this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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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?
Best TIL I've had in a while.
Between that comment and your username you must be a pretty great person.
OP means fusion power vs. fission.
They are suggesting that pursuing fusion is better…
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.
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.
Nope, today nuclear actually makes sense. Renewables are cool and relatively cheap but only as long as they output power. Then what? Spin up that coal power plant such as during night? And produce a ton of climate warming co2 and a lot of pollution. The problem is that we don't have energy storage nor a viable solution for it. Said that, cutting corners is a big no-no.
Nuclear doesn't make sense for that purpose because it'd have to quickly be able to spin up and down. Most reactor designs aren't really able to do it quickly in normal operations, and those that can can't do so in a way that makes any economic sense. They're financially outcompeted by their alternatives.
Storage is the solution, which we can build today in a viable way and is rapidly becoming cheaper and cheaper.
The financial case for nuclear today is shoddy at best. It's why no company wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole unless heavy government subsidies are involved. The case for nuclear in ten years is, given the continuous advancements in renewable energy costs and battery storage tech, almost certainly dead.
If we got our head out of our ass and invested into battery tech - e.g. sodium-ion batteries or proton batteries, we could very quickly build sustainable energy storage instead of relying on technology that is potentially dangerous or continuing to rely on fossil fuels.
Nuclear has similar but opposite problem of renewables. Its hard to tune down and back up in power output, and its economics require near full capacity, and high market prices,to justify them.
Renewables are always better, because they don't need as high market electricity prices, they have short and modular development times, modular battery addition.
Nuclear projects require suppression of renewables to ensure limited competition in supply, when they are finally built.
Nuclear doesnt need to ramp up and down. Just run them full tilt for baseline loads. Power use peaks during the day, when solar is most effective. Leave some extra unused nuclear capacity to pick up the slack when renewables cant meet demand, such as during winter storms. And then add batteries to smooth out the loads.
What makes you think todays modern world where even cigarettes are battery powered we do not invest in battery tech?
We invest in battery tech that utilizes supply chains with slavery and child labor to make those disposable cigarette batteries - and they just go straight into the landfill.
Lithium-ion batteries are absolutely not anything to be proud of - it's a rare material and not scalable like other emergent technologies.
Lithium-ion has the potential for fire/explosion, is hazardous, and has poor cold-weather performance when compared with sodium-ion batteries.
And earlier this year and late last year in Northern California, we had two lithium battery plant fires that very likely contaminated a significant amount of our agriculture and soil.
The contaminated farmlands produce 70% of America's greens and vegetables (a.k.a. the Salad Bowl of America). We were ill-equipped to address this situation or remediate it - see Status Coup News' reporting to see how it affected the health of residents in a 50-100 mile radius.
Even if we stored it properly (away from anything it could contaminate including people), lithium-ion is simply not viable for energy storage.
There are too many if-s in there. When you build energy strategy for at a country level, you can't base it on if-s. And even if we had viable battery technology today, there are still problems building them at scale, their cost and their volume. As of today, the more renewables you have, more expensive stable energy gets or you simply burn coal or gas when required.
There's only ifs because powerful forces (that do not represent the will of humanity) do everything they can to suppress or derail renewable energy efforts and divert our collective focus to war and conflict.
China is proving sodium-ion batteries are viable. Sodium is abundant and the batteries seem cheap to produce. Solar panels are also cheap to produce.
Instead of economic war or other forms of conflict, we could cooperate on these technologies and move forward as a species.
It's all very easy when you realize that war and conflict are not in anyone's best interest, with consequences that could spell the end of our planet's habitability, and could cause death and suffering that make previous World Wars look like child's play.
We already know fossil fuels are undesirable for the planet and we've already had plenty of nuclear disasters.
Let's worry about expanding nuclear technologies when we achieve fusion and the world achieves stability.
If you start a nuclear project today, you'll get it in 20 years. And that's for conventional reactor designs with all their well known flaws. If you spend the same money on renewables and storage, you'll have it all up and running next year. We don't have 20 years. We need solutions now.
This isn't even remotely true. Japan builds nuclear reactor in average of 5 years.
Edit for the down vote brigade:
80% or all nuclear reactors go from official planning to commercial production in under 10 years.
The longest process in building a nuclear reactor is cutting through red tape and getting permits cause of all the NIMBY and idiots progating mytha and lies about nuclear that originate in fossil fuels lobby.
Nuclear is the most ecologically friendly and safe power generation source we have until industrial scale fusion gets hammered out.
I wouldn't trust the Trump administration with building a styrofoam model of a nuclear reactor.
We could say the same about nuclear power:
EDF cuts nuclear production in reaction to soaring temperatures
No, we have viable energy storage solutions already. We haven't built them out, but they are already feasible. And the best part about them is that they get more feasible each year, while nuclear becomes less and less feasible each year.
Assuming that you start today, by the time the first nuclear plant comes online, it will be so wildly uncompetitive that only huge amounts of subsidies will be able to keep it running.
Closing down existing nuclear was a mistake, and there's probably an argument to be made that scaling back on its construction and R&D was also a mistake. But trying to go back to nuclear at this point when renewables and storage are so obviously taking over is a larger mistake.
What viable solution we have for i.e. a week worth of energy in worst case scenario? Let's take Slovenia for example with yearly consumption of 12.95 TWh, a week worth of energy would be 248 GWh. And during winter this number is probably higher. How would you store it? Note that US consumption is twice as high and population is x150.
A scenario where you get zero production for a week is very unlikely - broadly speaking, you cope with this by building out production to produce a massive surplus, with various industries that can at variable rates use up the massive amounts of cheap power in the base case, then you build up storage to cope with the most likely scenarios of capacity reduction/smoothing out the price curve throughout the day.
It's also important to note that demand is far from static - people can and will reduce their usage when incentivized to do so, usually in the form of raising prices in low capacity scenarios. It's already starting to become quite popular to do so today, with spot price electricity plans allowing people to pay ridiculously low rates by aligning their energy usage with capacity availability - things like charging EVs/running laundry/running dishwashers/storing up thermal energy.
This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.
Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.
I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?
The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc...
Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn't the solution. It's not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.
Slovenia is fairly high solar production with mildish winters. But winter heat needs storage.or heating fuel. A storage solution is hot water, and hydronic floor hrating, and heat pumps. But traditional heating fuel, can offload power requirements in low seasonal solar production.
In what way does nuclear get less feasible? It's the safest form of power per kw even when you weigh down the stats with crap like Chernobyl that never would have left drawing paper in the west, and uses the least amount of land so that low carbon footprint means something where we aren't tearing down trees as power demands expand.
Their cost goes up over time while the cost of both renewables and energy storage is plummeting.
The cost goes up entirely due to red tape and lobbying from fossil fuel organizations. Remove the boot that is nuclear fear induced largely by oil companies and actually commit to nuclear R&D and the cost will drop. And even the recent breakthroughs China made with Thorium made are genuine, even more so. And unlike every other power generation industry, nuclear operators are mandated by law to put aside funding to handle waste. Tell me which solar industry members are doing anything about PFAS generated in their production or wind turbine operators who give a damn about how many landfills they are flooding with expired turbine blades.
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.