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SN Scott Nolan On Cheeky Pint

“Vogtle was way over budget, way over schedule. But at a time of historically low interest rates, 20% of Vogtle's cost overruns were interest payment overruns. So you realize that the overnight cost of a plant, when it takes 10 years to build, doesn't matter as much as interest rates and how long you are actually taking to build these things. … I think the way we bring the costs down dramatically is just build them quicker and build more of them.”

Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026

“Vogtle was way over budget, way over schedule. But at a time of historically low interest rates, 20% of Vogtle's cost overruns were interest payment overruns. So you realize that the overnight cost of a plant, when it takes 10 years to build, doesn't matter as much as interest rates and how long you are actually taking to build these things. … I think the way we bring the costs down dramatically is just build them quicker and build more of them.” — Scott Nolan, Cheeky Pint

Context

John Collison asked how nuclear's cost problem gets solved. Scott Nolan argues that slow, one-off construction financed with debt is a bigger driver of cost than the usual story about safety fears, and that building faster and building more reactors is what brings costs down.

Transcript

Cheeky Pint Around 18:11 into the episode
Scott Nolan

…pure solar, solar and sunsync orbit for data centers, if we're talking data centers. I do think that that's the one other angle that's pretty smart and could possibly win. If we're talking about power on the ground, I think nuclear still wins, whether that's data center, industrial, whatever it is.

John Collison

How will cost get solved? Or will it get solved?

Scott Nolan

It will get solved. And then the way it gets solved depends on what you think the cause of the cost issues in nuclear being. So this is one of those overdetermined problems of like, why haven't we scaled nuclear? I think most people just say safety. You know, they look back to the 70s and they say there was a movie, The China Syndrome, you had Three Mile Island, you had Chernobyl. And so clearly nuclear was going to stop and we wouldn't scale it. And I do think the scaling piece is actually one of the proximate causes. Like we never hit economies of scale. We weren't doing it quickly enough. We never built out the supply chains. The workforces would shift around from project to project. Vogel was way over budget, way over schedule. But at a time of historically low interest rates, 20% of Vogel's cost overruns were interest rate overruns, interest payment overruns. And so you realize that the overnight costs of a plant, when they take 10 years to build, actually doesn't matter as much as interest rates and how long are you actually taking to build these things. And so if you think about the big reactors, I think the way that we bring the costs down dramatically is just build them quicker and build more of them. I think that goes…

John Collison

Because yeah, the classical story of what happened is this very accident-based mood of things like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And you basically reject that as an explanation where you don't think it was that we saw these near misses and accidents and things and said, screw that, we're going…

Scott Nolan

Yeah, and maybe the safety concerns put a slight pause on it, but I think that that is often blamed as the only thing. And maybe that was, you know, kicked off the cycle to some extent, but I think it was probably inevitable anyway when your product is not cost competitive. So I think fundamentally…

John Collison

stopped being a market and started becoming a place where people rent extract in all their local corners.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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