“I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” – Andromeda
Had Oppenheimer been a theoretical physicist he would have been frictionless, perfectly spherical, homogeneous, isotropic, involuntarily celibate, and have extended to infinity in all directions. I guess one out of seven isn’t bad.
You know, Oppenheimer probably didn’t realize that his little gadget would one day power cat videos on YouTube®. But yet, here we are, preparing to stare down the barrel of an energy crisis that makes the 1970s oil embargo look like a minor hiccup at the gas pump.
America’s tech overlords are building A.I. data centers faster than a caffeinated beaver on gas station Chinese boner pills. These behemoths suck down electricity like it’s free beer at an open bar to toss electrons so we can make A.I. cat videos because there weren’t enough cats in real life.
The scale is enormous: gigawatts upon gigawatts, enough to finally get Marty all the way back to 1985. But that begs this question:
Where’s all that juice coming from?
My walkie-talkie once took a lump of coal to a movie. It was a classic example of radio-carbon dating.
Coal? Ha! That’s so 19th century, and the eco-warriors have pretty much chained themselves to the last coal plant, screaming about carbon footprints.
Natural gas? Did everyone forget demand peaks in winter when everyone is cranking up the heat and prices spike like Nvidia® stock? Are we going to have to keep our homes at 40°F (3.14 millipedes) just so ChatGPT® can make GloboLeftist women on the East Coast even more neurotic?
We need power, so, naturally, the bright sparks in Silicon Valley and D.C. turn to the holy grail: The Simpsons.
Sure, Homer® looks incompetent, but he hasn’t melted Springfield down. Yet. When The Simpsons started, they were mocking nuclear power in the typical GloboLeft drive to get it shut down.
Deep down, though, nuclear really always has been the only viable transition plan into the future. Oil really will run out at some point, abiotic or not.
I had an allergic reaction and the doctor asked how I was. “Swell.”
But nuclear? If done right, it really can be clean, reliable, and if we don’t let Soviets do it, pretty safe.
So, problem solved.
Not.
We’re facing an immediate energy cliff. In 2025, nuclear isn’t a parachute, it’s really more like a bedsheet and some twine.
With a little help from Constant Reader Ricky, who sent me an email.
I’ll quote him directly because, well, he nails it better than I could.
Ricky writes: “Existing commercial power reactors in the US have two key characteristics – their uranium is enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 assay to a level of 3%, and they are cooled with pressurized water as the heat transfer fluid to run the turbines. The reactors were INITIALLY fueled via uranium enrichment done long ago in . . . monstrous factories that are now closed. An effectively experimental centrifuge enrichment operation in Piketon, Ohio shut down in 2016 without ever producing a pound of reactor fuel (we bombed a similar setup recently in Iran).
“Believe it or not, the US CURRENTLY fuels its commercial nuclear power reactors for the past ten years with Russian 3% enriched uranium, even through the Ukrainian war. The Russians basically dilute some of their bomb grade 93% enriched uranium stockpile down into 3% reactor fuel as an export profit center.”
Key point courtesy of Ricky: “The current American commercial nuclear power program is 100% dependent on the Russians and has been for the last decade.” He adds, “But we want that because that every kilogram of Russian uranium that goes IN a New York City power reactor is one less kilogram of Russian uranium that can go into an incoming nuclear bomb OVER New York City.”
He’s right. I want the Russians to hit the Somilsotans first. And then New York City twice. It’s the only way to be sure.
And just like uranium, Hillary is unstable, hard to find, and expensive. If only we could power a reactor with her tears.
It’s like we’re in a bad spy novel, relying on our geopolitical rivals for the fuel that keeps our lights on. We can stamp our feet as much as we want to, but as long as Mom and Dad are paying the power bills, they call the shots.
With AI data centers projected to gobble up an extra 200-300 gigawatts by 2050 (that’s tripling our nuclear capacity), we’re supposed to ramp up nuclear like it’s no big deal. It’s like the steady high school girlfriend you’ve been dating off and on for a year who you can always call for a date at the last minute.
Nope.
Building that kind of capacity?
Recent estimates peg adding just 63 GW at $354 billion. We’re talking trillions when you factor in overruns. The Vogtle plant in Georgia – two reactors, “just” 2.2 GW, clocked in at $35 billion after fifteen years of delays.
Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.
Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.
Except these micro wonders ditch the “obsolete” 3% enriched uranium for something hotter: 20% enriched stuff, packaged in pellets like, I don’t know, energy kibble. Supposedly, they’re meltdown-proof, corrosion-resistant, great with kids, fun at parties, and perfect for high-temperature gas or molten salt reactors. And they’re much smaller than kibble, like poppy seed sized, but kibble is a funnier word and I really don’t want to think how stupid it is to build highly radioactive balls that you could put into someone’s potato salad at the neighborhood picnic?
I did figure out where I got the plague: the flea market.
Cool, so where do we get this 20% enriched uranium for our nuclear kibble?
We downblend our surplus bomb-grade stuff from the Cold War.
The US has 480 metric tons total, but half is reserved for nuking India (it’s the only way to be sure), and 100 tons reserved for Navy reactors.
Bringing those numbers up to date and turning it into nuclear kibble leaves 86 metric tons up for grabs.
So, we have a safe plan. What’s stopping us?
Adding 250 GW of new nuclear by 2050 (a Department of Energy guess) requires 5,350 metric tons (it’s like a ton, but it has a French accent) of enriched uranium kibble.
Do the math:
86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?
It’s like trying to fill an Olympic®-sized pool by spitting into it.
Our energy policy in a single meme.
Okay, let’s restart a program that used to make the stuff. Great! The Piketon, Ohio centrifuge plant we mentioned above, let’s use that. They’re planning on delivering 900 kilograms (a ton for those of us from countries that have put people on the Moon) by 2026.
So, we need over 5,000 tons.
We’ve made one. Oh, scratch that, not even one yet.
Want to take odds on that bet?
Even if we magically create tons of usable uranium, Harry Potter-style®, there’s no supply chain for turning it into nuclear kibble. Right now, it’s a prototype lab in New Mexico fiddling with demos.
We’d need a whole new industry.
And we’d need to have started on this (checks watch) twenty years ago. That’s the bitch of exponential growth. We could play with 2030 numbers (“only” 50 GW), but since no concrete has been poured for this new capacity and there is no path to creating this fuel, it’s more realistic to discuss if Superman© could beat The Witcher®. It’s a non-starter.
I mean, who would win, Captain Kirk or T.J. Hooker?
We’re dependent on foreign fuel, short on domestic capacity, and staring at timelines measured in decades, not quarters.
Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole “AI will save us” stock market hype or at least stock up on candles and spears.
And hey, if that microreactor ends up in my yard, Homer© and I will host a barbecue, BYOGC.
(Bring your own Geiger counters, you know, potato salad).
Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.
Don’t worry about all the electric power left over after the AI’s have had their fill; we can mine bitcoin with it!
According to the BBC, and PBS, we should imitate Kodiak Alaska’s 99% renewable power system. It’s not just good for the environment, but it’s cheaper than the fossil-fuel alternative. Except, if you look a little deeper, you discover that it’s 80% hydroelectric power (20% wind), and supports just 6000 customers (none of whom are data centers or bitcoin miners). And the “conventional” power is diesel, which is probably refined down in California and shipped up by barge. And their “cheaper than oil” electricity is still about twice the price of my local grid, in Maryland. And there aren’t any more good hydro sites to develop. But, other than THAT, we’ll be fine.
Lathechuck
or how about this? USA buys uranium pellets from Canada? They’re right next door, own a huge inventory of both raw material and refined ore, shipping costs would be very manageable. And they speak English, sort of.
Oh wait, USA just kicked them in the nuts with tariffs, because they unfairly know how to do stuff, and they unfairly have lots of natural resources and trees.
And they tariff the crap out of US products, but that’s ok because why, they’re socialists?
I know, right? I love paying $4 per 2×4 when most of the mills in the US have been shut down after $1 2x4s flooded the US market for decades leading to the shutdown of local sawmills.
Too bad we don’t have biomass to use across half of the country either.
That will support a few million humans, and the rest will have to go without. Which might be the plan?
Great job, John. I am always amazed at your continuing ability to laugh in the face of impending doom. And I enjoy laughing with you.
