A few months ago, I heard the CEO of a large energy company talk about public perceptions. “People don’t like big, and they don’t like successful,” he said. No other industry in today’s world can touch the size and success of the Giant Five tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. How big are they? As seen above, those five tech companies have a combined market cap of $16.5 trillion. The numbers are so big that they are hard to grasp. The tech industry now accounts for about a third of the entire value of the S&P 500. Or, put another way, at $16.5 trillion, the market cap of the Giant Five tech companies is three times Germany’s GDP ($5.5 trillion). For reference, the US GDP is $32 trillion.

AI will likely make Big Tech even bigger and more dominant. OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX (which owns xAI) are all planning IPOs that could give each a market cap of $1 trillion or more. Thus, it’s a very real possibility that a handful of super-giant companies will dominate AI, and in doing so, they will further concentrate staggering amounts of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The SpaceX IPO could make Elon Musk a trillionaire. Not even John D. Rockefeller had that kind of wealth.

10. Don’t call them NIMBYs.

I loathe the term NIMBY. It’s a slur. Everyone, everywhere, cares about their neighborhoods and communities. I’ve been reporting on land-use conflicts for 16 years. Over that time, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people who are fighting solar projects and wind projects. The land-use conflicts and community opposition to data centers are very similar to what I’ve documented in the Renewable Rejection Database, which now has 1,202 rejections. What I’ve seen over and over again is that people will band together when they perceive a threat to their way of life, their neighborhoods, their property values, and their viewsheds. They will put aside political differences and class differences to fight what they see as a common threat. In that regard, the opposition that I’ve seen to Big Wind and Big Solar is exactly like the surging opposition to Big Tech and data centers.

In short, people all across the US and around the world are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities. The challenge facing Big Tech is to show people why these projects are good for them and their communities.

Given the reasons I’ve listed here, that won’t be easy.

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Note: I could list several more reasons for the data center backlash. But for now, 10 is enough. If you have others, please put them in the comments. If you know of a rejection that isn’t in the Data Center Rejection Database, please email me with the particulars. Or, if you have reasons why communities should embrace data centers, please put them in the comments as well. Thanks.

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Thirteen months ago, I quit subscribing to the New York Times after the paper imposed an 83% price hike. And as I explained here on Substack, there were four other reasons for my cancellation, including the paper’s “energy reporting is often laughably bad.” These days, I seldom look at the paper’s website other than to scan the headlines. But sometimes the paper’s energy coverage is just too appalling to ignore.

That’s the case with Thomas Edsall’s May 12 article, which carried the headline, “This is a Scam, A Giant Scam.”

Edsall’s 2,500-word article is labeled as “opinion.” But opinions should be backed by facts. And therein lies the problem: Edsall’s article is nothing more than Democratic Party/climate-NGO propaganda. His jeremiad reads like boilerplate agitprop from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is almost comical because Edsall’s article includes a long quote from an NRDC official named Amanda Levin, who claims the Trump administration’s “war on clean energy” is hurting consumers, and has weakened America’s “global standing and industrial competitiveness.”

Of course, Edsall, who has been writing for the Times for 20 years, can quote whomever he likes. But his inclusion of the NRDC is risible. The NRDC (annual revenue: $204 million) is the least credible NGO in America.

Remember, the NRDC played a leading role in the premature closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant, which sits about 40 miles north of Times Square. (I have a special fondness for Indian Point. We visited the plant before its closure, and it — and longtime Buchanan Mayor Theresa Knickerbocker — plays a prominent role in our feature-length documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World.)

In 2021, after the shutdown, a top NRDC official, Kit Kennedy, cheered the closure, claiming in a letter to the Times that “closing this dangerous plant is overdue.”

What has happened since Kennedy made that bullshit claim?

New York’s CO2 emissions have soared, and state residents are enduring huge increases in their utility bills due to the cost of installing large amounts of renewable energy. According to a December 2025 report from the left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute, residential electricity rates in New York jumped by 36% between 2019 and 2024. And as the Institute for Energy Research points out, that increase was “nearly three times faster than the national average and the second-fastest increase in the country during this period, after California.”

