nuclear-news

Oil Companies Are Key Partners in Trump’s Imperial Plans for Latin America

Stocks in ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and ConocoPhillips surged the day after Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela.

By Derek Seidman , Truthout January 8, 2026

or months, U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed that his pressure campaign against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, backed by dozens of illegal killings through drone strikes, was about fighting drugs and cartels. But at his press conference after the U.S. abduction of Maduro, Trump couldn’t stop talking about oil.

“We’re gonna take back the oil,” Trump brazenly said. “Very large United States oil companies” will “go in” and “spend billions of dollars,” he promised. “We’re gonna be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”

All told, Trump uttered the word “oil” at least 20 times during the press conference. Oil company stocks — ExxonMobil, Halliburton, ConocoPhillips, Valero, Phillips 66 — surged the following day, with Chevron, the only major U.S. oil corporation with a current foothold in Venezuela, seeing its share value jump more than 5 percent.

Further demonstrating the administration’s drug accusations to be mere propaganda, the Justice Department recently dropped its longstanding claim that Maduro was the head of “Cartel de los Soles,” implicitly conceding that it is indeed not a drug cartel but a slang term referring to political officials who have become corrupted by drug money.

The Trump administration’s barefaced imperial grab for Venezuela’s oil is fraught with challenges, and it’s far too early to predict what will happen. But its abduction of Maduro and effort to gain control over Venezuela’s oil industry aligns with the administration’s openly stated vision of reasserting undisputed political and economic hegemony across the Americas and the Caribbean, including control over natural resources and trade routes, through gunboat diplomacy backed by military threats. In doing so, Trump is looking to corporate allies like Chevron, which could stand to benefit handsomely from his administration’s action — though this is far from guaranteed……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://truthout.org/articles/oil-companies-are-key-partners-in-trumps-imperial-plans-for-latin-america/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=26a84c82c8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_01_08_10_43&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-26a84c82c8-650192793

January 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

The cost of America’s nuclear revival

On an industrial site on the shores of Lake Michigan, hundreds of workers
are racing to do something that has never been achieved before: restart a
US nuclear power plant scheduled to be decommissioned.

The revival is being
driven by power demand from artificial intelligence data centres and
reshoring of manufacturing, which is straining energy grids and pushing up
electricity prices. Big Tech is attracted to nuclear because it provides
[?] clean power that does not suffer from the intermittency that is a feature
of solar and wind energy.

Concerned that a power crunch could delay the
roll out of data centres, Microsoft and Google have signed long-term power
deals to support the reopening of shuttered nuclear plants in Iowa and
Pennsylvania.

President Donald Trump has also embraced atomic energy,
pledging to slash regulation and invest tens of billions of dollars to
reopen and build new fleets of reactors to provide the power needed to
“win” the global AI race. In May he set a goal of quadrupling US atomic
energy capacity by 2050, a massive undertaking that would involve building
hundreds of new plants.

And in October Washington inked an $80bn
partnership with private equity group Brookfield and reactor designer
Westinghouse, which aims to kick-start construction of eight large-scale
nuclear plants.

Last year private investors funnelled a record $3bn into
start-ups building smaller modular reactors, technologies that provide a
third or less of the power of large-scale nuclear plants. In 2024, Amazon
bought a stake in X-energy, a reactor developer with power supply
agreements to support the construction of 144 small modular reactors (SMRs)
in the US and UK.

But in an industry subject to high financing, regulatory
and reputational risks, not everyone is convinced the resurgence will be
sustained. Only a handful of mothballed nuclear plants in the US are
capable of being restarted, critics warn, and building large-scale reactors
from scratch is a highly complex undertaking prone to delays and cost
overruns in western nations.

None of the more than 50 SMRs under
development in the US has proved they are commercially viable yet nor
obtained an operating licence from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“The industry is boasting about how things are different now and they are
going to build fleets of new reactors, large and small,” says Edwin
Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and critic of
nuclear energy. “But the fundamentals haven’t changed: nuclear is more
expensive than other forms of energy and still poses a risk of accidents
and proliferation. You can’t wish these problems away, so I think
Trump’s so-called nuclear renaissance is built on a house of cards.”

 FT 7th Jan 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/9f6c4db1-559f-48e1-8c21-ac0bc1a1237c

January 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Microsoft wants to resurrect Three Mile Island. It will never happen.

regulatory barriers are just the start. Nuclear reactors can’t be simply switched back on like a light bulb. They’re more like a car left undriven in a garage for too long with old oil, putrid gasoline, rat-chewed wires and a rusty frame — except that nuclear plants are infinitely more complicated than any car.

