“ENTRA1’s website is a cyber Potemkin village, all façade with no reality. The site has buttons bragging: ‘drawing on 45+ years of experience’ … ‘portfolio experience of ~6B$ in energy and infrastructure projects’, … ‘delivering on a ~30GW SMR project pipeline.’ Click on those boxed claims for further information and the result is literally nothing.”
When the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced this month that it had reached a mammoth deal — financial and timing details unspecified — to acquire 6,000 MW (6 GW) of purchased power from a wide array of NuScale small modular reactors to be owned by ENTRA1–it produced some head-scratching.
What the heck is ENTRA1? It’s not an easy question to answer, although online sleuthing provides some useful details. The name first surfaced in the fall of 2023, when NuScale announced a sketchy deal with an Ohio data center developer with ENTRA1 described as NuScale’s partner with exclusive rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by NuScale’s SMRs.…
“… model-observation discrepancies can arise from three causes: the observations could be wrong (unrealized biases etc.), the models are wrong (which can encompass errors in forcings as well as physics), or the comparison could be inappropriate…. [I]t may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development … Or not….” – Gavin Schmidt, Real Science, May 31, 2025.
One of the most enduring themes of the popular discussion of a man-made warming globe has been sea level rise as a result of the melting of ice from the planet’s two frigid poles.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” featured images of icebergs calving off the Antarctic continent. He proclaimed that if the world proceeded to warm at its current rate, worldwide sea levels would rise “20 feet.”…
“What’s lacking are the products – the SMRs. It’s not the government’s job to pick winners and losers in the race to develop the products. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.”
The Department of Energy last Tuesday (March 24) announced a $900 million pot of money to “de-risk the deployment of Generation III+ light-water small modular reactors (Gen III+ SMR).” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said (although it’s more likely someone wrote the words for him), “America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now.”
Really? The new solicitation is a dead ringer for the Biden administration’s October 2024 $900 SMR solicitation, in many cases word-for-word, including a ‘two-tier’ structure: $800 million for the first, $100 million for the second. The residue of the Biden initiative has been scrubbed from DOE’s website, probably in hopes that no one would remember it.…