China claims it’s “homegrown,” and more than 90 percent of the equipment is sourced from China.

In reality, the technology was purchased from Germany when they abandoned nuclear a decade ago.

Still, China hopes to use it to demonstrate mastery over Fourth-Generation nuclear—and its evolution from nuclear amateur to pioneer on the world stage.

The reactor is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), which means it doesn’t need to be built near water or the coast.

And since there’s no need for a containment dome, it’s far more cheaper to build HTGR than ERPs.

In other words, it’s the ideal reactor for exporting globally.

But it’s not the only nuclear reactor China has developed.

China is now the proud owner of four advanced nuclear power plant designs that can be built at scale—all “obtained” from other countries: the EPR (France), the CAP1000 (U.S.), the HTR-PM (Germany), and the VVER-1000 (Russia).

So why is China building every model of reactor it can get its hands on? That’s been proven to be the least cost-efficient and time-efficient way to build nuclear.

It’s because China doesn’t care if these nuclear reactors are over time or over budget. They only want to see what works. They’ll replicate the best, and throw out the rest.

They also want to slowly iterate away from other countries’ intellectual property, ensuring everything is “Made in China”.

• China has already integrated everything it’s learned [stolen] from other countries into its own advanced design, the Hualong One.

The Hualong One, which has been called China’s nuclear “calling card,” is fully owned by China—so they can sell it freely around the world.

It’s already built two of the reactors in China, two in Pakistan… signed a contract to build one in Argentina… and is seeking approval to build one in the UK.

Of the reactors under construction in China, fully 50 percent are Hualong Ones.

The average construction time is just six years, and construction is $2,600 per kilowatt—less than half of the time and price of France’s EPRs.

China’s “Go Out” Nuclear Strategy

China recently announced an upgraded, simplified version, the Hualong Two. The first one is expected to begin construction in 2024.

Costs are around $2,000 per kilowatt, and the construction time to be an unprecedented four years.

After thirty years of “development”—squirreling intellectual property from other countries— nuclear in China is finally ready to face the world.

“‘Going out’ with nuclear power has already become a state strategy.”
– Former CNNC chairman Wang Shoujun

China plans to exert the full weight of its economic and diplomatic influence to go global with nuclear, bringing carbon-free energy to the world.

And their offer will be irresistible.

State-backed banks are loaning about 70 percent of the cost of Chinese reactors—at far lower rates than are available to other nations.

“With nuclear, China is stepping up to the plate with financing.”
– BloombergNEF analyst Chris Gadomski

Other developed countries, like the United States and France, will be unable to compete with ultra-cheap, state-backed funding.

Additionally, the policy of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is to export nuclear technology backed by full fuel cycle capability: China will provide the uranium, and they’ll take the waste.

So buyers won’t even have to worry about the biggest problem with nuclear.

Customers are lining up. The CNNC says that it has already sold reactors to seven countries, and is working on deals with forty more.

China already has a stranglehold on the international nuclear export market.

In 2019, the former chairman of China National Nuclear Corporation told a meeting of China’s political advisory body that China could build thirty overseas reactors that would earn Chinese firms $145 billion by 2030.

“Our goal is for China to lead the global nuclear energy industry by the middle of this century.”
– CNNC President Gu Jun

That’s just a small taste of what’s to come… except suddenly, the other large nuclear powers are realizing China’s master plan.

And they’re not happy.

The Power in Nuclear Power

China General Nuclear Power (CGNP) has been on a U.S. government blacklist for three years for attempting to steal nuclear technology.

CGNP is also a partner with EDF, the world’s largest operator of nuclear power stations. But it’s quickly becoming its fiercest rival.

EDF once had plans to build a Hualong One in eastern England—not any more.

And British finance minister George Osborne said that China could build and own a nuclear power plant in Britain—also no longer an option.

The UK has begun to look for ways to squeeze CGNP entirely out of its reactor development.

Even Romania cancelled an order for two CGNP reactors—opting to work with the U.S. instead.

But there’s a much bigger concern for the United States and other developed countries than stolen state secrets.

It’s called “the hundred-year marriage.”

Nuclear energy deals create nearly unbreakable ties between the seller and the host—ties that must last as long as the nuclear plant does.

