"Too cheap to meter" frightened most energy market competitors. They effectively worked to ensure it never happened. If nuclear energy had become "too cheap to meter" and we had completed the 1,000 reactors by 2000 that President Nixon's Project Independence envisioned, here are some consequences that might have happened – or not happened. 1. Coal would have become "too cheap to mine" and would have been pushed off of the US electricity grid. 2. Natural gas would have become "too cheap to drill." 3. George Mitchell would have never been motivated to develop the combination of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing that enabled the shale revolution. 4. The LNG industry would have never been created. 5. It's unlikely that the wind and solar industries would have expanded beyond certain niche applications and geographies with superior resources. 6. Hydro would have continued producing from existing dams, but would have experienced limited growth. 7. Oil markets would have been more limited than they are today. The ~100 nuclear plants that did get completed have steadily produced about 1/5 of US electricity for several decades now. If we had successfully completed 1,000 nuclear plants, would we have just stopped building? Imagine what 10-20 times as many nuclear plants would be powering? Who might have worked hard to limit nuclear energy's market penetration? Why should their proxies get all of the credit just because they were openly carrying the signs and attending the rallies? BACKGROUND This post was inspired by a Wall St. Journal USA250 podcast installment titled "Nuclear Power's Reboot." The host of that podcast is Katherine Sullivan. Most of the show tells a conventional interpretation of nuclear energy's development history, starting with Truman's announcement about how Hiroshima's military capability had been destroyed by a single bomb, going through Strauss's statement about a future with nuclear providing energy that was "too cheap to meter" and ending with the 25+ year hiatus in nuclear power plant construction. Victor Gilinsky, an NRC Commissioner during Three Mile Island, shares his certainty that serious accidents were bound to happen in the future. As history has shown, the low-consequence accident that took place on his watch is still the worst nuclear accident in US history. Sullivan played clips from Ralph Nader's antinuclear rallies and interviewed a woman who was a frighted young mother in Middletown, PA when the core at TMI unit 2 melted and caused a media/political/regulator stoked panic without harming anyone. When she returned from her governor-suggested evacuation to her undamaged home, she became an active member of the antinuclear movement. Finally, in the last few minutes of a 22 minute podcast, Ms. Sullivan attributed essentially all of the recent interest in nuclear energy to the growth of AI. That framing is not only wrong, it worries me. Nuclear energy is a clean, capable and potentially affordable replacement for much of the coal, gas and oil that we burn for electricity, industrial heat and ship propulsion. We need nuclear for far more than powering planned AI data centers. But energy system experts like Robert Bryce (@pwrhungry) have been warning that AI data centers are about as popular in rural America as hog farms. I worry about a near future when protests, finances and grid connection challenges slow AI data center expansion enough to cause the established antinuclear movement and its well-heeled, powerful, motivated friends to more loudly claim that less AI means we don't need new nuclear. The energy market consequences mentioned at the beginning of this post would be good for most of humanity. But those who are profiting by the enterprises that would lose in the competitive markets for energy fuels are guaranteed to do everything they can think of to ensure that they continue to survive and flourish. I suspect that many of those who would be negatively impacted by a thriving nuclear enterprise both read and advertise in the Wall St. Journal. @thecourier