Trump administration announces $17.5 billion in loans for 10 new large nuclear reactors

[WSHazel]

4. There is no rational reason to build new nuclear plants

Future increases in demand for electricity are dependent on massive increases in data center demand, which is economically impossible. Either the LLMs are going to get a lot more efficient, reducing demand for data centers, or the LLMs fail altogether, which reduces data center demand. Either way, straight lining capacity need off projected growth while holding technology steady, is an asinine assumption.

If the markets don’t need all these data centers, they won’t need huge, fixed production power plants that use old technology like nuclear power.

If there is a gap in power needs vs. capacity and there must be more power generation, using alternative to fill the gap is the logical path since it is so much cheaper than nuclear and it doesn’t compute. It also has much shorter lead times than nuclear.

Finally, if it is determined that nuclear must be part of the equation, why wouldn’t the market wait for miniaturization of nuclear which seems likely in the next 5 years.

In other words, there is no reason to start building expensive nuclear power plants that take a decade to build, may be unnecessary, and will certainly be obsolete by the time they are operational.