This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
While a sanity check on the absolute value is good I would argue that the most impactful data presented here is the rate at which debt is growing.
Yes, debt was paid off during COVID but now that the free money has dried up people are racking up debt much quicker than before. So while the current value might be in line with previous trends the rate at which debt is accumulating is what is alarming.
It’s unlikely for that trend to slow or stop unless real wages increase, prices fall, or demand drops. We’re seeing some of that but apparently not enough.
A lot of the NOVEC line is/was manufactured in Belgium. That plant was shut down for several months because high levels of PFAS was found in the surrounding area.
They cleaned it up and restarted the plant, only to announce they’re exiting the business by 2025.
I agree that the regulatory issue was their main motivator for shutting down PFAS manufacturing. Their plants (like Belgium) probably require significant maintenance and improvements, meaning millions in CAPEX. Money they probably don’t want to spend on products that will be globally banned within the decade.
3M announced they were exiting this space, rightfully so and probably a decade late. But I’ve heard rumblings in the industry that the US Govt might require them to continue to produce these awful materials as they are used in defense-related applications. Hope that’s not the case and we can shutdown all other producers (Chemours/DuPont etc) as well.
Money.
Now that USB-C is the required cable, people can go out and buy any cheap cable they want. The law turned a proprietary cash cow into a low return commodity item.