what timeline are we in that bill gates is not the worst guy
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Crazy times indeed. He is for sure not the lesser evil of all the billionaires but he has the best PR team of them all.
i'd argue that musk has even better pr team, if your goal is forming a cult that is
Lets hope they don't run windows.
As much as I dislike Bill Gates, I hope that this project finds success. With that said however, they're going against Rolls Royce, GE, and Hitachi, which are probably more trustworthy for the government than a relatively new startup
Rolls Royce, GE, and Hitachi are more likely to succeed, but they're doing little to innovate beyond light water reactors. Even among LWRs, NuScale has a more interesting design because it contains enough water to shut down without human intervention.
It's good that some startups are trying to improve long-tail safety, because the probability of failure increases with the number of reactors in the world.
Idk about you but in a world where collapse is a distinct possibility, I'd rather not have a bunch of nuclear facilities just hanging around.
You should inform yourself better. Nuclear power plants are not like on the Simpsons.
I know nuclear power plants need vast amounts of water pumped around them to keep them cool. If the worst of the climate models come true (which is likely as it stands) and we have mass civil unrest, there's no guarantee water and power will flow to them.
It's an unnecessary risk, we have other options.
You think the seas are just going to dry up? You're more dense than the uranium powering these plants.
Lol "water exists so how can a nuclear power plant possibly not get it". Who's the dense one here.
Keep being a science illiterate retard lmao
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On the one hand, I think that's great. We need more nuclear power to mitigate the climate disaster.
On the other hand, I don't trust anything Bill Gates does after he totally fucked up the U.S. education system.
No matter how you think about nuclear power in general, it will not be of any substantial help against climate change.
It's expensive and takes forever to build. Even the optimistic projections of the vendors are well above what wind and solar deliver right now.
Nuclear power is just a tech bro pipe dream. Nobody needs it. It's just prestige.
The goal of several of these new companies is to build small modular plants that are cookie cutter instead of individual boutique designs. That should bring cost down substantially.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear plants were built as large as possible because that was the only way that made any kind of financial sense. SMRs are a waste of money.
It might have been why in the past, but the issues right now with building new plants is getting a design through production that can survive the review process. Costs come down on the second plant because you have a design you can clone rather than developing it from scratch.
There are already several uses by several countries in using miniature nuclear power plants. This is just an attempt to make it more available to everyone.
Nuclear has never been competitive in terms of cost against the alternatives, first coal and gas, now renewables. In fact, nuclear is only getting more expensive. I really don't understand why you want to pay more for power than is necessary. I don't.
So travelling wave is out and SMRs are in? Right. What both have in common is that they're just pipe dreams. Nuclear power never was and never will be economically viable. If we could all just accept that we could get on with real solutions.
The energy density of nuclear fuels is unparalleled.
Modern reactor designs are extremely safe and stable, the only downside is the cost.
The cost is so high because they are basically boutique projects. Having a standardized design with mass produced components would go a long way to making nuclear reactors more affordable.
We've had 70 years to figure out how to produce cost-competitive nuclear energy. It's time to move on.
We did produce cost competitive nuclear. When France went through it’s oil crisis recovery shift to nuclear, they built them every single year for a decade, going from a couple to 40+ in the span of a decade.
We’ve just stopped. So then of course the institutional knowledge disappears.
That's fair. I'm not anti-nuclear on principle. If we had gone all-in 30 years ago it would've made some sense. To build new nuclear now though is a waste of money.
Honestly its a pretty great use of money if you're thinking long term. A useful if not ideal energy source for the climate crisis especially with batteries not quite being there yet, and thinking past that to more substantial space exploration/colonization its good to already have a working power source that doesn't rely specifically on earths environment.
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