Peter Zeihan

We've had three more companies say that they're working on it.

I have not seen what I consider to be a reliable timeframe for when their prototype will come online.

The national labs are involved.

People are working on it.

Yeah.

Nuclear, if you're going to build a large plant, let's just put the regulatory and the NIMBY concerns to the side for a moment.

From the day that you put a shovel in the ground and you have every dollar that you need to get it set up, you're talking about four to eight years, probably closer to eight.

And that assumes that the power grid can take the power.

One of the problems we have in the United States is because the period from roughly 1985 until roughly 2020 is

It was a period where we were moving towards higher and higher end industry that used more precision labor and more equipment, but less smelting and electrical work.

It meant that the amount of stuff that we were producing was actually going up in value, but the amount of power that we needed to do it was going down in value.

And as we moved from manufacturing and agriculture to a services economy, same thing, power demand stagnated or dropped.

until very, very recently, largely because of AI, but also because of the re-industrialization effort we're now going through because of the Chinese problems and de-globalization.

So for 35 years, we really didn't build out the grid because we didn't need to.

Now we need to.

And the biggest thing that is missing is high voltage, long range transmission lines, something that's like 70 kilovolts or higher.

The only part of the country right now that has spare transmission capacity is

It is this little triangle from Pittsburgh to St.

Louis to Chicago, Appalachia, coal country.

Because in the 67s and 80s, we had a number of administrations who realized, here's where the coal is.