Doug Burgum
speaker
1,008 appearances
32 recordings
11 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Doug Burgum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Everybody in Pennsylvania loves that because they'll get all the data centers. They'll get all the advanced manufacturing. In Arizona, you've got the TSMC plant coming there. That's going to require enormous amounts of power. People want to put data centers there. And yet their utility is just shutting down a coal plant. And it's like, OK, how are you going to power this stuff?
And so one of the goals we have is don't shut down any more baseload, preserve what we have and help, you know, get other get new sources of power permitted.
Yeah, we got to keep everything going. We got to go fast on the small modular nuclear. But again, that's really kind of in the 2030s. So that's in our next, it's in the important, but it's a little less urgent. We need to fast track all that stuff long term. That's where the solutions will likely lie.
But in between now 2025 and 2030, a lot of it's going to come back to LNG because the fastest thing we can get online for more electricity generation is LNG power plants.
A big difference is, again, back to the regulatory environment. I mean, the regulatory environment on nuclear has been so burdensome in terms of adding to the cost and the timeframe of bringing it on.
And then when that cost was put onto a utility and then utility felt they had to put that back on the rate, on the rate payers, their consumer customers, there was in some ways a revolt that it wasn't safety related. It was like, oh, you want nuclear, but now my electricity is going to cost twice as much. I'm not for that.
So we have to be able to get that regulatory regime down and allow them to go faster. And of course, on the SMRs, once that design gets approved, we should be able to have essentially like a manufacturing where we regulate the design, the design is proven and proved out.
As long as the manufacturing plant is producing that same design, then we don't have to do this stick built, show up, you know, you work for a week, the inspector shows up, oh, this is off by, you know, one millimeter, you got to redo it. I mean, some of that is where you end up with the doubling of costs.
I mean, you can't, I mean, some of the projects that have just been completed, you know, that took, you know, close to two decades on nuclear and then had doubled the cost and doubled the time. You know, that's not economically sustainable. So part of it is we've got to streamline the process. But these smaller amounts, they can be daisy-chained. They could be great solutions.
And then the other piece, which you love about having the small market for nuclear is we can spend money on power generation as opposed to money on transmission. Because transmission...
It's also it's really hard to build a transmission line in this country because whether it's a linear infrastructure, which includes natural gas pipelines, CO2 pipelines, oil and gas pipelines or transmission lines, those have become the focal point for protests. Because if they have any nexus, an 1100 mile long pipeline could have one mile that touches federal ground.
That is where the protest is going to occur.
I've got a great partner, Chris Wright, incredibly talented, arguably the most qualified secretary of energy we've ever had leading that effort because the Department of Energy has got most of the responsibility related to nuclear because they also are in charge of our nuclear stockpile. I mean, for the military, I mean, DOE has got direct defense responsibilities. And as part of that,
Uh, they, we've also got the 15 national labs and there's been great work that's happening in Los Alamos and Scandia. I mean, uh, you know, you go around the whole country and we've got an incredibly talented group of people and the research dollars have been flowing, but we've got to get some of that commercialized and out to the public.
So, but again, think of it literally as a Manhattan project. These were the, these were the places where we did the Manhattan project when you think of Los Alamos and others. So we've got to mobilize these government agencies to help us on the current the current crisis we're facing, which is this energy emergency.
Yes, you should.
Well, the fun thing when we meet with all of these people in the nuclear industry, if you were doing this five years ago, you'd have been talking to regulated utilities. Today, you can talk to a venture-funded startup. And there's at least 10 that are out there today that are chasing new designs. There's people that are chasing not just fission, but fusion. And so all of that is exciting.
And if you think of us having an air base in Alaska, I mean, think of being able to daisy chain some SMRs there and not having to build transmission. I mean, the applications for the military purposes and for other. And then if you have distributed, it's harder for the enemy to knock out your power source because it's not all sitting in one spot.
Well, I don't know if we've lost it or it's just the innumeracy of being selective about what industry or what form of transportation. Because on the automobile side, again, we'll track this year between 38,000 and 40,000 deaths on highways in America. Half of those are because of impaired driving, either from people texting or impaired drug or alcohol use.
And apparently everybody's okay with that because we lose 100 people a day and there's never a story about it. I mean, more than 100 people a day. But, you know, if you lose 70, you lose 70 people in the first airline crash in 12 years in America. And we're still talking about it three months later because somehow that is news and people dying on highways is not.
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