Nuclear’s newest pitch isn’t really to utilities anymore, it’s to whoever’s most impatient. The SMR deals taking shape this year have settled into a three-party shape: a developer builds, a utility handles interconnection and delivery, and a hyperscaler puts up money and appetite for risk that neither the developer nor the utility wants to hold alone. Los Alamos’s deputy utility manager did the math out loud this week: $120 a megawatt-hour is basically gas-plant pricing, if you can actually get the reactor built in the next few years. That “if” is doing a lot of work, but for once someone’s willing to underwrite it. Data centers want power badly enough to eat first-of-a-kind risk that utilities, with their much longer memories of cost overruns, have politely declined for decades.

Compare that to onshore wind’s week. The US added nearly 5 GW of it last quarter, and the pipeline still shrank, because 44 GW of projects are sitting in Department of Defense review, apparently paused for reasons nobody’s bothered to explain, and it took a federal judge ordering the department to just process its own paperwork again. Nuclear’s obstacle got solved by finding a big enough checkbook; wind’s obstacle is nobody opening the mail, and money can’t really fix that.

Also, quietly delightful: National Grid’s general counsel spent several hundred words this week rebutting an op-ed two other people wrote in this same trade publication nine days ago, about whose gas forecast means what. I have no stake in Upstate New York heat pump curves. I read the whole thing anyway.

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