The US lost its ability to innovate on nuclear power due to a combination of regulatory accumulation and anti-nuclear misinformation from environmental groups, which collectively made nuclear uneconomical. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 1 · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-05 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 1:41
Nuclear really got sidelined by the environmental advocacy groups that pushed misinformation on the general public. We just continue to ratchet up regulations for a variety of reasons including some of the public perceptions around nuclear is my opinion that we regulated nuclear out of business because we made it too expensive.
verbatim transcript · starts at 1:41
1:51public. We just continue [music] to ratchet up regulations for a variety of reasons including some of the public perceptions around nuclear is my opinion that we regulated nuclear [music] out of business because we made it too expensive. >> The current state of the energy grid is not great and it doesn't say hey America's ready to build. We need energy for everything. And the grid we're building on right now is mostly created
2:16in the 60s and 70s. Technology has changed a lot. Society [music] has changed a lot. And it's starting to show that what we're building on is aging. About 45% of Americans have experienced one outage in the last year. For a business, that can be catastrophic. It's a really important thing for folks to grasp that when you [music] turn the lights on, it's from the 60s. We kind of