Electricity Generation from Solar Could Exceed Coal in ERCOT for the First Time in 2026

[NNadir]

3. The United States before its collapse built more than 100 nuclear reactors in a 20 year...

...period while providing the cheapest electricity in the first world. The engineers who did this worked with slide rules and, if they were lucky, computers less powerful than a modern Apple watch.

The new first world power, having emerged from third world status in about 30 years - starting from a position far below the US in the 2nd half of the 20th century - built 60 reactors in the last 25 years and has an additional 39 under construction. The rate at which the Chinese build nuclear reactors is not slowing; it's increasing.

I don't credit soothsaying about what nuclear engineers can and cannot do from critics who obviously know zero about nuclear engineering other than that they hold nuclear engineers' abilities in contempt. Their chants don't mean a thing.

The boy my wife and I raised is working with people who print reactor cores, fuels and components using laser based additive manufacturing tools. Components so manufactured have already been installed in the commercial Watts Bar reactors.

I think my son has a deeper understanding of nuclear engineering than critics poking around the internet with a highlighting tools. I respect his vision and that of his colleagues, and of course the Chinese, Russian, Korean and French nuclear engineers who are serving on the front lines to save what is left to save, and can be saved, than I do people making tiresome claims denigrating their abilities.

Solar and wind junk have never, even with trillions of dollars and mindless worldwide enthusiasm and cheering for them, now carried on with all the enthusiasm of a rapturous religious cult, in any year, produced as much primary energy combined as nuclear reactors produce each year in a climate of vituperation and irrational fear.

The game is up. The results of all the soothsaying now need to compare with the observed results. The results are dire.

The planet is burning. Crops are failing. Desertification is accelerating. The planetary atmosphere is collapsing and the rising seas are dying. Glaciers on which the world fresh water supplies depend are disappearing.

It's a little late, and in my view, excreable, to be spitting on the capabilities of nuclear engineers simply because one is incompetent to know what they do.

Have a nice afternoon.