nuclear-news

Cost creep or cost leap? The staggering price of nuclear

In the fourth and final part of our serialisation from LINDA PENTZ GUNTER’S book No to Nuclear, she asks how anyone can see nuclear as value for money given its constantly ballooning costs.

Cost creep is a universal affliction in the
nuclear power industry and sometimes it isn’t so much creep as leap. The
two-reactor nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point C on the UK coast went
from an estimated $19bn to $26bn, then $35bn, $40bn and now $59bn! By the
time you read this, the number will likely be even higher. That makes the
plant — consisting of two evolutionary power reactors (EPRs) — the
second most expensive building in the world, after the Great Mosque of
Mecca, which cost more than $100bn. And the most expensive power plant
ever.

 Morning Star 12th Aug 2026, https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/cost-creep-or-cost-leap-staggering-price-nuclear

August 14, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

Economist Baker Explains: AI Bubble Is About To Burst

 August 10, 2026, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis TRNN

Economist Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research, author of Rigged and creator of the AI Bubble Monitor) joins Taya Graham and Stephen Janis to break down why the productivity data doesn’t match the hype, why Palantir’s CEO seemed to be panicking on live TV, why Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund idea might backfire, and what signs to watch for if this bubble bursts.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors.

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch Report, a show that examines government policy and action through the lens of extreme economic inequality, the existential issue of our time. Today, we’re going to discuss a technology which we’ve been told will transform our lives, an invention that has been touted as the ultimate arbiter of our collective futures, whether we like it or not. Of course, I’m talking about artificial intelligence, but with the promise also comes doubt and questions and most of all, a lack of clarity on how we’ll impact the working people of this country. AI leaders have casually warned us that their products could eliminate 40 to 50% of white collar jobs more than the losses in the Great Depression. They’ve promised that technology will be so disruptive that even staunch capitalists have discussed providing a UBI or universal basic income for Americans who will be left out.

They’ve borrowed money at such predigious rates to fund data centers that even Wall Street is beginning to just say no. And now some of the biggest names are saying it’s not working out as planned and an America’s already historic wealth imbalance and government hamstrung by the self-interested impulses of a single man. And you have a situation that could brew a toxic stew of making the already rich even richer and leaving the rest of us even further behind amid all the societal chaos and upheaval. And are the cracks just starting to show? 

Just this week, one of technology’s greatest apostles made accusations that AI has become a nemesis for his business and others. And capitalists who have gladly loaned billions to build data centers throughout the country are now starting to push back at the ever increasing demand for cash. Of course, the point of this show is to examine this topic through the lens of inequality and how it affects our political and social institutions and what it means for working people.

Just this week, one of technology’s greatest apostles made accusations that AI has become a nemesis for his business and others. And capitalists who have gladly loaned billions to build data centers throughout the country are now starting to push back at the ever increasing demand for cash. Of course, the point of this show is to examine this topic through the lens of inequality and how it affects our political and social institutions and what it means for working people…………….

Stephen Janis:

I think in a way, this is the greatest American kind of ripoff in the sense that they’ve spent about the past four or five years mining all our data, taking everything we posted online, and they’re regurgitating it back to us and want to charge us for it in some way. 

And so to me, I think what is most missing for me besides the promise of huge economic disruption is what the value proposition is for the American people. I mean, they took everything that we wrote and now they want to repackage it and sell it as some sort of deity that we have to worship. And so I’m a little worried, a little worried, a lot worried that we’re all going to be casualties of a great wealth concentrator, which remember, OpenAI was supposed to be a nonprofit. Now it’s a for-profit company. All these huge IPOs, I’m afraid they’re just taking everything we’ve created, sell it back to us and become even richer, and there’ll be a greater concentrate of wealth and power…………………………………..

Dean Baker:

I think to a very large extent, we have people who are really good at hype. People like Sam Altman, of course, Elon Musk, absolute master of hype. These are the Donald Trumps of the business world. They’re selling this stuff and they’ve been very successful. I mean, Elon Musk just had his SpaceX initial public offering, which is primarily AI. I mean, that’s their own assessment. I’m not trying to attribute things to them. 

If you read their registration statement, they say 90% of their expected market is in AI. So SpaceX is an AI company. So they’re looking to get rich by this. And I don’t mean necessarily because they’re going to have huge profits. They have huge stock prices. So Elon Musk became a trillionaire, not because SpaceX has enormous profits. It actually loses money hand over fist. He became a trillionaire because the stock price is ridiculously high.

