Atomic Energy’s death spiral has spawned a run to green power.
But the toxic mineral lithium has become a critical pitfall…with clear ways around it that demand attention.
Humankind’s 400+ licensed large commercial reactors embody history’s most expensive technological failure.
Once hyped as “too cheap to meter,” just three “Peaceful Atom” plants have opened in the US since 1996, all of them very late and hugely over budget. Four at Japan’s Fukushima blew up in 2011, with ever-escalating economic, ecological and biological costs. Two in South Carolina are outright $9 billion failures. Projects in Georgia (US), Finland, France and the UK have come with catastrophic delays, overruns and cancellations. So have much-hyped Small Modular Reactors, and the taxpayer-funded idea of restarting nukes already dead.
And in the post DeepSeek era, gargantuan projected power demands for Artificial Intelligence and crypto are coming back to Earth.
