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The Upside of Crypto's Catering Value
If the value of crypto plunges, wealthy people highly invested in those digital currencies are less able to pay high prices for houses and Superbowl tickets. To put it simply: there’s more for everyone else.
Dec 21, 2025
I realize most people have not been shorting crypto, although that would have been a smart move in the last couple of months. But the general public is nonetheless a big gainer from the sharp drop in crypto prices since October highs.
In fairness, the sum may not be “trillions,” more likely somewhere a bit over a single trillion. But in the era of Donald Trump, trillions would be far more accurate than most of what comes out of the president’s mouth.
Crypto and Counterfeit Currency
Before doing the numbers, it’s worth laying out the basic story. Imagine that a tremendously talented gang of counterfeiters was able to produce hundred-dollar bills that were indistinguishable from the ones printed by the Treasury. Suppose that they printed up tens of billions of these bills and got them into circulation.
The gang would be able to buy all sorts of things with their counterfeit money, possibly creating general inflation, but almost certainly pushing up the price of items in short supply, like houses, and tickets to big-name concerts and major sports events, like the Superbowl and the World Cup.
If some supersleuth detective figured out a way to recognize the counterfeit bills, they could then remove trillions of dollars of fake money from circulation. This would benefit the general public by reducing demand in the economy and reversing the run-up in the price of housing and Superbowl tickets.
It is the same story with plunging crypto prices. Crypto has no inherent value, but people with large fortunes in crypto can demand large chunks of what the economy produces. If the value of crypto plunges, they are less able to pay high prices for houses and Superbowl tickets. To put it simply: there’s more for everyone else.
This is why those who don’t have big bucks invested in crypto should applaud the plunge in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest. This isn’t like shares of stock, where the price can affect the ability of a company to make a useful product such as cars or computers. The only possible impact of lower crypto prices on production is that we will make less crypto. The horror! The horror!
Doing the Numbers
I’m not sure what exactly happened in early October, but it seems the world became much less friendly to crypto for some reason. Bitcoin hit a peak value of $124,800 on October 4th. Its price has since fallen sharply, standing at $85,900 at the close of trading on December 17th. The other major crypto currencies had similar tumbles.
In total, between early October and this writing on December 17, the major crypto currencies lost a total of more than $1.2 trillion in market capitalization. This would be enough to send every household in the United States a check for $10,000. In other words, it is real money.
Lacking a crystal ball, I can’t say whether this is just a temporary low, from which these currencies will bounce back or it’s a step towards reaching their fundamental value (zero). In any case, as it stands now, the crypto bros have lots less money to push up prices for houses, resort hotels, and all sorts of other things they do with their money. That’s a good story.
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Most of Trump's Net Worth Comes From 'Crypto Empire': Report
According to an investigation by Accountable.US, 73% of Trump's net worth may now come from crypto, which his administration is working to dramatically deregulate.
Aug 11, 2025
Over his nearly seven months as president, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been taking a sledgehammer to regulations on cryptocurrency. A new report sheds further light on the reasons why.
The president may be profiting far more from his "rapidly-growing crypto empire" than was previously known and has used it to dramatically increase his net worth, according to an investigation released Thursday by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US.
While a report from Bloomberg on July 2 estimated the billionaire president's crypto holdings to total about $620 million of his nearly $7 billion net worth, Accountable examined other investments that had not previously been reported.
"President Trump's net worth," the group estimated, "could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets." This would mean crypto accounts for 73% of his net worth.
Accountable reached this number by including investments that either had not yet occurred or were not public at the time of previous reporting.
These included roughly 22.5 billion tokens issued by Trump-owned WorldLiberty Financial Inc., which are estimated to be worth about $2 billion in value, but had not yet become tradable.
Other analyses, it said, also excluded the $7 billion in value of the new $TRUMP memecoins released in late July 2025.
"Two Trump-affiliated companies owned 80% of the $TRUMP venture as of May 2025 and were estimated to have collected over $324 million just in fees since January 2025," the report said.
Accountable also factored the holdings of Trump Media—the company that owns the president's social media app Truth Social. In July, the company bought $2 billion in Bitcoin and reserved another $300 million for Bitcoin options, and also announced the launch of its own set of NFTs.
As part of what they called "Crypto Week," Republicans passed multiple industry-friendly pieces of crypto legislation in July, the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, which Accountable says allow Trump to directly profit.
The GENIUS Act purported to create a regulatory framework for so-called "stablecoins," which are pegged to existing financial assets like the U.S. dollar and are poised to become part of the portfolios of increasing numbers of companies. However, as Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote for Rolling Stone in June:
One of Trump's priorities has been the normalization of these so-called stablecoins — a type of asset that his family is now hawking.
Despite the moniker, stablecoins can be extremely unstable. A 2023 study published by the Bank for International Settlements found that of 60 stablecoins analyzed in their review, all of them had become de-pegged from their underlying asset at least once.
The 2022 crypto crash was triggered by the failure of Terraform Lab's Terra/Luna "algorithmic" stablecoin—the collapse of which saw $45 billion erased in the span of a week.
The bill places only very light regulations on stablecoins, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that since he controls such a large percentage of the stablecoin market, their uptake into the broader economy could "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
"As soon as the players understand that Trump's intervention is a real possibility, then the stablecoin market is no longer about a careful review of whether there are adequate dollars to back up a particular stablecoin, or whether the stablecoin issuer has an AAA rating," Warren said.
"Instead, the whole game becomes one of trying to engage the president to weigh the end and make one set of coins more valuable, and therefore another set of coins less valuable," she added. "It's corruption, but it's also a market manipulation that ultimately drains away any development...It undermines all the markets at that point."
But the CLARITY Act, which has been passed by the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate, is "the real prize" for the industry. It would dramatically narrow the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) ability to regulate cryptocurrencies—most notably by recategorizing many assets as commodities instead of securities, which places them under the much smaller and less-resourced Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Trump would be one of the foremost beneficiaries of this bill, which would exclude digital assets like his $TRUMP and $MELANIA "meme coins" from SEC regulation.
It would also likely affect the classification of Bitcoin, which Trump Media has explicitly acknowledged would benefit the president. "If Bitcoin is determined to constitute a security," the company said in a June SEC filing, it could "adversely affect" the price of Bitcoin and the price of Trump Media's holdings.
Not only does this benefit Trump, said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk, but the legitimization and entrenchment of these unstable assets has the potential to make the whole economy less stable.
"Eerily reminiscent of the risky behavior that gave us the 2008 financial collapse, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of casino-like speculation on Wall Street with highly volatile crypto trading in retirement accounts," Carrk said.
"While the Trump family stands to win either way with crypto investment product fees," Carrk added, "throwing such a wild card into the financial system with little to no guardrails could lead to history repeating itself—with everyday Americans footing the bill when things inevitably go south."
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'Self-Enrichment': JD Vance Stands to Profit From Trump Military Contracts, Crypto Reserve
Financial disclosures analyzed by Accountable.US reveal that the vice president is invested in several defense contractors that have reaped lavish contracts since Trump's return to office.
Jul 11, 2025
The Trump administration has given contracts to four defense contractors that Vice President JD Vance has a financial stake in, according to a report by the government watchdog group Accountable.US.
Financial disclosure forms published by the Office of Government Ethics for June 2025 reveal that through at least the end of 2024—the last date at which he was required to disclose his investments—Vance had anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 invested in Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital group he helped to found before taking office.
Rise of the Rest is invested in at least four military contractors that have since received large contracts from the Trump-Vance administration. Two of them received those contracts—worth millions of dollars—within two weeks of Trump beginning his second term.
Hermeus, the maker of hypersonic aircraft, received a contract worth $9.36 million from the Department of Defense in February. Another company, Slingshot Aerospace, has been awarded $1.7 million in contracts from the Air Force. The report notes that Slingshot's tools, which include GPS monitoring technology, have been used in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The most lucrative company in Vance's portfolio is Anduril, which has received an eye-popping $220 million in government contracts since Trump and Vance took office and seen a 125% increase in its valuation.
It is expected to reap massive new contracts from the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" that Trump signed into law earlier this month through its creation of expansive new border surveillance technology.
As Sam Biddle reported for The Intercept on Wednesday, the bill includes language that effectively grants Anduril "a monopoly on new surveillance towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection":
A provision buried in the new mega-legislation stipulates that none of the $6 billion border tech payday can be spent on border towers unless they've been "tested and accepted by [CBP] to deliver autonomous capabilities."…
That reads like a description of Anduril's product—because it might as well be. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that under the new law, Anduril is now the country's only approved border tower vendor.
Anduril is also reportedly one of the main firms in contention for contracts to help build Trump's $175 billion "Golden Dome" security system.
Vance left Revolution in 2020 to start his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, and two of the companies received investments from his previous firm after his departure. However, Vance directly acknowledged that he had a financial stake in all four of them on a Senate financial disclosure form in 2023, "indicating awareness of the investments," according to Accountable.US.
The Rise of the Rest Seed Fund presents other potential conflicts of interest as well. In addition to its investments in the defense industry, it has also been a major backer of The Bitcoin Company, providing it with more than $2.1 million in seed money in 2022.
Vance himself is a major Bitcoin enthusiast. His disclosures reveal that he personally holds anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 worth of the cryptocurrency.
During his time in the White House, President Donald Trump has launched initiatives meant to supercharge the cryptocurrency industry, including a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve," which sent the digital currency's price soaring in March.
Accountability.US executive director Tony Carrk describes Vance's financial entanglements as part of a broader pattern within the Trump administration.
"Vance's background and investments in companies benefiting from Trump government contracts come as no surprise given this administration’s record of benefiting themselves while raising costs and gutting health care for hardworking Americans," he said.
Past reports by the group have highlighted the president's own profiteering from cryptocurrency and other financial ventures. And last month, an investigation revealed that Donald Trump, Jr. also stood to profit tremendously from the "Golden Dome" project via his own investments in Anduril and Elon Musk's company SpaceX.
"As much as the Trump administration claims to be draining the swamp, their conflicts of interest, self-enrichment, and ties to special interests show they are creatures of it," said Caark. "Vice President JD Vance is no exception."
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Trump Media Reportedly Plans to Raise $3 Billion to Buy Cryptocurrencies
"So much corruption and all out in the open," said one economist.
May 26, 2025
Monday reporting from the Financial Times that U.S. President Donald Trump's family media company "plans to raise $3 billion to buy cryptocurrencies" sparked a fresh wave of alarm over his administration's policies and potential corruption.
After winning a second term last year, the Republican president transferred his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—which is behind the Truth Social platform—to a revocable trust overseen by his son Donald Trump Jr.
Citing six unnamed sources, FT reported that TMTG "aims to raise $2 billion in fresh equity and another $1 billion via a convertible bond," and "also plans to launch an exchange-traded fund focused on cryptocurrency."
According to the newspaper:
TMTG said in a statement that "apparently the Financial Times has dumb writers listening to even dumber sources" but did not comment further. Representatives for Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
After Reuters also requested comment on the reporting, the news agency noted, TMTG called both Reuters and FT "fake news."
Responding on social media, Elizabeth Sheppard Sellam, director of the politics and international relations program at the University of Tours in France, said that "the most shocking thing is not the project itself, it is who benefits from it: those close to the president, through an opaque structure, and at the heart of the administration."
"The Trump administration has a very strong pro-crypto policy: favorable taxation, favorable regulation, promotion of investments. And meanwhile, his own family is preparing to raise $3 billion to go all-in on bitcoin," she wrote, highlighting Donald Trump Jr.'s role at TMTG.
