A “NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE”…. In May 2020, a German utility detonated explosive charges and brought down both cooling towers at the Philippsburg nuclear power plant — a fully viable 1,402 MW station that had been switched off by law just five months prior, on New Year’s Eve 2019, in a Green-governed state. Five years later, for an encore: 600 kg of TNT, threaded through 1,800 boreholes, brought down the two towers of Gundremmingen in front of 30,000 spectators in Bavaria. Billed as a “visible symbol of Germany’s nuclear exit,” it was purely theatrical, as the reactors had been dead for years. Made for great TV, though.
F–A, meet F-O … Over the preceding decade, Germany denuclearized and, in so doing, unilaterally disarmed itself of sovereign electrons. The country shut down 17 reactors that once provided a third of its power, starving its industrial base, increasing carbon intensity vs. the keep-them-running counterfactual, backfilling the gap with coal and imported gas, and then FAFO’ing when the gas was weaponized by Moscow, or more recently, held up in the Strait of Hormuz.
And now? A couple weeks ago, Germany’s energy minister called the nuclear phase-out “a huge mistake.” The same could be said of other rich, industrialized societies whose rulers talked themselves into denuclearizing in recent decades — and are now scrambling to memory-hole this choice and reverse course ASAP.
Something is happening everywhere all at once…
A new global nuclear consensus has taken hold, as was made evidently clear over the span of ~100 hours last week:
- NEW ENGLAND: On Tuesday, the region’s six governors signed a joint commitment to keep their existing reactors online and advance new sites.
- TEXAS: On Wednesday, Lone Star State opened applications for a $350M fund to pull reactor manufacturing and fuel-cycle capacity into the state.
- CALIFORNIA: On Thursday, Diablo Canyon, once slated for closure, won NRC license renewal through 2045.
What happened?
The 180° turns in Berlin, Brussels, Sacramento, Washington, and elsewhere all amount to an admission that the denuclearization agenda was driven by something other than decarbonization, that clean baseload power shouldn’t be taken for granted, and that these rich societies will now pay the price to rebuild the thing they talked themselves into blowing up (in some cases, literally).
Even as you blow up a good thing you had going, others will keep building while you’re crashing out. China approved 10+ new reactor starts per year for four straight years and now accounts for 62% of all new construction globally — building at ~$2.50/watt in five years, versus ~$15/watt and a decade at Vogtle, America’s only new-build this century.
THE GOOD NEWS: America still operates the world’s largest civilian reactor fleet, has the deepest capital pools, and there are price-insensitive buyers (hyperscalers) lining up to take whatever they can get, as the AI Supercycle, electrification, and reindustrialization pull grid growth out of a decade-long flatline. Last but not least, the political will to build has clearly arrived. Now for the hard part of rediscovering the lost art (and tribal knowledge) of building big reactors on schedule and on budget.