The first commercial nuclear plant started operation at Calder Hall in England in 1956. By 1970, reactors were in construction around the world. Many predicted that atomic energy would generate most of the world’s power by 2000. In 1973, President Richard Nixon stated, “It is estimated that nuclear power will provide more than one-quarter of the country’s electrical production by 1985, and over half by the year 2000.”
However, operational problems and environmental opposition would sway public opinion against atomic energy. Reactor failures at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, in Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986, and at Fukushima, Japan in 2011 raised safety concerns.…
Since ChatGPT released their AI chatbot in November of 2022, artificial intelligence has exploded. In only two years, the AI revolution became the driving force in the US high-tech industry. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other firms will spend over $100 billion this year building and upgrading data centers to run AI. Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI graphics processor units (GPUs), became the most valuable company in the world, its market capitalization soaring from $300 billion to $4.3 trillion in less than three years.…
“A recent survey by the American Automobile Association (AAA) found that only 16% of potential buyers were either “likely” or “very likely” to buy a fully electric vehicle as their next car, … down from 25% in 2022 and was the lowest level of EV interest recorded by AAA surveys since 2019.”
The road to adoption of Zero Emissions Vehicles (ZEVs) is growing steeper. For over two decades, states used incentives and mandates to try to force a transition from gasoline vehicles to ZEVs. But softening market demand, shifting federal policies, and poor economics threaten to halt the ZEV revolution in the United States.
Zero Emissions Vehicles are cars and trucks that produce no tailpipe emissions. These are either electric vehicles (EVs) or hydrogen vehicles. California is the only state with a significant number of hydrogen cars, but its hydrogen car population is declining, so ZEVs mean EVs in practice.…