Weekend Digest #4

A curated assortment of scrolls.

Happy Saturday, Barbarians.

Let’s get after it.

Housekeeping

1. China’s Cruel and Dirty Winter ft. Angelica Oung. ICYMI Angelica Oung and I had a great conversation about the Chinese energy crunch. She walks me through the structure of their energy sector, why Xi cracked down on coal, what the CCP’s afraid of, and more. We also got to talk about Taiwan’s energy future: looks like they’re mistakenly committing themselves to renewables.

2. Nukes 4 Kids. I had the pleasure of guesting on the international left-wing podcast Aufhebungabunga. Alex Hochuli, one of the hosts, asked me about the global energy crisis and the merits of nuclear energy. I’m proud to say that in the paywalled second part of the episode all three hosts assented to my critique of renewables, my thoughts on the grid, and the supremacy of nuclear energy. I’ve found that talking about grid reliability is a great way to get people to understand how special nuclear energy is.

News

1. China Climate Goals Hinge on $440 Billion Nuclear Power Plan. I don’t have a Bloomberg subscription—not in the budget at the moment—but from what I saw on the feeds, China’s going to build something like 150 nuclear reactors to meet its climate goals. Hard to know what else to say. America remains captured in its elite death spiral of bullshit ESG investments, while our global competitors marshal their resources to build things that matter.

2. Global CO2 Emissions Have Been Flat for the Last Decade, New Data Reveals. Suck it, doomers. New Carbon Brief data shows we’re on track for solving climate change. This is why I don’t support nuclear for strictly environmental reasons: human flourishing is a more important and more durable stance.

3. Supply Chain Chaos Threatens The Growth of Solar Energy. More Black Cascade woes for solar. Last week, I mentioned that over half of next year’s solar projects are in jeopardy due to China’s energy crunch jacking up the polysilicon prices by 300%—coal is how they make all that stuff and they’re running low on coal. Quartz has confirmed this in their latest. This is all for utility-grade solar, however. Their article rightly points out that for homeowners and businesses the price hasn’t been so impacted.

4. Nitrogen Fertilizer Shortage Threatens Global Crop Shortage. Natural gas provides us with nitrogen fertilizer. The soaring prices for natural gas have upset our ability to make that fertilizer. CF Industries, a fertilizer company based in the UK, posted quarterly losses of $185 million because they had to shut down fertilizer production. China and Russia are limiting nitrogen exports. The Black Cascade continues.

5. Lessons from NuScale’s Design Certification Process. Adam Stein and Sola Talabi have written up a brief post on the obstacles NuScale encounters as it moves through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regulatory hurdles. Stein’s also been posting tweet threads about it. People who care about advanced nuclear should be paying close attention to this process. My takeaway is that the NRC needs to be seriously defanged.

Commentary

On Thursday, I got to sit down with Bret Kugelmass over at Titans of Nuclear. We had a great chat, and Bret challenged me on some of my ideas—he brought up that environmentalists aren’t the only ones to blame for nuclear’s criminalization. Companies like Westinghouse have made suckling the government teet part of their business plan and they love all those cost overages—Bret didn’t put it quite like this, for the record. I’ll include the episode in the weekend digest when it comes out, so you can hear for yourself.

But his excellent point did get us onto another topic: the 1970s energy crisis and what it did to the nuclear industry. It seems I have, and I think many other American nuclear advocates also have this, a deficit of historical knowledge about the industry’s history. I’d like to make delving into and writing about the nuclear industry history part of this substack.

I’ve recently purchased a long out-of-print book that compares America, Sweden, and France in their nuclear energy responses to the energy crisis. It seems promising. If readers would like, I could start writing up a chapter-by-chapter digest to share what I find in the book.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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