• From first discussions to first operations: ten years.
• Unit operation: sixty years.
• Decommissioning: thirty years.

That’s a century, start to finish, of strategic operations between countries.

The license for that marriage has been signed once the plant begins operations.

All the fuel, maintenance, waste disposal, training, and even staff are provided by China. So breaking relations with them is to lose power for your country—both political and electrical.

And since China’s providing financing, they’ll have extreme leverage even if countries want to get out.

They’ve already used that kind of debt trap to coerce African nations into giving up strategic properties.

And now, China is intent on using nuclear reactor exports to “marry” United States allies.

• In other words, China’s nuclear reactor exports will lead to a guaranteed century of Chinese global dominance.

That’s why other nations are scrambling to boost their own domestic nuclear programs…

… starting with the United States of America.

Go to next chapter >

Those are the names of nuclear reactors under construction in Finland, France, and the United Kingdom. On the surface, they look like utter failures.

They’ve been subject to repeated delays. Olkiluoto 3 began construction in 2005, and is finally being wrapped up seventeen years later.

The reactors’ total price tag has exploded from $26.5 billion to $55.9 billion over the course of their construction.

All of the reactors are EPRs, which were designed by France, and they’re being built by a French-owned company EDF (Électricité de France).

But eight years ago, France decided to cap energy power from nuclear at 50 percent of electricity generation by 2025. That’s down from its current 70 percent.

So why is a country that wants to reduce its reliance on nuclear… wasting tens of billions of dollars and multiple decades to build more reactors?

• It’s not to lower carbon emissions. France already has one of the lowest emissions-per-capita rates in the EU.
• And it’s not for energy security. In 2020, France was the largest exporter of electricity in the EU.

No, the real reason is much, much bigger than either of those.

The French government knows that demand for nuclear energy is about to spike. And the first country that can build inexpensive, safe, replicable nuclear reactors will have the most valuable company on earth in short order.

So the reason why France is desperate bid to build nuclear power is simple.

France wants to sell the solution to the greatest danger the planet has ever faced.

Vive La French Nuclear

The reactors being built are prototypes for full-scale, French-style nuclear reactor production.

When France built out its nuclear fleet in the ‘80s, its strategy was to achieve a “series effect”—decreasing timelines and lowering costs by building many of the same thing.

It worked. France saw major construction timeline and price reductions for each successive reactor.

And they’re doing it again. The objective with the current buildout is to reduce the costs and construction timeline for future EPRs by 30 percent.

According to the French Nuclear Energy Society, the buildout could go even further, reducing construction and financing costs by up to 50 percent.

It will also serve to revitalize France’s competency in building nuclear reactors.

In building the Flamanville reactor, France has rebuilt an entire European supply chain that is qualified to build nuclear-quality parts for nuclear power reactors.

France already has what it needs to go global with nuclear.

It’s long been a large exporter of nuclear technology, including fuel products and services. And it has experience across the entire market, from uranium mining to reactor design and construction.

According to France’s Atomic Energy Commission, there will be “a real market for EPRs” beginning in 2030.

But France might not have to wait that long. In 2021, the VP of EDF hand-delivered an offer to build the most powerful nuclear energy site in the world—9.6 GWe of EPRs on a single site. 

According to leaked communications, India is paying a “high price” for these French reactors.

Which means that every country with the finances, state backing, and nuclear programs to pull this off—China, Russia, the United States, and South Korea—wants to get in on the action.

The payoff for the first country to export nuclear technology at an international scale will be oil-industry huge.

Which is why those countries are already buying… bribing… stealing… doing whatever it takes to win the most valuable market on earth.

The Real China Syndrome

That’s how Maureen Kearney found herself hooded, tied to a chair, gagged, and brutally attacked with a knife in her Paris home.

Maureen was a major union leader at Areva, a French nuclear company.

And in 2012, she had discovered that EDF was preparing to sell French nuclear secrets to a Chinese consortium.

Fearful that cutting-edge technology would be handed over to the Chinese, she decided to become a whistleblower. And she paid the price for it.

But it didn’t matter, because China found another way in.

In 2016, EDF suddenly had a new partner in Hinkley Point C: China General Nuclear Power (CGNP). CGNP now owns 34 percent of the project.

