The Audacious Reboot of America's Nuclear Energy Program (msn.com)
- Reference: 0178040545
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/13/1723246/the-audacious-reboot-of-americas-nuclear-energy-program
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-audacious-reboot-of-america-s-nuclear-energy-program/ar-AA1GuSbK
This strategic vulnerability has triggered an unprecedented response: venture capitalists invested $2.5 billion in US next-generation nuclear technology since 2021, compared to near-zero in previous years, while the Trump administration issued executive orders to accelerate reactor deployment. The urgency stems from AI's city-sized power requirements and recognition that America cannot afford to lose what Interior Secretary Doug Burgum calls "the power race" with China.
Companies like Standard Nuclear in Oak Ridge, Tennessee are good examples of this push, developing advanced reactor fuel despite employees working months without pay.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-audacious-reboot-of-america-s-nuclear-energy-program/ar-AA1GuSbK
Dangerously Behind? (Score:4, Interesting)
> reclaim nuclear energy leadership after falling dangerously behind China
How does the U.S. having less reactors than China create a danger? What danger?
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The US already has enough nuclear arsenal to end human civilization on the planet. Being able to end it three, four or even a hundred times over doesn't really make a difference.
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>> reclaim nuclear energy leadership after falling dangerously behind China
> How does the U.S. having less reactors than China create a danger? What danger?
The "danger" is that you wouldn't stop to read the article! C'mon, you know better than to genuinely question the sensationalism of a modern media piece.
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"Nuclear reactor gap" sounds as scary as "missile gap." It's great. Much better than "science funding gap" or "universal healthcare gap."
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> "Nuclear reactor gap" sounds as scary as "missile gap." It's great. Much better than "science funding gap" or "universal healthcare gap."
Don't forget we should not allow a mineshaft gap to develop. You know, to protect our precious bodily fluids?
It is not just China we are behind (Score:3)
Top 10 countries ranked by their ability to bring on-line new nuclear power:
1 China
2 India
3 Russia -- Exporting to India, Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh
4 United Kingdom
5 Turkey
6 France -- Exporting to Switzerland
7 South Korea -- Exporting to UAE
8 United States -- Exporting to Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and Indonesia
9 Ukraine
10 Canada -- Exporting to Scotland
Clearly the U.S. has companies that are capable, yet we seem to be largely incapable as a nation.
It's social not technical (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with nuclear power in America is social not technical. Nuclear power requires a great deal of very expensive maintenance in order to be safe. Even the very latest reactors cannot be allowed to fail for more than a couple of days.
America has a bad habit of cutting corners on maintenance when the parent corporation needs to do stock BuyBacks this quarter because of a dip in the market.
If you do that with a nat gas plant then you have extra emissions and a few more people have breathing pro
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Or you have a backup plan that doesn't put internal combustion in the basement in a tsunami zone, and your pumps keep running fine.
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> If you do it with a nuclear power plant you get Fukushima.
Fukushima was not a maintenance problem. The protective sea walls were simply not designed for the scale of that tsunami.
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> 10 Canada -- Exporting to Scotland
You're a little bit ahead of things here, considering that is not slated for completion until 2040.
[1]https://www.nationalobserver.c... [nationalobserver.com]
> The audacious plan to build a giant green powerline under the Atlantic
> Vast volumes of green electricity could be flowing through a 4,000-kilometre underwater powerline between Canada and Europe by 2040, if three UK-based investment bankers’ vision for a major new transatlantic energy artery becomes reality.
> Their $30 billion-plus project, the North Atlantic Transmission One Link (NATO-L), was sparked in 2022, when the sabotage of the giant Nordstream gas pipeline crossing under the Baltic Sea exposed the EU’s dangerous overdependence on Russian energy resources.
[1] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/04/07/analysis/canada-europe-green-powerline-under-atlantic
I'm not sure we need more reactors (Score:1)
At least not "big ones." There's something to be said about having small power plants, be they nuclear or otherwise, within tens of miles of where the electricity will be used. Closer-to-use means less strain on the high-voltage long-distance transmission towers.
As far as power-sucking computing centers go, put them near where they can get lots of wind and sunshine or hydro if you can, but if you can't, then you may need to use other conventional fuels or nuclear to power the data center. Also, use indus
This is "non-virtue" signalling. (Score:3)
My take is: The U.S. president will go on a site, hold a speech, and then we hear nothing for five years, then there are cost overruns on the site, and finally, the plant will never go online, but instead, a giga battery will be installed at the site.
Nuclear is simply expensive, and I don't think its price will go down. And don't you come with "France! France! France!" chants: France's nuclear power plants never turned a profit. France's customers pay for the electricity with their taxes.
Good (Score:3)
Just remember we would have prevented climate change from happening if it weren't for the fossil fuel companies and their fucktard lackeys in the antinuclear movement.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Ok bot
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I'm a bot now. LOL. You're just mad that you lost the argument, and your ego is taking it out on good faith commenters.
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Nuclear power cannot solve climate change without electric cars and heat pumps. I would blame the idiots who spew hate, fear, and uncertainty about those. Quite a few people in favor of those are in favor of nuclear power too.
