Motley Fool Money - Who Controls the Magnets?

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

If you didn’t have a reliable supply of electricity, what would you do to secure it? Robert Bryce is the author of “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations” and the writer of an eponymous Substack. Motley Fool Senior Analyst Nick Sciple caught up with Bryce to discuss:  - Why more countries are turning to coal - The challenges of building a reliable green energy grid - The resurgence of interest in nuclear energy - Supply chain issues for electric car batteries  Company mentioned: SMR Host: Nick Sciple Guest: Robert Bryce Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. We're seeing a shift in public sentiment that is increasingly pro-nuclear. And I think it's partly due to climate change. I think some of it's due to the receding fears after Fukushima. But I think it's also a recognition that if we're going to be serious, we're going to be grown-ups about energy policy, we have to adopt nuclear.

So I'm very encouraged by that. I'm Mary Long, and that's Robert Bryce. He's the author of six books, including, most recently, A Question of Power, Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. He also writes an eponymous substack. Motley Fool, senior analyst Nick Seiple, cut up with Bryce to discuss the constraints and obstacles of a green energy future, innovative companies in the nuclear space, and the challenges of building any kind of energy infrastructure.

Before we get into some energy policy topics, what's going on the energy markets today, let's establish some knowledge for our listeners, for something that people use everyday electricity, probably something that's not intimately understood by the everyday person. walking around. So if I ask you the question, what is electricity? How would you answer that question? I would answer it by saying it's a flow of energy. It is the world's most important and fastest growing form of energy, which is really the thesis of my book, A Question of Power. It's also the most difficult form of energy to supply reliably. It is both a commodity and a service, and there are arguments about that. But now we are more than 140 years into the electric age and the electricity

business is still expanding rapidly. But I'll add just a couple more framing points because I want to talk about what's happening in the coal markets, et cetera. But there's still over 3 billion people in the world today. We live in a world of electricity abundance here in the United States. It's incredibly reliable. It could be more reliable. But there's still 3 billion people in the world today who use on an average basis, live in countries, and on average basis, use less electricity than an average kitchen refrigerator in the United States. So electricity is many things, but it is the most important form of energy in the world, and a lot of people don't have it and want more. Yeah, how wide do you see you articulated some of those differences? When you look at the

gap between the electricity rich and the electricity poor on a global basis, how stark is that difference. Where are people around the globe at when it comes to electricity deployment? Sure. So in the book and also in our new film, Juice, how electricity explains the world, we divide the world into three sections, the high, watt, low-wad, and unplugged worlds. Well, we live in the high-watt world, and that is the countries where the consumption is over 4,000 kilowatt hours per capita per year. Here in the U.S., we use on average about 12,000 kilowatt hours per capita. people in the unplugged world use less than a thousand kilowatt hours per capita per year. And so roughly four out of ten people in the world today live in the unplugged world.

So the disparity is really quite stark. And those countries are predominantly in Africa. Continent of Africa as a whole uses approximately the same amount of electricity. There are billion, 1.2 billion Africans. They use about the same amount of electricity roughly as 35 million Canadians. So that gives you a kind of indicator of just how, stark the differential is between the electricity has and the electricity have-nots. Yeah, so when you talk about that there's large segments of the world that are without energy

at all today, one of the ideas you talk about in the book is what you call the iron law of electricity. How does that weigh into the decisions countries make about their energy mix? Sure. Well, I'll give a shout out to my friend Roger Pilke, Jr. He coined the Iron Law of Climate, which says that when forced to choose between economic growth and action on climate change, politicians will choose economic growth every time. So I stole that idea, just shamelessly stole it, right? Amateurs borrow professional steel. That's the variously attributed to Picasso and John Lennon. So I stole it and I coined the Iron Law of Electricity, which says people, businesses and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need. And I've seen

this myself. I saw it in Beirut, where people pay the generator mafia. I saw it in India, where people steal electricity. I saw it in Puerto Rico, where people run small generators after hurricanes. I saw the same in Louisiana. So we, as humans now, we crave electricity, and we're not going to do without it. We'll do whatever we have to do to get it. Yeah, and that ties into maybe what's happened over the past year or so. Last year in 2022, we saw coal demand hit a new all-time high. The highest demand had been since 2013. To what extent is that driven by that iron law of electricity? Well, I think you can say that is a direct reflection. It's the iron law of electricity at work. I mean, let's look at Europe and Germany in particular, right,

a country that has prided itself on this energy venda effort, right? Roughly spending roughly a trillion dollars to try and get off of or quit using hydrocarbons. I don't think they're going to achieve that. But nevertheless, they're spending staggering amounts of money. Well, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, natural gas from Russia became more scarce, right? And in some cases, I mean, there's still some gas flows into Europe from Russia, but they've been minimized dramatically. So what are the Germans doing? They're burning more lignite.