The Hill. by Neil Chatterjee, opinion contributor – 01/02/26 

Microsoft and Constellation Energy have spent the last year trying to resurrect the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The plant shut down in 2019 under economic pressure, after a separate part of the facility was decommissioned following a partial meltdown in 1979.

The effort is laudable, especially in light of Microsoft’s rapidly rising demand for [?] clean energy to fuel its artificial intelligence data centers. Unfortunately, it will never work. A fully shut-down nuclear plant has never been restarted in America for good reason: There are too many regulatory, material and logistical hurdles to overcome.

So far, Constellation Energy has painted a rosy picture. It originally stated the plant would be back online by 2028. Then, in early 2025, it revised its estimated opening date to 2027 following various inspections and the restoration of the plant’s water systems.

But traditional nuclear projects have a long history of going over budget and past schedule. A big factor is that the U.S. regulatory environment is not friendly to traditional nuclear power.

As the former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, I have seen firsthand how red tape can choke even the best-intentioned projects under goodwill regulators. Reactors that were permanently shut down must go through an extensive regulatory review process and request special exemptions for both their operations and use of radioactive fuel.

Constellation Energy and Microsoft have some solace in that the Department of Energy offered their project public support. But the Department of Energy isn’t the only player in town. 

To ensure safety, Three Mile Island will also have to pass rigorous rounds of inspections, receive environmental approval and get the green light from the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, FERC and other state and local offices.

Even under a pro-business, pro-energy, regulation-slashing Trump administration, this is quite a gauntlet — especially because pro-nuclear government officials may nevertheless be hemmed in by existing laws and review processes outside of their control.

If regulatory barriers were the only holdup, perhaps there would be reasons to be more bullish on Three Mile Island. After all, President Trump has offered full support to nuclear energy and is committed to winning the energy-intensive AI race against China, red tape or not.

But regulatory barriers are just the start. Nuclear reactors can’t be simply switched back on like a light bulb. They’re more like a car left undriven in a garage for too long with old oil, putrid gasoline, rat-chewed wires and a rusty frame — except that nuclear plants are infinitely more complicated than any car.

At Three Mile Island, the reactor vessel could be brittle and fatigued. The core rods may need to be refurbished, the steam generators might have corroded, the turbines may break after not being rotated for years. And we know the cooling tower was partially removed as a fire hazard.

Replacing and restoring this equipment and more will not come cheaply. Constellation Energy originally projected it would take $1.6 billion to bring the facility back onto the grid, but that was before it fully cracked open the hood.

Then there are the basic economic realities of traditional reactors. Three Mile Island, Indian Point, Crystal River and others were shut down not because they were unsafe or failed to produce energy, but because maintenance was costly and they couldn’t keep up with the low price of other energy sources like natural gas.

As energy demand rises, those costs may become more comparable. But restarting Three Mile Island is still an expensive bet that will take years or decades of the right economic conditions to pay off.

And all of this does not even count the difficulties with accessing or creating a supply chain for nuclear fuel and long-unused components, integrating with the local electricity grid, hiring and training a highly competent workforce and overcoming the (unjustified) cultural stigma against a power plant that shares a name with the only major nuclear meltdown in American history…………………………… https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5667831-microsoft-constellation-nuclear-challenges/

January 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Trump Floundering Efforts to Shore Up US Hegemony

Michael Hudson The Unz Review, December 20, 2025

The National Security Strategy’s Drive to Shed the Costs of Imposing Its U.S. Unipolar Empire

The one area in which the National Security Strategy makes a claim to be realistic is to recognize that the United States cannot directly be seen to impose its control by force. This task is to be delegated more to client oligarchies and their governments, by assigning responsibility (and most important, the military costs) on a regionwide basis along lines similar to how the European Union’s foreign and domestic political policies have been made subordinate to NATO Cold War policy controlled by the United States.

Replacing at least the anti-Russian rhetoric of Biden’s and the EU’s support for the war against Russia, the NSS proposes dividing the world into spheres of influence for the major regional powers: the United States (monopolizing control of all of Latin America and the Caribbean for itself), Russia (with its Central Asian and other former Soviet republics, including what formerly was eastern Ukraine), and China over mainland Asian neighbors. A Pacific NATO-like arrangement to be shepherded (and financed) by Japan, with India as the wild card. The EU under NATO are dismissed as a waning power with little influence.

