Trump Orders Faster Build-Out of Nuclear Power Plants
www.nytimes.com
Among a flurry of executive actions, Mr. Trump directed the nation’s nuclear safety regulator to speed up approvals for new reactors.

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.

  • Vytle@lemmy.world
    2412·
    6 days ago

    Nuclear is the single best technology humans have invented. A broken clock is right twice a day.

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
      202·
      6 days ago

      Being able to harness the power of atoms is cool, but directly harnessing the power of a star is arguably far cooler.

      • Lightor@lemmy.world
        21·
        5 days ago

        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’.

        • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
          41·
          5 days ago

          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.

          • Lightor@lemmy.world
            12·
            5 days ago

            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.

            • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
              31·
              5 days ago

              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.

    • uniquethrowagay@feddit.org
      3·
      5 days ago

      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.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 days ago

        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:

        https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/164282/how-much-potential-fusion-energy-is-in-earths-ocean#164291

        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.

    • Oniononon@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Nuclear is great and all but only when done safely.

      diaper donny is saying “donny like fire, make more fire, donny no care where make fire, fire must be more since i say fire good”

      This will end up with everyone burning down everything.