Not quite.

Because at the same time as it purchased a stake in Hinkley Point C, CGNP quietly began building two EPR reactors in China.

It’s obvious where this is going…

The first European Pressurized Reactor (EPR)—the most advanced commercial reactor design on the continent—didn’t start up in Europe.

It started up in China, six years after Maureen was attacked.

Decades of engineering and planning, construction delays, and cost overruns, all borne by France, paid huge dividends for China.

China even poached project managers from Olkiluoto and Flamanville for work on the new reactor. Experience in France meant that engineering teams worked 60 percent fewer hours on the Chinese EPR than on Olkiluoto 3, reducing costs.

A day after the first EPR launched, the most advanced commercial reactor design from the United States, the AP1000, started up for the first time… also in China.

In 2009, American company Westinghouse had agreed to work with China to develop a larger version of their AP1000 model, creatively named the CAP1400.

The agreement gave China full IP rights for all co-developed plants greater than 1350MWe.

So China is only building plants greater than 1350Mwe.

They plan to follow the CAP1400 with a CAP1700… then a CAP2100 design—the largest nuclear reactor in the world by far.

The first two units of the CAP1400, the first “fully native” Chinese nuclear reactor, are currently under construction and expected to come online in 2025.

China has openly bragged that the CAP1400 broke a number of “technological monopolies”. And that all the key materials are designed by and manufactured in China.

The design is being developed for deployment in high numbers across China, as well as for export around the world.

Neither the EPR or the AP1000 is yet online in its home country—the AP1000s in the U.S. were cancelled—but China could care less.

They leeched their technology from France, and now France is actually worse off in its ability to build nuclear power plants.

Meanwhile, China is actively building high numbers of what is possibly the safest production-level reactor there is.

More importantly, they’re rapidly preparing to bring it to the global market at the largest scale in human history.

Go to next chapter >

A year earlier, Japan had been the world’s third-largest producer of nuclear energy. Nuclear supplied more than a quarter of the nation’s electricity.

Then… nothing. Zero reactors in operation, and not a single kilowatt of energy from nuclear.

It was a knee-jerk reaction to the Fukushima disaster, fully supported by a vast majority of Japanese citizens. And it shot Japan in the foot.

Because it quickly discovered that shutting down nuclear required paying an extra $37 billion a year for imported fossil fuels…

… which led to spiraling electricity prices, extreme government debt, and rising emissions.

In fact, emissions increased 30 percent from 2011 to 2012. And in 2013, Japanese emissions hit an all-time high.

Japan’s climate change goal had been to reduce emissions from electricity production by 25 percent by 2020.

But without nuclear, Japan’s Minister of the Environment was forced to revise that figure… to a 3.1 percent increase.

In early 2021, amidst historic power shortages, Japan’s Energy Minister finally reversed course on the nuclear-free policy. “Nuclear power will be indispensable,” he said.

A new future, indeed.

A year later, the Prime Minister of Japan called for the “maximum use” of nuclear. And he ordered the government to restart idled nuclear plants at an accelerated rate.

Out of Japan’s thirty-three operable nuclear reactors, ten have already been restarted. Sixteen more are slated to be restarted by the end of 2023, and two new reactors will be brought online.

• Not only that, but Japan has begun developing next-generation nuclear reactors.

It’s a momentous policy shift for a country that swore off of nuclear energy just a decade ago.

And it’s a common theme in every country with a major nuclear energy program.

From Japan to Germany to the UK to the U.S., closed nuclear plants are being recommissioned —and those scheduled for closure are remaining open.

But many countries are going even further…

They are transforming from hell-bent on shutting down nuclear to accelerating and even incentivizing the development of new nuclear programs.

Sweden Drinks the Radioactive Kool-Aid

For the last thirty years, Sweden has deliberately created the worst possible environment for nuclear.

In the ‘80s, it made plans to phase out nuclear power generation by 2010.

Then it outright banned nuclear research.

Then it banned restarting closed reactors.

And then it imposed a $0.30/kWh tax on nuclear energy.

In 2006, that tax was doubled… and increased another 25 percent in 2008.

One study put the tax at 60 percent of the operating cost of nuclear reactors in Sweden.

