Energy Secretary Chris Wright on the Future of American Energy | All-In Summit 2025

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Frack, frack, frack, and drill, baby, drill.

**Chris Wright** (0:05)
He's all in on bringing common sense back to energy. More energy is better than less energy.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:11)
The US oil industry has become more productive than ever.

**Chris Wright** (0:14)
The long-talked about nuclear renaissance is finally going to happen. Unleash American energy, American entrepreneurship, American innovation.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:23)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the United States Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright.

**Jason** (0:36)
There he is.

**Chris Wright** (0:38)
Good to see you.

**David Sacks** (0:38)
Round two.

**Friedberg** (0:40)
Let's go.

**Chris Wright** (0:41)
Awesome.

**Jason** (0:42)
Good to see you. Well, thanks for putting up with us again. I know that the last time was such a joy for you.

**Chris Wright** (0:49)
That is a joy.

**Jason** (0:50)
It was a joy. For those of you who missed it, Jay Cal decided to turn our very short panel into a debate about batteries. No, it was solar. He's like, just throw some batteries on the solar and then it works great. What do you mean?
But thank you for being here. Yesterday, we were talking about the panel and Chamath said, why are we talking about nuclear? It's not even real. We shouldn't be doing this. No, let me be clear.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:15)
Nuclear is small. It's interesting, but it's the pimple on the dog's ass.

**Jason** (1:22)
I just want to give you a statistic and get you to respond to the future state of nuclear in this country. It's, I think, about 4,000 bucks a kilogram for enriched uranium to go into a nuclear power plant. To have a gigawatt nuclear power plant, it's only burning 3-4 million bucks. Sorry, it's only burning about 3-4 million of electricity per day for 12,000 bucks of fuel, of uranium fuel. So the incredible production capacity of nuclear is unmatched with any other energy source. Why does it take so long and why does it then cost billions of dollars, and when I can turn 12,000 bucks of fuel into 4 million dollars of electricity, what's going on in the structural challenges with scalability of nuclear, particularly in the United States? And why is it not a real path to kind of scalable energy production in this country for us right now?

**Chris Wright** (2:17)
I mean, it will be in the long run for the reason you just said, the greatest energy density. That's the key thing. If you can get a lot out of a little, that's got running room. But nuclear involves something people can't see and they can't understand, and therefore it's easy to scare people about. So nuclear really has been a victim of fear in our world. It's the safest form of energy production we've ever seen. For amount of energy it's produced and the amount of negative impacts. But people think it's the scariest and the most dangerous. So if you make it very long, very bureaucratic to permit things, if you make it so that therefore you've got to so over design and so over engineer everything, it's so hard to permit enrichment. So you make everything expensive and you make everything move slow, and then you have other energy sources that turn on and off, and you pay people a lot to build those things. That also erodes the economics of nuclear, of something that's reliable. So we, meaning the government, has killed nuclear over the last four generations. The goal of the Trump administration is to reverse that strangulation of nuclear and let it fly again. But you're right, it'll take some time.

**Jason** (3:28)
Sorry, but let me just make one... What is China doing differently?

**Chris Wright** (3:33)
I hate to say it, but just more rational. You know, China is... They're worried about if nuclear accident happens and it injures people, makes them sick, then they're going to look bad. That's going to kill them. But their design criterion are just for human safety, not for getting the environmental groups off them, or doubling down because someone else will be mad at them. So they're just pragmatic. They're building reactors faster and therefore cheaper, and they got 20 plus under construction right now.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (4:03)
Chris, let's break down the challenge as the world needs an infinite amount of electrons and an infinite amount of heat. Fair? Yes. Why don't you just ground people on where we get those things today, and what percentage comes from coal, what percentage comes from natural gas, what percentage comes from nuclear globally, just so that we can maybe figure out where we need to go, and how do we get more of this stuff now?

**Chris Wright** (4:29)
Yeah. So in 1973, and I use that year because that's the Yom Kippur War, that's when oil prices tripled. Later in the decade, they doubled again in the Iranian Revolution. So we said, we got to get off oil and gas. So in 1973, oil, gas and coal provided 85% of global energy. And last year, 2024, 85% of global energy. And they've continued to grow. Over that 50 years, natural gas has grown 3%, compound annual growth rate, coal 2%, oil 1%.