From CFACT

By Craig Rucker

After years of efforts by radical greens to strangle America’s oil, gas, and coal industries — while forcing the nation to accept costly, land-devouring wind and solar — the U.S. is once again emerging as a global energy superpower.

And this time, it’s not just fossil fuels: In fact, nuclear power is taking center stage.

Tennessee is poised to become the world’s leading hub for nuclear innovation, thanks to Trump administration policies and state leaders willing to back real energy solutions over climate virtue-signaling. Public and private investments are now flowing into advanced reactors, uranium enrichment, and next-generation nuclear technologies.

The Kairos Power Hermes 2 salt-cooled nuclear reactor demonstration plant has already broken ground and is expected to deliver 50 megawatts of reliable electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority grid by 2030.

Meanwhile, GE Vernova Hitachi plans to invest $40 billion in two small modular reactors — one in Tennessee and one in Alabama. These projects will create 2,000 construction jobs, hundreds of manufacturing jobs, 600 permanent plant jobs, and roughly 65 additional local jobs for every 100 jobs at the reactors themselves.

America’s uranium industry, nearly wiped out during the COVID pandemic, is also roaring back. The Trump administration has approved permits for new uranium mining and enrichment projects, while the Tennessee Valley Authority and Centrus Energy partnership plans to invest $560 million in a major uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge. That means less dependence on Canada, Kazakhstan, and Russia for critical nuclear fuel.

Even more exciting, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is moving toward construction of a “commercially relevant” nuclear fusion power plant in Virginia capable of generating up to 400 megawatts of electricity later this decade. The plant is expected to produce more tritium fuel than it consumes.

Together with a resurgence in oil, natural gas, and coal production, these developments will unleash American energy, manufacturing, innovation, and job creation while lowering electricity prices and reducing blackout risks for families and businesses alike. They also send a clear warning to America’s blue states: If you cling to anti-energy ideology, you will be left behind.

Democrat-controlled states remain obsessed with eliminating fossil fuels in favor of wind, solar, and battery systems — supposedly to prevent climate catastrophe. In the process, they ignore the devastating economic damage inflicted on working families and the environmental destruction caused by massive wind and solar projects. Worse, the supposed climate benefits from any individual state’s emissions cuts are effectively meaningless — undetectable against constantly changing global climate systems and constantly rising global greenhouse gas emissions.

Forty years ago, blackouts were routine for India’s 950 million citizens. Today, despite adding another half-billion people, it has made power outages a rarity. Why? Because India built hundreds of coal-fired power plants. China is doing the same thing on an even larger scale.

As energy analyst Vijay Jayaraj observes, Africans from east to west to south are rejecting permanent poverty imposed in the name of climate orthodoxy. Across the continent, nations are embracing oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power because they know abundant, affordable energy is “the only proven path to prosperity.”

Those policies are lifting billions of people out of poverty, disease, malnutrition, and premature death.

Meanwhile, many Europeans are finally waking up to the disastrous consequences of green energy fanaticism: soaring electricity prices, shuttered industries, destroyed jobs, landscapes marred by wind turbines and solar panels, families unable to heat or cool their homes — and rising deaths linked to energy poverty.

Unfortunately, Europe’s ruling elites remain trapped in their climate obsessions. But perhaps some American blue-state governors and legislators will eventually abandon ideology and start governing responsibly.

Electricity prices in Northeastern states are roughly twice those in much of the Midwest and South — and they are still climbing. Even Democratic governors are now quietly delaying or abandoning once-sacred green energy mandates, or at least hinting they may do so.

Some are cautiously reconsidering nuclear power. A few may even join President Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright in supporting new pipelines from Pennsylvania’s shale fields to deliver abundant, reliable, affordable natural gas for heating, cooking, and electricity generation — and thus for lights, refrigeration, computers, entertainment, and air conditioning.

If they fail to follow through, their residents will remain dependent on overpriced Canadian gas and electricity, fuel shipped from Texas, or extremely expensive liquefied natural gas imports from Norway and Russia.

Residents of New York and other states could also face the nightmare confronting roughly 40,000 angry residents of Co-Op City in the Bronx. New York City climate mandates demand that the entire complex convert entirely to electric heating by 2035. Between the costs of heat pumps, system retrofits, shutting down an efficient combined heat-and-power gas plant, and purchasing expensive wind-solar-battery electricity, monthly fees for a one-bedroom unit could skyrocket from $950 to nearly $4,000.

And then they’d have to rely on wind and solar, which will appear when Mother Nature chooses to cooperate, regardless of when they need electricity or how much they need.

America finally has a chance to reject decades of energy deprivation and economic self-sabotage. Nations that embrace abundant, reliable, affordable energy prosper. Nations that worship Net Zero mandates decline.

Thankfully, America is beginning to choose wisely.

This article originally appeared at The Hill