Terrifying an entire generation with the illusion of scarcity.

 

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

Marc Andreessen just explained how the United States assassinated its own future.

In the 1970s, the Nixon administration launched something called Project Independence. The mandate was absolute. Andreessen: “Build a thousand new civilian nuclear power plants in the US by the year 2000.” One thousand reactors. Unlimited, carbon-free baseload power. Enough electricity to move the entire country to electric vehicles four decades ahead of everyone else. But it went further than energy. Andreessen: “It’s called Project Independence because it means the US won’t have to be involved in the Middle East anymore, because we won’t need the oil.” No oil dependence. No Gulf Wars. No generations of soldiers stationed in deserts protecting supply chains that never needed to exist. A complete strategic withdrawal from the Middle East. Permanent. And none of this was hypothetical. Andreessen: “France ran for a long time almost entirely on nuclear power. Japan ran for a long time almost entirely on nuclear power.” Other nations proved it worked at scale. America had more capital, more engineers, and more ambition than all of them. Andreessen: “How many nuclear power plants were built out of the thousand? Rounds to zero.” Zero. Not because the physics failed. Not because something superior replaced it. Because the same administration that drafted the blueprint for unlimited energy also created the institution that killed it. Andreessen: “They never got built because the Nixon administration also created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which made it its purpose in life is to stop nuclear power plants from getting built.” Same government. Same decade. Same pen. One directive launching the most ambitious energy program in American history. Another creating the bureaucracy that would quietly dismantle it from the inside. Andreessen: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a new nuclear plant design for 40 years.” Forty years of zero approved designs. Not because no one submitted them. Because the institution built to regulate nuclear energy became the institution built to prevent it. That’s not oversight. That’s abolition dressed as due diligence. We spent the next fifty years fighting wars in the desert for a resource we never needed. Choked the atmosphere with carbon we didn’t have to burn. Terrified an entire generation with the illusion of scarcity. And the entire time, the physics already worked. The government didn’t fail to navigate the energy crisis. They took the densest source of energy in the universe and drowned it in paperwork. Every war fought for oil. Every carbon debate. Every geopolitical crisis of the last half century. All of it was a policy choice. We didn’t lack the technology to power the future. We let a committee outlaw the math.