Nov. 10, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:55
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| One issue that you've been working on for a very long time is promoting nuclear power as a solution, as an energy solution. | |
| And, you know, I guess, you know, you're seeing suddenly the beginnings of the realization of your quest here. | |
| How does that feel? | |
| It feels great, Jan. | |
| Thank you for asking. | |
| It was a lot of grief trying to say, as an environmentalist and Gen Xer. raised on fear of nuclear power. | |
| I took a lot of grief over speaking out for nuclear, pointing out just how superior it is to renewables. | |
| I mean, orders of magnitude better. | |
| So it's been enormously satisfying, particularly the change in public opinion. | |
| I mean, it's 70, no, sorry, it's 61% public approval in the United States of nuclear power. | |
| Renewables, I believe, are at 52%. | |
| When I first started making the case for nuclear back around 2016, those numbers were reversed. | |
| I mean, renewables actually, I think, were in the 70s in terms of public approval. | |
| Nuclear, I believe, was in the 40% area. | |
| So it's been a huge change. | |
| And I think it's inspiring in that way. | |
| You know, there's, you know, the bad news is that all the stuff I was warning about, you know, that nuclear plants are being shut down. | |
| We did lose a fair number of them, saved a bunch of them, saved the nuclear plant in California, saved a couple of plants in Illinois and New York, South Korea, made the case in Europe, but they're still shutting down nuclear plants in Germany, lost a couple in the United States. | |
| You know, it's a mixed thing. | |
| I mean, you know, Facebook, you know, Meta needs so much power for their server farms that they bought all the power from Three Mile Island. | |
| That's the one reactor that has been operating since 1979. | |
| The reactor right next to it melted in 1979. | |
| And people thought that was some apocalyptic event. | |
| Actually proved the overall safety of the worst form of accident of a nuclear plant. | |
| It melted and the radiation was contained in the containment dome just like it had been designed to do. | |
| And now everybody wants that power, desperate for that cheap nuclear power in a plant that's already built. | |
| So now the question is, what do we do to build new nuclear plants? | |
| And on this, you know, I'm excited to see there's been talk about, you know, just continuing to build. | |
| Once you build a standard water-cooled nuclear plant, a big one like we have in the United States, it's guaranteed to pay for itself. | |
| It's just guaranteed. | |
| And the reason is, is that they can run for 92% of the year or so, which is a huge amount of time. | |
| They can basically always be on. | |
| You can rely on them for your server farms. | |
| You have to refuel the time where you can't, that 8% of the year, you refuel them or you do a little bit of maintenance, but they're guaranteed to make money. | |
| Even if they go way over budget, they're still going to make money, you know, depending on financing and the price of electricity, you know, in the 20th year or the 25th year. | |
| And, you know, they can run forever. | |
| I mean, you might have to swap out parts, but you're talking about plants that are going to be licensed to run for, they are licensed for 80 years or more now. | |
| So it's a long-term investment. | |
| There's a lot of hope for a whole different kind of nuclear, but I just think my view is you kind of continue to iterate on the kind of nuclear we know how to build and have proven to build, do some experiments. | |
| But yeah, I mean, I just think you see Silicon Valley, the Trump administration, a fair number of Democrats, including, you know, Governor of California, have all recognized that nuclear is really amazing. | |
| It's really quite a, it's the best form of electricity. | |
| It's got all these advantages, and we just should be building a lot more of it. |
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