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Yeah we will need electric cars and heat pumps. You do realize that electrification is how we decarbonize other sectors. Which is why it is so vital to reduce electricty emissions to zero.
clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a clickbait article. The only thing that's happened is;
"Trump’s executive orders seek to slash some red tape and hasten deployment, including by allowing reactors on federal lands, which could result in largely bypassing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?
Some tech giant may try to build a reactor on federal land with loosened safety precautions but it takes at least a decade if recent experience is any guide. And the electricity will be vastly more expensive than any other source. OpenAI may be willing to pay the price to get that juice at any cost, but it will not result in a 'reboot' of nuclear energy in the USA.
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> This is a clickbait article. The only thing that's happened is;
> "Trumpâ(TM)s executive orders seek to slash some red tape and hasten deployment, including by allowing reactors on federal lands, which could result in largely bypassing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
Kicking the NRC in the shorts to get them to clean up their mess of a permitting process should have lasting effects. Sure, we can get rot to set in over time like has been the case at the NRC for decades but once the rot is cleared out it will take time to accumulate again. By that time we may have some very different processes for licensing nuclear power plants, such as the states issuing permits than the federal government.
> The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?
Both the Democrats and Republicans have in their party platform documents that t
But not in Oklahoma (Score:1)
This may be true in 49 states. But Oklahoma will never, ever have one. Search Black Fox Reactor project for the ugliest battle ever against nuclear power.
There's nothing audacious about it (Score:1)
The people making these decisions aren't taking any risks because they don't live anywhere near the nuclear power plants and they will have the government subsidize them with your tax dollars.
And it isn't bold. They are just going to spin up a bunch of old plants long past there life cycles. That's the only way they can get the power they want at the cost they want. Otherwise it's just too expensive to build a nuclear reactor and you're just going to either burn coal or nat gas were you going to build
Re: There's nothing audacious about it (Score:5, Interesting)
You think all liberals are âoeelites living in gated communitiesâ you must live in deep red state. Most liberals live in cities and communities with all sorts of people around and they discover that brown people arenâ(TM)t scary.
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Seriously. In my experience it's the wealthy conservatives that live in gated communities.
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The only thing past life cycle about a US built nuclear plant of the 1970s is the regulatory framework that makes extending a license from 40 to 80+ years such a expensive process it is cheaper to forgo the cheapest decades of the plant in leu of paying K Street to get inside the federal governments good graces with a plant that is perfectly compliant at 39 years, but imposable to extend because of regulations in year 41. The US inventory is the most modeled, most reviewed, most inspected devices on the
Even Greenpeace Founder admits we need nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
> The people making these decisions aren't taking any risks ...
Given the existential world ending climate crisis would their not acting be a far greater risk? Even greeenpeace founders have admitted that nuclear energy is part of the the all of the above strategy we need to save the world from climate change.
"“Nuclear energy is the safest of all the electricity technologies we have.” This statement by Patrick Moore, former director of Greenpeace in a recent interview on NewsNation’s “Special Report,” is at odds with the position of the environmental organization he helped found. New EU taxonomy: Moore did the interview in the wake of the European Parliament’s controversial action to support the addition of nuclear energy and natural gas to the European Union’s taxonomy of environmentally sustainable, green technologies. In response to that action, Greenpeace announced that it would submit a formal request to the European Commission to review the move and, if necessary, mount a legal challenge to the action with the European Court of Justice. Accidents are the exception, not the rule: Moore expressed his strong disagreement with Greenpeace’s antinuclear position, emphasizing that there are more than 100 operational nuclear power plants in the United States and Canada—none of which have ever caused an injury or death from radiation or an accident. Even the well-known accidents at the Three Mile Island and Fukushima “did not harm anyone, never mind kill anyone from radiation.” The only nuclear accident that has resulted in human injury, he pointed out, was the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union, which he attributed to the Russians’ faulty reactor design, adding, “No other nuclear plant in the world has ever had that kind of nuclear accident.”"
[1]https://www.ans.org/news/artic... [ans.org]
"The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident (, Fukushima Dai-ichi (pronunciation) genshiryoku hatsudensho jiko) was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the Thoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.[9][10] It was the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986,[11] and the radiation released exceeded official safety guidelines. Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out.[12] However, studies by the World Health Organization and Tokyo University have shown that no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected.[13] Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]"
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities.
The chances of experiencing adverse health effects from radiation are slim for both nuclear and coal-fired power plants—they're just somewhat higher for the coal ones. "You're talking about one chance in a billion for nuclear power plants," Christensen says. "And it's one in 10 million to one in a hundred million for coal plants."
Developing countries like India and China continue to unveil new coal-fired plants—at the rate of one every seven to 10 days in the latter nation. And the U.S. still draws around half of its electricity from coal. But coal plants have an additional strike against them: they emit harmful greenhouse gases."
[3]https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
[4]Read the rest of this comment...
[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-4126/former-greenpeace-director-explains-his-support-for-nuclear-energy/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_casualties
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
[4] https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23717829&cid=65447719
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Name one other type of power generation that, when it fails catastrophically, renders hundreds of square miles of territory uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
Just one.
