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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Before you go:

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

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.

Before you go:

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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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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Back in 2000, Pets.com raised $82.5 million in its IPO. Nine months later, the company declared bankruptcy, and in doing so, became a symbol of the dot-com bubble.

Fermi Inc. might have a longer lifespan than Pets.com, but it may not be by much.

On Friday, the company announced that Toby Neugebauer, the co-founder and CEO of the Amarillo-based power-for-AI startup, has “departed his role as Chief Executive Officer.” In a terse 8-K filing, the company did not give any reasons for Neugebauer’s departure, which came just 198 days after Fermi went public on the NASDAQ and London Stock Exchange.

The splashy IPO valued Fermi at nearly $12.5 billion. The company claimed it would build 11 gigawatts of power capacity, including nuclear reactors, gas-fired plants, and other facilities, on a site outside Amarillo. At the time of the IPO, Neugebauer claimed that Fermi was:

A global company with global partners, suppliers, and team members. With the exchange providing access to deep pools of international capital as well as investors who share our long-term vision, we look forward to working together to secure the future of AI. We are humbled and pleased with the strong investor demand in both the New York and London IPOs, and are already back to work, delivering long-term value for all of our stakeholders.

In the wake of the IPO, according to Nuclear Engineering International, Neugebauer’s stake in Fermi was “worth more than $4.5 billion including shares held by his wife Melissa and his father, former Texas congressional representative Randy Neugebauer.”

Those glory days are long gone.

On Friday, after the company announced Neugebauer’s sudden departure, Fermi’s shares dropped by about 30% in after-hours trading. The Friday filing also said Fermi has “created an Interim Office of the CEO, which will include Mr. Jacobo Ortiz, the Company’s Chief Operating Officer, and Ms. Anna Bofa, currently an observer on the Company’s Board.”

That move is unlikely to reassure investors.

Last Wednesday in “As Fermi Falters, Insiders Are Dumping Millions of Shares,” I reported that Ortiz sold nearly 831,000 Fermi shares less than two weeks ago, collecting $3,938,728 in proceeds. Of the four insiders who have sold Fermi shares since the IPO, only Griffin Perry, the son of former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has sold more than Ortiz. The elder Perry is a co-founder and board member of Fermi. The younger Perry, who is also a co-founder of the company, sold 11 million shares, and he, or rather his company, Caddis Holdings LP, collected nearly $56.3 million in proceeds. Since March 30, Ortiz, Perry, and two other insiders have sold Fermi shares worth nearly $68 million.

Now that Neugebauer is out, those insider sales raise obvious questions. Did Ortiz and Perry know that Neugebauer was leaving? What did they know and when did they know it? Further, if they are selling, why should retail investors buy?

Here’s another close look at Fermi, including excerpts from its 10-K that may explain Neugebauer’s departure, an odd statement from Neugebauer, a Fermi timeline, and my thoughts on what will happen next.

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Long before Zig Ziglar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, and other motivational gurus, there was Elmer Wheeler.

Wheeler was known as “America’s No. 1 Salesman.” His most famous dictum was: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle. It’s the sizzle that sells the steak, and not the cow.” Wheeler also created “Sizzle Labs” to help determine which word combinations were most effective in sales. The sizzle, Wheeler declared, “is the tang in the cheese, the crunch in the cracker, the whiff in the coffee.”

Last fall, Fermi Inc., a startup co-founded by former Texas governor and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, was sizzling. Perry’s name, pedigree, and position as a co-founder and board member, brought significant media attention to the company. Fermi’s founders claimed it would build more than 11 gigawatts of power generation capacity on a site near Amarillo dubbed Project Matador, and become the go-to destination for a massive collection of data centers. Fermi claimed it would build gas-fired generators, small modular reactors, and four AP1000 nuclear reactors, with the first one becoming operational by 2031. It also dubbed the 6,000-acre site the “President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”

On October 1, Fermi went public in a transaction that allowed the company to raise nearly $746 million. A day later, one analyst told Reuters that Fermi’s IPO “speaks to the gold rush happening in AI infrastructure right now. It’s a cash geyser.” It certainly looked like a geyser. At the time of the IPO, Rick Perry’s shares in Fermi were worth $540 million, and his son, Griffin Perry, had a stake valued at $2.3 billion.

But Fermi’s sizzle has turned to fizzle.

Since the IPO, the company’s stock price has dropped by nearly 84%. Shares that peaked at nearly $37 were trading yesterday for $5.28.

On March 30, the company reported its 2025 financial results, and they were ugly. Fermi reported a full-year loss of $486.4 million, which included some $177.8 million in general and administrative expenses, $173.8 million in charitable expenses, $132.7 million in share-based compensation, and $111.6 million in losses related to financing.

The losses are the latest in a string of bad news for Fermi. On December 12, the company reported that its first prospective tenant had terminated a $150 million Advance in Aid of Construction agreement. The prospective tenant was never named. Within weeks, class-action law firms announced they were suing Fermi. In a January 7 press release, one firm claimed that “Fermi overstated tenant demand for Project Matador and misrepresented the agreement with the First Tenant.” Another firm alleges that Fermi’s “positive statements about its business, operations, and prospects were misleading and lacked a reasonable basis from the IPO onward, and that the registration statement contained material misrepresentations.” Yet another firm claims “Fermi’s IPO registration statement inflated the actual demand for Project Matador’s multi-gigawatt capacity to attract high-valuation multiples.”

Given these facts, it may not be surprising that some Fermi insiders, including one of the company’s founders, are selling significant amounts of their stock. Let’s take a look.

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For 16 years, I have been reporting on land-use fights over energy projects. Over that time, I have interviewed dozens of people from all over the world — including farmers, ranchers, politicians, and ordinary citizens — who are fighting against the encroachment of alt-energy projects. In all, I’ve documented nearly 1,200 rejections or restrictions of solar, wind, and battery projects.

But I’ve never seen anything like the raging backlash against data centers.

Since January 1, there have been more rejections or restrictions of data centers in the US than in all of 2025. Furthermore, the number of US data center rejections in 2026 is already nearly equal to the total number of wind projects rejected worldwide in 2025! And more rejections are coming. A recent poll found that 65% of Americans surveyed oppose data centers in their communities. (Details on that in a minute.)

My hometown of Tulsa is one of the communities that’s hitting the pause button. Last month, the Tulsa City Council voted unanimously to halt construction of new data centers for nine months. A total of 19 people spoke in favor of the moratorium during public comment, and one councilmember, Jackie Dutton, said she would support an indefinite moratorium due to concerns that data centers are being sited in the city’s underserved communities.

So what is happening? And why is it happening now?

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. And speaking of hot buttons, a new study claims that data centers can create heat islands that raise nearby temperatures by an average of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F.)

The study, which has a dozen authors and has not been peer-reviewed, found that data centers can induce:

Local microclimate zones, which we call the data heat island effect. We assess the impact on the communities, quantifying that more than 340 million people could be affected by this temperature increase. Our results show that the data heat island effect could have a remarkable influence on communities and regional welfare in the future, hence becoming part of the conversation around environmentally sustainable AI worldwide.

