Those who have followed my writing for a long time may remember a prediction I made more than a decade ago.
At the time, Germany was in the middle of its grand nuclear exit. Reactors were being shut down, celebrated like fallen monuments to a supposedly barbaric technological age. The political class congratulated itself on moral leadership, the activist class applauded with religious enthusiasm, and the media dutifully described the entire project as a triumph of enlightened progress.
It was during that moment of collective celebration that I made a rather unfashionable prediction.
The nuclear exit would eventually be reversed.
And not in some distant future either. I argued that new nuclear plants would begin appearing on planning tables before 2030 arrived.
That opinion was not particularly popular.
In fact, “unpopular” is a charitable description. The response was considerably more colorful. I was called many things: naïve, reactionary, delusional, technologically illiterate, morally compromised. Some critics were strangers. Others were acquaintances. A few were even friends who were quite certain I had lost my grip on reality.
After all, the narrative of the time was crystal clear.
Wind and solar would power the future. Fossil fuels would disappear. Nuclear energy was a dangerous relic. The energy transition was unstoppable, and anyone who questioned its technical or economic feasibility was clearly living in the past.
Predicting a nuclear revival in that environment was treated as the intellectual equivalent of predicting the return of steam locomotives.
Yet here we are.
Germany, having spent a small fortune dismantling perfectly functional nuclear plants, is now quietly rediscovering the awkward fact that electricity must exist not only in theory but also in reality. Industrial economies require enormous quantities of stable energy. Factories cannot run on moral satisfaction. Power grids cannot be stabilized with slogans.
And suddenly, conversations about nuclear power are returning to polite society.
One could say the prediction aged rather well.
But in truth, the prediction itself was not particularly impressive. There was no crystal ball involved. No secret data sources. No prophetic visions. The entire argument rested on something far less glamorous.
Arithmetic.
The weaknesses of the wind-and-solar experiment were visible from the beginning to anyone willing to examine the basic physics and economics involved. Intermittent energy sources require backup. Massive storage systems remain prohibitively expensive. Industrial societies need reliable baseload power whether the weather cooperates or not.
These are not ideological statements.
They are engineering constraints.
From those constraints, a chain of predictable consequences follows. If a country dismantles stable power sources and replaces them with intermittent ones, the cost of electricity tends to rise. Rising energy prices ripple through the entire economy. Manufacturing becomes less competitive. Households face higher bills.
People notice.
When prices climb high enough, voters begin asking uncomfortable questions. Inflation amplifies the discomfort. Political patience evaporates. Technologies that were marketed as miracle solutions begin revealing their practical limitations.
Electric vehicles behave differently when winter arrives. Heat pumps perform differently when temperatures drop far below freezing. Systems that worked beautifully in promotional brochures sometimes struggle in the real world.
None of these developments were particularly mysterious.
They were predictable.
Every component of the current energy frustration was visible years in advance: the cost escalation, the reliability problems, the public backlash when households discovered the real price of ideological energy policies.
One did not need to be an oracle to foresee the trajectory.
One merely had to ignore the comforting narrative and add one plus one.
And yet that simple exercise turns out to be surprisingly difficult for many people. Not because the mathematics are complicated, but because the social pressure surrounding certain narratives can be overwhelming.
Questioning fashionable ideas requires a small but essential ingredient.
Courage.
The courage to look at reality even when reality contradicts the prevailing story. The courage to say that engineering limits exist. The courage to point out that physical systems cannot be negotiated into obedience by political enthusiasm.
Such courage is not evenly distributed.
In fact, it appears to be one of the rarest commodities in modern public discourse. Many intelligent people are perfectly capable of understanding complex technical issues. What they often lack is the willingness to follow those conclusions when doing so becomes socially uncomfortable.
It is easier to repeat the narrative.
It is easier to join the applause.
It is easier to assume that someone else must have solved the technical details.
But physics is not impressed by applause. Engineering constraints do not vanish because they are politically inconvenient. Eventually the numbers assert themselves.
When they do, reality begins to reclaim territory from ideology.
Germany’s slow rediscovery of nuclear power may be one small example of that process. Whether it leads to a full reversal of earlier decisions remains to be seen. Political systems move slowly, and pride has a remarkable ability to delay obvious corrections.
Still, the direction of travel is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Sometimes the most reliable prediction tool in the world is not sophisticated modeling or elaborate forecasting.
Sometimes it is simply the willingness to perform basic arithmetic and accept the answer.