And in fact, in one of the most remarkable things, Nick, in Germany, they're reopening or expanding a lignite mine. Lignite is a low-rank coal. It is the most carbon-intensive way to produce electricity, bar none. They expanded the Garsweiler-Lignite mine, and in doing so, they took down a wind project to expand the coal mine. So this is just a prime example of how here's a country. in Europe, the richest country in Europe, the heavy industry predominates across Germany,

they're not going to do without electricity, and they're going to do whatever they have to do. One more example of the iron law, I was in Japan earlier this year in February and in March, and in TEPCO, the company that owns or operated the Fukushima Daiichi plant, they're building a 1.3 gigawatt coal-fired power plant on Tokyo Bay. So this is another example of the iron law of electricity at work. One of the things you've talked about fairly frequently is, and you just mentioned that with respect to Germany as well, is the difficulty of replacing existing fossil fuel-based energy production, whether it's coal or natural gas with renewables. Can you explain why? Why? Well, there are many reasons. One, of course, is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather. And when it comes to that, my simple reply is, well, if we're facing climate change, we're facing more extreme weather, hotter, colder, more extremes, longer extremes, why in the world would we make our most important energy network, the electric grid dependent on the weather? So I think that's a false promise on its face. But there are many other aspects to this, and they involve power density. What is power density? It's a measure of energy flow that can be harnessed. from a given area, volume, or mass.

And what we care about, particularly when it comes to power density, is land use. And what I've been documenting, and I write in the new preface to a question of power in the paperback, is I've been documenting the backlash against renewable energy wind and solar projects across the country now for more than 10 years. And we've seen a huge uptick in the number of rural communities across the country that are saying, we don't want these big solar and wind projects in our neighborhoods. And I don't blame them. I mean, these projects are very intrusive. they reduce property values, the wind energy business, the wind turbines produce noise pollution

that harms human health. These are real issues. And so the land use problem with solar and wind is the binding constraint. And I could talk about material intensity and other things as well, but that is perhaps the most important factor. Yes. So when you talk about land use, one of the big issues when it comes to deploying wind and solar is you need to put many of these large arrays in rural communities and then build long distance transmission lines. in order to get it to population centers and cities and things such as that. What are the barriers to deploying those types of long, long distance transmission lines in these rural communities?

And do you think our regulations are getting closer to it to what we need to do to meet those needs? You know, that's a really good question, Nick. And I'll reply, quoting my friend Lee Cordner, who worked at California Independent System Operator for many years. He said, when you build any kind of energy infrastructure, you have three challenges. Where are you going to put it? How are you going to connect it?

And how are you going to pay for it? So what we've seen over the last few months with the Inflation Reduction Act, well, some of the, how you're going to pay for it has been resolved in some parts because of these massive tax credits, hundreds of billions of dollars, of just tidal wave of federal cash, and jumped on the wind and solar business. But it doesn't then solve the problem where are you going to put it, which we talked about to some extent. We had now about 500 communities across the country from Maine to Hawaii that have rejected wind or solar or both. but then how are you going to connect it is the other problem. So as you know, it's difficult to build pipelines of any kind, or wind or, I'm sorry, for oil or natural gas. Very difficult, right?

A lot of rejections, a lot of people opposed, a lot of climate activists saying, we don't want this. Well, high voltage transmission projects are very similar in terms of the problems facing the siding, except you're putting that pipeline 200 feet in the air, right? If I'm using figuratively here, right? But that means there are more people who are going to be opposed. And so there is this blithe assumption

and the New York Times ran an editorial just a couple of days ago saying, oh, we just need to give FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, authority to cite high-voltage transmission. Well, that doesn't solve the land acquisition problem because you're talking about building a massive number, tens of thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission to get to this mythical or to achieve this goal that a lot of these climate activists have of 100% renewables.

It's not going to happen because you can't build that much high-voltage transmission. Not only can you not get the land, we don't have enough transformers, and we don't have enough linemen, which is a different issue that I'm just starting to research and getting more information on, but there are key constraints in the system that are going to prevent this from happening. Yes, something else you've written about. You mentioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is how injecting some of these intermittent sources like wind and solar that are dependent upon the weather can cause grid reliability issues. Can you lay out some of those concerns for our listeners? Sure, of course. What is amazing to me, Nick, is that on May 4th, you had the commissioners from the FERC testify before the Senate Energy Natural Resources Committee warning them about a catastrophic reliability problem. That's an exact quote from, I think, Commissioner Phillips, catastrophic reliability problems on the national, in America's electric grid May 4th. All the other commissioners agreed with them, including Commissioner Danley and Commissioner Christie, also warning about. reliability problems. Exactly a week later, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed rule that could force the closure of vast amounts of hydrocarbon, coal and natural gas fire generation

in the United States. So there is these policy makers, particularly at the EPA and under the Biden administration, I'm not picking on the Bidens. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I'm disgusted. But what they're proposing is terrible for the reliability of the grid. And yet there's no kind of understanding of what the dangers are here and the dangers are real and the problems are so much of this is regressive on the poor in the middle class. It's going to cause massive increases in electricity prices across the country. Can you kind of share some figures there? I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot here. No, of course. I'm happy to do it. I wrote another piece on my substack about California, which of course is in the vanguard of this push toward renewables.

Well, the data from the Energy Information Administration shows that since 2008, when California, when Arnold Schwarzenegger passed or signed an executive order requiring the state's utilities to get a third of their electricity from renewables, now they've gone to 100% renewable mandate. California's electric prices have gone up faster than any other state in the country. And now they have some of the highest electricity prices in the country, save for, I think, one other state, Hawaii. So this headlong rush toward renewables. And remember, California has closed the San Anofrey nuclear plant, which was a big mistake. They're keeping Diablo Canyon open. But California provides a clear example of not what to do, of what not to do. And yet the Biden administration, the federal government seems hell bent on following this broken model that is regressive.

California, by the way, has the highest poverty rate in America. So this is terrible for the poor in the middle class, terrible for electricity reliability, and California is proving that in real time. So you mentioned nuclear power. We've talked about some of the things you think maybe policymakers are doing wrong. Maybe let's talk about the things you think they should be doing. You've been a proponent in the past about natural gas to nuclear as a primary way of fueling or energy mix. Can you outline what that means for our listeners, what that might look like?

Sure. Let me just add one other quick point, if I may. So a friend of mine, Rob Nikoleski, is a reporter for the, San Diego Union Tribune. He did some great reporting earlier this month on the arrearages, the amount of money that is owed to the California utilities. In San Diego, in the San Diego area for San Diego Gas and Electric, the number of customers that are behind in their utility bills has skyrocketed. And now I think on average, the average customer that is behind in their bills is something like $700. So these high energy prices are having a real effect in California.

So what should we do? Well, I think one of the things is that, that policymakers need to understand is that the grid we have is largely the grid we're going to have. And that if we're serious about decarbonization, the way forward is going obviously going to be to embracing nuclear energy. And until we get there, we need to use more natural gas. But I think even before that, Nick, given the reliability problems that are facing the United States already, I think we should immediately stop closing our coal plants. And this is a point that the CEO of PJM, one of the biggest regional transmission organizations in the country made just recently was saying, we're closing these coal plants and we're not replacing them with reliable generation.

So let's quit closing those plants. And this is something the FERC commissioner said as well. So let's preserve our coal plants until we know we can replace them with reliable gas or with nuclear. So let me talk. We have a lot of gas in the U.S. And that gas right now is relatively cheap about $2.2.30 on the front month price. But with regard to nuclear, I'm not casually saying this is going to be easy. It's not going to be easy.