So step one, is it creating inequality? Absolutely. By a stock bubble, bloated bubble. Now, in terms of what it delivers, they’re saying this, is it going to have massive impact? I’m sure it will. And the model I look to is the internet. Had massive impact. Does that mean that it’s going to lead to mass unemployment? Well, a lot of people lost their jobs to the internet. I mean, Amazon put a lot of small sellers out of retailers out of business………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Stephen Janis:

But these people are hyping valuations. They’re borrowing billions and billions of dollars, I think, based on a higher rate of return. I mean, is this like a house of cards? I mean, they’re hyping this over and over again saying it’s going to be transformative. But now you’re saying the impact so far has not been. Does that put at risk all these billions of dollars they’ve thrown at this problem?………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

bubbles can have very bad consequences. So that’s why I’m very worried about this one. They’re selling this and Elon Musk undoubtedly is stuffing his pockets. And Sam Altman and the others, they’re stuffing their pockets. But no, I don’t see that these stock prices make sense. And when does the music stop? I don’t know. Both previous bubbles went way longer than I expected them to. But all I could say is the sooner it bursts, the better it will be for the country.

…………………………………………………………………………….I was saying we want stock investors or we think they should be knowledgeable. They aren’t. And people were spending based on their stock wealth. So you had a lot of people that were saying, “Oh, I had money in the NASDAQ and just doubled,” which it might well have. A lot of people owned stocks in the NASDAQ and over two years they would’ve doubled. So they said, “Oh, I’m going to buy a new car, get a bigger house, go on a big vacation.” Well, when those prices plummeted, that consumption stopped. So it was a very, very big hit to the economy

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….It’s like using paper. Oh, I used five reams of paper today. And you go, okay, great. What’d you do? I mean, that’s kind of nuts, but that’s what they were literally doing. So you’ve had companies looking to cut back hugely on the AI they use because they want to see that they’re actually getting something for it. And in many cases, their conclusion was that they weren’t. The other part of the story that he’s raising, Carp is raising, is they’re worried. They don’t know what’s happening with their data. So when you’re running your programs through Anthropic, through OpenAI and whoever else, they have your data. ………………..

They don’t want to give that away for nothing to Anthropic, to OpenAI, whoever. And they don’t know whether they are or they aren’t………………..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. increasingly the companies, and these are big companies, these are Meta, Alphabet, the biggest companies in the world. They’re having to borrow. So even though they’re very profitable, they’re undertaking such massive investments that they’re having to borrow. And you’re seeing a very interesting story here that investors in bonds are starting to get worried. We actually saw this with SpaceX. It was really striking.

One of my AI bubble monitors was about this, that SpaceX bonds are being sold at a discount, meaning that bond buyers see a risk that it actually could default, that they might actually go bankrupt. So here on the one hand, you have stock investors going, “Oh, SpaceX is going to be the most profitable company in the history of the world.” You have bond investors going, “It might go bankrupt. It might not be able to pay its bills.” So I would look at the bond market and it seems to be. I recently saw some data showing that there’s much less interest in Alphabet, Meta, the hyperscalers are called, that are involved in building the data centers for AI………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/10/economist-baker-explains-ai-bubble-is-about-to-burst/

August 13, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

Nuclear power’s ‘second renaissance’ is built on a myth

the civil nuclear sector has also made the case that it provides an essential flow of qualified personnel to the military nuclear sector, ensuring the maintenance of the so-called nuclear deterrent. This reasoning has justified not only the squandering of billions of taxpayer dollars to prolong the use of nuclear power but also an obscene increase in military spending, all to prepare for a nuclear war that can be neither fought nor won. As we are seeing today in the US and the UK, especially, this comes at the expense of essential social welfare programmes, plunging more people into poverty.

In the second of a four-part serialisation from her new book No to Nuclear, LINDA PENTZ GUNTER highlights how the industry is searching for ways to preserve its relevance

Linda Pentz Gunter, 9 Aug 26 https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/nuclear-powers-second-renaissance-built-myth

SO WHY the sudden renewed enthusiasm for nuclear power? Although nuclear power has been in existence as a commercial energy source since the 1950s, it is now finding itself eclipsed as a technology by more advanced and far cheaper renewable energy sources, in particular solar and wind power. While nuclear power has demonstrated what is known as “negative learning” — in other words, the longer it has been around, the more expensive and slower to deploy it has become — renewable energy is getting faster and cheaper almost by the month.

