The Hubbert curve was only extended by fracking and tar sand oil, far more expensive in investment. Big oil would not be harvesting oil with these methods if there was a cheaper alternative and as the Honest Sorcerer has pointed out repeatedly every form of energy generation comes back to oil for mining and production whether it's nukes, turbines or solar. We've known oil was finite from the beginning and squandered it on a big, unsustainable party rather than use it to create sustainable societies, creating temporarily boosted population growth, destroying the fundamental natural systems we depend on, overheating the planet, and producing massive amounts of endocrine disrupting plastic. Feedback loops have been set in motion we cannot stop such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic which will release more GHGs into the atmosphere than we've managed to since we burned our first lump of coal. Not recognizing these realities feeds into the hopium that technology will save us. It won't.
"how do we reduce the overuse of resources and the pollution which comes with that — aka overshoot"?
There are only two ways to do it: use far fewer resources per person and have far fewer persons using resources. I like to summarize the actual process of overshoot resolution as "get poor and die". Admittedly, this is not likely to become a common political campaign slogan and will never appear on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Overshoot will not be resolved by any deliberate policy implementation. Reducing and eliminating overshoot is the exact opposite of what everyone wants to do. Nonetheless, it will happen, but it will happen to us, not by us.
As long as there are resources yet exploited, people will continue to exploit them until no longer able to. Their will be a contraction. However, it will not be deliberate. Overshoot will always be corrected. Always. Physics, chemistry, and biology will always have the last say.
We are already going through degrowth and contraction.
Just not by choice but out of necessity brought amount by less materials and energy being available year by year due to all the easy to access stuff having been harvested long ago.
Thank you for the succinct Thorium summary at the end. It's always the Gotchas that ruin a good story. We are pretty good at creating technology that sometimes provide new routes around them.
If there is one technology that I have to wonder if it will eventually make a difference, it's 3D metal printing. For example, Rocket Lab 3D prints engines, tanks and housings. It takes ages to do, but as it is robotic in nature, there is efficiency.
Presuming the turbines are the same as LNG driven ones (i.e. mass manufacturing), I have to wonder if there are a few tricks yet that can still be applied. But the greater issue is always going to be finding and processing the nuclear fuel.
I always enjoy Sunday mornings and your Substack. Thank you again!
There was analysis somewhere (reported on Tim Watkin's blog Consciousness of Sheep, that to use nuclear to replace FF we'd have to be building 3 nuclear reactors a day and phasing out 2 coal plants a day, or something like that. We're not even building 3 a year currently, and the number of old reactors scheduled for phase out world wide exceeds even that.
Nuclear power as a solution to overshoot = techno-utopianism and outright delusion.
If readers want a sardonic laugh, just look at the development history of the UK's Hinckley Point C, started in 2016 and due to finish in 2031, being built on a coastline much of which will be underwater by 2050. If it wasn't so serious a subject it would a Monty Python sketch.
The reactors may be a comparatively modest problem. There are the contents of the nuclear waste dumps at Sellafield, UK; Cap de la Hague, France; Hanford and Oak Ridge, USA, along with equally-contaminated sites in Russia, China, India, etc. Weapons and civilian reactors both contributed to the mess.
The contents of some of the nuclear waste tanks at Sellafield will boil, once the electricity that keeps them cool is cut off. I suppose the possible end of industrial civilisation didn't occur to the boffins in the 1940s-50s who set up these places. In the 1950s, the UK Atomic Authority predicted we'd have working fusion reactors by now, to keep the show on the road.
I have also spent quite some time doing manufacturing engineering stuff and I fully agree with your assessment. In my ignorance, I thought that SMRs were similar to the reactors found in nuclear subs, something that could be squeezed inside a volume of 2 or 3 40ft containers. Your correction is very welcomed!
One argument that can be added to the “unscalability” of smrs is the security. A site with 3x1GW reactors might need maybe 3 times more security assets than a single smr, but with an output 10 times greater…
I wonder whether the tax breaks given to ordinary nuclear plants apply to SMRs....If they aren't, Congress can fix that within...5-10 years...Without them, they won't be built...
The bigger picture is that the increasing impoverishment of the ratepayers will make it very difficult to raise electric rates a lot...which is what investment in nuclear power plant construction will require..I think new nuclear is generally going nowhere for that reason alone...
It is easy to get the impression that proposed new modular nuclear generating units will solve the problems of nuclear generation. Perhaps they will allow more nuclear electricity to be generated at a low cost and with much less of a problem with spent fuel.
As I analyze the situation, however, the problems associated with nuclear electricity generation are more complex and immediate than most people perceive. My analysis shows that the world is already dealing with “not enough uranium from mines to go around.” In particular, US production of uranium “peaked” about 1980 (Figure 1).
For many years, the US was able to down-blend nuclear warheads (both purchased from Russia and from its own supply) to get around its uranium supply deficit.
Today, the inventory of nuclear warheads has dropped quite low. There are few warheads available for down-blending. This is creating a limit on uranium supply that is only now starting to hit.
"As soon as I look at the mainstream media, this problem doesn’t exist. We have too little investment in the Netherlands to sustain growth." "According to former Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, ..."
I have a request for B or any of the other readers or commentators.
Lately, the MSM has been pushing "breakthroughs" in nuclear fusion lately. It comes across as desperate because it is. People lap it up.
B could you please dedicate a future article to nuclear fusion. It is quite literally being sold as a panacea that will solve all of our problems with "clean, limitless, energy" with little to no input and no environmental costs! Woohoo!
Or if anyone has any somber analysis on the matter, not small bits overladen with hype.
Thank you again, B.
The pro nuclear cult as I refer to them is constantly putting out their propaganda.
Push back no matter how small is appreciated.
If B were to release this in the MSM he would be denounced as a fossil fuel shill. Haha.
Fossil fuels make nuclear power plants possible in the first place.
Haha. Sometimes I feel like 2023 is also last year. Thank you. I love Tom Murphy's work. Anything physics related and his blog is an excellent source of information (collapse related without the human supremacy hype). I will give it a read. Hopefully, B addresses it too. Nice to get a perspective from an engineer.
Haha. Everything. Despite it being not physically possible. Let's wave a magic wand and bring it into existence. All that the energy would be used for is to power all the activities we are already engaged in that is destroying the planet. It is our way of life that is killing the planet. Burning fossil fuels is part of that not the whole of it. Mining powered by electricity is still mining. Sorry, I just can't love the human race after studying all the ways it has destroyed and continues to destroy its own mother(Earth).
Great stuff as always. You have 29.7 months until you are proven SO SO SO wrong ;) https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-deploys-advanced-nuclear-reactor-technologies-for-national-security/
Anything that has "Fact Sheet" and "Donal Trump" in the same headline is a self-contradiction, and automatically suspect.
Except among his adoring, mentally-challenged fans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/
How many times do you have to be lied to before you wake the fuck up.
Remember when 3D printing was going to make china factories obsolete hahahahahaha
Sucker
Whoa, I haven't had my morning blue pill yet.
I'm nuclear power experienced myself and I agree completely with your assessment. Glad someone else is saying it out loud.
The Hubbert curve was only extended by fracking and tar sand oil, far more expensive in investment. Big oil would not be harvesting oil with these methods if there was a cheaper alternative and as the Honest Sorcerer has pointed out repeatedly every form of energy generation comes back to oil for mining and production whether it's nukes, turbines or solar. We've known oil was finite from the beginning and squandered it on a big, unsustainable party rather than use it to create sustainable societies, creating temporarily boosted population growth, destroying the fundamental natural systems we depend on, overheating the planet, and producing massive amounts of endocrine disrupting plastic. Feedback loops have been set in motion we cannot stop such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic which will release more GHGs into the atmosphere than we've managed to since we burned our first lump of coal. Not recognizing these realities feeds into the hopium that technology will save us. It won't.
Overshoot: https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/the-planet-has-limits-so-must-we
End of oil: https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/the-end-of-oil
Bye bye permafrost: https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/permafrost-maybe-not
Brilliantly summarized, Geoffrey.
Looks like the Sorcerer supplied the article you were looking for on SMRs. Wish I could offer more optimistic assessments, but that would be hopium.
Indeed. As you have clearly stated before, we are not going to “technology” our way out of this mess.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/11/11/nuclear-electricity-generation-has-hidden-problems-dont-expect-advanced-modular-units-to-solve-them/
Thank you for this. The author and the site in general seems to have research and articles well worth reading.
A very good and helpful article B. I was unaware of the math behind small reactors. Many thanks
"how do we reduce the overuse of resources and the pollution which comes with that — aka overshoot"?
There are only two ways to do it: use far fewer resources per person and have far fewer persons using resources. I like to summarize the actual process of overshoot resolution as "get poor and die". Admittedly, this is not likely to become a common political campaign slogan and will never appear on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Overshoot will not be resolved by any deliberate policy implementation. Reducing and eliminating overshoot is the exact opposite of what everyone wants to do. Nonetheless, it will happen, but it will happen to us, not by us.
Mother Nature always bats last.
Correct.
MPP
Maximum power principle.
As long as there are resources yet exploited, people will continue to exploit them until no longer able to. Their will be a contraction. However, it will not be deliberate. Overshoot will always be corrected. Always. Physics, chemistry, and biology will always have the last say.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/05/27/economic-contraction-coming-right-up/
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/04/24/brace-for-rapid-changes-in-the-economy-the-world-economy-is-reaching-limits-to-growth/
We are already going through degrowth and contraction.
Just not by choice but out of necessity brought amount by less materials and energy being available year by year due to all the easy to access stuff having been harvested long ago.
Thank you for the succinct Thorium summary at the end. It's always the Gotchas that ruin a good story. We are pretty good at creating technology that sometimes provide new routes around them.
If there is one technology that I have to wonder if it will eventually make a difference, it's 3D metal printing. For example, Rocket Lab 3D prints engines, tanks and housings. It takes ages to do, but as it is robotic in nature, there is efficiency.
Presuming the turbines are the same as LNG driven ones (i.e. mass manufacturing), I have to wonder if there are a few tricks yet that can still be applied. But the greater issue is always going to be finding and processing the nuclear fuel.
I always enjoy Sunday mornings and your Substack. Thank you again!
Infinite growth, meet finite planet
There was analysis somewhere (reported on Tim Watkin's blog Consciousness of Sheep, that to use nuclear to replace FF we'd have to be building 3 nuclear reactors a day and phasing out 2 coal plants a day, or something like that. We're not even building 3 a year currently, and the number of old reactors scheduled for phase out world wide exceeds even that.
Nuclear power as a solution to overshoot = techno-utopianism and outright delusion.
If readers want a sardonic laugh, just look at the development history of the UK's Hinckley Point C, started in 2016 and due to finish in 2031, being built on a coastline much of which will be underwater by 2050. If it wasn't so serious a subject it would a Monty Python sketch.
I'm curious- what happens to a nuclear power plant when we humans have run our course and it is left unattended?
I imagine that it would overheat, then explode or burn.
This is the ultimate Black Pill outcome. I will save Fast Eddy several nanoseconds of effort, and link one of his posts that covers it:
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
I have a follow up in the chamber and unleash it tomorrow
The reactors may be a comparatively modest problem. There are the contents of the nuclear waste dumps at Sellafield, UK; Cap de la Hague, France; Hanford and Oak Ridge, USA, along with equally-contaminated sites in Russia, China, India, etc. Weapons and civilian reactors both contributed to the mess.
The contents of some of the nuclear waste tanks at Sellafield will boil, once the electricity that keeps them cool is cut off. I suppose the possible end of industrial civilisation didn't occur to the boffins in the 1940s-50s who set up these places. In the 1950s, the UK Atomic Authority predicted we'd have working fusion reactors by now, to keep the show on the road.
Nothing good, I'll wager.
Thank you, great analysis!
I have also spent quite some time doing manufacturing engineering stuff and I fully agree with your assessment. In my ignorance, I thought that SMRs were similar to the reactors found in nuclear subs, something that could be squeezed inside a volume of 2 or 3 40ft containers. Your correction is very welcomed!