Re:Even Greenpeace Founder admits we need nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Hydro. Ever hear about a dam collapsing? By the way nuclear can't leave an area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
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> Hydro. Ever hear about a dam collapsing?
Bullshit. After the initial devestation, the territory could basically be rebuilded right away.
> By the way nuclear can't leave an area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
Then you should have no problem moving with your family to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and offering your current home to one of the numerous families that have been permanently displaced over there.
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Rebuilt after hundreds of thousands of deaths. And I would have no problem living near Fukushima. I wouldn't want to live in the Ukraine due to the ongoing war. But just for the record all of the highly radioactive isotopes near Chernobyl(like iodine 131) have already decayed. If I do make that trade you have to support nuclear energy indefinitely.
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Not sure if it renders land uninhabit able , but time and again it's been shown that polaric energy can kill an entire planet.
"Hey kid, you were right about one thing. I was lying. I don't eat children."
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polaric energy? From Star Trek?
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I can name two that do it when operating normally, but we pretend it don't, and nuclear directly replaces em.
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Then name them. And prove to me that if they were to be shut down right now, and area of a thousand miles around them would still be unfit for human habitation a hundred years from now.
Nuclear power is safe (Score:2, Insightful)
When it is properly deployed and maintained.
Nothing about the last 20 years of my life is an American has given me the slightest reason to think our country is capable of that.
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The sad reality is that Humanity itself isn't capable of that, we're just not mature enough.
We may be smart enough certainly, but as a species we aren't capable of containing our greed and arrogance.
Honestly the French seemed to do it just fine (Score:2)
But they also burned cop cars and ride it in the streets when they're ruling class tried to raise the retirement age to 64.
You would have to fundamentally break down and alter American culture completely destroying the puritanical pro corporate obsession that we have with worshiping capitalists, corporatists and members of the ruling class in order to have safe reactors.
I don't normally say that because it triggers all the libertarians here that are obsessed with nuclear power. And for some reason it
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Have you seen recent polling on nuclear power in the USA?
[1]https://news.gallup.com/poll/6... [gallup.com]
Support for nuclear power has been growing among the politically left, right, and center. Democrats still poll below 50/50 at 46% but that is on the upward climb and likely within the margin of error. Among all voting Americans support for nuclear power is above 60%, and if we translate that how Congress might vote then that's enough support to get past a filibuster in the Senate.
Further down the page I linked to abo
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/659180/nuclear-energy-support-near-record-high.aspx
54 plants in USA. 31 research. 99 US Navy. (Score:2)
>> When it is properly deployed and maintained.
> Nothing about the last 20 years of my life is an American has given me the slightest reason to think our country is capable of that.
Maybe the 54 nuclear power plants currently operating in the USA?
Maybe the 31 test and research reactors?
Maybe the US Navy's 99 reactors?
Want an example? San Onefre in California, this plant was on the pacific coast, in earth quake country. Unlike Fukushima they had a plan for loss of power. Portable backup generators were pre-positioned inland on US Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton. The Marines would use heavy lift helicopters to deliver those generators if needed.
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We should develop nuclear energy, but even if we don't the world will not ending due to climate crisis. Such catastrophising is not supported by science and this is exactly why nobody on the right takes this issue seriously.
Spurring something to think and evolve ... (Score:2)
> We should develop nuclear energy, but even if we don't the world will not ending due to climate crisis. Such catastrophising is not supported by science and this is exactly why nobody on the right takes this issue seriously.
There is a correlation between climate catastrophists and nuclear power catastrophists. If we should listen to the science for one shouldn't we listen to the science for the other? Pointing out the hypocrisy is instructive, it might spur someone to think, like the evolved GreenPeace founder.
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I'm not really against nuclear energy per se, but it is a really expensive way to go. On the other hand, Patrick Moore is a shill of industry. Greenpeace has disavowed him. Hell, he has appeared on Jordan Peterson's podcast. He really shouldn't be mentioned in any serious conversation.
The truth is not shilling (Score:2)
> I'm not really against nuclear energy per se, but it is a really expensive way to go.
A large part of that expense is litigation and the delays litigation results in.
> On the other hand, Patrick Moore is a shill of industry. Greenpeace has disavowed him. Hell, he has appeared on Jordan Peterson's podcast. He really shouldn't be mentioned in any serious conversation.
The truth is the truth, and the truth coincidentally aligning with an industry does not make one a shill. The guilt by association fallacy proves nothing.
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This will be the nail in the coffin for coal plants, and probably a fair number of natural gas plants as well. Once this AI bubble bursts, coupled with the ability to process AI demands much more efficiently (on silicone designed specifically for this purpose, instead of using much less efficient GPUs and the like), there will be a huge surplus of power. The shiny new, and extremely expensive to build, nuclear power plants certainly won't be the things shutting down when there is too much energy.
The environ
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It is pretty hard to beat coal and oil in deaths. Air pollution alone takes 4.5 million lives per year, and heating by burning coal and wood takes another 3.5.
Even if every nuclear power plant in the planet went full chernobyl, it wouldn't be as lethal.
Fukushima you cited killed 2000 people (the radiation, the tsunami etc took around 13000).