Don't fly mister 🔀 I'm just walking down the road, Early morning sunshine tell me all I need to know fuelcycle.bsky.social

It's open, blatant and on a massive scale now.

The DoE is considering low interest loans for 5-6 US utilities, to pay for components of up to ten AP1000 reactors. The move will help develop the AP1000 supply chain, would lead to plant construction. Article link in reply.

The Electricity Grid I post a lot of stuff about the electricity grid, here the CEO of the largest grid in America (PJM) lays it out pretty clearly. • What worked for 2 decades… no longer works • This is structurally different from history • You are facing an era of scarcity • The situation is not tenable PJM are facing a demand explosion. Now a demand explosion in some industries is 500% demand. But this is infrastructure, this is tens of trillions of dollars of assets and it takes time to mobilise and deploy things at this scale. In infrastructure, when demand growth shifts from 1-2%/yr to 8%/yr, then you suddenly need to be building 4-8 times more assets per year, than you previously did. If you were deploying $1 trillion / yr to grow at 1%, you now need to deploy $8 trillion / yr to grow at 8%. Suddenly you need to deploy many trillions of dollars per year to meet this growth. If you cannot get it done, prices will rocket for everyone. Failure leads to inflation. This is not a PJM problem, this is not even a US problem, this is a global problem. PJM are formally validating what some people have been saying for a while now. This is not temporary, we cannot uninvent the technologies that have precipitated this change. The world has changed and we must adapt. Global retail electricity sales are about $3.6 trillion per year, of that, around $900 billion goes to transmission and about $2.7 trillion goes to wholesale generation. The transmission system many developed countries have is the wrong system going forward. Our transmission systems in the West are built for transporting power from big coal plants to power big towns. That’s not what we are doing now. We have replaced most of the coal plants with two largely decentralised but highly correlated fleets of intermittent generators (wind and solar), that are growing like fracking wells because they are also quick to deploy. Their quickness to deploy new generation projects is massively destabilising for the grid. The grid was designed for coal plants. The grid is a $50 trillion machine. It is by far the biggest asset in any country. It isn’t something you can toss away, it isn’t something you can swap out overnight. We also have new categories of industrial demand (hyperscalers) that will capture an increasing share of GDP. This new demand category is going to set the marginal price of electricity for everyone else, and these guys are not as price sensitive as your widowed grandmother. This is a difficult problem to address because of: i) the scale ii) the capital intensity It’s also a global problem, because it’s born out of a new technological paradigm. It will not spread around the world at equal pace, but everywhere is going to eventually face it down. Some people are fleeing to space for solutions to avoid this snafu, but that’s only a temporary fix. Once the hyperscalers have their demand satisfied, the next demand explosion immediately follows, and this second wave is 20x the scale of the current problem. The second wave is how do you power billions and billions of robots and billions of autonomous machines, doing work that currently can’t be done? This industrial revolution is very much a two stage revolution, first you power up the chips, then you power up the actuators. Chips scale down, actuators scale up. There’s no Moore’s Law for actuators, they obey Newton’s Laws of motion instead. This is the crux of the energy problem facing our civilisation. The energy system we have today is the one we wanted 20 years ago. The energy system we will have in 20 years from now, is the one we start building today. It’s time to build this solution.

Mark Your Calendars ! FEBRUARY 28, 2026 Don't forget to look up the planets will drift quietly across the sky, reminding us how beautifully the universe can align.

The most efficient U.S. road trip route, as determined by a data scientist… In 2015, data scientist Dr. Randal Olson created what he dubbed the “perfect” U.S. road trip using genetic algorithms—a type of search heuristic—to tackle the classic Traveling Salesman Problem. His aim was to chart the most efficient route visiting either 50 major national landmarks or all 47–50 National Parks without needless backtracking. The final route stretches over 13,699 miles, covering all 48 contiguous states and iconic sites like the Statue of Liberty, the Alamo, and Yellowstone. While the pure driving time totals roughly 224 hours, most travelers would spend 2 to 3 months completing the journey with sightseeing.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. -- A. Einstein (1879-1955)

Battery's Ancillary Service → Energy Trading shift, done two different ways: Texas vs. the UK Batteries switch to energy trading once a market's Ancillary Service products are saturated In Texas, this new meta means performing fewer, deeper discharges to alleviate congestion during scarcity events This is why the shift to energy trading has resulted in discharge depth rising 16 → 32%, while the fleet continues to average 0.8 cycles/day But in the UK, the lack of price spikes means batteries rely on consistently shifting larger volumes of energy instead And so, in the GB market, the shift to energy trading has resulted in cycling rising 0.5 → 1.2 The same phenomenon, but two different operational strategies

A reminder that other countries have amazing infrastructure:

Some recent buzz re: a possible new Japan nuclear build, but what's the update on JP nuclear restarts projects being built? TEPCO's Higashidori site near the idled but operable Tohoku plant hasn't even poured a concrete basemat yet. Debatable to say it's under construction.🧵

The full @ENTSO_E "factual" report is here: eepublicdownloads.blob.core.…

Tipping Point from the Stable Climate at ~280 ppm CO₂ (Holocene, during past 10,000 years) to a Stable Hothouse Climate at 560 ppm CO₂. We already at 560 ppm CO₂ equivalent and will likely hot (and pass) 560 ppm CO₂ later this century. Simplified graph, adapted from @KNMI.

GAS TURBINE SHORTAGE RISKS NEW ENERGY CRUNCH 🚨⚡ Orders for turbines for natural gas power plants are vastly outpacing supply, threatening the world’s ability to keep pace with rising electricity demand 🧵 Thread on how we got here and what it means for power-hungry nations

China commissioned 21 GW of new coal-fired power stations in the first half of 2025 (that's the highest first-half total in 10 years). With that in mind, I’m re-publishing this @Opinion video column from exactly a year ago about why coal remains king .

WHY $NVDA WILL DOMINATE TODAYS EARNINGS Hyperscalers just spent $88B in CapEx: • $AMZN: $32B • $GOOGL: $22B • $MSFT: $17B • $META: $17B

The second page is in this article. Ultimately, it became the Achenson-Lillenthol plan, a way to avoid a nuclear arms race through cooperation around fissionable material. time.com/7310119/oppenheimer…

RT @WxNB_: This is unbelievable. The high temperature at one of Finland’s northernmost weather stations, in the municipality of Sodankylä…