Isaiah Taylor

There's these attributes of nuclear that they're thinking about and very seldom are you hearing, it's just gonna be so much cheaper.

And this is really a product of how poorly we've been building nuclear in the West for the last 30 years, is that it became very expensive.

And opponents of nuclear will say, nuclear is $150 to $200 a megawatt hour, whereas other forms of generation are less than 100.

And so nuclear looks like the expensive option.

I would appeal to the past.

I would say, what was nuclear energy before we kind of mucked it up, right?

Before we over-regulated, before Three Mile Island, before we kind of tripped over our own feet, what was nuclear doing?

And what's fascinating is that if you go and look at the original costs of nuclear from the 1970s, it was and remains the cheapest energy that humanity has ever experienced.

And that's adjusting for inflation.

So if you take what did nuclear energy cost in the early 1970s and adjust those numbers to today, it was around $35 to $40 a megawatt hour, which is cheaper than the cheapest energy on Earth today.

So we've actually gotten more expensive in every way since the early 1970s.

And again, we're not talking about nominal 1970s dollars.

This is inflation adjusted.

which proves to me from a physics perspective and an engineering perspective that nuclear can obviously be the cheapest source of energy because we did it before.

We've already proved it.

And so we just have to get back there.

Now, what's also interesting is that even in the early 1970s, that was only, what, 20 years since we even invented nuclear, right?

It was 20 years since we turned on the first reactors.

And so that technology was like pretty new and it was already the cheapest energy on earth.

So where would we be if we had continued to march down that line?