The tax forced two reactors, Ringhals 1 and 2, to close in 2019–2020.

And it was on track to close all three nuclear power plants in Sweden, which provide 30 percent of its electricity.

Vattenfall, a state-owned energy company, said abolishing the tax would decrease its generating costs to $20/MWh by 2021.

In 2022, the average wholesale electricity price in Sweden was $112/MWh.

That’s why 2022 polls showed that 60 percent of the population didn’t just want nuclear to stay—they wanted new reactors to be built.

But the political risk and uncertainty surrounding nuclear investments prevented any company from ever wanting to touch it again.

So when the new government came into power, it released a policy called the “Tidö Agreement.”

The agreement says that nuclear plants must be guaranteed the right to produce carbon-free electricity.

• And if Sweden forces a plant to close, “the owners must be entitled to compensation.”

Then, the government pivoted from taxing nuclear reactors out of existence… to subsidizing them.

The document pledged $40 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power construction—making it far easier for nuclear developers to get commercial funding.

It also called for:

• A removal of the ban on restarting closed reactors.
• Restarting Ringhals 1 and 2.
• A shorter permit process and a fast track for new nuclear power.
• A highly reduced application fee for new nuclear reactors.

None of this is hypothetical. Vattenfall, the previously mentioned major nuclear power company, has already been asked to identify suitable locations for additional nuclear reactors.

China: First in Emissions, First in Nuclear

Sweden is one of only thirty-three countries that currently produce nuclear energy. Thirty more are considering, planning, or starting their own nuclear energy programs.

Belarus, Bangladesh, and Turkey are all building their first nuclear reactors.

A single reactor coming online in Finland will provide 28 percent of its electricity.

But the real demand won’t come from small or developing nations. In fact, nuclear plants produce too much energy for them; if they are taken offline for refueling or maintenance, it could cause blackouts.

That’s why Slovenia and Croatia literally share a nuclear power plant on their border.

• The real demand for nuclear energy will come from rapidly developing countries with high carbon emissions and huge populations.

That makes China, which has the largest and fastest-growing group of energy-consuming humans in history, the perfect candidate for nuclear.

In 2021, China’s electricity demand jumped 10 percent. For context, that’s equal to the total electricity demand of all of Africa.

Which means emissions are exploding. While every other developed country is trying to cut their emissions, China’s have risen by more than 300 percent in the past twenty years.

Right now, more than a third of global CO2 emissions come from China.

They are building out solar and wind, but their real focus is on nuclear.

Thirty years ago, China had zero nuclear power. In 2002, China was 15th in nuclear production in the world.

• 10th in 2007.
• 3rd in 2016.
• 2nd in 2020.

Fitch analysts now predict that China’s nuclear power capacity will overtake the U.S. by 2026.

Nuclear energy capacity in China is precisely following its emissions trajectory—only about a decade later. Which means it won’t stop when it’s #1 in the world.

In just fifteen years, China plans to build 150 nuclear plants, which is more than the U.S. has built—ever.

CNNC, a Chinese nuclear power company, is urging the government to approve a new nuclear project every two months for the next decade.

China plans to get up to 327 GWe by 2050, or more than three times the United States.

China’s population twin, India, is facing the same problem with growing emission—and seeking the same solution.

India Goes Fleet Mode

For its 1.4 billion people—18 percent of the world’s population—India has a measly 6.8 GW of capacity across seven nuclear plants.

It’s an embarrassing 1.7 percent of the country’s total power generation capacity.

Even so, Prime Minister Modi is intent on scaling up nuclear energy as fast as is humanly possible.

In the past fifteen years, nuclear power generation in India has already risen more than 300 percent.

India’s building another 6.6 GW of capacity right now—the most after China.

It has already approved another 8.4 GW of capacity—twelve more reactors—to begin construction in the next three years.

And it has a staggering 31 GW of nuclear builds planned.

Modi plans to triple nuclear capacity again over the next decade. That’s nearly seventy new reactors coming online.

How big could it really get?

• India plans to supply 25 percent of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050.

That would require 100 GW of nuclear—again, more than the U.S.

To facilitate this, India is setting up five massive “Nuclear Energy Parks,” which can handle 10GW at a single location.