For the record, here’s the receipts:
The US current stockpile of 93% enriched bomb-grade uranium (last manufactured in 1964) stood in 2023 at 482 tons with allocations of 361 tons for weapons, 88 tons for ship / sub fuel, and 14 tons for use in government research reactors. That leaves a little more than 18 tons officially allocated for down blending to lower enrichment levels usable in micro reactors.
https://fissilematerials.org/countries/united_states.html#
This “surplus” 18 tons of US bomb-grade material POTENTIALLY could be down-blended into the 86 tons of 20% micro reactor fuel John mentions above. Currently DOE has an official program to ACTUALLY do this with 2 tons of surplus weapons grade material, part of the ongoing New Mexico science project at Karios. In the picture, the “20% enriched kibble” are the little dots embedded in the graphite ball. Dump enough of these balls in a gumball machine and they somehow suddenly get very, very hot because science.
https://www.nucnet.org/news/kairos-and-bwxt-to-collaborate-on-commercial-production-of-triso-nuclear-fuel-9-3-2025
The DOE projection for 250GW of new nuke capacity by 2050 (for Net Zero carbon emissions under Biden, er, now AI data centers under Trump) is here. If you play with their numbers from page 7, you come up with 21 tons of 20% uranium required for every GW of new installed nuke capacity. SO 86 tons of available down blended material from the stockpile is enough for 4 GW of new nuke plants, not 250 GW. Oops. So the plan is to restart and turbocharge Piketon centrifuges after a decade of shutdown. Good luck with that.
https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/Sort_53484.pdf
And if you want the numbers on how the Russians are fueling our power plants while blasting Ukrainian ones:
https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/russia-continues-to-export-uranium-to-united-states
Yeah, there’s been 19 rounds of sanctions on the Russians over the last four years. Funny how those never included the stuff we really need from them.
“The DOE projection for 250GW of new nuke capacity by 2050”
250Gigawatt divided by 300million people is nearly a MILLION WATTS per person; the amount of waste heat given off would certainly cause global warming.
250GW / 0.3Gpeople= 830 watts per person. The human body produces around 100 watts of heat from the food we eat. Units can be confusing
Don’t panic.
Ummm…
Ooops…
300 million people x 1000 watts = 300 billion watts
that’s 300gigawatts
you were right,I was wrong
so sorry.
Ricky missed some things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enrichment_Facility
New Mexico has an enrichment plant that can provide the majority of our current commercial fuel. European plants provide some.
The 20% percent, yeah, we are down blending our bomb material or paying the Russians to do so.
Love the blog
NEF has a capacity of 4.3 million seperative work units (SWU) per year ramping up to 5 million by 2027. It is optimized for 3% enrichment for legacy reactors.. 250 SWU are required to make a kilogram of 20% enriched uranium from natural mined uranium, so 250,000 SWU per metric ton. Even if NEF were modified. to produce 20% enriched material, it could only do a max of 20 tons per year = 1GW of capacity.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-phase-of-us-enrichment-plant-expansion-starts-up
NEF is a cool facility, but far from what would be required to meet expanded US dreams.
Plus, technically, NEF is a Dutch/British/German owned business facility operating in the US. The US has not hab its own indepen3 nrichment capability since 2016. We currently depend on Europeans for all our nuclear needs.
Thank you!
On one hand it makes sense that the whole gambit is based on the principle of if you build it some future customer that doesn’t exist yet and never asked for this will pay you cost plus 50% and thus the future energy requirements will show up under similar laws of magic.
On the other hand it makes sense that as a vehicle for strip mining present value from a walking dead economy based on that future value imputed by black magic is just the sort of thing the lizards would do if they knew the whole equity stack of America inc or for that matter GloboCorp inc was going to be imploded and compressed into some digital fortress.
The energy/food/fuel/water demand destruction would require around 3 billion deaths by my math. But I’m a liberal arts guy who never learned to code so I’m probably off by a lot.
I did, however, once try to buy an energy concern in India for an Globofinancial cartel and learned a lot about energy. It didn’t take. Indians are too corrupt which says a lot coming from globocorp. But they were fully prepared to kill thousands of their own people to make it happen. Energy isn’t created or destroyed. People are.
I think you put your finger on the real endgame.
More people than you would guess are allergic to cat dander, so the AI cat videos are likely here to stay. We’ll adapt and overcome by tightening our belts and turning down the Winter thermostats. Perhaps we could call upon the patriotism of the CIA to release some of the enriched uranium from their Black Vault. Or President Gavin Newsom could rebuild the Iranian enrichment facilities for a 20% share. Many small measures add up.