Nuclear power has seen its global electricity share plummet from a global high of just over 17 per cent in 1996 to less than 9 per cent today, while renewables have soared in the same timeframe from a 2 per cent share to well over 15 per cent today.

Consequently, the economically failing nuclear power industry is desperately seeking ways to remain relevant. There are only two ways to do this: by making the argument that it is essential to mitigate climate change, thereby securing massive subsidies funded by taxpayers and consumers; and by providing the pathway to the atomic bomb.

To achieve the former, the nuclear power industry is rolling out its second “renaissance” regardless of the fact that the first one resulted in abject failure. In the US, for example, only two of the 34 promised new reactors heralded under the “Nuclear Renaissance” of the early 2000s ever reached completion.

In France, home to what was supposed to be the flagship “renaissance” reactor with the wildly exaggerated name of Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR), evolution ended up going in reverse with the vaunted EPR taking longer to build than any of its predecessors. Prices in most cases doubled or even tripled into the tens of billions of euros.

These economic disasters prompted the nuclear industry to revert to an old formula with an even worse track record than that of the current large reactor designs. The small modular reactor (SMR), typically 300 megawatts (MW) or smaller and gaining much hype and fanfare, is a concept rejected long ago because of its poor economies of scale.

Hundreds if not thousands of SMRs would be needed to meet the same energy needs as delivered by a traditional-sized reactor (usually 1,000 MW), including upfront costs for the factory to produce them. But the SMR has been revived to make the convincing-sounding argument that smaller is better and therefore, somehow, also cheaper and safer.

None of this is borne out by reality. The SMR designs in circulation are either simply miniature versions of the current large reactors, with the same vulnerabilities to accident and meltdown and making the same highly radioactive waste. Or they are based on what is known as a “fast reactor” design, one that uses materials volatile to fires and explosions and that produces plutonium, the trigger in atomic bombs. All of this would allow for the continued and seamless transition to nuclear weapons production.

Further, the civil nuclear sector has also made the case that it provides an essential flow of qualified personnel to the military nuclear sector, ensuring the maintenance of the so-called nuclear deterrent. This reasoning has justified not only the squandering of billions of taxpayer dollars to prolong the use of nuclear power but also an obscene increase in military spending, all to prepare for a nuclear war that can be neither fought nor won. As we are seeing today in the US and the UK, especially, this comes at the expense of essential social welfare programmes, plunging more people into poverty.

Those frustrated with fission reactors have turned to another revivalist theme — fusion. The dreams and delusions of fusion — which would involve the fusing rather than splitting of atoms to generate electricity — have been harbored for decades. Fusion is the “breakthrough” that has remained perpetually 30 years away since it was first embarked upon in the 1930s and will likely remain so in perpetuity. The few minor “advances” that garnered recent headlines were minuscule and hugely expensive and, when considered in the context of the immediate, or even future, needs of climate mitigation, entirely irrelevant.

In this book, I endeavor to deliver some clarity and to set the record straight about what “zero carbon” actually means (no energy sources are) and why nuclear weapons do not protect us. But writing the book led me to ask a bigger question. Our nuclear crimes are not committed in isolation, so what underpins our pervasive compunction to continue such a reckless plunder of our planet, actions that can only accelerate and ultimately ensure our own collective demise?

Aside from burning fossil fuels, exploding atomic bombs and melting down nuclear power plants, we have also blotted out the night sky, clear-cut essential forests, sprayed chemicals across our landscapes, and filled the oceans with plastics.

In following such a clearly self-destructive path, we have not only harmed ourselves but also disregarded the survival of the thousands of other remarkable creatures whose homes we have turned into our refuse dumps. (The fact that we refer to “animals” in a derogatory way, worthy of ill-treatment and viewed as lesser than, is already a problem and symptomatic of our misplaced hubris.) In wantonly destroying these crucial members of the web of life, we have set ourselves on the pathway to our own demise.

No To Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War by Linda Pentz Gunter is published by Pluto Press, £14.99 (www.plutobooks.com). Part 3 of this serialisation will appear in tomorrow’s edition.

August 12, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment