Oklo’s Valuation: Nuclear on Welfare (joining wind, solar, batteries)

“The siren song of inexpensive nuclear power continues into its seventh decade. Taxpayer and ratepayers beware.”

Commercial nuclear power has turned into the welfare energy de jure. It is politically correct despite many decades of failure to compete against other forms of thermal energy. Uranium might be the ultimate energy density-wise, but nuclear fission (and more so nuclear fusion) is the most complicated, expensive, fraught way to boil water.

Commercial nuclear power was government-created in the 1950s and remains government dependent today. (Stay tuned: my primer on the history of this energy source is forthcoming. [1]). Regarding the present, consider this example from Jamie Smyth, editor of US Energy, who wrote:

Nuclear technology company Oklo has no revenues, no licence to operate reactors and no binding contracts to supply power. But this has not stopped the Silicon Valley-based start-up from riding a wave of investor enthusiasm that has propelled its stock market valuation above $20bn, a rise of more than 500 per cent since the turn of the year.

He provided the background.

The company, backed by technology boss Sam Altman and with close ties to Donald Trump’s energy secretary, has set ambitious targets to deliver commercial power to its first customers in 2027, having broken ground on its pilot in Idaho last month.

Oklo, led by the husband-and-wife team Jacob and Caroline DeWitte, envisages a future powered by a new generation of small modular reactors that use liquid sodium rather than water as a coolant. The company is seeking to become a leader among businesses that will supply energy hungry data centres with the power they need to fuel the artificial intelligence boom.

Yet the surge in its shares, buoyed by enthusiasm from retail investors who make up an outsized proportion of its shareholders, has worried experts who fear the stock has become wildly overheated. It is among the highest valued pre-revenue businesses listed in the US.

I commented:

A government play, like Tesla. Political capitalism with the US DOE ready to subsidize commercial nuclear power. Nuclear is the new subsidy baby, or welfare queen, the politically correct replacement for wind/solar/batteries under a new political regime.

The siren song of “competitive” nuclear power continues into its seventh decade. Taxpayer and ratepayers beware.

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[1] “Nuclear Power: A Free-Market Perspective.” American Institute for Economic Research, forthcoming.

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