The findings make sense: Data centers produce huge amounts of heat, and it has to go somewhere. And the larger the data center, the more heat it produces. In addition, the study found that the heat island effect can extend for several kilometers around large data centers and that temperature impacts can be as much as 9.1 degrees C. (16.4 degrees F). (Ed Note: A few hours after I published this piece, I found Andy Masley’s March 30 Substack which says the heat island claim made by the study is “wildly misleading.” In light of Masley’s analysis, I made a few edits to my description of the report. I suggest you read his article. Again, here’s a link.)

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.

Jacob and I have painstakingly built an up-to-date compendium of every US data center rejection or restriction since January 1. We also pulled the key polling data, mapped the rejections, and created a graphic showing how opposition to data centers has exploded over the past three years.

Here are the details — and the receipts.

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On March 22, shortly after President Trump made his first threat to destroy Iran’s power stations, I published “Don’t.” In that piece, I listed five reasons why Trump should not destroy the Iranian power grid. The first one: “The grid is not a legitimate military target.” Indeed, under the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols, striking power plants and other infrastructure that’s primarily used by civilians is prohibited.

Fortunately, on March 23, Trump reversed himself and said he would give Iran a five-day reprieve because there had been “productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of hostilities in the Middle East.”

But Trump renewed his bellicose threats over the weekend. He said he will escalate the bombing campaign and declared that “all Hell will reign down” on Iran if it doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic. On Easter Sunday morning, he published this:

Also on Sunday, he told the Wall Street Journal that if Iran doesn’t agree to a deal, “they won’t have any power plants and they won’t have any bridges standing.” On Monday, during a press conference, Trump reiterated his threat, saying, “The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” The latest deadline for a deal, he said, is tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8 pm Eastern Time.

As I noted on March 22, bombing Iran’s power plants would cripple the country’s ability to function and would likely “result in tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of civilian deaths.” For perspectives on what might happen if Trump follows through on his threat, I put the following task to three AI platforms:

Here are the responses:

Perplexity:

Days 1–2: Shock and improvisation

Grid collapse immediately knocks out most lighting, elevators, traffic signals, ATMs, and a large share of mobile service as backup power at cell towers and exchanges drains within hours.

Water pumping stations and many high‑rise building pumps stop, so residents start hauling water from mosques, public taps, and tanker trucks, while authorities urge boiling or chlorination that many cannot perform without power.

Days 3–4: Water, sewage, and health crises

Municipal reservoirs and building tanks run down; low‑pressure, intermittent water service in some neighborhoods is replaced by dry taps, driving crowds to any functioning well, tanker, or bottled‑water seller.

Wastewater pumping and treatment falter, so sewage backs up into low‑lying streets and basements, raising risks of gastrointestinal disease as people store water in unsafe containers and sanitation deteriorates.​

Days 5–6: Food, fuel, and security stress

Cold chains fail almost completely; meat, dairy, and many medicines spoil, and markets shift to dry goods and fresh items that must be consumed immediately, pushing up prices and sparking queues and small‑scale looting.​

Fuel shortages worsen because many filling stations lack power for pumps; diesel for generators at hospitals, data centers, and government buildings becomes a strategic commodity, rationed and, in some cases, diverted or stolen.

Day 7: Governance under extreme strain

Hospitals exhaust generator fuel and spare parts in some facilities, forcing triage, cancellation of most surgeries, and withdrawal of life‑support for some patients as only a few major centers keep limited power.

With traffic signals dark, lighting absent, and police and security services also short on fuel and communications, authorities rely on curfews, ad‑hoc checkpoints, and neighborhood committees to maintain order as frustration, protests, and crackdowns intensify.

Gemini:

1. Collapse of Critical Infrastructure

Water and Sanitation: Tehran relies heavily on electric pumps to move water across its mountainous terrain. Within 24 hours, taps would run dry in most high-altitude neighborhoods. By day seven, the lack of sewage treatment would lead to environmental contamination and the rapid spread of waterborne diseases.

Healthcare Crisis: While hospitals have backup generators, these typically rely on diesel fuel. Given the ongoing war and potential strikes on transport bridges, fuel resupply would be nearly impossible. By the end of the week, life-support systems, refrigeration for medicines, and surgical capabilities would likely fail.

2. Economic and Digital Blackout

Financial Paralysis: The city’s banking system, ATMs, and digital payment platforms would be offline. In a modern economy, the inability to access funds or process transactions would halt all legal commerce, forcing a shift to a primitive barter system or total economic standstill.

Communication Breakdown: Mobile networks and internet services would collapse as cell tower batteries deplete. Tehran would become an “information black hole,” leaving residents unable to contact family or receive emergency updates, heightening mass anxiety and rumors.

3. Food Insecurity and Logistics

Supply Chain Failure: Without refrigeration, commercial and residential food stocks would spoil within the first 48–72 hours. With bridges potentially targeted, the “just-in-one” delivery of fresh produce into the city would cease, leading to severe food shortages and potential civil unrest at distribution centers.

4. Public Safety and Social Order

Security Vacuum: Total darkness at night would make the city difficult to police. Combined with the lack of communication, the risk of looting and specialized crime increases.

Mass Displacement: By day seven, the lack of water and food would likely trigger a massive humanitarian exodus as residents attempt to flee the city for rural areas with traditional wells or more stable resources.

Grok:

In the wake of U.S. strikes on Iran’s major power plants, Tehran—a metropolis of roughly nine million people—would face a total grid collapse. After seven days without electricity, the city would descend into a humanitarian crisis marked by cascading infrastructure failures, acute shortages, and social breakdown.

Water systems would fail first. Municipal pumps that draw from distant reservoirs and treatment plants would stop within hours once backup generators exhaust their diesel. By day three, taps run dry. Residents would queue at dwindling wells, mosques, or emergency tankers, but contamination from overflowing sewers would spread rapidly. Gastrointestinal diseases like cholera and dysentery, already a risk in dense urban slums, would surge; hospitals report spikes in dehydration cases by day five.

Food supply would collapse next. Refrigeration in homes, supermarkets, and warehouses fails immediately. Perishables rot within 48 hours; by day seven, most households exhaust rice, bread, and canned goods stockpiled under sanctions-era habits. Black-market prices skyrocket. Gas stoves still work for those with bottled fuel, but cooking fuel itself becomes scarce as distribution halts. Malnutrition and food-borne illness climb, especially among children and the elderly.

Transportation grinds to a halt. Traffic signals dark, the metro and electric buses idle. Gas stations run dry after pumps lose power and tanker deliveries stall. Roads clog with abandoned vehicles and desperate foot traffic. Ambulances and security forces prioritize fuel for generators and military vehicles, leaving civilians stranded.

Hospitals, initially sustained by diesel backups, would ration power by day four. Ventilators, dialysis machines, and operating theaters go offline. Elective surgeries stop; critical patients die in the dark. Pharmacies cannot refrigerate insulin or vaccines. Morgues overflow without cooling.

