“What’s lacking are the products – the SMRs. It’s not the government’s job to pick winners and losers in the race to develop the products. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.”
The Department of Energy last Tuesday (March 24) announced a $900 million pot of money to “de-risk the deployment of Generation III+ light-water small modular reactors (Gen III+ SMR).” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said (although it’s more likely someone wrote the words for him), “America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now.”
Really? The new solicitation is a dead ringer for the Biden administration’s October 2024 $900 SMR solicitation, in many cases word-for-word, including a ‘two-tier’ structure: $800 million for the first, $100 million for the second. The residue of the Biden initiative has been scrubbed from DOE’s website, probably in hopes that no one would remember it.…
“Since its 2009 formation under Obama, ARPA-E within the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded about $4.2 billion to some 1,700 energy projects. The latest nuclear revival continues a long string of starts-and-stops for a technology that has been more promise than performance.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the White House appear to be headed for a clash on major DOE spending programs, including the agency’s Loan Programs Office and the main research arm, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-Energy).
Last week, DOE earmarked another $57.8 million in federal money to the Palisades nuclear plant resurrection in Michigan, part of a $1.52 DOE billion loan to Holtec International for the project.
Since DOE’s Loan Programs Office approved the deal last September, the agency has doled out almost $96 million for the restart of the 805-MW reactor that shut down in 2022, starting with $38 million this January.…
“Under the proposed deregulation plan, data centers would not need to worry about grid reliability to keep their business running. The two parties can make their own reliability arrangements, involving engineering (underground connections, backup generation, storage or through contract provisions).”
Data center madness due to artificial intelligence (AI) struck the U.S. Last week. President Donald Trump kicked it off with a strange White House session January 21, as AI gurus announced a $500 billion plan (scaled up from an initial $100 billion bet) to use private money for a veritable plethora of data centers across the entire U.S. The moniker was “Stargate,” not to be confused with “Watergate.”
Joining Trump at the White House meet-and-greet were Open AI founder Sam Altman, Oracle founder Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayosh Son. They would find the money, not ask the government for it.…