Weekend Digest #6
A curated assortment of scrolls.
Happy weekend, Barbarians.
Let’s get after it.
Housekeeping
Ireland Energy Report ft. Gavin Mendel-Gleason. Talking to Gavin was really informative for me. I had no idea that Ireland has uranium deposits! I’ll be very interested to see what the Irish energy conversation is after this winter. As I found out from Gavin, they’re highly reliant LNG imports and they’ve been totally in the tank for wind. But they want to expand their data center economy, which means they’ll be hungry for terawatts. Gavin was a great guest!
The Black Cascade. I finally organized my thoughts about the Black Cascade. If you missed that piece, you can read it now! I tried to make it brief and helpful.
Correction: When I was on Aufhebungabunga a couple of weeks ago, I said that Gina McCarthy had something to do with the closure at Indian Point. I said this on the pay-walled portion of the episode. Fred Stafford over at Jacobin reached out to let me know I was wrong about that. The Indian Point closure was locked in before she was President of the NRDC. My mistake.
News
DOE Infrastructure Deal Fact Sheet. The Biden admin finally rounded the bases on the infrastructure deal. I haven’t dug into the bill’s language just yet, but the DOE’s fact sheet declares $6 billion for the existing nuclear fleet and $2.5 billion—so $8.5 billies all told. Not nothing. But only half a bill more than what’s been allocated for hydrogen projects—I think only the energy sector vies with defense for bankrolling pipedream projects.
Clean Energy Faces Its Own Supply Chain Crisis. This piece in The Verge provides a good overview of the difficulties renewables advocates are running into. The reality is that we cannot build out tons of solar without relying entirely on China. This piece points that out. What’s painfully clear in this piece is that the Democrats are absolutely slaves to the renewables golem they’ve built.
TerraPower Selects Kemmerer, Wyoming as the Preferred Site for Advanced Reactor Demonstration Plant. Of the $2.5 billion set aside for advanced nuclear, it seems $1.5 billion of it is going to Wyoming for TerraPower’s coal-replacing reactor. According to Granholm, that is. Anyway, I truly wish them all the luck. Replacing coal with nuclear is a net gain for everyone.
Coal is Making a Comeback. Supplies Are So Scarce That Pa.’s and N.J.’s Electric Grid Operator is Worried. This one’s straight out of the Black Cascade files. There’s a lot of good info here, but this caught my eye: “Replenishing stockpiles is more complicated than calling a broker and ordering a barge delivery. In the current topsy-turvy economy, energy markets are encountering the same supply-chain disruptions that have upended manufactured goods ranging from furniture to new vehicles. The energy industry is dealing with shortages of transportation and labor, including truck drivers, railroad personnel, and coal miners.” It’s gonna be a cold winter.
The True Face of the Anti-Nuclear Movement. Based Ted Nordhaus is spitting heat in the BTI blog again. Here he is taking aim at the subtler, wonkier version of anti-nuclear that’s been gaining prominence: “Opinion on the subject has started to turn again, largely driven by concern among left-of-center folks about climate change and rising concern, more generally, about energy prices, as natural gas prices have risen substantially and the realities of attempting to operate a grid primarily with intermittent sources of renewable energy have begun to hit home. It turns out that the only thing more costly than trying to build out a zero-carbon grid with nuclear energy, even with all the challenges associated with building large, current generation, light water reactors in the current regulatory and political environment, is trying to build out a zero-carbon grid without nuclear energy.” Read the whole thing.
Commentary
Culture needs weirdos. So, Kanye’s presence comes as a great helping of weird for a particularly stale moment in American culture. On a recent show, Kanye compared himself to Putin. He was talking about his aspirations to overtake all the major clothing brands—Adidas, Gap, Nike—with his brand Yeezy. Typical Kanye bluster. What he said next thrilled me, though.
“Culture is an oil—it’s an energy.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. At this point, our entire modern existence is shot through with media and thus culture. But all of that relies, quite literally, on hydrocarbons. In other words, oil. There’s no culture without energy.