Communications blackout compounds isolation. Cell towers exhaust battery reserves within days. Internet dies. State radio and military loudspeakers become the only official voice, broadcasting pleas for calm while rumors of looting spread. Nighttime brings total darkness; residents burn trash or candles for light, raising fire risks in high-rise apartments.

Security erodes. Police and Revolutionary Guard units struggle to patrol without radios or streetlights. Reports of smash-and-grab looting at markets and pharmacies emerge by day three, escalating to armed clashes over water and fuel by day seven. Wealthier northern districts barricade; southern working-class neighborhoods see the worst disorder.

The government would declare emergency rule, airlift limited aid, and blame foreign aggression, but repair crews cannot restore bombed plants quickly. Seven days in, Tehran would resemble a besieged city: silent skyscrapers, desperate crowds at distribution points, rising death tolls from disease and untreated conditions. International observers warn of a public-health catastrophe rivaling major natural disasters, with long-term recovery measured in months, not days. The human cost — thousands of avoidable deaths — would be felt most sharply among the urban poor.

I will end by repeating here what I said on March 22: Don’t.

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We live in interesting times. Indeed, the news over the past few weeks has been depressing. I won’t reprise the world’s many maladies here. Instead, I will make an appeal for one of my favorite causes: the Bettering Human Lives Foundation.

We are lucky to live in the West. We take energy abundance for granted. But the harsh reality is that energy poverty around the world is rampant. About one-third of the world’s population eats food that has been cooked over open fires or on polluting stoves. I saw this myself on our trip to India several years ago, when we were shooting our documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World. Everywhere we went, we saw people cooking over open fires. They burned dung, straw, and every scrap of available firewood. On the highway near Agra, we saw women carrying baskets full of cow dung on their heads. In the nearby village, we saw cakes of dung drying on the roofs of houses.

The lack of clean cooking fuels has resulted in a public health disgrace that’s largely ignored by major media outlets. As seen above, more people — most of them women and girls — die from indoor air pollution caused by low-quality cooking fuels than die from AIDS/HIV, cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. (All numbers from World Health Organization.)

That death toll could be slashed if there were sufficient supplies of propane, butane, and LPG stoves. That’s where BHLF comes in. The organization, led by the indefatigable Anne Hyre, is increasing access to clean cooking fuels in Africa by lending money to local entrepreneurs who are expanding their propane distribution businesses. Right now, BHLF is working in Kenya, Ghana, and Zambia. And while it is doing great work, it’s still a tiny outfit. (2024 revenue was $1.2 million.) To make a bigger impact, BHLF needs more money, a lot more.

It’s one thing to talk about energy humanism. BHLF is taking action by facilitating greater access to LPG in developing countries.

Lorin and I support BHLF and we hope you will, too. Donating is easy. You can do it by credit card, wire transfer, or check.

Happy Easter, y’all.

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Back in 2008, while running for the White House, Barack Obama declared that our planet is “in peril” due to climate change. He continued, saying one of the major challenges facing the US is “what we will do about our addiction to foreign oil.”

In that address, known as the “New Energy For America” speech, Obama said, “We simply cannot pretend, as Senator McCain does, that we can drill our way out of this problem.” He went on, saying, “Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.”

In June 2013, Obama again mocked the idea of increased oil and gas drilling. During a speech at Georgetown University, Obama introduced what he called a “new national climate action plan” that he claimed would make the US “a leader — a global leader — in the fight against climate change.” In that speech, Obama used the word “climate” two dozen times. He claimed Congress should “end the tax breaks for big oil companies, and invest in the clean-energy companies that will fuel our future.”

The line from that speech that resonates today is this one: “We can’t just drill our way out of the energy and climate challenge that we face. That’s not possible.”

Those speeches haven’t aged well.

I’m not picking on Obama. That said, his rhetoric about drilling captured the anti-hydrocarbon/anti-drilling sentiment that prevails among climate activists and, unfortunately, among Europe’s political leaders. As the Battle for Hormuz continues with no end in sight, it’s clear that the global economy has become too dependent on the hydrocarbons and other strategic commodities that flow through that narrow waterway.

Europe’s energy strategy was built on imports and hopium. Both just ran aground in the Strait of Hormuz.

Since February 25, three days before the US and Israel launched the air war against Iran, the price of natural gas delivered to the TTF trading hub in Holland had jumped by about 85%. Meanwhile, the US has been partially insulated from the energy-price shocks hitting Europe and the rest of the world. Natural gas prices in the US have increased by about 3% over that same time period.

What’s the difference? The answer is simple: The US actively drills for oil and gas. Europe doesn’t.

Here are eight charts that show how Europe’s refusal to drill has made it heavily dependent on imported hydrocarbons and, therefore, left it at the mercy of the energy price spikes now slamming consumers around the world. The charts also show why — like it or not — it’s time for Europe to drill, baby, drill.

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Transcript of the interview, which was done at CERAWeek on March 24, 2026

Robert Bryce: Hi everyone, coming to you today from CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston. I’m pleased to be here with Grant Isaac. He’s the president and chief operating officer at Cameco. Grant, welcome.

Grant Isaac: Hi Robert, great to see you.

Ca…

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After three weeks of the war against Iran, I have tried to maintain an intellectual and emotional detachment from President Trump’s decision to start the conflict. Yes, Iran’s theocratic regime is dangerous, and it has been seeking the destruction of America for decades. I get that. But by joining with Israel in launching widespread bombing attacks against Iran, Trump is playing a dangerous game that could trigger a wider conflict that could drag on for months, or even years, to come.

On Friday, Trump said he was thinking about winding down US attacks on Iran. But on Saturday afternoon, he delivered an ultimatum to Iran’s leaders, saying that unless they agreed to fully open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, he would begin bombing the country’s power grid. His exact threat, which he wrote on Truth Social, was that if Iran doesn’t open the Strait, the US “will hit and obliterate their various power plants, starting with the biggest ones first.”

My response to Trump’s latest threat is simple: Don’t.

As I have written many times (see here and here), electric grids are commonly targeted during wars. A year ago, I noted that more than any conflict in history, the Russia-Ukraine war “has been about electricity.”

But there are at least five reasons why Trump should not bomb Iran’s power grid.

First, the grid is not a legitimate military target. Since February 28, when the US and Israel began bombing Iran, the argument we’ve heard from Trump and his allies is that the purpose of the attacks was to destroy Iran’s ability to deploy nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles against its neighbors. That argument has now expanded to preventing Iran from slowing or stopping ships from transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s electric grid is civilian infrastructure. Destroying it does not serve a military purpose.

Second, destroying Iran’s power grid could, within a month or two, result in tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of civilian deaths. The electric grid is the Mother Network, the system upon which all of our most important networks – fresh water supplies, wastewater, communications, hospitals, and communications -- depend. It is, as Chris Keefer memorably put it, our “civilization life support system.” By destroying Iran’s grid, Trump could turn much of Iran into a humanitarian disaster zone.