One argument that can be added to the “unscalability” of smrs is the security. A site with 3x1GW reactors might need maybe 3 times more security assets than a single smr, but with an output 10 times greater…
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/11/11/nuclear-electricity-generation-has-hidden-problems-dont-expect-advanced-modular-units-to-solve-them/
I wonder whether the tax breaks given to ordinary nuclear plants apply to SMRs....If they aren't, Congress can fix that within...5-10 years...Without them, they won't be built...
The bigger picture is that the increasing impoverishment of the ratepayers will make it very difficult to raise electric rates a lot...which is what investment in nuclear power plant construction will require..I think new nuclear is generally going nowhere for that reason alone...
The biggest impediment is lack of fuel...
It is easy to get the impression that proposed new modular nuclear generating units will solve the problems of nuclear generation. Perhaps they will allow more nuclear electricity to be generated at a low cost and with much less of a problem with spent fuel.
As I analyze the situation, however, the problems associated with nuclear electricity generation are more complex and immediate than most people perceive. My analysis shows that the world is already dealing with “not enough uranium from mines to go around.” In particular, US production of uranium “peaked” about 1980 (Figure 1).
For many years, the US was able to down-blend nuclear warheads (both purchased from Russia and from its own supply) to get around its uranium supply deficit.
Today, the inventory of nuclear warheads has dropped quite low. There are few warheads available for down-blending. This is creating a limit on uranium supply that is only now starting to hit.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/11/11/nuclear-electricity-generation-has-hidden-problems-dont-expect-advanced-modular-units-to-solve-them/
So to keep the lights on, we are quite literally cannibalizing old warheads to provide fuel for electricity generation?
Haha.
And this is the technology that is supposed to replaced fossil fuels?
A technology that it itself is completely dependent upon fossil fuels in order to be created in the first place?
When it is running out of its own fuel source?
What a joke this all is.
"As soon as I look at the mainstream media, this problem doesn’t exist. We have too little investment in the Netherlands to sustain growth." "According to former Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, ..."
Well written and very illuminating article. This is exactly the information I was looking for. Thank you, Sorcerer.
Thank you B.
I suggest people read the below as they are good follow ups.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/11/11/nuclear-electricity-generation-has-hidden-problems-dont-expect-advanced-modular-units-to-solve-them/
https://energyskeptic.com/2025/the-nuclear-bomb-is-back/
https://energyskeptic.com/2025/nuclear-is-definitely-not-the-solution/
I have a request for B or any of the other readers or commentators.
Lately, the MSM has been pushing "breakthroughs" in nuclear fusion lately. It comes across as desperate because it is. People lap it up.
B could you please dedicate a future article to nuclear fusion. It is quite literally being sold as a panacea that will solve all of our problems with "clean, limitless, energy" with little to no input and no environmental costs! Woohoo!
Or if anyone has any somber analysis on the matter, not small bits overladen with hype.
Thank you again, B.
The pro nuclear cult as I refer to them is constantly putting out their propaganda.
Push back no matter how small is appreciated.
If B were to release this in the MSM he would be denounced as a fossil fuel shill. Haha.
Fossil fuels make nuclear power plants possible in the first place.
Tom Murphy wrote a great piece about fusion last year: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/fusion-foolery/
Haha. Sometimes I feel like 2023 is also last year. Thank you. I love Tom Murphy's work. Anything physics related and his blog is an excellent source of information (collapse related without the human supremacy hype). I will give it a read. Hopefully, B addresses it too. Nice to get a perspective from an engineer.
Thank you, Florian. Much appreciated.
Create the sun on Earth. What could possible go wrong?
Haha. Everything. Despite it being not physically possible. Let's wave a magic wand and bring it into existence. All that the energy would be used for is to power all the activities we are already engaged in that is destroying the planet. It is our way of life that is killing the planet. Burning fossil fuels is part of that not the whole of it. Mining powered by electricity is still mining. Sorry, I just can't love the human race after studying all the ways it has destroyed and continues to destroy its own mother(Earth).
Loving doesn’t necessarily mean liking…!