As for the reactors: I’ve been close to ’em, and they look to have an excessive amount of concrete. We need to consult with the guys who pound out subdivisions full of mcmansions. They know how to build fast and efficiently.
I too want American nuke plants built with the same careful commitment to quality shown by Big McMansion™
We deserve it!
With the lowered demand for antihistamines, we’ll save dozens of dollars with artificial cats!
The roommate of a friend in college actually thought that electricity “came from in the walls”. Never realized that it actually had to be generated and distributed through those things that are conveniently called “power lines”.
Tells you a lot about the state of science education in this country.
It is awful. Remember, there are actual politicians in congress that thought that the data “in the cloud” was in the air somewhere.
The solution is Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.
I think I’ve written about those before here, and, I agree it’s a part of the solution. But we needed to have started 20 years ago.
Beyond fuel, where’s the water to cool the nuke plants and the data centers? Western NC has plenty, but something happened there recently that appears to have been planned, right?
Duke Energy abandoned completing one in Upstate SC 30 years ago (its only use has been as the underwater set on “The Abyss”) and SCE&G (now Dominion) did the same north of Columbia ten or so years ago. I’ve no idea if each could be re-started. NIMBYs and the whacko left would do their best to stop both, ‘fer sure. BTW, plenty of water is present to cool both.
FWIW, seeing lots of blogs saying AI is a fraud. I agree. But TPTB needs it to fire oodles of White Americans and replace them with Pajeets & other POCs.
My understanding is that there is nothing left of SCE&Gs 2 uncompleted nukes north of Columbia, SC and that demolition was a condition of the SC Public Service Commission’s approval of the sale of a practically bankrupt SCE&G to Dominion. I could be wrong as this was 6 years and 2 careers ago.
OO-
Thx! Received the Beaufort paper for free 7 years ago but currently don’t. Same for Charleston. There’s a local rag in Beaufort, but it only covers local stuff. Unless Murdaugh is involved.
We don’t watch TV; if I’m in The Fillin’ Station (Beaufort), one TV will be on a Savannah channel, unless it’s Saturday or Sunday. So, have no idea what goes on in SC.
In my experience, restarting a project like that fails because no one trusts what someone else built.
There will just have to be rolling blackouts. After all, security, commerce, silly cat videos, and social media are more important than air conditioning, heating and microwave popcorn. Everyone will keep their cell-phones charged, so they can watch silly cat videos, complain on social media, sweat, shiver, and long for microwave popcorn. Lifestyles will change, since technology has advanced to the point it’s only real purpose is to replace the gladiators of the past. Some will call it a brave new world, while those with a little common sense will call it the enlightened dark ages.
Imagine the cost of AC down in Houston . . . yikes!
LOL read the EO OPERATION GENESIS
Not gonna happen.
If something can’t happen, it won’t happen. Plan accordingly.
Bingo.
Wasn’t it Homer Simpson who crossed tobacco with tomato seeds to develop “tomacco”? I seem to recall he used some plutonium to help speed up the genetic cross-fertilization.
As bad a concept as that was, it is still better than the path we are on trying to power AI.
JB
Mmmmm, tangy tomacco.
Pie in the sky. First they want no nukes, now, thousands. The heat produced, as one pointed out, could produce that global warming we’re always hearing about. My belief is they only want to produce the power for AI to enslave mankind, and then sink into the miasma they’ve created for themselves. It’s all a lot of rubbish, and none of TPTB have any kind of a viable plan to make it happen, or control and maintain it. I believe it will end stupidly, and rather quick. Anyone remember the fever-swamp dreams of cold fusion a while back? I miss the sarcasm and wit of Bill Holden.
Yeah, the Nvidia CEO said everyone was going to have their own nuke. Delusion.
The reactors during WWII and shortly after used natural uranium moderated with ultra-pure graphite. They generate a great deal of waste and created a lot of plutonium, which is why we used them. Chernobyl in the Ukraine was a graphite reactor, but I do not know if it used natural or enriched uranium.
AND its all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He was supposedly an expert in nuclear power from his time in the Navy. When the 70’s oil crisis was going on he had the perfect opportunity to tell America that nuclear was the way to go. He should have pushed building reactors, etc. and we would not have the problems we have now, at least as far as electricity goes.