Third, it invites wholesale retaliation against the power grids of Iran’s neighbors, and ours. Electricity grids are fragile things. Damaging them can easily be done with a myriad of weapons, including small arms, drones, missiles, and bombs. If Trump bombs Iran’s grid, it invites our adversaries to do the same. Indeed, just a few hours after Trump made his threat, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf warned that critical infrastructure and energy facilities in the Middle East could be “irreversibly destroyed” if Iranian power plants are attacked. In a post on X, he wrote:

Immediately after the power plants and infrastructure in our country are targeted, the critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and oil facilities throughout the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be destroyed in an irreversible manner, and the price of oil will remain high for a long time.

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Fourth, if the US bombs Iran’s power grid, it will hinder the ability of the next ruling regime (friendly to the US or not) to manage Iran’s society. It may also result in electricity shortages in other countries. Why? Iran exports power to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fifth, it’s apparent that Trump has fallen into the escalation trap. As I noted on March 4, that term has been popularized by the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape. As he explained it in a March 14 article in The Guardian, he said, when the war begins, “The attacker still has escalation dominance, so there is a doubling down, which then moves up the escalation ladder and that still does not lead to strategic success. Then you reach stage three, which is the real crisis, where you are contemplating far riskier options.”

The Guardian went on to summarize Pape’s view, writing that the “Trump administration had become mesmerized by the initial attack and had an ‘illusion of control’ based on the accuracy of its weapons. All of this has pushed Tehran towards its own model of escalation, one with a far wider global economic and political impact, Pape and other critics say.”

By declaring war on Iran, Trump risked a wider war in the Middle East. By issuing yet another deadline, he has set an escalation trap for himself. If he bombs Iran’s power plants, he risks setting off an even more serious conflict in the region. If he doesn’t bomb Iran’s power plants, he loses face.

The situation in Iran reminds me of an interview I heard last month of a former senior US military official, who, it was clear, was not a fan of Trump. The official said that during his second term in office, Trump has repeatedly made moves that alienate our allies. He called Trump’s moves “strategy-free action.”

Did Trump consult with top military leaders or our allies before issuing his ultimatum? Is there a long-term strategy at work here? If so, what is it? Or was this yet another example of Trump’s whim? We may not know the answer to those questions. But by threatening to destroy Iran’s power grid, Trump has set the US on an even more perilous course in the Middle East.

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Last Tuesday, I published an article documenting the stunning amount of stock sold by Oklo Inc. co-founders Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran. I invited the company to respond if any of my reporting was erroneous. I have not heard back. Since then, I have found tens of millions of dollars in additional stock sales by other Oklo insiders.

In this SMR Intelligence Update, I detail those insider sales at Oklo. I also have updates on Rolls-Royce and explain why the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s recent approval of TerraPower’s construction permit may be a turning point in the labyrinthine regulatory process that has been hindering the US nuclear sector. And we have two other short items: ZettaJoule goes to A&M, and yet another startup (this one says it will use thorium fuel) gets added to SMR Intelligence US.

One other quick point: Yesterday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of America’s most strident anti-nuclear NGOs, announced it would support the restart of the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa. As ace reporter Ken Braun explained yesterday, the NRDC operates on an annual budget of more than $200 million, and with this announcement, it will be the “first anti-energy NGO to be removed from the InfluenceWatch list of nuclear power opponents.” While this is positive news, I must point out that the NRDC was one of the main culprits behind the foolish, premature closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in Buchanan, New York.

So now that NRDC is finally starting to accept rational thought about nuclear energy, when will its leaders apologize for the enormous damage they have done to our power grid? I am not holding my breath.

On to the SMR Intelligence Update #6.

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Transcript

Robert Bryce: Hi everyone. Welcome back. I’m delighted today to have a short conversation with Dr. Jeff Waksman. He is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment. And I ran into some people at the Texas Nuclear Summit last October who said, well, if you’re interested in what’s going on with nuclear in the federal government, you have to talk to Jeff Waksman. So here we are. Dr. Waksman, thanks for making time to talk to me today.

Jeff Waksman: Oh, it’s great to be here. Real pleasure to talk to you.

Robert Bryce: Okay, so good. You have a long title. Tell me, Deputy Principal Assistant. No, Principal Deputy Assistant... you’re in charge of energy for all Army facilities, is that the punchline here? Am I reading this correctly?

Jeff Waksman: Well, the main thing of my title is it means when I go to conferences, they have to use smaller font to fit my title on the badge. But really, the way to visualize it, because even most soldiers don’t know the structure of the service, the Army has a secretary. Then there’s an undersecretary who’s the deputy. And then there are five assistant secretaries. We break it up into five assistant secretariats, and within that I’m the principal deputy, the number two for one of the assistant secretariats. Our assistant secretariat oversees installations, energy and environment, also things like permitting, infrastructure, et cetera. So we do everything from building the border wall to overseeing energy to cleaning up PFAS. It’s a pretty broad remit that we have, but within that, energy is really what my passion is and particularly nuclear energy, so when it comes to that, those are really my babies.

Robert Bryce: Sure. And by way of background, Dr. Waksman, you have a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin, expert on fusion. I think as we talked about before, that was your doctoral work. So let’s talk reactors. This is really why I wanted to connect with you. You’re overseeing Project Pele. The project is being designed, I think, by BWXT, if I’m right. It aims to provide one to five megawatts of capacity at remote military bases. I’ll cut to the punchline: how soon could we see this reactor up and running?

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(00:02:15) Jeff Waksman: So Project Pele, which I started back in the fall of 2018, is what I did for six and a half years before I took this job, and that reactor is under construction right now. That design is effectively done. You’ve got to be careful about that because the thing with any first‑of‑a‑kind hard tech is, your final design versus what you exactly build is always slightly different, so you always do another review of what you actually build as opposed to what you design. But the reactor is as designed as it could be. It’s under construction now. All the fuel is fabricated, and in fact we had a ceremony a few months ago when all the final fuel showed up at Idaho. The current intent is to have that reactor fully fabricated by some point in 2027, and then once it shows up in Idaho, realistically it’ll probably be six to nine months before it actually turns and reaches a megawatt. So sometime in early to mid‑2028, but we very much intend and have all expectations that this will turn on in this administration. It remains the furthest‑along microreactor in terms of an entire system, and it’s important to differentiate that because I think there’s been some confusion about the criticality tests which are happening this year in DOE, which are great and important milestones, but are just criticality. Pele is an entire system. It’s going to make the electricity, it’s going to be hooked up to a microgrid, everything, and that will be in Idaho National Lab. At Idaho National Lab, that’s right. So the fuel has already shown up. The reactor is currently being fabricated in a few different places, but it’s being led by BWXT in Lynchburg, Virginia, and when that’s completed, it will be shipped to Idaho and then it will be fueled in Idaho.

Robert Bryce: And for people who are listening, BWXT is publicly traded. It is the former Babcock and Wilcox, a very old‑line industrial firm. Babcock and Wilcox—I’m not showing off here—built the boilers that Edison used on Pearl Street. So this is a company that’s been around for a while. And correct me if I’m wrong, Jeff, this is the company that’s been building nuclear reactors for the U.S. Navy for decades.