By 2032, five of these parks are planned to potentially provide between 40 and 45 GW of carbon-free energy.

Once it gets going, this is hockey-stick growth.

There’s only one problem: India has very little nuclear technology of its own. For that matter, most developed countries don’t—even those with nuclear reactors.

Only five countries on the planet actually have the skills, materials, and supply chain to build nuclear reactors.

And they are all preparing to wage a full-scale war to be able to deliver the world’s most valuable energy to the rest of the planet.

Go to next chapter >

France was heavily dependent on fossil fuels for electricity—but had no reserves of its own. So when OPEC pushed up the price of oil by 400 percent, it threatened to destroy the country.

With little domestic coal or gas, France had zero energy security.

But it did have something else: substantial heavy engineering expertise.

So in 1974, French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer made a speech on national TV, declaring a new direction for French energy:

He called for France to go “all nuclear, all electric.”

Construction of the first three nuclear plants under the “Messmer Plan” started in December 1974. They were completed six years later.

• And in just fifteen years, France went from breaking ground to producing electricity at forty-eight nuclear reactors.

France built reactors that quickly by making two smart decisions:

• The forty-eight reactors were made from just five designs.
• They were built at only twelve plants.

That meant standardized processes and greater efficiencies, keeping the price of construction low.

Then France ran into a snag. Messmer’s original plan called for constructing 170 plants by 2000.

• But by 1990, less than fifty nuclear reactors were providing more than 75 percent of France’s energy needs.

France simply had too much power from nuclear, and its nuclear units had to operate at a capacity of only 61 percent.

EDF, the French electricity company, began trying to stimulate electricity demand to soak up spare capacity.

To this day, nuclear power generation in France remains so high that nuclear plants occasionally close for the weekends.

It’s an unbeatable level of energy security.

Not only that, but it accidentally gave France an incredible head-start in the race to net zero.

Because the year Messmer gave his speech, per-capita emissions in France peaked—and they have fallen by 60 percent since then.

France is beating climate change without even trying.

Meanwhile, in Germany…

In 2009, Germany unveiled a plan of its own: the International Climate Initiative. It laid out how the country would switch entirely to renewable energy by 2050.

As with everything German, they came up with a new word for the conversion: “Energiewende.”

The goals for Energiewende were ambitious, including emissions reductions of 80–95 percent and a renewable energy target of 60 percent by 2050.

Energiewende was passed into law in 2010. Germany was celebrated as “The World’s First Major Renewable Energy Economy,” and Germans were proud.

“It’s a gift to the world!” a German analyst bragged to the New York Times.

Curiously, the first source of energy to be eliminated was nuclear—which has zero emissions.

In other words, Energiewende was a perfect counterpoint to the Messmer Plan. It would demonstrate whether energy security and a carbon-free economy could be achieved through renewables alone.

A year later, Fukushima happened. Frightened by the incident, the German government decided to permanently close all nuclear reactors by 2022.

“It’s definite. The latest end for the last three nuclear power plants is 2022. There will be no clause for revision.”
– German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen

The decision, spearheaded by former German Environment Minister and former nuclear proponent Angela Merkel, was not without its detractors.

In 2011, the New York Times reported predictions that eliminating nuclear could:

• force Germany to import nuclear power from France, or even
• inflate the cost of energy across the continent.

If only they knew…

How It Started Versus How It’s Going

Germany’s renewables costs—for solar panels and wind turbines and biogas plants—were rapidly forced onto consumers.

A study by the OECD found that the cost of household electricity in Germany increased by 50 percent from 2006–2017. And the report came to a surprising conclusion:

• Electricity prices will continue to increase as long as Germany keeps building solar and wind.

Meanwhile, France’s electricity costs are 40 percent lower than Germany’s.

But that’s just because clean energy is more expensive, right?

Wrong. France also produces twice as much of its electricity from clean energy sources as Germany…

… while producing one-fifth the carbon emissions from electricity per capita.

In fact—thanks to Energiewende—German carbon emissions are rising.

• Germany saw its largest rise in CO2 emissions in thirty years last year.

Why? Because as German nuclear was phased out, it was primarily replaced by two electricity sources: coal and imported gas.