AI is a scam; of course it will allow people to screw things up faster then they could before. How big an EMP do you need to take out an AI farm (or whatever you call it)?
Unfortunately, Three Mile Island occurred during his term. That put the kibosh on nukes.
It’s the GloboLeft. They hate nuclear power because they want to see everything burn.
When talking about Jimmy Carter – please, it’s ‘nucular’ power.
JW: you did an outstandingly clear explanation of the situation. Are our betters too greedy/stupid/uninformed to not see the situation is untenable? Good Gawd.
Like Clippy, AI must die. Win-win: absurd need for power takes a dive and humans have to start thinking for themselves again. Pull The Plug® !
Can somebody explain using small words how Fusion (The Power of the Future®) is any better than Evil Fission with respect to overheating Mother Earth if all we’re gonna with it is boil water to make steam to make electricity?
“Rolling blackouts”. No sweat, just have the town crier announce the schedule. I’m ready with a solar panel and a battery and a generator. Uh-oh. Just did the math: I’m gonna die. The cost for generator gasoline (assuming it’s even available) at today’s price means 24/7 power would cost me $1,800 per month. Nevermind.
Thank you! And, I don’t miss Clippy.
The AI will gain sentience send drones to capture us and use as batteries as our minds are fed a false 1990s reality. Then Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus will lead a rebellion to free us.
Hey, wait . . .
This can be totally accomplished if we can get rid of ALL those pesky peasants!
Again, the plan.
Another factor:
Money can’t buy expertise. Read something in Zerohope recently about how this buildout will require an additional 300,000 skilled laborers.
AI is worse than a boondoggle: it’s a boondoggle that will work well enough that it will be implemented due to short-term bonuses for the execs that do so. Then everything falls apart because it’s retarded, and there won’t be humans to fix the problems.
Nice to know exactly where we stand:
brownouts and expensive power- government sleeps
datacenters needed to power cat videos- government springs into action!
Nah, the stock market will collapse first.
I’m a mechanical engineer who worked in oil and gas exploration for 32 years, including ultra deep and hot well drilling. The obvious solution to energy needs is geothermal from deep wells, drilled specifically for this purpose. There is R&D work going on in this field, primarily led by a few small outfits and by Schlumberger, the big services company (they are a partner in over 80% of all currently operating geothermal projects worldwide). Geothermal of this type leverages the vast experience and equipment from the oil and gas industry and the conventional steam turbine thermal cycle generation tech used everywhere. It just needs a bit of R&D to get it through the part where the kit at the bottom of the wells, and the wells themselves, can survive a long life at temperatures a couple of hundred F higher than the current max temperature of the hottest producing hydrocarbon wells. Definitely doable, and when the breakthroughs happen, this tech will see plants pop up all over the place at very cheap $/kWh because it leverages so much of how we already know how to do so cheaply.
Of course the problem is that this is not the kind of thing that is going to make a ton of money for all the grifters that have piled into wind turbines, solar, nuclear, and every other useless, impractical dead ends that has been held up as the holy grail and caused buckets of tax money to be invested in these nowhere avenues. The DOE has allocated nothing to support this effort, and that’s because the politicians can’t see how to make a lot of money from it.
You are objectively correct.
Any power gen guys/gals chip in but as I understand it nukes don’t do demand fluctuations very well and need something like coal/gas plants for that. Or big batteries like in this article https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/data-center-volatility-batteries-and-electric-grids-new-reality
AI isn’t a steady demand (see article) “AI workloads do not draw power the way traditional computing does. They surge. They idle. They fluctuate thousands of times a second, driving load profiles that look less like a flat demand curve and more like an EKG. For utilities and transmission operators, that volatility is more than an inconvenience. It is a destabilizing force on local feeders and substations that were never designed to handle such rapid swings.”
Going to be lots of fiddly bits to figure out.
And that works so well when it’s on the tail end of a financial instrument.
Tesla generators is my 1st choice to fill the gap. Small nuclear modular reactors are what will end up doing it.
And electrical generation isn’t the true data center/AI backstop. Water is. Even if they had all the electricity they needed, there is not enough water for cooling for human and data center/AI coexistence.
The real fight will be over water.
One of the fights . . . but at least it’s not destroying the water . . . .