Sometimes you have to attach yourself to dumb ideas to sell the smart idea. There's a good chance these folks don't care about cypto at all and are just using this to obtain further investment and survive another day.

"We want to build a nuclear reactor to supply energy exclusively to _____." is an easy blank to fill.

Bitcoin mining is actually a really interesting use case as induced demand for a nuclear reactor which cannot easily lower its output beyond a certain threshold. Currently, fossil fuel plants are spun up and shut down to match demand for electricity, if our grid was entirely solar, wind, and nuclear, supply cannot be regulated, but by turning bitcoin miners on and off, you can regulate demand. There are other ways too, of course, such as grid connected EV chargers, but the nice thing about bitcoin mining is that the utility company can operate it themselves and use the revenue from mining to subsidize the construction and operation of the nuclear plant.

From what I understand the purpose of the mining operation is to keep the grid "balanced". "Bitcoin solves this" loses its luster a little when you compare it to running a data center next to that plant, without implicitly gambling the financial success of the nuclear investment on the continued value of bitcoin.

If it displaces fossil fuel based Bitcoin mining that's still a net gain in my book.

Our intelligence is dwarfed by our unlimited greed.

We’re more properly Homo callidus, not Homo sapiens.