Whatever cost society bears from “tech debt” is negligible compared to “infrastructure debt”
Japan operates half of its grid at 60hz and half at 50hz today because Osaka and Tokyo didn’t coordinate generator equipment procurement at the dawn of electrification in the 1890s
@ShanuMathew93 And I say this as someone who would be elated to serve as off take for commercially viable nuclear in the future given it does have a valuable role to play in portfolio construction
Nuclear power faded out of relevance due to cost* and regulatory corruption. If those issues aren’t addressed head on then there just won’t be a nuclear renaissance.
There was no secret cabal acting against the nuclear industry, just incompetence
Same story with data centers
A small group of activists shut down clean nuclear power - and now they are trying to do the same to data centers. It would plunge the country into a recession, high unemployment & risk our national security to China. 🇺🇸
Is our current economy conscious?
At the very least it exhibits a form of aggregate agency through its capacity to allocate resources and respond to a dynamic environment via our public and private capital markets
Nuclear proliferation seems to be going well as of late wrt to Iran
But yeah agree regulation in all forms is a huge portion of the cost. One can argue that cost is inextricable from scaling nuclear in a sufficiently safe manner (both operationally and geopolitically) but it may be in our national interest to do it anyways.
marginal pricing makes new entrants compete on a marginal cost basis (assuming the same use profile)
The two statements you made are not consistent with each other, if there is sufficient demand from hyperscalers for bilateral offtake or to make a market for forward hedging, price wouldn’t be depressed
The goal of the naturally short not to make money on their hedges MtM, they just want to fuel their end use, so if the offtake is serious about incentivizing nuclear specifically (instead of just whatever is the most affordable and scalable supply) there will be a market for offtake making new supply economic even with insufficient wholesale pricing (although if your offtake is perpetually OTM than there is likely market distortion at play)
To clarify my confusing phrasing, I’m not saying that data centers have the same binding constraints as nuclear generation
I mean to say, for the sake of serving their own selfish interests, the powered-land/data center development industry must engaged with (and optimize for) the subject matter of their primary constraints directly rather than creating some narrative attempting to delegitimize the reality of those constraints