BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
Well acthtually we prefer to be called fission/fusion nerds
“greenwashing is cheaper than action” indeed. (edit2) On that note, storytime about the clownshow that is Dutch politics. So our radical right wing government is pro nuclear power, of course, and they want to build more powerplants. So what are they planning on doing? They are going to start a study on which locations are best. Which is maddening, as these studies have already been done before (so it prob is just an attempt to hopefully have the study finish when it isn’t them in power anymore so they are not at risk of starting an too expensive megaproject). But it gets worse, the absolute clowns of our farmers party just went ‘fuck the studies’ and they just pointed at a province where there are a lot of farmers and went ‘we will put a powerplant there’. And this is how they discovered nuclear powerplants need running water and they picked one of the areas without a major river. ('im ignoring the clownshow re ‘the immigration crisis’ (not a crisis) as this post is already too long, and there is a big risk of honk overdose if I go into that).
Our local Swedish right-wingers in gov have a chubby for nukes too[1], because their main motivation besides hating on brown people is pissing off Greens. But in the Swedish way they handed this off to a researcher (“utredning”) who found out that to get the industry on board you need a) rock-solid political promises (so need to get the Social Democrats at least on board) and b) have a price guarantee for power for at least a decade, along with massive government loan guarantees.
It’s gonna be hard to get voters interested in 10 new reactor sites (NIMBY gets supercharged when it comes to nukes) if it slightly pushes up lending rates and power bills.
[1] the right-wing part of the opposition social democrats like them too to be fair
wouldn’t it make more sense to put NPP on seashore and just dump waste heat to ocean like everyone else does
I’m looking forward to seeing the tech attitude of “move fast and break things” being brought to nuclear reactors.
how come all these botfans talking points are just repackaged cryptobros talking points
it keeps happening
If these nuclear plants manage to come to fruition, it’ll be the sole miniscule silver lining of the bubble. Considering its AI, though, I expect they’ll probably suffer some kind of horrific Chernobyl-grade accident which kills nuclear power for good, because we can’t have nice things when there’s AI involved.
even if you’re ardently pro-nuclear, SMRs are just a failure purely on the economics and always have been. And that’s before wind/solar/battery made them just obsolete. So SMRs are the perfect tech when you don’t want to do anything useful.
See, I feel like AI might have the actual solution to this problem. We can overcome the economic issues with setting up SMR infrastructure the same way AI has powered through all their economic problems: setting VC money in fire and trust that the smokescreen will hold out for another funding round.
Once the reactors exist, I’m assuming that their operation can be relatively cheap for whoever ends up owning the actual plants once the AI bubble pops and the datacenters around them are shut down or repurposed.
BRB making a video for a cold fusion based kickstarter. I smell money