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, in fact we make the fuel in the facility at Lynchburg in which the fuel for every reactor that the Navy has ever had has been built in that building. They have all come from that site in Lynchburg, Virginia. So if you actually go there, Admiral Rickover chose that site specifically. He wanted to build the plant there because it’s got a rail spur and it’s on the James River; it’s a convenient location to do big, heavy things.

Robert Bryce: Right. So then once that is fabricated, will it move by—because there was a lot of interest in the movement of the Valar Atomics modules by C‑17 cargo plane—are you going to, well, I don’t know whether you want to tell me or not, are you planning to truck them? Are you going to fly them? Or is that even discussed on rail spur, or how are you going to get it out to INL?

(00:05:01) Jeff Waksman: So the intent is to fly that reactor out as well. But the most important thing that we’ve been very clear—and this has come down from the leadership of the Pentagon—is that reactor has to turn on in this administration, and so if we get any sense at any point that trying to do the flight adds extra risk, then we will cut it off. But the intent now, we believe we have plenty of time to fly it out there. But flying it does create extra risks. You’re always afraid of breaking something, you have to do extra inspections once it gets there, so we will run all that down and a final decision will get made collectively in the Pentagon. The final decision lies with the program manager at SCO, but it’ll be a collective decision.

Robert Bryce: And in looking at Pele, the project and the work, I’ve just looked back at it: it started in 2022, and the target prototype delivery at INL was apparently in mid‑2024. Am I right on the timeline slipping here? I mean, the timeline slipped—is that history correct?

Jeff Waksman: Well, we started to design the program in 2019, and at that point we were hoping to turn on in 2024. By the time we awarded the full contract in 2022, we knew 2024 was no longer realistic. We were hoping for 2025. It is a challenge, and you know it’s one of the things that we’ve tried to impose—and to take it back a step, if you ever read anything about Admiral Rickover, he comes off as this real cynical jerk, negative, whatever, but then you realize once you try to actually build a reactor, it is very difficult. Anyone who’s read the paper‑reactor memo knows. This is just the nature of it: nuclear reactors are complicated, especially if you want to handle the whole balance of plant and everything that’s involved in it. Schedules slip to the right. But I give the comparison to SpaceX and nuclear. Every time Elon announces a schedule, he always ends up being two years late, but he usually delivers. And so the most important thing in Pele has been that there have been a number of government advanced‑nuclear‑reactor programs over the last 40 years; none of them got to hardware. The point of Pele was, above all else we had to actually deliver real hardware. This could not end in press releases, and that is what this is doing. Pele is going to get built, it is going to turn on, and it has already had major impacts because when the president signed his executive orders last year, one of the things they asked for was a reformulating of the Department of Energy regulatory requirements. Well, who did they turn to? The folks who did Pele, because we’d actually regulated a reactor under DOE licensing, and our team was able to come and say, hey, this is what worked, this is what didn’t work, here’s how you can reduce paperwork. And so they’ve come out with a new set of rules, and the reason why these crit experiments were able to go so fast this year under DOE licensing has been all that learning under Pele. You just have to build something and then get better at the next one and better at the next one. That’s the nature of hard‑tech development.

(00:08:03) Robert Bryce: So, as you talk through this, I want to emphasize this point. This will be the first microreactor—and micro, I guess in this case I’m thinking under five or 10 megawatts, I think is micro. This will be the first microreactor that actually gets to the hardware stage and actually starts producing power in the U.S. in modern history. I guess we can go back a long time, but am I right there?

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, so the Army had some microreactors back in the 1960s, but the last one of those turned off in the mid‑70s. So yeah, it’ll be the first one in 50 years.

Robert Bryce: So let me jump ahead because I think I met some—well, I did meet some people with BWXT in October here in Austin at the Texas Nuclear Summit. Why gas‑cooled? Why is this—there’s a school of thought, obviously, in the nuclear‑reactor world: go with what’s tried and true, go with light water; we know we have hundreds of operating years, maybe thousands of operating years, of experience with light water. Why is the military, why is the Army going with a gas‑cooled reactor with Pele?

Jeff Waksman: Well, while Pele is gas‑cooled, we’re actually not requiring gas‑cooled, and under Janus we may be considering other options. But the only other realistic option is heat pipes. The reason not to do water—I’m sorry, Janus, forgive me. Janus is the broader program that Pele is under?

Robert Bryce: Right, thanks for clarifying.

Jeff Waksman: No, Janus is a new program that we announced in October. So let me bring that back for podcast listeners. Pele, we started that seven years ago; that’s under construction now. When the president signed his executive orders in May of 2025, one of the things he said is that the Army is going to have the lead for installation nuclear power across the Department of Defense, and the Army is going to have to start a program of record and deliver reactors to power military bases under Army licensing. So we spent about four and a half months formulating what that would look like, and in October I stood on stage with the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Energy and we announced the Janus program. That program is currently under source selection, but it is going to be a well‑funded program, and that program is going to select multiple vendors and we will hopefully build multiple reactors in the coming future. We’re in source selection right now so I can’t talk about specific companies—we haven’t decided on specific companies at this point—but those don’t have to be gas‑cooled. They can really be anything. However, realistically it’s got to be gas‑cooled or heat pipes.

Robert Bryce: The reason you don’t want to do light water is…

Jeff Waksman: …that light water makes a lot of sense for the Navy—you’re in the ocean—but because most commercial reactors are light‑water reactors, they have to be along a large body of water, either along a big river or along the ocean, something like that. Well, we need to have the flexibility to not have to be there. The whole idea of microreactors is that you can move them other places. We’ll put them in remote locations, places in the Arctic, for instance in Alaska, potentially. So in order to do that, you have to pull yourself away from light water. Now, in theory, you could do molten salt, but generally in my opinion things like molten salt are going to be difficult for transportable reactors; those make more sense for bigger, non‑transportable reactors. And so generally what we’ve been seeing from all the microreactor companies coming to us is that they’re gas‑cooled or heat‑pipe designs.

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Robert Bryce: To summarize that, if I could, Jeff—and this was the folks at BWXT—they very quickly said, well, weight is the key attribute here, and size, that you can make a reactor that’s lighter and more compact than one that uses water. Is that fair?

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, there are a lot of unique challenges to making a reactor small enough to fit inside conex boxes. It’s just different from when you have tons of space to build a gigawatt plant; you can put in all the concrete and whatever. You have to fundamentally think differently about your neutron shielding versus gamma shielding. It’s a completely different paradigm when it’s small, and it just turns out to be pretty convenient. And the other attribute is higher temperature, which—as the folks at BWXT said—gives you higher‑temperature output that you can use for multiple different processes if you want to in a remote location: desalination, other things. So size, weight, and temperature are the key attributes for gas.

Robert Bryce: Yeah, absolutely. And I know this is something that you’ve written about before. I mean, I’ve read a couple of your books and you talk about how we focus on the electricity in the trying‑to‑get‑off‑fossil‑fuels conversation, but people forget that most of what fossil fuels are used for is not electricity. We have a lot of other applications that need energy, and some of those are high‑temperature heat. And for the military that’s largely going to be heating in the winter, but there are other applications when it comes down to processing, doing different chemical and industrial processes; there are different things that we’re increasingly doing where you need high temperatures, and you can get that with fossil fuels or you can get that with these advanced reactors that get upwards of 900 degrees, 1000 degrees Celsius.

