Tea at Trianon: Trump’s Nuclear Moonshot

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Trump’s Nuclear Moonshot

From Amuse on X:

The rationale behind this bold move is both pragmatic and philosophical. Pragmatic, because the exponential growth of AI, machine learning, and data centers threatens to swamp our antiquated and overstretched electrical grid. Philosophical, because energy independence and abundance are preconditions for national sovereignty, economic vitality, and technological supremacy. A free republic cannot remain free if it is energy-starved and dependent on geopolitical rivals.
The numbers speak for themselves. A single gigawatt can power roughly one million homes. Trump’s proposal to quadruple the current 100 gigawatt nuclear capacity to 400 by 2050 signals a historic realignment of strategic priorities. If achieved, this would place the United States as the single largest producer of nuclear energy in the world by a wide margin, accounting for over 40% of global nuclear capacity, based on today’s figures. This is not a green fantasy or a bureaucratic platitude. It is a deliberate act of national engineering, designed to position the US as the premier energy power of the 21st century. At its core lies a brilliant recognition: energy abundance is the currency of geopolitical dominance in an AI-driven world.
What enables this initiative is an executive-led reformation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), long a bastion of bureaucratic inertia. Trump’s orders instruct the NRC to embrace a technology-inclusive licensing framework, shifting from rigid prescriptive rules to performance-based evaluations. This might sound like a minor procedural tweak, but it represents a philosophical transformation. It moves the federal government from an attitude of technocratic distrust to one of principled enablement. It trusts American engineers to build what they know they can build. (Read more.)