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.
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.
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?
Between that comment and your username you must be a pretty great person.
Uhh thanks I guess? You too
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OP means fusion power vs. fission.
So you are saying fusion isn’t an atomic level process?
They are suggesting that pursuing fusion is better…
And I’m suggesting that fusion is 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.
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.
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/
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:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/164282/how-much-potential-fusion-energy-is-in-earths-ocean#164291
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.