Earlier today I wrote that we live in stupid times.

It’s true. In an era defined by apocalyptic warnings about how fossil fuels, agriculture, and breathing will cause the Earth to catch on fire, the one thing that has held the environmental movement together is an abiding faith that generating power with clean, renewable, and carbon-free nuclear energy is a terrible idea.

The result has been a ridiculous draught in the commissioning of nuclear reactors. The US has closed nukes but hasn’t commissioned a new reactor in decades.

We live in stupid times.

Still, somehow this new reactor in Georgia managed to slip through the cracks and get built.

Georgia Power announced Monday that its Plant Vogtle 3 nuclear reactor has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new U.S. nuclear reactor to come online in more than 30 years.https://t.co/h2GJLW609Q

— AG (@AGHamilton29) July 31, 2023

The new reactor is the third of eventually 4 units at the Vogtle nuclear power plant and is years late and ridiculously over budget. Delays and budget overruns are inevitable when building nuclear plants, largely because they get tied up with legal issues that drag things out indefinitely.

The problem is political, not technical. While I have more than a few quibbles with how nuclear energy is deployed in the United States–the designs and technology we use is decades-old and getting a new and improved design approved has been a ridiculous, expensive, and time-consuming process–the barriers to deploying the technology efficiently have mostly been based in politics.

Nuclear has the potential to provide clean, cheap, and indefinitely available electric power. Breeder reactors could recycle nuclear fuel, reducing the nuclear waste disposal problem, but again politics has prevented its deployment.

New generations of technology are out there to reduce cost, increase reliability, and make nuclear much easier to deploy.

I’ll believe it when I see it deployed. I expect the government to screw that up too.

I am convinced that most environmentalists have stood in the way of deploying nuclear power not because they fear it–coal plants and coal production kills more people in a year than nuclear power ever has–but because they oppose energy abundance. Degrowth is the watchword–fewer people consuming less is the goal, not cleaner growth with abundance.

That’s why you see power plants getting closed and replaced with less generation produced by unreliable energy. The electric car future is more about eliminating most cars themselves–obviously so given that the environmentalists oppose expanding generation to meet electricity demands. And forget about putting in anything like enough transmission to “electrify everything.”

America should have gone nuclear decades ago, but alarmists have slowed both the construction of existing designs and slowed the development of better and cheaper designs. We will be paying a price for this for decades to come.

Two new reactors coming online this year is a good step forward, but the process needs to be streamlined to make it cheaper and more efficient. Good luck with that.