America's Nuclear Reactor Made Zero Watts of Power. Welcome to the Golden Era?

On June 4th, a reactor at Idaho National Lab hit something called "zero power criticality"—energy in equaled energy out. The plant won't produce a single usable watt until at least 2027, yet the Department of Energy is calling this the start of nuclear's golden era. At the same time, that same DOE is blocking wind farm permits that could be generating power right now. Mike and Neal spend the episode separating the real technology from the press release. Fusion—the "limitless energy" version everyone gets excited about—has been ten to twenty years away for the last thirty years, and this test doesn't change that math. Fission is the one that actually exists, but the new reactor designs the administration is betting on need uranium enriched well beyond what current regulation and fuel supply chains support—the same enrichment thresholds that turned Iran into a decades-long international crisis. Every nuclear project ever built has come in over cost and behind schedule, and somehow the industry still doesn't publish the one number that would tell you if it's worth it: levelized cost of electricity. Mike makes the case—backed by his grandfather's decades in the nuclear program going back to the Manhattan Project—that the economics simply favor renewables now: batteries and solar get cheaper the more you deploy them, while nuclear and gas get more expensive the more fuel they burn. Neal, who runs the wind company Airloom, pushes back on how much of this is really strategy versus picking favorites, and flags that Vestas just posted 60-plus percent sales growth, mostly overseas, while the US share of the global wind market keeps shrinking. Goods, bads, and others: the world deployed 112 gigawatts of batteries in 2025, ten times the pace of four years ago—unambiguously good news for anyone who wants gas turbines to lose. Lake Mead just hit its lowest water level ever recorded, and the states that rely on it are still stalling. On the other side, General Dynamics landed a $76 billion contract to keep Virginia- and Columbia-class submarine production moving after years of delay. Neal's got a 162-year-old bottle of Guinness pulled from a shipwreck that people are now trying to recreate, a warning for Trump to stay out of FIFA's business, and an IAEA operation removing nuclear material from a clandestine site in Syria that's equal parts relief and "wait, how long has that been there?" Got a take? Email us: [hardpoints.show@gmail.com](mailto:hardpoints.show@gmail.com) Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.