The DOE move to prop up the nuclear big iron also prompts a recollection of the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Alternatively, “Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.” Some 20 years ago, facing a 30-year decline in the U.S. nuclear power business (no reactor ordered after 1974 got built), the George W. Bush administration threw $8 billion in 2005 dollars each to two, two-unit AP-1000 reactor projects.
The Trump administration and its Department of Energy have made Canada–who many Americans other than Donald Trump consider our closest ally and good friend–happy. Recently (June 23, 2026), DOE’s loan office (grandiosity renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing) announced a $17.5 billion dollar loan program to subsidize building five as yet unidentified, two-unit 1,000-MW, nuclear power plant stations.…
“All the recent flurry of fusion fascination prompted one long-time observer of the story to quip, anonymously, ‘The folks who brought us the most expensive way in the world to boil water, fission, now want to double down with fusion.'”
Fusion energy — yielding enormous amounts of heat from the violent combination of elements — has long been touted as the holy grail of energy future. That’s wrong, according to a new article in the prestigious Nature Energy.
“While nuclear fusion power is often hailed as a future source of abundant, clean energy, current dominant fusion designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are unlikely to become competitive due to their expected low experience rates,” concludes the article by a team of researchers led by Lingxi Tang of the Energy and Technology Policy Group, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.…
“Energy hyperbole and the madness of crowds are evident with both NuScale Power and Fermi America. Bubbles burst.”
The most mature U.S. small modular nuclear reactor vendor — NuScale Power — and a politically connected firm planning to build perhaps the largest reactor project in the U.S. to power an enormous Texas data center — Fermi America — have both suffered recent, major, possibly existential blows. NuScale and Fermi, both publicly traded, have seen their stock value plummet amid bad financial results, questionable management decisions, and attacks by the wolves of Wall Street, short sellers, and claims of securities fraud.
NuScale Power
Oregon-based NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) is the only advanced reactor vendor in this new market with a design approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a “first mover” advantage. It also uses the familiar and well-understood pressurized light water cooled technology, which has decades of mostly successful operation.…