(00:13:19) Robert Bryce: So let’s talk about TRISO. You mentioned that the first load of fuel for the Pele reactor, which is TRISO—Tri‑structural Isotropic, I forgot the acronym there; you can fill me in.

Jeff Waksman: Isotropic.

Robert Bryce: Okay, thank you. So why is the Pele reactor using TRISO? And the second part of this is, isn’t that a problem? Because TRISO is hard to fabricate. I mean, this is a very difficult fuel to fabricate. A lot of the SMR companies are planning to use TRISO, but again back to the supply chain and talking about light water versus newer chemistries, this is one of the big issues. It’s not just how you cool it, it’s the fuel that you put into it. So in this case, why TRISO?

Jeff Waksman: So TRISO is definitely significantly more expensive to make than traditional fuel; you’re right, this is the Cadillac of fuel. But the logic is that fuel is generally a pretty small percentage of the cost of a nuclear power plant, and the intent is that yes, we’re going to spend more on the fuel, but in exchange we can spend less on a lot of other things. We have far fewer redundant safety systems because the fuel itself is its own containment. The fact that it can get so hot without melting just makes the system a lot safer and we can regulate it differently. So the idea is that you can hopefully bring down your costs, because what has really killed these big‑reactor projects like Vogtle is not making the fuel and making the core; it’s the concrete building they built around it. That’s what is really killing them from a financial perspective, so that is in large part why people are pursuing TRISO. Another benefit for us is the safety aspect. Obviously the first priority for nuclear is safety, and that’s always everyone’s top priority. But beyond that, if you were to ask the Navy, “Beyond safety, what’s your number‑two priority?” their number‑two priority is performance. They need extraordinary performance and they’re willing to pay extra and to have very highly trained personnel at that reactor at all times to make sure it runs. Well, after safety our second priority is ease and safety of operation and not needing to have so many highly trained people, to be able to have something that has much higher margins for failure so that we don’t need a bunch of Naval Reactors‑trained people operating these things. So Naval Reactors has looked at TRISO and said, this is insane, your uranium density in the core is so low, why would you do this? And the reason is because we want to have a core that is what we call walk‑away safe: if all of our operators were to keel over with a heart attack and there’s no one at this reactor and it starts to go wrong, the physics of the core itself prevents a meltdown. That is one of the advantages of TRISO, and because it has that safety capability, that is part of what allows us to have less redundant safety and drive down costs. So yes, we will have less energy per unit volume than a naval reactor, but that’s because we’re not trying to do what Naval Reactors does; it’s a very different problem we’re trying to solve.

Robert Bryce: Right. So when you say less energy per unit volume, you’re talking about power density per square meter, power density per cubic centimeter.

Jeff Waksman: That’s right. We’re significantly lower in watts per cubic centimeter than a naval reactor—way lower.

Robert Bryce: But you may have higher power density in watts per kilogram then. Is that fair?

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, potentially. We’re trying to see, and these are meant to be commercial reactors; these are going to be commercially owned and operated reactors. We want to allow these private companies to be creative and to come up with their own solutions, and more than anything we’re trying to have these costs be low. We need these to be affordable for the Army; they don’t need to be 10 cents a kilowatt‑hour, but long term they need to be something like 25 cents a kilowatt‑hour for this to make sense for the Army. Now, we recognize that it’s going to take a while to get there, and so the money that we are going to be spending over the next few years is to help these companies get to those sorts of prices. We recognize no one’s building a first‑of‑a‑kind microreactor and selling it for 12 cents a kilowatt‑hour. We get it. But in the same way that when NASA got SpaceX going, they had to put several hundred million dollars in to help get SpaceX going; once they got there, SpaceX was able to launch things way cheaper than NASA could. And that’s our hope: that we will get these companies over and through their challenges to the point that they get to nth‑of‑a‑kind, and these can be affordable so that any installation can purchase them in the future.

(00:17:55) Robert Bryce: So let me follow up on that. I like that because the nth‑of‑a‑kind is always the hurdle, the technological valley of death, as the term goes. The first‑of‑a‑kind is going to be expensive, and then as you build more, we know from project learning that costs come down. But you said something important there at the end: so that these commercial entities can build them on military installations. As I hear that, it reinforces for me that—as I look at this, and I’ve been pro‑nuclear, we’ve spoken briefly before, I’ve been saying the same thing for 15 years—it appears increasingly that the DOD could be the lead horse, the bell cow, when it comes to new deployments of nuclear in the U.S. It seems to me that the pathways that are laid out seem easier for the DOD, or Department of War, than perhaps any other route. Am I right there?

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, this has been one of my arguments for a military microreactor program, because there’s a recognition, as you’re saying, that we need to build a bunch of reactors. It’s the only way we’re going to get good at it. We can sit around waiting for a bunch of AP1000s to get built, and the administration is working very hard to try to make that happen, but it’s going to be very hard to start building five AP1000s a year; that’s going to be very difficult to pull off. But when you talk about microreactors and the size of these systems and what they’re going to cost, this is something that the Department of Defense can afford to do, can actually put in a few hundred million dollars and make this happen and build enough systems that we potentially get good enough. And as we’ve seen with the utilities, all the utilities want nuclear power but no one wants to be first. They all want someone else to go first; they all want the third one. So we will take that risk. Any company that’s bidding on Janus has to give us a minimum of two reactors, and realistically we’re hoping for more. What that exact number is—give us a few months and we’ll announce—but we want to get to multiple reactors, and that way the commercial sector is not buying the first one or the second one, but maybe they’re buying the sixth one and we’ve already done a lot of that de‑risking for them. I think that’s one of the things we can do uniquely as the Department of Defense. And also we have more reason to pay for this, because microreactors actually have operational value to the military where an AP1000 doesn’t. I can’t plug a military base into an AP1000; that’s not useful to me.

Robert Bryce: But your advantages in this, if I could just run through them thinking out loud: one, the obvious one, you don’t have to deal with the NRC. You bypass the NRC; you have your own licensing process; you have the land; you have the customer; and you have the supply chain in terms of the fuel as well. Those seem like four key advantages you have. Are there other ones that I’m missing?

Jeff Waksman: Well, also the military through its history is good at getting stuff done and bringing new technology forward—among other things, nuclear power. Nuclear power came out of the U.S. Navy. But there are a lot of other technologies. An example I like to give, because it blows people’s minds, is that the U.S. Army over the last 30 years has had a number of major breakthroughs in breast‑cancer research, and you go, why would the Army research breast cancer? Well, because you give the Army a mission and they will accomplish the mission. It is a mission‑oriented organization and, more than any other part of the government, the military is good at just getting stuff done. The program‑management capabilities, the contracting capabilities, just the ability to manage is unique. There are many examples of the military leading a technology, and I think that is an advantage we have over an organization like the Department of Energy or other civilian agencies that just don’t necessarily have that same drive that the military does.