In fact, closed coal plants are being restarted to compensate for shuttered nuclear. And Germany is scheduled to open a half-dozen new fossil fuel facilities by the end of 2023.

That’s right.

The nation that Bloomberg says “did more than any other to unleash the modern renewable-energy industry” is actively building CO2 factories.

Meanwhile, the deployment of renewables is falling off a cliff. Wind turbine installation dropped by nearly 60 percent from 2017–2018.

• In 2021, Germany barely installed more wind than in 2000.

It was an echo of solar: Installations of solar panels fell by 85 percent from 2010–2014, and have still not recovered.

But it’s too late: the money has been spent.

Three years ago, Germany’s Federal Court of Auditors found that Energiewende had cost $160 billion over the last five years—an expense that was “in extreme disproportion to results.”

“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail.” – Der Spiegel

Back to the Nuclear

By 2025, Germany will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure.

Yet CO2 emissions in Germany have dropped by less than two percent a year since 2010. They need to drop by six percent every year now to reach the country’s 2030 goals.

So Germany is already setting aside $300 million a year to pay EU emissions fines. At the same time…

France is making $3 billion a year from selling nuclear electricity to other countries.

And it’s ready to double down on nuclear. At COP26, French president Emmanuel Macron made it clear: France would “relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors” to “guarantee our country’s electricity supply.”

In February 2022, Macron announced that France was planning to build six more nuclear reactors… and considering building eight more after that.

It will also extend the life of existing reactors deemed safe and suitable past fifty years.

French electricity company EDF called it the “fastest and most certain path to achieve carbon neutrality.”

Germany has no choice but to follow suit.

In October 2022, it announced that its three remaining nuclear plants would extend operations until April 2023.

Economy and Energy Minister Robert Habeck said it was a “necessary” step to avoid power grid shortages.

Some lawmakers in Germany are going further—suggesting that decommissioned plants be reopened and new reactors built.

Because reducing carbon emissions is good. But since the Messner Plan, this has always been about one thing: energy security.

And in its quest to gain independence from nuclear, Germany found itself with a new dependency—on Russia.

The “partnership” with Russia was supposed to provide a “mutual dependency intelligently for the future.” It has not looked intelligent thus far.

The results of the trillion-dollar, half-century energy experiment are in: Nuclear won.

And now every country that wants to remain energy independent and go low-carbon is turning toward the only viable solution on the planet: nuclear.

Go to next chapter >

Installing wind and solar increases CO2 emissions.

It’s due in part to something called “The Duck Curve.”

This graph shows how much power California needed from everything except solar, by hour of day, for the last decade:

During the day, solar generates so much electricity that nearly all other sources have to shut down. Otherwise, it risks blowing out the grid.

In the evening, when everyone comes home and needs to use power just as the sun is setting, demand for other sources of power spikes off the charts.

Ordinarily, nuclear would provide a consistent source of power throughout the course of the day.

But nuclear can’t just be shut off during the day when solar takes over, and turned back on at night when the sky goes dark.

So coal, oil, and gas plants have to be used to handle the spike.

• Which means that every solar panel erected requires a fossil fuel plant to work.

Note: Oil and gas companies aren’t stupid. This is exactly why they’re lobbying so heavily for solar and wind.

California is not the only place emissions are rising because renewables are installed. In Germany, the Hambacher Forest is on the verge of being destroyed. Why?

Because it’s sitting on a ton of coal. And since Germany is shutting down nuclear and turning to renewables, it needs to burn more coal to account for peaks in demand.

Sweden thought about replacing its nuclear with wind. It found that every gigawatt of nuclear replaced by wind would require an additional gigawatt of gas-based electricity.

And the buildout would cause Sweden’s CO2 emissions to double.

As renewable energy increases around the world, nuclear plants are forced to shut down…

The same nuclear plants that emit 75 percent less CO2 than solar and 99 percent less than coal.

Oh, and as a bonus—nuclear plants require zero fossil fuel plants in order to run.

Nuclear with uranium doesn’t just win the clean energy and emissions contest with renewables.

In every category that matters to stopping climate change and saving the environment, renewables lose.

Renewables Don’t Hold a Candle to Nuclear

A nuclear reactor can produce about 1 GW of electricity. But that’s not equivalent to 1 GW of installed wind or solar.

