With our billionaires looking to nuclear power for their emerging AI data centers, I was wondering about costs. Found some data in various places and it was looking like nukes were 9x the price to generate electricity compared to wind and solar. Then I found an article on the new Georgia nuclear plant that does the math for me. It’s 10x. And nuclear is getting more expensive while renewables are rapidly decreasing in price. When you figure in operational costs of nukes are 20% it is starting to look like shutting down existing plants could be a big saver. Well, a saver for energy users. A big problem for people who own the debt used to finance those nuke plants. Whoops!

Georgia’s new nuclear plants drive US power sector clean-up

While I don’t follow it too closely there seems to be significant changes happening in Mexico. As Llosa famously said:

In 1990, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa famously described Mexico under the PRI as being “the perfect dictatorship”, stating: “I don’t believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, nor the USSR, nor Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.” The phrase became popular in Mexico and around the world until the PRI fell from power in 2000.

Since the final losses of the long empowered PRI party, Mexico has seen a legalizing of abortion, a woman president and now an undoing of the lifetime powers of their supreme court. From The Guardian (UK).

Mexico supreme court judges resign over reforms to allow voters to elect judiciary