(00:21:49) Robert Bryce: And as you say that, I think it’s important to remember—and this is an important but largely forgotten bit of history—that the Army operated the Sturgis, the MH‑1A, in the Panama Canal Zone—I looked it up again—from 1968 to 1976. It was moored in Gatun Lake; I’ve been there. It was a 10‑megawatt reactor on an old Liberty ship. It was a power ship before power ships were cool, and power ships are really cool now. But this is an important part of that history: this is 50 years ago, but still what’s old is new again in some ways. I like how you explain that the Army can lead on this again. And I guess, if we look back, we should have said, why did we let that program die? But hindsight’s always 20/20. Have you thought about that project at all?

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, absolutely. The Army had eight reactors that were built largely in the 1960s. The Army Reactor Office still exists, in fact, and it has now been moved underneath my organization. It’s obviously a lot smaller than it used to be. But the reason they stopped back then is that prior to the last 20 years or so, logistical challenges were about fuel to the front; when we were fighting in Korea or Vietnam, it was about whether we could get fuel to the front. What has changed now, what is dramatically different about energy, is that we are now at risk at home: we could have attacks on our electric grid, take down the U.S. electric grid, and we will be on our backs. We operate so much of what we do here at home, so having energy resiliency here is new; this was not a problem back in the 70s. So in the 70s they said, hey, we have budget cuts, it’s Vietnam, gas is cheaper than nuclear, so kill the nuclear program; gas is cheaper. But now gas is not enough. We know that, as we saw with the Colonial Pipeline a few years ago. Our adversaries with very simple cyberattacks can shut down our ability to move fossil fuels around the country. Having a source of power that does not need refueling for years at a time is a complete game‑changer from a resiliency perspective.

(00:23:54) Robert Bryce: So how many reactors then might the Department of Defense—the Department of War—how many might they build? In the U.S. alone, I’m just trying to imagine these numbers: 200 military bases in the U.S. that in theory could become grid‑independent or grid‑adjacent. You could have grid power, but you could effectively be self‑sustaining. So the question again: how many of these reactors might the department build, or buy, or commercialize?

Jeff Waksman: Theoretically, the Army did a study a few years ago about, with all the money in the world, how many different reactor sites would potentially make sense, and they came up with a number of a couple hundred. Now, I want to be clear, the Army’s not committing to building that many at this time. In fact, I can’t talk about specific numbers because the president’s budget’s not out yet and we’re in that time. But what I can say is that we are going to take a minimum of three companies, and they’re going to be delivering a minimum of two reactors each. So at least six, and it should be more than that. We have already released a list of nine Army installations that we are seriously considering for these. We did a down‑select on a number of categories and we came up with the top nine and we have released that. Eight of those sites are in the contiguous 48 states and there’s also one up in Alaska. It doesn’t mean we’re going to put reactors at all nine sites, but we’re going to down‑select from there because we’re trying to find the right balance based on the companies we select: which sites work best for them. We also need to make sure that we can work with a utility, because some of these companies have relationships with one utility or another. It’s a bit of an awkward seventh‑grade dance; we’ve got to match up the boys and the girls. But we’ll do that in the next few months.

Robert Bryce: I live in Austin, Texas. I think Fort Hood is just north of here by about 60 miles. I would assume, of those eight installations, am I right to think Fort Hood is one of them?

Jeff Waksman: It is. It is, because it’s one of the biggest Army bases in the world, and it has a significant power load. So I’m just making an assumption there, but yes, that would be on the list.

Robert Bryce: Because it’s one of the biggest Army bases in the world, right? And it has a significant power load. So I’m just making an assumption there, but yeah, I assume that would be on the list.

(00:26:04) Robert Bryce: Let me switch gears here just a minute, Jeff. We talked before briefly, some weeks ago, about the challenges in the nuclear sector. One of the things that you brought up was the importance of engineering codes that are promulgated by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Why are these ASME codes important, and why are they important for the nuclear sector?

Jeff Waksman: Sure, so you brought up how Babcock and Wilcox has been making boilers going back to the 19th century. These engineering codes actually originally came out of boilers. Back in the 19th century, when boilers started to become a thing, they started to explode on people. They started exploding and killing people, which is a bad outcome. And so then you had Hartford Insurance, Hartford Boiler Company, and insurance for boilers became a thing. A lot of people died, and they finally realized, okay, we have to collect a bunch of data and figure out how these different materials will behave under different conditions, and they built these codes. You started then having code stamps—people would stamp the boiler saying, this has been approved under this code. This is now applied to all sorts of engineering. I used to work at NASA; this is how you deal with rockets. Similarly with nuclear, there are nuclear stamps to say that we understand that this graphite or this steel or whatever is how it’s going to behave under these conditions and that we have confidence it’s not going to break over the lifetime of the system for these reasons. And this is based on large amounts of data.

So what is the data that we have in the nuclear world? It’s largely light‑water reactors; it’s what we’ve been operating, under very specific conditions. You mentioned before how these advanced reactors can operate at higher temperatures. Well, if you’re operating at higher temperatures than reactors have traditionally operated, you don’t have all that data. You don’t have all that history. The engineering codes are often very sparse in terms of data under those conditions. What we’ve discovered is that every microreactor program, when it gets far enough—whether it was Pele or other programs like MARVEL and DRACO that have gotten underway—they’ve all had this problem. They realize that their materials can’t be validated under the codes because they’re under these new conditions, and you just have to do testing. You have to take this material, heat it up, irradiate it, whatever you have to do to validate and basically create new codes. The Pele program is leading to a change in the ASME code for material because of something that we learned.

(00:28:32) Jeff Waksman: This also gets into what we’re trying to do under Janus, which is: let’s say we have four different companies and they’re using four slightly different flavors of graphite. That’s not very useful if I’ve got to validate four different types of graphite at these new conditions. If we can just get everyone to compress to the same thing, validate it for everybody, it’ll be cheaper and faster for everybody. So this is part of what we’re trying to do. It’s not just about choosing the design you like best. This is about creating an ecosystem for these advanced nuclear reactors to actually happen.

Robert Bryce: I like how you describe that—an ecosystem. So it’s not just that you’ve got the gas‑cooled reactor; let’s say plate steel or some kind of steel you’re using in that, you’re going to need an ASME code for that—for temperature, for pressure, and for radiation. But if you’re building a salt‑cooled reactor or something, you’re going to need the same kind of—well, is it right to call it a certification? It’s called a code, but it’s effectively a type of certification then. Am I apprehending this right?

Jeff Waksman: Yeah. So, you know, traditionally in nuclear they call it an “N‑stamp.” You put it on and say, hey, this is nuclear‑grade. One of the things that microreactor companies are arguing is, maybe less of the reactor needs to be nuclear‑grade. Maybe we can get away with commercial‑grade for more of the system, and that’s a conversation we’re having with the regulator. But regardless, you have to satisfy the regulator that your materials, whatever they happen to be, are going to be able to handle the environment that you’re saying they’re going to have to handle. That’s just a very complex technical conversation that goes on between engineers. We lived it every day on Pele; I have scars from this. Our team is coming in eyes open. Some of these startup companies kind of have this idea of, well, Elon Musk got to just blow up rockets in the desert, so maybe we can just screw around with reactors and blow them up in the desert. That’s not really going to fly in nuclear. We really have to have confidence that you’re not going to have a failure or a meltdown before we get started. These codes are what drive how we have confidence that things won’t actually melt down in the real world.