Nuclear plants produce energy more than 90 percent of the time. Wind only runs about 35 percent of the time, and solar a measly 25 percent of the time.

That means that three to four times as much wind and solar has to be installed just to produce the same amount of energy as nuclear. Here’s what that difference looks like in real life:

• Eleven nuclear plants in Illinois and Pennsylvania produced more power than all solar in the U.S. in 2021.

In both land and waste, that makes a huge difference for the environment.

Those eleven plants cover about 25 square miles of land total.

Generating the same amount of electricity via solar requires more than 775 square miles—all of it deforested to make room for solar panels.

And wind? It would take more than 4,000 square miles.

In fact, solar and wind require so much land that countries like Japan would need to cover every last square inch of free land with solar to fully power the country.

But that’s not wind and solar’s biggest problem. Because unlike their name, renewables don’t last forever.

Solar panels have to be replaced every thirty years, resulting in staggering amounts of waste.

The International Renewable Energy Agency expects that by 2050, the world will have accumulated 78 million tons of solar power waste.

• Solar will generate 300 times as much waste by 2050 as nuclear has since 1950.

Wind is no better. More than 720,000 tons of 150-foot blades are expected to be dumped in landfills in the next two decades.

The high material requirements and low capacity of renewables present a little life-threatening problem:

They can never be built fast enough to save the earth.

Rising Tides Sink All Boats

In 1995, 7.2 percent of electricity in the U.S. was generated by renewables. A quarter century later, that had risen to… just 12.4 percent.

It took a twenty-five years to increase renewables as a portion of electricity by five percent.

For the record, it took three years for nuclear to make a similar move, from ’74-’77.

On its current trajectory, it will take renewables another twenty years to catch up to nuclear as a percentage of electricity generation.

And it would take a century for the U.S. to get to 50 percent renewables.

In fact, renewables aren’t even covering increases in demand right now.

• Global energy demand increased by 600 percent more than renewable energy consumption in 2021.

In an open letter, professors at MIT, Columbia, and the Carnegie Institution wrote:

Renewables… cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires….
In the real world, there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.

The OECD agrees. It projects that to meet emissions goals, nuclear needs to produce 9,000 TWh a year by 2050, which will cost about $8 trillion.

That’s assuming wind and solar can produce about the same amount of energy by then… at a cost of about $20 trillion.

The world would save $12 trillion by using nuclear instead of renewables.

It doesn’t matter what angle it is… emissions, waste, land, cost…

In the fight against climate change, nuclear is the only renewable worth a watt.

Our Newest Renewable

Yes, nuclear is a renewable—arguably the only real renewable other than hydro.

Unlike wind and solar, nuclear generates the only waste from electricity production that is safely contained.

And used nuclear fuel still has about a hundred times more energy than was extracted from it. Reprocessing that fuel enables it to be used again… and again.

France, Russia, and Japan already re-use their nuclear fuel, getting more energy out of it each time.

As additional reactors that can use reprocessed fuel come online, nuclear waste will become worth billions of dollars.

Fourth-generation nuclear reactors called “breeders” could extract almost all of the energy from uranium—99x more than is currently used—without the fuel ever leaving the reactor.

There are also about 4.5 billion tons of uranium floating in the ocean.

When uranium is extracted from seawater for clean energy production, more uranium is leached from rocks to replace it to the same concentration.

And those rocks hold 100 trillion tons of uranium, a super massive source of clean energy.

• So if nuclear provided 100 percent of earth’s energy for a billion years… uranium wouldn’t run out.

That makes it roughly as renewable as solar and wind.

Only with minimal waste, small land requirements, and zero additional CO2 emissions.

Governments are already recognizing that uranium is a clean, renewable source of energy.

The EU has taken the first step, stating that nuclear power will qualify as a green investment starting in 2023.

The state of Utah passed their Renewable Energy Development Act, which defined nuclear power as a form of renewable energy.

As nuclear gains renewable status, utilities will be able to use it to meet their renewable electricity regulations.

Policies will change, and massive tax incentives will be rolled out to build nuclear power plants. Uranium will be on top of the clean energy options.

And soon—unlike with wind and solar—the world’s CO2 emissions will begin to fall.

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