It's not going to be cheap, and it won't be quick. But we need a very clear, and I've testified before Congress to this, we need bipartisan long-term. That is decadal support for the nuclear industry in America. And it's going to require, including one of the points, one of the things is going to be required is more mining of uranium, more processing of uranium, a more robust government backing of the fuel supply. for the United States because now we're not, we don't want to buy our nuclear fuel from the Russian. So it's a complex system. And to change it is going to take time, but it's going to also take commitment if we're going to reduce the CO2 coming from the electric sector. And that's going to be the easiest sector to decarbonize. Yeah. So we talked about how coal has seen a resurgence

in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that the crimping that's done on supplies of natural gas, you've also seen a real resurgence in an interest for nuclear power. How would you, kind of, in a nutshell, summarize the shift we've seen in nuclear interest over the past few years since the book came out? Well, this is one of the things that I think is really encouraging and also, it's frankly a little daunting. And it's more particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, what is that, 15 months ago? So you have all across Europe countries looking at the current geopolitical, geostrategic geo-geoenergy situation. and saying, we're not going to be able to rely on the Russians for gas or for crude or for coal.

We need to build nuclear. So we've seen a big push toward nuclear all across Europe, including in France, where Macron has doubled down and said, we're going to build more nuclear plants. Poland has announced a deal with Westinghouse to build, I think, four nuclear reactors in Poland. Big interest in Estonia, Romania. Britain is pushing forward with small modular reactors, and they're likely to adopt what I believe. will probably be the Rolls-Royce design. Rolls-Royce has rolled out a design.

I think it's three or 400 megawatts. It's relatively small design. But there is a tremendous amount of activity in the nuclear sector. A lot of vendors, GE Hattachi, Westinghouse, X Energy. X-E.Rex-E. recently announced to deal with Dow, the chemical company, to deploy four of their gas-cooled reactors on the Texas Gulf Coast in C-drift, Texas. There is a lot of momentum, a lot of money behind it.

but I'm also very clear-eyed about what it's going to take to make this happen. And it's not going to, again, not going to happen quickly, but there is a lot of momentum behind it. Yeah, you outlined some of the land use issues for renewable deployments, likely to see some of those same issues for nuclear. But the resurgence and interest in countries around the world certainly significant. When you talk about some of these small modular reactors. Can I jump in for just a second on the nuclear part? Yes, sir. Absolutely.

Because I think it is interesting in that the polling data most recently for nuclear shows a shift that there is more public acceptance of nuclear. And I also think there's a generational shift. So I'm an old guy. I'm turning 63 this year. I grew up in – I'm a baby boomer. I grew up in the era of fear of nuclear war. And, you know, bomb shelters were common, you know, not well, relatively common where I grew up. It was like we're preparing for nuclear war.

Well, there's a new cadre, a new generation of younger pro-nuclear activists. who are in their 20s and 30s, who are coming out and they don't have that specter of nuclear war. They're worried about climate change. And so they, many of them, including, you know, Mark Nelson, Emmett Penny, Maddie Hilly, Peros Ortiz wines, Chris Kiefer, people I've had on my podcast, that are leading this new generation of pro-nuclear activists. And we're seeing a shift in public sentiment that is increasingly pro-nuclear. And I think it's partly due to climate change. I think some of it's due to, you know, the receding fears after Fukushima.

but I think it's also a recognition that if we're going to be serious, we're going to be grownups about energy policy, we have to adopt nuclear. So I'm very encouraged by that. So I just wanted to throw that in because one of the other things, you mentioned land use, Terra Power, one of their strategies is to put new nuclear plants at the site of existing coal plants, which I think is a very clever strategy. Yes. So you mentioned Terra Power.

You mentioned X Energy. There's probably going on a dozen of these small modular reactor designs out in the market today. For somebody watching on the sidelines, how do you make sense of which design is better than the other? Any advice there? Well, let's look at them, just a couple of them. So the other is New Scale Power. I haven't mentioned them yet. Now, they have had their reactor design approved by the NRC.

But to go back to some of the hurdles that we talked about, Nick, it took New Scale six years and $500 million to get that design approved by the NRC. That's unacceptable. I mean, it's just too long. It's too expensive. And New Scale is now a public company. Their ticker is on the New York Exchange's SMR. X Energy has said they're going to go public. I haven't followed up on that.

I thought they were going to go public this month, but I'm not sure of that. But new scale is it may be among the first to deploy a new reactor and they've had their design approved. Why? Because they're really just a shrunk-down version of the existing reactors, right? They're a light water design. The water is the moderator for the... the reaction and the NRC knows that design pretty well. So they're not dealing with some new chemistry, some new design that is different really from what the agency has seen before.

Will X Energy or Terra Power, which are new chemistries, get that kind of approval from the NRC? How long will it take? We don't know. I mean, they're the salt-cooled reactors, there are different designs that we don't know how the agency is going to respond. And if they're going to respond in a way that makes sense on any kind of. of timeline that makes sense for commercial deployment. Yes. So you talked about that this energy divide, we opened up the podcast, the conversation, talking about the divide between the haves and the have-nots for energy. So I want to talk about that, maybe looking forward to the future. When you look at the unplugged world,

the undeveloped world when it comes to energy infrastructure, what is your biggest question about the future of that segment of the world and their power grid? Well, another really good question, one that's hard to answer, because grids are always regional, right? How different areas of the, let's look at the U.S. Well, hydro power is the cheap and abundant in the Pacific Northwest. Well, it's not so much out in Hobbs, New Mexico or Odessa, Texas, right? Because it's dry. There's no hydro there.

So will solar work in those areas? Yeah, or they're going to use gas because they're in the middle of the Permian Basin. Wyoming has a lot of coal, so they're going to use coal there. The same kind of regionalism or geographic determinism, I'll use that phrase, too, also applies in places like Africa and where they need more power. But more than the fuel source, I think it's the critical parts of, as I point out in a question of power, we have to over the challenge for electrification in many of these places has to do with the culture itself.

Will the grid pay for itself? Is there too much corruption? If there's a lot of corruption, what's going to happen? I mean, then the money is going to be squandered. And we've seen this in places like Nigeria. I saw it myself in Lebanon. High levels of corruption, as I point out in the book, theft is the enemy of light. If you have a lot of theft, your electric grid isn't going to work. So the first obstacle in a lot of these countries where they are relatively poor or dirt poor is going to be overcoming the corruption in the systems. So that's the first order of business. Second is which type of fuel will be appropriate for them. Yeah, in some places solar might work, but in some places it won't. So then should they be using gas, there's a tremendous amount of natural gas in Africa that can be utilized.

And I think in Mozambique now, there's a power plant that's being built there that will be using fuel from one of the offshore projects. I think that ExxonMobil is building. So, you know, how do we achieve? How do we bring more people in the developing world out of the dark? Well, it depends. but long term, I think we need to be looking to nuclear, to smaller, safer, easier, you know, cheaper reactors that we can deploy at scale around the world so that these countries don't necessarily turn to coal. But remember, a lot of them are turning to coal, including Pakistan. Right.

As you said, the iron law of electricity says that people will choose whatever power source is the cheapest form that gets you to having the lights on. And so we can likely expect to see increasing demand for power in whatever form it may take in some of these. Well, and Pakistan is a good example of that because, you know, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we saw massive swings in prices in liquefied natural gas. And Pakistan was an active buyer. Well, a few months ago, they said, okay, we're out of the natural gas market. We're going to build coal-fired power plants. And they're going to build four gigawatts.

Well, that's relatively small compared to what's happening in China, where they have been permitting roughly one new coal plant per month. month. I'm sorry, one new coal plant per week. So the Chinese government and the Chinese officials, they're building more coal plants. India is also planning to build something like 25 to 30 gigawatts of additional 25,000 to 30,000 megawatts of new coal-fired capacity. So the idea that coal is going away is just not true. And countries around the world will do whatever they have to do. And many of them are turning to coal because it's abundant. The fuel is abundant. Price isn't controlled by any OPEC-like entities and the technology and the companies that can build coal plants, there are lots of those. So these countries are going to act in their own self-interest. They always will.

And then on the other side of the coin, so we talked about, you know, the unplugged world, the segment of the world where electricity demand is continuing to march up into the right. By contrast, you look at the United States, some other developed countries. You've seen energy demand level off. When you look at the future of the electric grid in this segment of the world, what questions do you have? Where do you think the world's headed? Right. You know, that's the one, that's a $64 question. I mean, there's a lot of good questions, and this is one of them. So you're right. Electricity demand in the U.S. has been relatively flat now for roughly 20 years. And now there's a push on to electrify everything that is being pushed by some very significantly moneyed interests, a lot of dark money, in fact, behind these groups that are pushing this effort, including a group called rewiring America. It's a dark money outfit that's pushing. these electrify everything efforts across the country. And give them some, you know, credit.

