
U.S. Nuclear Comeback Stalls as Two Reactors Are Abandoned - themgt
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-project-canceled-in-south-carolina.html
======
nprecup
Interestingly, South Carolina produces most of its energy using nuclear
already... It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky'
energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed,
in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour. Its just that when something goes wrong,
it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general
public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which
there are sadly many, many more. So, it seems it is hard to get support to
invest in newer, safer technologies in the industry. I do understand the short
term economic incentives. Nuclear is expensive to build. However it is very
cheap to operate, and relatively environmentally friendly. It takes long term
planning on timescales of many years, and looking at safety data rather than
focusing on the disasters on their own. Neither of which humans are any good
at.

The one thing that turns me off nuclear power is how to store nuclear waste.
The collapsed storage tunnel at the Hanford site this year is an example of
how poorly this can be done. The waste will remain dangerous for thousands of
years. How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that
long?

~~~
grecy
> _Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong._

Not only does it go wrong, we have absolutely no way to stop it. It's
literally out of our control.

I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important
lesson.

When things went bad there, we literally stood back and said "well, damn.
There is nothing we can do" and watched it melt for weeks and weeks. Nobody
could go in, and we had no robots that could go in and do a thing. It was
lucky it's close enough to just pump endless water into it. Then a few weeks
later the experts said "oh, all that highly contaminated water is going
straight into the ocean. We wondered where it was going". As it were the
Japanese had elderly people volunteering to go in, essentially committing
suicide.

It's also worth remembering that at Chernobyl there was also nothing we could
do - other than force people to commit suicide by going in where it was
deadly. That won't fly today.

While the chances of things going that wrong are very low (it's only happened
twice, maybe three times in history) I think the consequences are too great to
justify it. We can't even control it when it goes bad!

~~~
cjslep
This seems like cherry picking and the innate human bias at play. Given a big
enough disaster, there isn't anything anyone can do as it unfolds. And
spectacular failures stick in our mind. Here's some non-nuclear disasters that
happened that people could only watch:

* Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse

* Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River

* But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either.

* Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly

* Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls.

I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic
catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day
(well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing
dam).

~~~
grecy
In all of your examples, a few hours or days later people could wander right
into "ground zero" and begin cleaning/re-building or whatever.

No so with nuclear. The impact is so much more serious when radiation comes
into play.

> _Valdez_

Actually thousands of people were mobilized to contain the spill then clean up
afterwards. It would have been a much better outcome if they didn't try to
hide/downplay it for the first couple of days.

~~~
cjslep
Yes, and radiation can be serious. But nature knows how to deal with high
levels of radiation (see Chernobyl's flourishing ecosystem) after a period of
time, same with any other disaster. You as a human could go into some
moderately radioactive areas since the civilian limits are set so extremely
low below the non-stochastic effects, and maybe not have much more of an
elevated cancer risk than if you went to the hospital and got an MRI or PET
scan (which is unregulated in terms of legal dosage limits).

Just because radiation causes different constraints on cleanup than oil on a
large ocean or arsenic in the water table or issues in a space rocket means it
is morally worse? That's the part I fail to understand, so long as the
engineering continues to behave ethically behind all the systems in their
design and construction and retrofit.

~~~
roenxi
Adding to this - there seems to be a lack of observable damage from nuclear
accidents apart from self-imposed evacuations.

Literally no-one died at Fukushima. It is the only energy disaster I know of
where no-one ended up dead.

This is strong circumstantial evidence that we are being too safe, because we
implicitly accept a few deaths when things go wrong in, eg, coal (pollution &
extraction deaths), solar ( mainly in installations not in operating), hydro
(big-time risks).

Going from 1 death to 0 deaths on this scale is a huge marginal cost. It
almost certainly outweights the benefits.

EDIT: We haven't had a solar disaster yet, but coal & hydro disasters happen
and can be very bad indeed.

~~~
true_religion
I agree. Anywhere there's a dam, people will drown in it. In fact, if it's
close enough to a town and people like to drink then we'll see many more
deaths in the winter since it looks like you an skate on it---but can't.

