It’s worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they’re actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.
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If there’s one thing that you should compromise on when it comes to nuclear power it’s definitely safety.
Hey good news everyone, instead of 40 years to build a new reactor, it’ll only take 39 years. What a relief. Good thing we didn’t fall for all that free sunlight and wind bullshit!
Hey, maybe nuclear plants can run on clean coal!
Beginning investments nuclear at this point when renewables so obviously to everyone in the know are beating them on all accounts is extremely on brand for someone as dumb as Trump
Nuclear is the single best technology humans have invented. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Being able to harness the power of atoms is cool, but directly harnessing the power of a star is arguably far cooler.
I’m confused as to what you think powers a star.
solar panels, duhh. why’d you think they were called that?
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Between that comment and your username you must be a pretty great person.
Uhh thanks I guess? You too
They are suggesting that pursuing fusion is better…
And I’m suggesting that fusion is an atomic level process.
OP means fusion power vs. fission.
So you are saying fusion isn’t an atomic level process?
Well both of you are incorrect because a star is when gravity creates enough energy to cause nuclear fusion.
Yeah that’s still atom powered.
You don’t get nearly as much power and you need huge fields of panels. They are also very weather dependant. Nuclear energy is pretty clean and safe really.
Unless we’re talking about a Dyson Sphere thingy. Now that’s powa’.
You don’t actually need to get as much power out of them - this is a benefit of a system built upon renewables. There’s far greater resilience as the power generation is spread out over more nodes, leading to less large potential points of failure. Add in distributed localized storage capacity, and you’ve got a far more sophisticated solution than one based on a few large nuclear plants.
You don’t need to get at much power? You need a certain amount of power, and even if you setup a country wide grid that can self balance, it’s is still prone to tons of issues. You then have to setup and manage storage. Issues nuclear just doesn’t have.
The solution you’re presenting is sophisticated yes, but that’s not good. That’s more points of failure, more things that can break in the complicated system. You need to account for: weather impacts, storage imbalance and redistribution, maintaining communication between all nodes to balance, finding suitable places to build solar fields, cleaning and maintaining all those panels, having good sun tracking to get max power value, etc. Nuclear makes power and sends it, whenever needed. It’s that simple.
It’s that simple.
That’s such a massive oversimplification of operating a nuclear power plant that I’m not quite sure there’s any more value to be had in this discussion.
Nuclear doesn’t scale globally and it’s not renewable. It’s contribution to humankind’s power generation negligible and it will stay that way.
not renewable
I mean that may be true, but the amount of easily available fuel for fission reactions is several orders of magnitude greater than that of fossil fuels.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today’s consumption rate in total. […] First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today’s nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
This is only for uranium-based reactors. Thorium can also be used in fission reactors and is 3 times more common than uranium.
In 360,000 years, I’m sure we’ll find a new way to make energy. Which is to say that we’ll probably perfect fusion confinement.
Fusion:
Some rough estimates (you can dig up more accurate numbers): The oceans contain about 321 million cubic miles of water (source: http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html), or 3.5e20 U.S. gal.
1 gal seawater contains roughly enough deuterium to provide the same energy as 300 gal of gasoline (maybe slightly less - that’s the part for your homework!), so the oceans are equivalent to 1.1e23 gal. gasoline.
Conversion factors: 1 gal. gasoline = 1.24e5 Btu; 1 Btu = 1055 J; 1e15 Btu = 1 quad; U.S. annual energy consumption is a little under 100 quad; world annual consumption is about 500 quad.
So, the oceans contain about 1.3e28 Btu = 1.4e31 J of fusion fuel, which is 1.3e13 quad, which is enough to supply energy at the current rate of consumption for 26 BILLION years.
Worrying about the amount of nuclear fuel available is about a sane as worrying about how the porch that you built on your house will affect the orbit of the Earth over the next 3 billion years. Technically it will affect things, but the timescales involved are so much longer than anything humanity deals with.
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Nuclear is needed for the AI tech industry. He doesn’t give a fuck what the people need. These are pushes from META, Google, Amazon and Open-AI. But guess who is gonna pay.
AI needs large amounts of cheap power. Nuclear does not deliver on those requirements - vast quantities of renewables would be far more suitable for this purpose. However, renewables are woke and as such Trump would never lean into them, no matter how profitable it would be.
AI needs large amounts of reliable power (24/7 delivery). Renewables can power AI for now, but for the long run the demand is showing that expanding nuclear power is mandatory.
There is nothing woke and shit for that. The problem is that they play with safety in nuclear power.
Why would you need 24/7 delivery for AI? You can vary the load for training as much as you want, while inference can be throttled to meet energy availability. There’s nothing inherent to AI that warrants that type of power profile.
You can not stop training that easily, it takes weeks or months of planning. Also idling hardware is bad usage of capital. Companies do not like these. They want to eliminate energy bottlenecks. Its not that AI needs it, its economics.
great idea, nothing wrong will come from pressuring the nuclear power regulators. nuh uh.
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It really depends on what these reactors are going to be used for. Are they going to be licensed to private corporations to power data centers, or are they going to provide power to citizens homes?
AI
I guess the good news is when we have an iron man uprising it won’t cause blackouts to humans to cut the power.
Individually alot of his ideas could be good, with proper care and planning. Instead he does them all at once without any sort of considerations, its wild to witness this train wreck.
Idk how tariffs work but I like to imagine in our economic toolbox they are like a hammer. Can a hammer be useful, absolutely. But is it useful to throw 10,000 hammers at the rest of the world like trump is doing?
I am sure making consideration of climate change impacts illegal during the approval process won’t have adverse consequences. When the water used to cool the reactor dries up, we’ll have plenty of money and foresight to just pump it in from somewhere else, right?
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Not really, those massive cooling towers use evaporative cooling and that water just goes poof
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No discard all that so we make steam now!
/s
We need to work on permitting of New plants. Not new construction of Old plants.
But I get it, Don likes towers.
Quite glad that America is far away from where I am.
If the nuclear industry is going to be quadrupled, and gas and oil are similarly enlarged, and renewables are at least not shrinking, what are people supposed to do with all that extra power in such a short time? I mean, I get that induced demand is a thing but… a quadrupling of long-standing industries? Is there any intention for this plan to be realistic?
Feed the hungry AI, I guess?
If you even get a doubling of power usage that way, I’d be surprised.
One AI datacenter will soon take up the same electricity as a city if we let tech bros keep building.
Instead of admitting the tech has hit a wall they will burn the planet down for diminishing returns on this scam
But what if AI collapses at some point? Approve a load of nuclear reactors and then AI collapses so we can use all that power for the good of humanity.
Why would we make excess power we have to discharge?
It’s literally a waste of resources.
Maybe we should build housing and other things people actually need.
Countries that still use coal could turn those off thanks to the nuclear reactors
I feel like you don’t understand how spending money to produce extra cities worth of power that we then have to throw away is a bad idea.
Also building nuclear has nothing to do with AI
Trump doesn’t do realism.
Soviet quality nuclear plants. Great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
Great, more power at unrealistic prices in… 2045.
Don’t fret, these will never become operational anyway.
I seem to remember something going wrong before when corners were cut with nuclear…