Sheppard Sellam also noted that both he and the president's second-eldest son, Eric Trump, are set to speak at the Bitcoin 2025 conference, scheduled to start Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Other planned speakers include Vice President JD Vance, Trump's "Crypto Czar" David Sacks, and various Republicans in Congress.
"Where does politics end and business begin?" the professor asked. "He is a sitting head of state whose immediate entourage is organizing massive financial operations, with a direct effect on the markets... and on their wallets."
trump is corrupt. Republicans don't care.
[image or embed]
— Action Together New Jersey (@actiontogethernj.bsky.social) May 26, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Florian Hollenbach, an economist at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, simply said, "So much corruption and all out in the open."
The FT reporting came just days after the president dined with the top investors in his meme coin at his Virginia golf club—an event that drew protesters whose chants included: "America's not for sale," "Lock him up," and "Trump is a traitor."
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has also generated alarm with his crypto executive order. His administration faced further criticism last month for disbanding a U.S. Department of Justice unit tasked with investigating criminal actors in the digital asset space—a decision laid out in a memo authored by the president's former personal defense attorney.
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Trump Plan for Strategic Crypto Reserve Called a 'New Level of Corruption'
"The administration has made it clear there's no limit to what it's willing to give the crypto industry—regardless of the costs to taxpayers, investors, or the financial system as a whole."
Mar 03, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement Sunday of the names of digital assets he expects to include in a yet-to-be-established national cryptocurrency reserve was seen as his latest corrupt gift to an industry that pumped tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election and Trump's inauguration.
In a post to his social media platform Truth Social, Trump wrote that the new reserve will include Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana, and Cardano.
"I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World," wrote Trump, whose own recent foray into crypto has been a boon for himself and his family—and a disaster for many smaller investors.
The New York Times noted Monday that "it's still not clear how such a reserve would work or when it would be introduced, though a Republican-authored bill in the Senate would direct the government to buy one million Bitcoins—worth about $92.6 billion at today's prices—over five years."
Eric Naing, communications director at the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement that Trump's push for a strategic crypto reserve "sets a new low for transactional politics."
"The administration has made it clear there's no limit to what it's willing to give the crypto industry—regardless of the costs to taxpayers, investors, or the financial system as a whole," said Naing. "President Trump just mentioning the reserve led lagging crypto prices to shoot up overnight. Current crypto holders will be able to exploit this moment to sell high, and if Trump's plans continue, leave the federal government as the buyer of last resort."
"A U.S. Crypto Reserve would only serve to bail out crypto speculators who have donated millions to the Trump campaign and inauguration, as well as further boost the Trump family's own crypto investments," Naing added. "If this continues, the Trump administration will waste billions of taxpayer dollars on a soon-to-be worthless asset, just like the millions of Americans who were lured into predatory crypto markets by star-studded Super Bowl commercials or Trump supporters who were lured into buying his predatory meme coin."
The president's post on Sunday, which sent Bitcoin soaring, attracted additional scrutiny to the investments of billionaire entrepreneur David Sacks, the Trump administration's crypto czar.
Sacks "has a massive conflict-of-interest with this announcement that folks should be aware of," Derek Martin, the founder of Pathfinder Research and a board member at Campaign for Accountability, wrote on social media.
Martin noted that Sacks is "listed as the primary investor" in Bitwise, a crypto index fund manager.
"A new level of corruption," Martin wrote.
Right now, @BitwiseInvest is celebrating because the main crypto coins going into the Crypto Strategic Reserve fund **just so happen to match Bitwise's top 5 crypto holdings.**https://t.co/SLdUHgfeC7
— Derek Martin (@dmartkc) March 2, 2025
Late Sunday, Sacks said in response to criticism from Martin and others that he sold all of his crypto holdings before Trump took office in January. Sacks added that he sold his "$74k position in the Bitwise ETF" two days after the president's inauguration and insisted that he does not have "large indirect holdings" in crypto.
But the Financial Times reported that Craft Ventures, an investment firm that Sacks founded, "retains stakes in a small number of crypto start-ups."
"Sacks is in the process of a government ethics review," FT added, citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter.
Sacks is set to chair a White House crypto summit later this week.
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Bitcoin Hits New High as Crypto-Friendly Atkins Tapped to Lead SEC
"If Atkins is confirmed by the Senate, crypto grifters will surely rejoice at their newfound freedom to swindle, but most investors in the U.S. will be much less safe," wrote one researcher.
Dec 05, 2024
The price of a single Bitcoin topped $100,000 Wednesday—a major milestone for the cryptocurrency—mere hours after President-elect Donald Trump selected crypto advocate Paul Atkins to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Atkins previously served as the SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 and then went on to found a financial consulting company, Patomak Global Partners, which included failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX among its clients, according to The Wall Street Journal. Atkins is expected to adopt a warmer approach to crypto.
On a podcast last year, Atkins noted that "if the SEC were more accommodating and would deal straightforwardly with these various [crypto] firms, I think it would be a lot better to have things happen here in the United States rather than outside," according to The Washington Post.
"[Atkins] believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, and that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the world. He also recognizes that digital assets and other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before," wrote Trump on Truth Social when announcing the pick.
Trump on Thursday claimed credit for Bitcoin reaching new heights: "CONGRATULATIONS BITCOINERS!!! $100,000!!! YOU'RE WELCOME!!! Together, we will Make America Great Again!"
Crypto leaders cheered the Atkins news.
"Paul Akins is an excellent choice for the new SEC chair!" wrote Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of the cryptocurrency firm Ripple, called Atkins an "outstanding choice."
Current SEC Chair Gary Gensler has pursued legal action against a number of crypto companies, including FTX, and drawn the ire of the crypto world for maintaining that by and large the crypto industry should be governed by the same SEC rules that oversee stock and bond trading.
Meanwhile, critics of the Atkins pick warned that investors could be less safe if he is confirmed to helm of the SEC.
"Donald Trump's nomination of Paul Atkins to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission is a huge gift to the crypto industry, as evidenced by the immediate jump in Bitcoin's stock price... If Atkins is confirmed by the Senate, crypto grifters will surely rejoice at their newfound freedom to swindle, but most investors in the U.S. will be much less safe," wrote Kenny Stancil, senior researcher at Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group.
Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate for Public Citizen, added that "any sentient being—let alone a securities markets expert—should understand that bitcoin is 'thin air,' as Trump himself once put it. That Paul Atkins has made a living promoting such a scam doesn't bode well for his reflexes as a shepherd for investor protection."
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What the Pro-Nuclear Bros Don’t Want You to Know About Their Mini Reactors
SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure; for that to happen, it is essential to have a realistic understanding of their costs and risks.
May 06, 2024
Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.
Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
What Are SMRs?
SMRs are nuclear reactors that are “small” (defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less), can be largely assembled in a centralized facility, and would be installed in a modular fashion at power generation sites. Some proposed SMRs are so tiny (20 megawatts or less) that they are called “micro” reactors. SMRs are distinct from today’s conventional nuclear plants, which are typically around 1,000 megawatts and were largely custom-built. Some SMR designs, such as NuScale, are modified versions of operating water-cooled reactors, while others are radically different designs that use coolants other than water, such as liquid sodium, helium gas, or even molten salts.
To date, however, theoretical interest in SMRs has not translated into many actual reactor orders. The only SMR currently under construction is in China. And in the United States, only one company—TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates—has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a permit to build a power reactor (but at 345 megawatts, it technically isn’t even an SMR).
The nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on SMRs primarily because some recent large reactor projects, including Vogtle units 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia, have taken far longer to build and cost far more than originally projected. The failure of these projects to come in on time and under budget undermines arguments that modern nuclear power plants can overcome the problems that have plagued the nuclear industry in the past.
Regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features.
Developers in the industry and the U.S. Department of Energy say that SMRs can be less costly and quicker to build than large reactors and that their modular nature makes it easier to balance power supply and demand. They also argue that reactors in a variety of sizes would be useful for a range of applications beyond grid-scale electrical power, including providing process heat to industrial plants and power to data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging stations.
Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.
1. SMRs Are Not More Economical Than Large Reactors.
In theory, small reactors should have lower capital costs and construction times than large reactors of similar design so that utilities (or other users) can get financing more cheaply and deploy them more flexibly. But that doesn’t mean small reactors will be more economical than large ones. In fact, the opposite usually will be true. What matters more when comparing the economics of different power sources is the cost to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and that depends on the capital cost per kilowatt of generating capacity, as well as the costs of operations, maintenance, fuel, and other factors.
According to the economies of scale principle, smaller reactors will in general produce more expensive electricity than larger ones. For example, the now-cancelled project by NuScale to build a 460-megawatt, 6-unit SMR in Idaho was estimated to cost over $20,000 per kilowatt, which is greater than the actual cost of the Vogtle large reactor project of over $15,000 per kilowatt. This cost penalty can be offset only by radical changes in the way reactors are designed, built, and operated.
For example, SMR developers claim they can slash capital cost per kilowatt by achieving efficiency through the mass production of identical units in factories. However, studies find that such cost reductions typically would not exceed about 30%. In addition, dozens of units would have to be produced before manufacturers could learn how to make their processes more efficient and achieve those capital cost reductions, meaning that the first reactors of a given design will be unavoidably expensive and will require large government or ratepayer subsidies to get built. Getting past this obstacle has proven to be one of the main impediments to SMR deployment.
The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.
Another way that SMR developers try to reduce capital cost is by reducing or eliminating many of the safety features required for operating reactors that provide multiple layers of protection, such as a robust, reinforced concrete containment structure, motor-driven emergency pumps, and rigorous quality assurance standards for backup safety equipment such as power supplies. But these changes so far haven’t had much of an impact on the overall cost—just look at NuScale.
In addition to capital cost, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs will also have to be significantly reduced to improve the competitiveness of SMRs. However, some operating expenses, such as the security needed to protect against terrorist attacks, would not normally be sensitive to reactor size. The relative contribution of O&M and fuel costs to the price per megawatt-hour varies a lot among designs and project details, but could be 50% or more, depending on factors such as interest rates that influence the total capital cost.
Economies of scale considerations have already led some SMR vendors, such as NuScale and Holtec, to roughly double module sizes from their original designs. The Oklo, Inc. Aurora microreactor has increased from 1.5 MW to 15 MW and may even go to 50 MW. And the General Electric-Hitachi BWRX-300 and Westinghouse AP300 are both starting out at the upper limit of what is considered an SMR.
Overall, these changes might be sufficient to make some SMRs cost-competitive with large reactors, but they would still have a long way to go to compete with renewable technologies. The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.
Microreactors, however, are likely to remain expensive under any realistic scenario, with projected levelized electricity costs two to three times that of larger SMRs.
2. SMRs Are Not Generally Safer or More Secure Than Large Light-Water Reactors.
Because of their size, you might think that small nuclear reactors pose lower risks to public health and the environment than large reactors. After all, the amount of radioactive material in the core and available to be released in an accident is smaller. And smaller reactors produce heat at lower rates than large reactors, which could make them easier to cool during an accident, perhaps even by passive means—that is, without the need for electrically powered coolant pumps or operator actions.
However, the so-called passive safety features that SMR proponents like to cite may not always work, especially during extreme events such as large earthquakes, major flooding, or wildfires that can degrade the environmental conditions under which they are designed to operate. And in some cases, passive features can actually make accidents worse: For example, the NRC’s review of the NuScale design revealed that passive emergency systems could deplete cooling water of boron, which is needed to keep the reactor safely shut down after an accident.
In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features. For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas. It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them. Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers. Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.
Considering the cumulative impact of all these changes, SMRs could be as—or even more— dangerous than large reactors. For example, if a containment structure at a large reactor reliably prevented 90% of the radioactive material from being released from the core of the reactor during a meltdown, then a reactor five times smaller without such a containment structure could conceivably release more radioactive material into the environment, even though the total amount of material in the core would be smaller. And if the SMR were located closer to populated areas with no offsite emergency planning, more people could be exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.
But even if one could show that the overall safety risk of a small reactor was lower than that of a large reactor, that still wouldn’t automatically imply the overall risk per unit of electricity that it generates is lower, since smaller plants generate less electricity. If an accident caused a 250-megawatt SMR to release only 25% of the radioactive material that a 1,000-megawatt plant would release, the ratio of risk to benefit would be the same. And a site with four such reactors could have four times the annual risk of a single unit, or an even greater risk if an accident at one reactor were to damage the others, as happened during the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan.
3. SMRs Will Not Reduce the Problem of What to Do With Radioactive Waste.
The industry makes highly misleading claims that certain SMRs will reduce the intractable problem of long-lived radioactive waste management by generating less waste, or even by “recycling” their own wastes or those generated by other reactors.
First, it’s necessary to define what “less” waste really means. In terms of the quantity of highly radioactive isotopes that result when atomic nuclei are fissioned and release energy, small reactors will produce just as much as large reactors per unit of heat generated. (Non-light-water reactors that more efficiently convert heat to electricity than light-water reactors will produce somewhat smaller quantities of fission products per unit of electricity generated—perhaps 10 to 30%—but this is a relatively small effect in the scheme of things.) And for reactors with denser fuels, the volume and mass of the spent fuel generated may be smaller, but the concentration of fission products in the spent fuel, and the heat generated by the decay products—factors that really matter to safety—will be proportionately greater.
Therefore, entities that hope to acquire SMRs, like data centers that lack the necessary waste infrastructure, will have to safely manage the storage of significant quantities of spent nuclear fuel on site for the long term, just like any other nuclear power plant does. Claims by vendors such as Westinghouse that they will take away the reactors after the fuel is no longer usable are simply not credible, as there are no realistic prospects for licensing centralized sites where the used reactors could be taken for the foreseeable future. Any community with an SMR will have to plan to be a de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal site.
4. SMRs Cannot Be Counted on to Provide Reliable and Resilient Off-the-Grid Power for Facilities, Such as Data Centers, Bitcoin Mining, Hydrogen, or Petrochemical production.
Despite the claims of developers, it is very unlikely that any reasonably foreseeable SMR design would be able to safely operate without reliable access to electricity from the grid to power coolant pumps and other vital safety systems. Just like today’s nuclear plants, SMRs will be vulnerable to extreme weather events or other disasters that could cause a loss of offsite power and force them to shut down. In such situations a user such as a data center operator would have to provide backup power, likely from diesel generators, for both the data center AND the reactor. And since there is virtually no experience with operating SMRs worldwide, it is highly doubtful that the novel designs being pitched now would be highly reliable right out of the box and require little monitoring and maintenance.
It very likely will take decades of operating experience for any new reactor design to achieve the level of reliability characteristic of the operating light-water reactor fleet. Premature deployment based on unrealistic performance expectations could prove extremely costly for any company that wants to experiment with SMRs.
5. SMRs Do Not Use Fuel More Efficiently Than Large Reactors.
Some advocates misleadingly claim that SMRs are more efficient than large ones because they use less fuel. In terms of the amount of heat generated, the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small. And although reactors that use coolants other than water typically operate at higher temperatures, which can increase the efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, this is not a big enough effect to outweigh other factors that decrease efficiency of fuel use.
Some SMRs designs require a type of uranium fuel called “high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU),” which contains higher concentrations of the isotope uranium-235 than conventional light-water reactor fuel. Although this reduces the total mass of fuel the reactor needs, that doesn’t mean it uses less uranium nor results in less waste from “front-end” mining and milling activities: In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.
If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
One reason for this is that HALEU production requires a relatively large amount of natural uranium to be fed into the enrichment process that increases the uranium-235 concentration. For example, the TerraPower Natrium reactor which would use HALEU enriched to around 19% uranium-235, will require 2.5 to 3 times as much natural uranium to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity than a light-water reactor. Smaller reactors, such as the 15-megawatt Oklo Aurora, are even more inefficient. Improving the efficiency of these reactors can occur only with significant advances in fuel performance, which could take decades of development to achieve.
Reactors that use uranium inefficiently have disproportionate impacts on the environment from polluting uranium mining and processing activities. They also are less effective in mitigating carbon emissions, because uranium mining and milling are relatively carbon-intensive activities compared to other parts of the uranium fuel cycle.
SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure. For that to happen, it is essential to have a realistic understanding of their costs and risks. By painting an overly rosy picture of these technologies with often misleading information, the nuclear bros are distracting attention from the need to confront the many challenges that must be resolved to make SMRs a reality—and ultimately doing a disservice to their cause.
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New Probe Reveals 'Real-World Harm' of Crypto Mining Operations
"This report vividly shows how proof-of-work crypto-mining operations are contributing to increased air, water, and noise pollution in many communities across the U.S."
Apr 05, 2023
A report published Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group examines how the "mining" process behind popular cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Monero creates a wide range of pollution that is harming communities and fueling the climate emergency.
The EWG report—entitled Proof of Problems: Bitcoin Mining's Pollution Toll on U.S. Communities—profiles six case studies of adverse effects of the cryptocurrency mining process known as "proof-of-work."
"This report vividly shows how proof-of-work crypto-mining operations are contributing to increased air, water, and noise pollution in many communities across the U.S.," EWG policy director and report co-author Jessica Hernandez said in a statement.
"It amplifies the voices of those who are fighting to save their homes and livelihoods from the bitcoin mines invading their communities," Hernandez added. "The industry cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the real-world harm it is causing or greenwash the problem away."
As an executive summary of the report details:
Not all bitcoin mines are alike. Some rely on the resurrection of dormant fossil fuel power plants, some find low-cost high-pollution fuel sources like burning coal waste in Pennsylvania, and others flare gas from oil wells to generate the necessary electricity, like the mines blighting Montana's scenery.
They all use the same technology, individual computer hardware no bigger than a shoe box or two, all competing to solve the same puzzle and earn a few bitcoin. But it takes thousands of these mining computers, called rigs, to become competitive in the mining industry. That's why some companies are placing multiple shipping crates full of bitcoin mining rigs in communities across the U.S...
What these mines have in common is their use of proof-of-work, which is wasteful by design. This system, a type of software to record and manage bitcoin transactions, has proven highly inefficient, requiring massive amounts of fossil fuel-generated electricity to operate. Proof-of-work is a source of constant noise, a blight in communities across the country, and a hotbed of fraud and corruption that bilks consumers and ratepayers out of billions of dollars.
"Despite staunch opposition nearly everywhere bitcoin is mined, Wall Street bankers and other large financial backers manage to continue this assault on climate and communities across the country," the report states. "Change is needed, and it's needed urgently."
One of the report's case studies shows how a Blockstream mining center in Adel, Georgia created so much noise that the residents of one nearby house spent thousands of dollars to install 11 layers of insulation as the constant din damaged their hearing and kept them captive in their own home.
"It sounds like 1,000 jet engines taking off at one time. You can hear it five miles away from here," said Annette Tiveron, who lives in the house. "It ripples our pond from the vibration with the machines. It's literally shaking your brain."
The EWG report renews the group's calls to "change the code, not the climate" and highlights alternatives to proof-of-work, such as "proof-of-stake," to which the cryptocurrency Ethereum switched last year.
"Speaking with people around the country has been eye-opening in revealing the extent of the problems that bitcoin mines are causing in communities," EWG editor in chief and report co-author Anthony Lacey said in a statement. "It's hard to learn of these stories and not ask why bitcoin miners can't change their code to be better neighbors."
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