I bet you didn’t know an energy deal with widespread bipartisan support is in the works.
Not only that, but it would save 7 million lives over the next three decades,
I know, it seems hard to believe, but it’s true. So why aren’t you hearing about it?
In this day and age, do you even need to ask? It doesn’t fit the narrative for either party.
The Republicans are busy spending any second in front of a microphone pushing the election agenda.
The Democrats are busy doing everything they can to paint Trump as evil incarnate.
And while no one is looking, it is going to do more to advance environmental causes than virtually all of Obama’s efforts in the last eight years, thanks to his overreliance on executive actions and overreach.
The vast majority of investors don’t see it coming, but some smart money, and industry outsiders see it coming.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel staked out early positions. Even the man who probably did more than anyone to keep Trump out of office, George Soros, has over $125 million in play.
Nuclear’s future in America, and across the world, is looking more secure than ever.
Rocket Scientists and Environmental Concerns
NASA, at least on the surface, is hardly the first place people would look for comprehensive and definitive proof of how nuclear saves lives and the environment.
Yet it has the ultimate bird’s eye view, and its atmospheric observation programs have been second-to-none for decades.
The agency showed that nuclear energy is far safer than any form of fossil fuel. Period. Back in 2013, NASA published a report called, “Coal and Gas Are Far More Harmful Than Nuclear Power.”
Using U.S. and UN information, researchers reached some startling conclusions:
- Nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009.
- Nuclear power prevented an average of 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent over the same time period.
The researchers then used projections that cover 2010 through 2050 from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency to determine:
- A full nuclear phase-out scenario leads to an average of 420,000-7 million deaths worldwide.
- Replacing nuclear energy with coal and gas results in an additional release of 80 to 240 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions.
- The extra emissions released by fossil fuels from ending nuclear energy generation would account for 16% to 48% of the emissions allowed to stay below conservative targets set by the international community.
The simple fact of the matter is that while people worldwide aren’t dying due to black lung disease like coal miners do, the particles, and others from the burning process, are slowly poisoning huge swaths of the global population.
International Consensus
On the international stage, the U.S. has all but abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement.
If you remember, it did a lot to subsidize often uneconomical renewables — like solar in some regions, wind just about everywhere, and fringe technologies like tidal power — while penalizing fossil fuel-based energy sources.
What it also did was put nuclear energy on the same pedestal as renewables — a zero-carbon fuel source on its own.
It was a no-brainer. Most of the major signatories are already entering a period of rapid construction and deployment of nuclear power.
Today there are some 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 31 countries. Over 60 are being constructed in 13 countries.
Meanwhile, plant upgrades and large investments in maintaining capacity — in the U.S. in particular — are making existing plants bigger and better.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved more than 140 “uprates” totaling over 6500 MWe since 1977 — well past the peak of domestic construction — with a few of them being “extended uprates” of up to 20%.
This is just what is happening now. The future will see a rapid increase in nuclear power generation.
In all, over 160 power reactors with a total net capacity of some 182,000 MWe are planned and over 300 more are proposed.
As of February 2017, the World Nuclear Association believes that ever-increasing world energy demand, especially with China and India getting up to speed in nuclear energy, creates a realistic possibility that we may see the equivalent of one 1000 MWe unit worldwide every five days in the years ahead.
Nuclear power has NEVER been built that quickly.
This Is Happening
You may not be hearing about it in the press. It simply isn’t the editorial prerogative of the mainstream media these days.
However, it will get more attention soon. Trump has already expressed a lot of interest in nuclear power. His budget, which slashed funding for the Dept. of Energy, actually increased the funding for the DoE’s nuclear programs by over a hundreds of millions.
And with the capacity to save millions of lives, and prevent a potential environmental catastrophe, no one with any credibility — even in the hyper-partisan climate of today — is going to stand against it when it comes time to vote.
Outsider Club founder Nick Hodge has been following the sector for years, and his research into the Trump Administration’s moves signal that an “all-in” approach is imminent. Check out his research.