Furthermore, in March, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and New York Congressman Mike Lawler (a Republican) held a press conference at Indian Point calling for the plant to be reopened.

Despite these facts, Edsall is carrying water for the NRDC in the pages of the New York Times. It really does beggar belief.

Further — and this really sticks in my craw — Edsall is leading the cheering section for alt-energy while refusing to acknowledge the raging land-use conflicts that are slowing, or in many cases, stopping, the growth of solar, wind, and battery projects all around the world. That caught my attention because the Renewable Rejection Database now contains 1,200 documented examples of local communities saying no to Big Solar, Big Wind, and Big Battery.

Let’s take a look at the facts, not the spin.

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Nothing can — and nothing will — replace the immediacy and impact of live in-person events. I say that because of the thrill I get from hearing live music here in Austin and from connecting with an audience when I’m delivering a lecture or a speech. I love that feeling when I know that the audience is listening and engaged. They aren’t checking their phones, answering emails, or watching TikTok. Instead, they’re paying attention because I’ve succeeded in capturing their focus for a few minutes in a world that’s overflowing with spectacular distractions. And that live, two-way connection is what keeps me on the road.

Since 2008, I’ve delivered nearly 600 invited or keynote lectures. This year, I already have 22 events on my calendar. My speaking business has traction for three reasons. First, the energy and power sectors are the world’s biggest and most important businesses. That means pretty much everyone is interested in them. Second, energy’s importance has been magnified by the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran, as well as by soaring power demand for AI and data centers. Third, people want to engage and learn the same way humans have for millennia: by talking to one another in person.

If you are having a conference or meeting and want me to speak, please send me a note. If you want to see some of my prior speaking engagements, I have dozens of excerpts on my YouTube channel.

I’m currently booking dates for the rest of 2026 and early 2027. You know how to find me: Robert (at) robertbryce.com. Thanks.

Three New Charts

The first chart illustrates how the closure (or near-closure) of the Strait of Hormuz has sent shock waves through the LNG market. While Europe, which prices much of its gas at the TTF trading hub in the Netherlands, and Asia are getting hammered by the surge in LNG prices, the US has been insulated from those price changes. This chart shows the price changes in the spot price of natural gas at Henry Hub, TTF, and JKM (the Japan Korea Marker) through April 30.

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One reason the US economy remains resilient is that American consumers are benefiting enormously from low-cost natural gas. Indeed, the falling price — in real terms — of methane has been a key deflationary trend underway for nearly three decades. This chart shows the spot price of gas at Henry Hub since 2000 in nominal and inflation-adjusted dollars. Why is the price falling? US drillers continue to innovate. They are wringing more and more oil and gas out of shale formations and doing so with fewer rigs and fewer workers. The result of that continuing innovation: Over the past two decades, gas production from places like the Permian Basin and the Marcellus/Utica has soared, and because of that, American consumers are saving untold billions of dollars every year.

There’s enormous interest in, and opposition to, data centers. The chart below, derived from MISO data, provides a good comparison of the power demands of the largest data centers. To be clear, the massive data center complex that Meta is building in Louisiana, which will consume 2 gigawatts of power, isn’t typical. Nonetheless, that single site will use 1,000 times as much juice as a typical Costco store.

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Media Hit

On Friday, I spoke with my friend Jim Puplava, the host of the Financial Sense podcast, about the data center backlash. As Jim explains, “Bryce describes an unprecedented wave of local rejections and protests, driven by concerns over job losses, property values, water use, noise, and distrust of Big Tech. The opposition spans political lines and reflects a deep cultural rift. Despite resistance, Bryce notes that data centers are still being rapidly built, largely powered by natural gas.” You can listen here.

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As always, please click that ♡ button. And, of course, please share and subscribe. Thanks, y’all.

A relatively short note today.

It’s short because the videos below are powerful examples of the raging backlash against Big Tech, an issue I began writing about last December, in “The Data Center Backlash Is Global.”

Since then, the opposition to Big Tech, AI, and data centers has grown faster than I ever imagined. I have been covering land-use conflicts over alt-energy projects for 16 years. In that time, I’ve interviewed dozens of people all over the world about their opposition to solar, wind, and battery projects. I’ve documented hundreds of examples of rejections or restrictions on alt-energy projects in the Renewable Rejection Database.

