Nuclear power supplied 20% of U.S. electricity by the mid-1970s before Three Mile Island halted expansion for decades. Modern reactors use passive safety systems that work without external power, addressing the failures that caused Fukushima. Smaller, factory-built designs could restore nuclear as a fast-deployed, low-carbon power source.
What do you think about nuclear and how close are we to being able to really ramp it up? And tell us a little bit how it's changed so that people can allay some of their fears. Mm-hmm. Super exciting. So yeah, you know, we first built commercial nuclear power just past the mid-1950s. And in 20 years, we had 100 reactors, many of them done, the rest under construction. And in 20 years, almost 20% of US electricity. That's like new technology hitting the ground running. And Three Mile Island happens. The rise of fear in politics grows even larger, and nuclear just gets smothered and doesn't grow for decades. You know, this is an energy-dense— it works whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. You can take a small amount of land and a small amount of fuel and generate an enormous amount of energy. So what we want to do is get nuclear moving at full speed again. Now, Kaz, you also mentioned innovation is required here. For old generation reactors, you had to actively cool them. You know, so Three Mile Island was scary. No radiation was released, but active cooling systems struggled. And at Fukushima, you saw flooding of the generators that were the backup cooling. You know, we had a meltdown. Again, no meaningful radiation was released. So even these first, second generation nuclear reactors, safest way to produce energy on the planet, right out of the box. You have to actively keep them on. If everything goes wrong, they just automatically turn off. So they're just inherently safe. And they're going to be smaller. So we think we're going to be able to be built faster.
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