American nuclear energy just got a swift shot in the arm from one of Silicon Valley’s biggest names of all time. This past monday, Bill Gates, the Microsoft-founding mega-geek and globe-trotting do-as-I-say-not-as-I-doer, added another item to his CV when he broke ground on a next-generation nuclear power plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
TerraPower, the company which Gates chairs, plans to build and operate this sodium-cooled reactor as a commercial powerplant — pending approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
It’s a big moment for Windows Willy, who founded TerraPower in 2006 with the goal of helping inch the U.S. away from fossil fuel power generation, which still accounts for nearlty 2/3 of production capacity. And despite its questionable reputation, nuclear does appear to be the best candidate to actually achieve that goal.
Why American Nuclear Energy Could Be The Greenest Of All
It’s safe when it’s done right. It produces zero emissions.
Uranium is more than 100,000 as energy dense as coal, and in its raw form, is about as abundant on Earth as tin.
Reactors don’t require untold square miles of flat surface to operate, as wind and solar both do.
They do not require rivers or bodies of water, nor do they permanently alter topography and ecology on a mass scale the way that major hydroelectric dams do.
The technology is well known and tested and has proven to be reliable with only a small number of notable failures — all of which were either avoidable or were a product of known and substantial risk factors.
Reactors built today are expected to last up to 60 years, more than twice as long as your typical solar panel or wind turbine.
Put simply, once you’ve removed childish fantasies, the power of the atom is the best candidate for humanity’s next step in meeting our energy demands.
Bill Gates isn’t alone in recognizing the potential in nuclear. The Department of Energy is starting to awaken to it once again, as a decade long drought in nuclear plant construction has recently come to an end, with more projects in various stages of planning.
There is one problem, however, as there always is… And that problem is fuel.
Did The Good Life Crush American Nuclear Production?
The U.S., with its economy blossoming in the golden era of post WW2, stopped U-235 refining operations in the 1950s choosing instead to outsource.
The result of that hubris and greed was that we became dependent on external sources, and in recent times, one of our greatest external suppliers of reactor fuel was none other than Putin’s Kremlin.
As of this year, all of that came to a stop, which has put a serious crimp on supply for our existing 94 power-producing reactors.
To supply new and planned projects and to ensure an end to dependency on hostile suppliers in the future, the only answer is to restart the American nuclear fuel industry.
Right now, that is beginning to happen.
Late last year, one Bethesda, Maryland-based company began the first new U-235 enrichment program since 1954.
Few investors took notice, as the stock continues to trade largely under the radar, but that has been characteristic of the entire sector.
Want To Be A Real Energy Investor? Forget What Everyone Else Is Doing
Nuclear power stands as one of the most overlooked within the energy investment circles.
Lacking the status and magnitude of oil, and the high-tech freshness of wind and solar, nuclear energy is the quiet, all-business sibling in the family, but reality is starting to catch up to the competition.
Fossil fuels are on the way out and renewables simply do not have the capacity and efficiency to be anything more than a side show — not without major technological breakthroughs.
Nuclear stands as the one solution that can get a job this big accomplished, which is what makes it the greenest of all energy sources from the most important perspective there is — practicality.
The lynchpin, is fuel.
Those investors looking to get involved before the retail world starts to get wise to this opportunity, have it easy this time around.
There is only one publicly traded pure-play operating in this space that’s done anything noteworthy in decades.
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