This plan is not really a division of spheres of regional influence at all, in the sense that World War II’s 1945 Yalta conference was. It does carve out a uniquely U.S. control over Latin America and the Caribbean. European and Asian countries are to keep away from investing in the major resources of these countries.[1] This is Trump’s travesty of the Monroe Doctrine. That doctrine called for a reciprocity with foreign countries: Europe would stay out of political control of Latin American countries, and the United States would not interfere in European affairs. But U.S. officials had no problem with the newly independent Latin American countries going deeply into debt to British and other foreign creditors who imposed debt dependency, much as France did with Haiti as the price of its buying its political freedom to abolish domestic slavery. The effect was for many of these countries obtained political freedom from colonialism only to fall into debt dependency. But the Monroe Doctrine was only concerned with direct political and military control.

The major U.S. violation of the original Monroe Doctrine has been to maneuvere to control Eurasian affairs.  It has meddled in European elections, most notably in Italy and Greece after World War II by mounting right-wing challenges to their rising Communist parties. And it has ringed Eurasia with U.S. military bases and mounted regime change coups. The effect is that U.S. diplomats have been trying for eighty years to turn the entire world into a unipolar U.S. region of influence.

But the military and related costs of this effort have been largely responsible for the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit since the Korean War, and also the U.S. domestic budget deficit (at least until the neoliberal tax cuts on the revenue side of the budget). These costs are to be shifted onto foreign countries. 

The costs of maintaining the U.S. diplomatic empire must be assigned on a region-wide basis under the leadership of particularly loyal U.S. proxies, much as is the case with NATO countries Europe under British, French and German dominance.

In Asia, U.S. diplomacy relies on the Quad (Japan, Australia, India and the United States) along with friendly governments in South Korea and the Philippines to prevent their economies and those of China and other countries in the region from obtaining oil and gas from Russia, Iran and Venezuela to install military basis ringing China. Much as U.S. neocons are trying to convince NATO allies that these adversaries pose an imminent military threat, Asian countries are being mobilized to support a separatist political movement in Taiwan.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Trump’s drive to attract foreign financing to the U.S. debt market via cryptocurrency

In seeking to counter other countries’ moves away from the dollar, the most recent U.S. tactic is to try to surreptitiously get other countries to hold dollars by persuading them to invest in stablecoins – cryptocurrency that is invested in U.S. Treasury securities, not bonds of China or other countries…………………………………….

And a major aim of cryptocurrencies is, of course, to facilitate tax evasion and criminal activities through libertarian “privacy” (that is, secrecy from public authorities) and criminal management of such currencies themselves. The Trump Administration’s support for cryptocurrencies actually is a new version of the U.S. drive to promote offshore banking centers in the 1960s…………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.unz.com/mhudson/trump-floundering-efforts-to-shore-up-us-hegemony/

December 29, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Instead of buying Venezuelan heavy crude…Trump just steals it

Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glen Ellyn IL ,22 Dec 25

The US desperately needs Venezuelan heavy crude oil to run its Gulf Coast refineries. But 20 years of failed US sanctions to overthrow last 2 Venezuelan socialist presidents has caused Venezuela to pivot away from US petro dollars to sell their crude to China and Russia, and pay for it in Yuan and Rubles.

The rest of the world is looking at tiny (GDP, defense, population) Venezuela and realizing its cool to push back against America’s weaponized financial system that’s been holding them hostage to petro dollars for half a century. If Venezuela can do it so can many others, weakening America’s grip on them while undermining the US economy. And they are.

The dollar has fallen from 90% of energy transactions to 60% since 2000 and will likely be under 50% by 2035. As petrodollar usage goes bye bye, US debt will sour, interest rates balloon, presaging tough times ahead for the world’s second largest economy.

Maybe that’s why Trump has pivoted away from just sanctions to mass murder of small unarmed boats off Venezuela, seizing two oil tankers and threatening invasion. But Venezuela’s new economic pals China and Russia are rushing in to prop up Maduro’s regime which has essentially told Trump to pound sand. Maduro has the upper hand against the American colossus which can obliterate Venezuela but not without US cannon fodder arriving back at Arlington. That appears to be a criminal war too far even for mass murderer Trump.

Time for the US to drop all sanctions, withdraw the multibillion-dollar armada threatening Venezuela, and make nice with Maduro. Sure beats the economic suicide Trump and his deranged neoconservative advisors have chosen to foist upon the American people.

December 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment