Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Twomeows/gettyimages “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” said the former American baseball player, Yogi Berra. The old catcher’s cheeky warning aside, let me offer three. They are as close to sure bets as can be.
Nuclear’s Return The late Intel CEO, Andrew Grove, said he was lucky to have chosen semiconductors over nuclear power as his life’s work. Born in Hungary, Grove escaped his Soviet-occupied land to America, where he got his Ph.D.
in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. The civilian nuclear industry was young and glamorous. It attracted many of the smartest physicists and chemical engineers on earth.
Integrated circuits weren’t even a thing until 1958. Despite nuclear’s promise, the hype faded. Nuclear lost the public’s trust and today supplies only 4% of the global energy mix and 10% of its electricity.
But now nuclear is again in fashion. The drive for more carbon-neutral economies, combined with a surge in demand from AI-class data centers and EVs, spells a far greater role for nuclear in the coming decades. Think of nuclear as coal’s replacement for baseload electricity.
Today coal is 26% of the mix. Nuclear has much room to grow. Robotics Powerhouse China’s manufacturing and export push has puzzled outsiders, since the world has reacted not with checkbooks, but skepticism and tariffs.
Why is China furiously making what the wor.