Robert Bryce: And to just finish that point, you said on behalf of the regulator, the regulator has to be confident. So here we have the regulator being the Department of the Army for the reactors that you’re going to deploy. But the same process is going to apply for anybody that’s going through the NRC with a different type of reactor as well. So different, but you may have one ASME code that will satisfy both. Nevertheless, it’s going to have to go through that rigorous process, which is time‑consuming.

Jeff Waksman: Yeah, and so the idea is, the NRC, the Department of Energy, and the Department of War all have the authority to regulate nuclear reactors, but the standards are the same, right? It’s not going to be such a situation that DOE says this graphite’s good, but NRC doesn’t. To use TRISO as an example, the TRISO flavor that we use has been validated by the Department of Energy. DOE did a whole bunch of research and said, under these conditions, this is how TRISO behaves; as long as you stay within this range, you’re okay. NRC has that data. So any company that comes to the NRC with TRISO, if they’re staying within the range of what DOE validated, NRC goes thumbs up, you’re good to go. If you’re trying to push beyond that—if you want to do some more advanced TRISO variant that’s outside the specs of what DOE did—NRC is going to ask for more data. Smart companies just leverage the stuff that’s already been validated rather than spend a lot of time and money trying to validate something new.

(00:32:01) Robert Bryce: So I know you have a hard stop here in just a few minutes, but let’s briefly talk about materials science. I don’t know if it was in your interview with Emmet Penney, my friend Emmet, or whether it was something we briefly discussed, but you said that the materials‑science part of this—and I think the ASME codes would fit under this—is the single biggest challenge that the nuclear industry has. Can you briefly tell me why that is? Am I right to think the ASME codes are part of that? And more broadly, what you’re thinking about when you talk about materials science?

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Jeff Waksman: Yeah, this is the hard part of a reactor. Any nuclear‑engineering undergraduate student knows how to do basic neutronics. Anyone can design a basic reactor core to operate. If your teacher says, hey, I need a reactor that operates for this many years at this power, anyone can design that; there are basic neutronics codes that tell you how that works. That’s the easy part. The hard part is, how do you make sure that when you have these thin strips in your heat exchanger, or you have your power‑conversion system over here, that when you scram it a couple of times you’re not going to break something that’s going to take that reactor down for a year? That’s really the hard part, and that is what has been validated in commercial systems. These old PWRs, they know that they can run for years and years; they can scram as many times as they want and they’ll be able to withstand it. As you start to compress to these microreactors, that’s really the challenge. You start to make stuff thinner and thinner—how do you make sure it doesn’t shatter when you scram a few times? This is a challenge that every microreactor that I’m aware of has had, and it’s all materials science. Materials science is not sexy. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is you have these huge amounts of data that these codes are based on, and you go, where did all this data come from? It tends to be that some post‑grad in the 1950s just sat there and did 10,000 experiments, wrote all the data down in his notebook, and that gets injected into the codes. Tons and tons of that data were collected back in the day.

So I’ve had people say to me, hey, maybe AI can just figure this out. But AI can’t figure out what we don’t have data for. Materials don’t always behave linearly. Once you have the data and you have the codes, then yes, AI can optimize your reactor. But that materials science has to be done. Someone has to put that material in a test, heat it up or put it under fluence or something to get the data. Once you have the data, then yes, you can use all the computer models and AI to optimize your system. But without the materials science, you have nothing and your reactor is not going to work.

Robert Bryce: We talked about the different regulatory regimes. I’m going to skip over the political support because I do see—and I think you agree—that we’ve seen a change on Capitol Hill with more bipartisan support for nuclear. Particularly given where the Department of War is on this and leading in this resurgence and renewed interest in nuclear, that’s very positive. So I’m going to put you on the spot here.

(00:35:02) Let’s assume blue sky everything for me: that the nuclear sector, both the commercial sector and what you’re doing within the Department of War, succeeds. How many gigawatts of new nuclear capacity will be online in the U.S. by 2035? Not refurbished reactors, not Palisades, not Three Mile Island—give me a number for the number of gigawatts of new nuclear capacity that will be online in the U.S. by 2035.

Jeff Waksman: I am going to say 20 gigawatts. I think that can be done, but the only way that happens is—it’s not going to come from microreactors. It’s not going to be that we’re going to build 10,000 microreactors. This administration is working very hard to make an AP1000 deal happen. They’re trying to get 10 AP1000s built, and if they could close that deal, that’s most of your way to 20 gigawatts. So I have optimism that they will get that done, and that’s how I think that happens. The reality is microreactors are great for learning how to build reactors; they’re great for military operational needs. But if you want to power the country with gigawatts and gigawatts, that’s got to be bigger systems. The learning that we do in microreactors is going to help us know how to build bigger reactors. We saw that when I worked with X‑energy on the Pele program, where a lot of knowledge flowed back and forth between the Xe‑100 program and their microreactor, because it’s the same materials, a lot of the same things. But it’s going to have to be these bigger reactors; that’s going to be the bulk of it. I’m an optimist, so I’m going to say 20 gigawatts.

Robert Bryce: Well, I like that number. I think 10; I’ve settled kind of on 10 because I think that’s doable and I’m trying to be sober. So last question, because I know you need to run and I’m glad we were able to make this happen. You’ve spent a lot of time in this arena. You’ve worked hard. I know you’re dedicated to it. What gives you hope?

Jeff Waksman: What gives me hope is that we have an incredibly smart group of people. Because Pele has been the fastest‑moving program and has had a lot of money, we’ve been able to attract the best talent from the labs. We’ve been able to say, hey, we need the world’s leading expert on this—oh, that guy, he’s at Oak Ridge. All right, when you need him, you can have him. So we just have an incredible set of people. We also have incredible support. I’m a Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army, whatever that means, but the Secretary of the Army and the Chief of Staff of the Army support this program. Every time I run into the Chief of Staff of the Army, he always asks me, “What’s going on with Janus?” And we know that this is supported over at the Office of the Secretary of War as well. So there is tremendous support up and down the government. We’re going to have a very significant budget that’s going to get released by the president in a couple of months, and we have this incredible team. So if anyone is ever going to build microreactors, it’s going to be now. This kind of combination has never come together and will never come together again. If this is ever going to work, it’s going to be now.

Robert Bryce: I like that, and that is hopeful. I appreciate the work you’re doing. It’s inspiring, and I’m glad to see that—my quibbles and my criticisms of the Trump administration aside—on this front I think they’re doing exactly the right thing, and I’m glad you’re leading the charge. So my thanks to Dr. Jeff Waksman. He’s the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and the Environment.

Thanks to you, Jeff, and thanks to all of you for tuning in. See you.

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