PJ Vogt

Not to freak you out, I know there's a lot going on, but here's a fairly obvious additional problem on the horizon, the rising cost of electricity.

Our electricity doesn't just come from nowhere.

We have to use resources to generate it.

In the US, the electric grid is mostly powered by coal and natural gas.

And lately, for the first time in 20 years, our demand for that electricity has been spiking.

Some of that spike is driven by AI and data centers.

They're often the villains of the story.

But it's actually not just them.

It's also from a lot of things that everybody actually wants.

More electric vehicles, more induction stoves, more factories that have been electrified, hooking up to the grid instead of directly burning fossil fuels for power.

The spike in demand isn't just raising the price of electricity, it's also generating more emissions.

Since even an electric car running on electricity, that electricity is generated in part by burning fossil fuels.

So that's the problem.

And one of the solutions people have started discussing as a way to solve this is actually nuclear power.

Nuclear power, which in the 1980s and 90s was kind of a taboo, has become much more popular in recent polling.

These days, a majority of Americans, about 60%, are in favor of it.

Some of this is being driven by an understanding that nuclear technology itself has gotten safer, and some of it is just people's fear of climate change outweighing, or at least re-weighing, their fear of nuclear disaster.

In any event, nuclear power seems to be very much on its way.

Today in America, nearly 20% of the electricity we use comes from a reactor somewhere.

Tomorrow, we'll probably be using much more nuclear power.