“It's the cleanest baseload, the safest baseload, not the cheapest baseload. So you have to be the cheapest. … Why would you say yes to a more expensive electricity bill? … I think there just wasn't a strong enough incentive in the ecosystem to push prices down.”
Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026
Context
John Collison suggested the standard account is that accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed nuclear. Nolan says nuclear stalled mainly because it was not cost competitive, and no one in the supply chain was pushed to cut costs.
Transcript
…the 70s. So you had oil price shocks, you had oil prices going very low, you had interest rates that peaked, I think, in 1981 on mortgages, like 18% mortgages at that point. And so how do you finance a huge infrastructure project when your cost of capital is well north of 10%, way north of that?
…you know, we're going to strangulate nuclear and over-regulate and everything like that. You think it was much more of a WTF happened in 1971 type story where we lost the ability to build large infrastructure projects generally and nuclear plants are an example of a large infrastructure project.
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 that's the thing in nuclear. It's the cleanest baseload, the safest baseload, not the cheapest baseload. So you have to be the cheapest. I also think people in general, if presented with, you know, here's a new technology, would you like this to power your grid? You've maybe heard some safety issues with it that are probably confusing of which side to believe. And then also your energy won't be cheaper. And so if we're talking about being in 1970s, 1980s, when global warming was not really a topic and emissions wasn't as front…
stopped being a market and started becoming a place where people rent extract in all their local corners.
Maybe not intentionally. But I think absent a strong pressure to keep prices low and push them down and compete them down. I think in a lot of industries that happens. And it happened in space launch as well.
I mean, it feels like in general the nuclear mood is this very interesting story of extremes where there was crazy unbridled optimism early on. Like remember the radium watches for, you know, people are making watches with radium 226. For the like low-in-the-dark dials and this, you know, energy…
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