‘GenAI for Nuclear Licensing’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW9lusiwMz8&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251118-vibe-nuclear-lets-use-ai-shortcuts-on-reactor-safety - podcast
time: 6 min 24 sec
‘GenAI for Nuclear Licensing’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW9lusiwMz8&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251118-vibe-nuclear-lets-use-ai-shortcuts-on-reactor-safety - podcast
time: 6 min 24 sec
It’s not even trying to solve the right problem. In the US, the NRC has given out licenses for new reactors. They’re sitting there without the funding needed to go forward.
I have no doubt that licensing is a long process. It should be. That’s how we keep fission power safe. But the more fundamental reason they’re not getting built is because they reliably blow their budget and schedule.
Hell yeah.
Nuclear energy isnt a technical problem, it’s a human problem. Specifically, the real expense in US nuclear construction is that there are only a handful of contractors who have the tribal knowledge to actually do nuclear construction e.g. pour concrete, install old-fashioned non-networked electrcal control systems, big switchgear, pipefitting, startup V&V, an so on.
They’ll all gladly monkeywrench, slow walk, and re-work every step because they know there’s no real competition for fleet-wide contracts, and no one from the CEOs to the craft on the ground want the job to end, so you get it decades late or not at all.
One more piece of evidence that prompt fondlers are not serious people.
Source: am person of nuclear
Yeah, even before the techbros showed up, there was this industry push to try to convince people that regulation was the problem. If we loosened the bolts just 10%, everything would work out, they think. Attacking the “linear no threshold model” seems to be the latest strategy.
It’s almost like there’s a reflexive need to blame government regulation on all the problems.
Linear no-threshold isn’t under attack, but under review. The game-theoretic conclusions haven’t changed: limit overall exposure, radiation is harmful, more radiation means more harm. The practical consequences of tweaking the model concern e.g. evacuation zones in case of emergency; excess deaths from radiation exposure are balanced against deaths caused by evacuation, so the choice of model determines the exact shape of evacuation zones. (I suspect that you know this but it’s worth clarifying for folks who aren’t doing literature reviews.)
Hence, SMRs.
Yeah SMRs rule. They are so easy to build. You just move the map over to where you want them to be built, press the Building button or hotkey (B) and then choose the SMR (hotkey: S). Then you move the mouse over to where you want to place the SMR; a silhouette will appear at the target location. You click to start the build. It’s 150 minerals, 50 gas, and takes 15 seconds to construct. Just a few keypresses and you have green, clean energy anywhere you want it :) Crazy that nuclear power is so easy to get but governments treat it like it’s so scary.
Just make sure you have a few missile turrets protecting the area if you’re playing against zerg. You don’t want your SCV that is building the SMR to get sniped by a flock of mutalisks.
@frezik @dgerard but when did they ever even identify an actual problem?
Even ignoring AI datacenter builds, we still need clean energy. I would be all for nuclear fission if it were at all economically viable. It just isn’t.
yeah, even the green case for nuclear - which has been around for a long time - falters on wind and solar with battery just being hilariously cheaper. At this point the funding problem is interconnects.
@dgerard @frezik
The problem is alway interconnects.
(There aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be scaled for fossil-fuelled power stations, probably 1MW being the smallest unless there were CHP setups with a grid feed.)
Removed by mod
@frezik there is an economic case for three nuclear reactor applications.
Medical isotopes need to come from somewhere, and so far as I’m aware, you can’t do all of them with particle accelerators.
Marine power; your 250,000 DWT bulk transport or large container ship pollute significantly, can’t go solar, and marine nuclear is not obviously a bad technical option. (They can maybe go with some sort of fuel cell, but that’s not developed tech.)
High-latitude baseline power.
@kgMadee2
high latitude is sort of served by hydro because there’s lot of river per person in some of areas that are in any significant way populated (norway, russian north)
medical isotopes are research reactor thing because of frequent loading/unloading - either that or some kind of channel reactors so either CANDU or RBMK. neither are exactly industry standard
marine power requires small reactors = way more enriched than usual sub 5% = expensive and a lot of diplomatic noise about proliferation
@fullsquare Sub reactors use enriched for service life (and some compactness); having to get things through the pressure hull is such a pain you will pay high upfront costs to not do it. A reactor designed to push a large cargo vessel around doesn’t have those constraints and could be designed for easy refueling. (There are some marine thermal siphon designs with very few moving parts, come to that.)
High latitude hydro has “and it froze” issues, same after anything else outside up there.
either sub or aircraft carrier reactors might be somewhere around 50 to 220MWe, panamax might need 60MWe tops, regular land based PWRs are more like 300MWe and up. the smaller you go, the higher enrichment you need, but also military propulsion has different priorities, they use 90%+ enrichment in part because they can, and in part because this gives them massive excess reactivity, which means power level can change ridiculously fast. tradeoff is that spent fuel has much more useful uranium, and it’s overall expensive, but you also don’t skimp on your doomsday ride so it’s all fine. commercial powerplants are physically capable of doing slower load following, but it’s more economical most of the time to just use full power in order to best utilize fissile material. what you’re proposing would have all disadvantages of both, because no way in hell this thing will run on standard, low enriched fuel for PWRs, it might need something maybe more than 5%, maybe closer to 10%, perhaps more, which means problems, because it means worse proliferation risks than with normal fuel and it’s already fuel that goes around, and can be taken over in some unfriendly waters; higher enrichment also means it’ll be much more expensive, both because of more SWU needed, but also because it’s a specialty product that requires extra licensing; and it also won’t be as compact and responsive as military reactor, because civilians don’t get to play with HEU like that; and also it will require refueling after some time, maybe longer than regular-sized PWR (refueling every year to three) that probably will require visit to manufacturer to do refueling there, which would be, everything else equal, a bit harder than in regular powerplant because it needs to be done in a drydock
it has all disadvantages of SMRs but also you can steal them on high seas and it’s probably great for diplomacy if some random ass pirate get hands on that
And you never know when a couple weirdos are going to break in and steal your gamma-ray photons so they can recrystallize their dilithium.
Medical isotopes don’t necessarily need to be created in power reactors.
High-latitudes is a very limited application. Very few people live in areas where solar isn’t viable. They also tend to have a lot of space for wind power and some potential geothermal. Long distance HVDC lines shouldn’t be discounted, either.
Marine power is where I hope SMRs actually work out.
helps to be the US Navy and not be worried about costs
ship-sized SMR power is quite expensive!
iirc us navy loads their reactors with 93% enriched uranium, the same grade that is used in (american) nukes (and also in couple of very special use cases like oak ridge high flux reactor fuel). can’t hand this out just like that. one fuel load is expected to last entire ship lifetime. the less enriched grade you use, the bigger reactor becomes and refueling has to be more frequent
Trump was ready to give some Sam Altman project highly enriched uranium, though I’m not clear on whether that was 20% (already considered a serious proliferation risk) or full bomb-grade 95%.
uranium or plutonium, because i’ve heard of some plutonium that was slated to be disposed of this way 20 years ago and just sat there unused (not that saltman has facilities or people to do anything with it)
The conclusion of the NS Savannah was that it would have been economical after the oil crisis of the 1970s caused a price spike in fuel costs. Ports also need facilities and training to handle nuclear fuel. Once you have that, it’s perfectly viable.
Unlike energy generation on land, there isn’t a lot of alternatives for decarbonizing marine transport.
I’m sure there will be no issues setting up nuclear fuel handling at ports worldwide. Well, maybe one or two.