From: Rational Optimist Society - Substack
By: Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart
Date: October 12, 2025
If friendly aliens landed on Earth in 2025, they’d be baffled.
You earthlings discovered nuclear power in 1938… yet you barely use it? Does not compute.
Nuclear is the cleanest, safest, densest, and most reliable energy source ever discovered. Yet instead of embracing it, we all but banned it in the West.
Thankfully we’ve snapped out of it, prompted by the need for a lot more clean energy to feed AI progress. Governments aren’t just allowing nuclear development again… they’re urgently pushing it, clearing regulatory roadblocks and widening loopholes for nuclear entrepreneurs to sprint through.
It’s the most exciting time for nuclear in at least 50 years. In this monthly Deep Dive - which you’ve received in lieu of our usual Rational Optimist Diary - we’ll focus on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and the crop of companies racing to deploy the first one in the US.
As you read, keep in mind 71 American nuclear-powered submarines have been cruising the oceans for some 60 years. They can go years without refueling. Sailors sleep feet from the reactors.
SMRs can bring this safe, portable, clean energy to everyone. Imagine dropping a self-contained, school-bus-sized SMR into a remote town to safely power it for 20 years.
We won’t have to imagine much longer. (continue reading)