They're having success. The state of California, there are something like 70 communities that have banned the use of natural gas in new buildings, city of Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City. But is this legal? That's another, that's a different question than what we're addressing here. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently talking about the fact that the Ninth Circuit said, no, this is illegal under the Energy Policy Act, I think, of 1975. So is it legal for them to be banning the use of natural gas, which I think is a bad idea from an energy security standpoint because relying on one energy network is less, is a bad idea when if you have two, let's make sure we hedge our bets. But nevertheless, to get back

to your question, so if we ban the use of natural gas for home heating, we're going to need a lot more electricity because particularly in the cold winter months, well, that's going to be difficult. We're going to have to overbuild the grid. And we're going to add electric vehicles on top of that, well, that's going to add a whole other set of demands onto the grid. And right now, and I wrote on my substack as well about the shortage of transformers. We don't have enough electricity transformers. And there's sometimes waiting periods of two years now for distribution transformers. So again, this is a network of networks that we have to deal with and have to think about when we talk about changing our energy mix at scale. And the electric grid that we

have, we've built over more than a century, and the idea that we're suddenly just going to pivot and we're going to put all this new demand on it for transportation, for heating, and the rest of it, it won't happen quickly, and it's going to require tremendous amounts of money, and labor. Skilled labor is another part of it. But I think that we also have to be very clear about the energy security implications that are at stake here, and they are significant. Is there something that I haven't asked you about today that our listeners should know about the energy kind of mix or a story that's maybe under the radar for our listeners, they should be paying attention to. Sure. Well, one of the other things that I've been thinking about a lot is this,

well, a couple things. So energy transition and China. So let's talk about the energy transition. This is something we hear a lot about. I've been working on an article on this. I haven't published it yet, but I do a lot of public speaking and I've been talking about it a lot. So the idea that we're going to miss sudden energy transition, we're going to quit using hydrocarbons. I think, again, this is a lot of marketing, and it's not backed up by the numbers or the facts. The reality is that around the world, including here in the U.S., the growth of hydrocarbons, coal oil and natural gas, continues to be far faster, far greater than the growth in wind and solar. So last year alone in the United States, just the growth in natural gas use, last year, just the increase in gas consumption

in the United States was greater than the growth in wind and solar combined. Globally in 2021, just the growth and oil demand was four times the growth of wind and solar. So this idea that we're suddenly going to pivot, I think, is wrong and do so quickly, is wrong. The second part of that is about the metals, minerals, and magnets, and this is where China comes in. And I'm not a China basher. China's going to do what is in the interest of China. But the idea that we're going to suddenly pivot, well, okay, so where are we going to, let's talk about magnets for electric vehicles and for wind turbines. It's a special type of magnet. They're called neodymium iron boron.

These magnets are very highly specialized. They're custom made for each technology. And they're doped with a little bit of terbium or dysprosium. Both are rare earth elements, as is neodymium. Who controls the market for the magnets? According to the Department of Energy, it's China. They control 90% of the global market for neodymium iron boron magnets. So why, in the name of Peter Paul and Mary, would the United States make our auto sector,

and to some extent our electric sector dependent on Chinese supply chains. That doesn't make any sense to me. But it's not just the magnets. It's also the minerals, graphite. It's also the metals, copper, cobalt, the batteries. China has a commanding position in all of these markets that they've developed and been nurturing with very close ties between government and corporations to develop their dominance in each of these verticals.

And so despite that, and despite this, very well-understood vulnerability, including for high-powered transformers, 80% of which we import. These are the ones, not the pole-mounted transformers you see on the street corner, but the high-power transformers that are required for the high voltage grid, we import 80% of those as well. So, you know, this idea will pivot and we'll go to something else. Well, we're making ourselves vulnerable to foreign supply chains, and some of which are very clearly controlled by China. And this, again, has not gotten the kind of attention that it deserves, and I'm doing what I can to call attention to it. But these are major challenges that are not going

to be resolved in any short amount of time. And they're similar, as I mentioned, to the nuclear fuel supply chain. Again, another thorny issue that is not going to just be resolved overnight. It will take years. So I just think, you know, my bottom line, Nick, is we have to be very sober about our thinking about our energy and power networks and how we're going to change them. And what is the way forward, that is, offers us the best no-regret strategy. And as I've said many times now, and for more than a decade, natural gas to nuclear. If we're going to decarbonize, let's focus on those. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about.

And the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.