But the rage against data centers is different.

Over the past seven months, it’s become apparent that people all across the US are pissed off. They don’t like the super-rich tech oligarchs, they don’t trust Big Tech, and they are ready and willing to fight to stop AI data centers from coming into their cities, towns, and rural areas.

Broad coalitions of people from Indianapolis to Independence, Missouri, have organized to stop data center projects, and, as I noted a few weeks ago in “AI Rejected: Tracking The Great Data Center Revolt,” there have already been more than 70 rejections or restrictions in the first four months of 2026. That’s more than occurred in all of 2025. And remember, the rejection numbers for 2026 don’t include projects canceled or withdrawn due to local opposition. For instance, last month, Compass Datacenters withdrew plans for an 800-acre project in Prince William County, Virginia, after facing “intense pushback from local residents.”

Why is this happening? Here’s what I wrote on April 11:

The backlash against data centers looks a lot like the fights against Big Wind, Big Solar, and Big Battery. People are concerned about their neighborhoods, property values, viewsheds, and noise. But the opposition to data centers also includes two other hot-button issues: soaring electricity prices and water availability... Now add in distrust — or even outright hatred of Big Tech — and add in fears about AI destroying jobs, and you get a dream issue set for activists across the political spectrum. In short, this is a broad cultural backlash that cuts across political and demographic lines. (Emphasis added.)

Nothing has changed since then to change my mind. Indeed, the anger toward Big Tech and opposition to data centers are part of an unprecedented cultural backlash. Local people are looking at these big projects and asking a simple question: “What’s in it for us?” And in many cases, they are finding that the local benefits aren’t enough.

Of course, there have been claims that outsiders are funding the opposition to data centers. Last month, one conservative group claimed that foreign money is funding the anti-data center movement and that it is “classic political warfare for the detriment of our sovereignty and ultimately our way of life.” A few days ago, another group, Power The Future, sent a letter to two members of Congress requesting “a formal investigation into a coordinated, billionaire-funded and potentially foreign-backed political campaign designed to block the construction of data center and AI infrastructure.”

Those claims are bogus.

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Don’t take my word for it. Watch the two videos below from the Salt Lake Tribune, which show the huge crowd of people that gathered at the Box Elder County Fairgrounds on Monday to oppose the Stratos data center project being pushed by Kevin O’Leary, the irascible star of “Shark Tank.”

They were there to attend the Box Elder County Commission’s hearing on the project, which aims to build up to 9 gigawatts of data center capacity on a 40,000-acre tract north of the Great Salt Lake. If the project does get built with 9 GW of capacity, it could consume more than twice as much juice as what’s now used by the entire state of Utah. The Tribune estimated that more than 600 people were inside the gymnasium-sized exhibit hall and another 300 protesters gathered outside, where many chanted “no data center” and “we want water.”

The meeting was standing-room-only. Every chair was taken. The overwhelming majority who attended were opposed to O’Leary’s project. From the outset, the three commissioners were showered with jeers and catcalls by the project’s opponents. At the three-minute mark, one of the commissioners warned the crowd that if they continued to disrupt the meeting, they would be escorted out of the building by security. (The full video of the hearing is available here.) After about 28 minutes, a large number of people began chanting, “People over profits.” At that point, the three commission members stopped the hearing and moved into an adjacent room where they continued the meeting on Zoom. After they left the stage, dozens chanted, “shame, shame, shame.”

The commissioners went on to approve the Stratos deal by a unanimous vote. While O’Leary’s project may move forward, the proposed campus has zero tenants. And given the controversy over the project, the fact that none of the infrastructure has been built — and the fierce competition already underway across the data center industry for tenants — it will be difficult for “Mr. Wonderful” to make the Stratos project work. For proof of that, look no further than Fermi Inc.

Here are the videos:

And while you are watching those, be sure to look at my latest mini-documentary, “The Data Center Backlash,” which I published here on Substack last month.

Thanks.

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As always, please click that ♡ button. And, of course, please share and subscribe. Thanks, y’all.

