The Private Nuclear Market

“Robots can’t replace senior clerics, but they can be a trusted assistant that can help them issue a fatwa in five hours instead of 50 days,” said Mohammad Ghotbi, who heads a state-linked organization in Qom that encourages the growth of technology businesses.

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"No region of the United States fared worse over the postwar period than the Rust Belt. This paper analyzes how much of its decline can be accounted for by the persistent labor market conflict that characterized Rust Belt union-management relations. We develop a multi-sector, multi-region, dynamic general equilibrium model in which labor market conflict leads to strikes, wage premia, lower investment, and lower productivity growth. These lead to shrinking Rust Belt industries and to workers moving out of the Rust Belt. Labor conflict accounts for half of the decline in the region’s share of manufacturing employment. Foreign competition plays a smaller role, and its effects are concentrated after most of the region’s decline had already occurred."--U of Chicago Journal

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The Private Nuclear Market

Microsoft is plunging ahead on nuclear energy. They want a fleet of reactors powering new data centers. And now they're hiring people from the traditional nuclear industry to get it done.

Lack of stable long-term power, whether clean or dirty, is constraining Microsoft's growth. They need to build big data centers that consume electricity all the time and the old assumption that somebody else's reliable plants will always be around to firm up your wind and solar is falling apart.

Microsoft, like many companies, was held back by what we might consider "Enron-ism" infecting its energy thinking: renewable energy credits plus markets plus cute little lies to the public about how electricity works. Greenwashed fossil/hydro/nuclear with the ESG stamp of approval. The problem? Eventually, you run out of other people's cheap firm power. So Microsoft has recently become a leader in openly asserting that nuclear energy counts as clean energy, as opposed to the ongoing cowardice we see from the other big tech companies who lie to the public about being "100% renewable powered."

A world is coming where only the tech companies willing to become nuclear power developers may get to keep expanding their cloud businesses, and only countries open to new reactors get to host this expansion. A world where tech companies with 50% margins become the only survival hope for traditional industrial concerns with 5% margins who need someone else to bootstrap a proper electricity supply. Where diesel backup generators are replaced with microreactors reliable enough to be trusted to keep a cluster of facilities secure in the case of public grid failure.--Nelson