Nearly everything about Elon Musk is cartoonish. Forbes puts his net worth at about $776 billion. That makes him more than twice as rich as Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, who is worth about $286 billion.

Musk’s so rich his fortune defies our imagination. It might help to think of it this way: Musk’s personal wealth is roughly equal to the GDP of, take your pick, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, or Israel.

Need another cartoonish number? Last year, Tesla shareholders approved a pay deal that, if all 12 requirements are met (they won’t), Musk’s compensation at Tesla could total $1 trillion. That money, of course, would be added to his existing fortune.

Speaking of Tesla, the company just revealed that Musk’s compensation for 2025 could — repeat, could — ultimately total $158.4 billion. That sum, as Bloomberg’s Liam Denning has noted, is about two times the EBITDA that Tesla has generated since 2010. And since we’re talking about Tesla, the EV maker sports an absurd price-to-earnings ratio of 357. For comparison, NVIDIA, which is minting cash, has a P/E of 41; Google’s is 29; and Microsoft’s is 25.

Oh, and then there’s this: Musk reportedly has fathered a total of 14 children with four different women. And while Musk’s cartoonish business deals — and amorous peregrinations — are noteworthy, the details of SpaceX’s pay package for Musk that were recently disclosed in the company’s IPO documents take those cartoons and shoot them into the stars.

Let’s perform an earth-based reality check.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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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“Among the world’s ultra-rich, owning a big, expensive airplane is the closest thing one can get to an actual penis-measuring contest.”

I published that sentence 24 years ago in my first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron. In a chapter called “Air Enron,” I reported on the air-travel predilections of top Enron executives in the years before the company’s ignominious bankruptcy in 2001. I wrote:

No other part of Enron’s business better reflected the company’s out-of-control egos and out-of-control spending than the aviation department. While other parts of the company were burning through cash at record rates, Enron executives were cruising five miles high in ultra-luxe style.

To cite just one example, in the late 1990s, Enron CEO Ken Lay (or his wife, Linda) dispatched one of the company’s Falcon 900 jets from Houston to pick up their daughter, Robin, in Nice, France. The plane flew to France, empty, except for the pilots, and promptly brought Lay’s daughter back to Houston Intercontinental Airport. According to Enron’s aviation department, those two flights cost a cool $125,000. And that was back when $125,000 was real money.

Enron’s high-altitude indulgences come to mind as more details emerge from the raging dumpster fire known as Fermi Inc., which is now facing investor lawsuits, boardroom turmoil, and a collapsed stock price.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A lot has happened since Sunday, when I published “Fermi Isn’t Faltering, It’s Imploding.” As I noted in that article, last Friday, the startup — which went public on October 1, 2025, and promised to quickly build 11 gigawatts of power capacity for AI and data centers — announced that its CEO, Toby Neugebauer, had left. No reasons were given. On Sunday, the company’s CFO, Miles Everson, resigned. Everson was one of four insiders who sold shares after the company reported its full-year 2025 loss of $486.4 million on March 30, 2026. Everson sold about 830,000 shares and collected $3.9 million in proceeds. Although Everson resigned, he still has a seat on the company’s board.

On Tuesday, Neugebauer issued a press release in which he said the company’s board fired him “without cause.” The release said that Neugebauer “ultimately cares about making money for all shareholders more than finishing” what he started. Toward that end, he called on the Fermi board to “conduct an immediate process, led by an independent investment bank, for the sale of the Company to a third party.”

Why would Neugebauer want a sale? I’m speculating here, but a quick sale might, repeat, might, allow Neugebauer and his family, who own about 40% of the company’s stock worth some $1.4 billion, to cash out without collapsing Fermi’s market capitalization. A few hours after Neugebauer’s press release was published, the company’s board issued its own press release confirming that Neugebauer had been fired. It rejected his call for a quick sale, saying it “firmly believes a sale is not in the best interest of its continued momentum on Project Matador.”

While those events are noteworthy, the real bombshell dropped on Monday, when Fuzzy Panda Research, a short-seller, issued a savage takedown of Fermi that contains several allegations of misconduct by Neugebauer. The real blockbuster, though, is about Neugebauer and — you guessed it — a very expensive private jet. Here are the details.

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