------
tvchurch
While the full article is gated at WSJ, John Cochrane and David Henderson
write about the lack of quantifying economic costs when it comes to addressing
climate change. Their last paragraph:

 _Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and
mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest
threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal
and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of
genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less
land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the
future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering
should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective,
political grab-bag policies should be intolerable._

Here's Cochrane's write up about the op-ed:
[http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/07/on-climate-
change....](http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/07/on-climate-
change.html?spref=tw)

~~~
mcguire
I mostly agree with his paragraph above. But from your link,

" _No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted,
relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis.
Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must
compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources._ "

"Small economic adjustments?" How many large scale resources does preventing
war or pandemics require? Is chaos a real threat?

Most of what he lists are effects, not causes. Here's an economic question for
him: what happens when the area between the Mississippi and the Rockies
returns to being an unusable semidesert? (That's not an if. It is all
irrigated.)

And I'll just leave this comment here: "As I favor a uniform VAT in place of
the idiotically complex income and corporate tax system."

~~~
jessaustin
_what happens when the area between the Mississippi and the Rockies returns to
being an unusable semidesert? (That 's not an if. It is all irrigated.)_

Here in Missouri, there is actually fairly little irrigation. There's a 1.5
hour drive through rural farmland I take regularly, and I see _one_ irrigation
setup on the whole trip. The other irrigation I can think of off the top of my
head is just north of Jefferson City, 100 yards from the Missouri River, and
that's for a sod factory that turns its fields over every couple of months.

This year the rain has been fantastic. We put up more hay than we ever have.
July was hot, as July often is, but the first week of August will be our
coolest in memory. If this is climate change, I vote for more of it. b^)

~~~
mcguire
I was being hyperbolic. :)

But a large part of that region was known as the Great American Desert before
the invention of suitable irrigation. And water is being removed from the
aquifer much faster than it is being replaced.

~~~
jessaustin
Yes, things that can't continue forever, won't. Eventually much of the Great
Plains will be native grassland again. That is its natural condition. The
parts of Arizona and California that currently host alfalfa fields will be
_actual_ desert again, and the dairy industry will return to the Midwest where
it belongs.

Even when being hyperbolic, however, you could move your border west a whole
state. I doubt Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, or Louisiana are any more worried
about the next Dust Bowl than we are. My impression is that Missouri is the
driest of the states on our longitude.

------
skywhopper
This brings to light a risk of nuclear power that's rarely mentioned: that the
scale of practical projects is so great that the likely cost overruns and
delays make the systems politically or financially difficult to fund. Not to
mention the additional risk that when/if a nuclear power station goes offline
(whether for maintenance, accident, or some other kind of failure), the gap in
energy production is massive. Compare that to solar and wind energy projects,
which are typically smaller scale (and can be much, much smaller), built with
diverse technologies in multiple locations, in small units. The risks of
disruption, project failure, cost overruns, and financial failure are all much
smaller.

When we are seeking solutions to growing energy demand and climate change, the
likelihood and ease of fulfilling the demand has to be included in the
calculations.

~~~
epistasis
Most certainly, and this is what really stuck out for me:

>The nuclear project now accounts for 18 percent of the electric bills of
South Carolina Electric & Gas’s residential customers. Santee Cooper, a state-
owned utility, has increased rates five times to pay for the reactors.

The costs of mistakes like this are massive!

A failed $100 million storage experiment has little impact. This $9B
experiment is a financial disaster. Heads should roll for such poor decisions.

~~~
jessaustin
_Heads should roll for such poor decisions._

If that happens, no new nuclear project will ever be started in USA again.

~~~
6d6b73
And why is that bad?

~~~
bpodgursky
Because some of us care about the environment more than we like populist
posturing.

~~~
6d6b73
When you show me how to safely store radioactive waste for the thousands of
years that are required to make it safe, I consider nuclear power as a safe,
effective and economically viable option.

If you care about the environment, tell me what would happen to all of the
nuclear plants and the nuclear waste, if suddenly all or most of the people on
this planet died?

~~~
opo
>...When you show me how to safely store radioactive waste for the thousands
of years that are required to make it safe, I consider nuclear power as a
safe, effective and economically viable option.

Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the
amount of waste:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste)

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU)
waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides),
turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission
products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the
original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries,
rather than tens of thousands of years"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor)

While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear
waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are
manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this
"waste" to generate electricity.

~~~
6d6b73
> Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the
> amount of waste

But it's not, and even when it was it would just reduce the amount not get rid
of. Also it would make the whole nuclear energy economically unfeasible.

".Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste
components"

From your linked article: "At present there are no Integral Fast Reactors in
commercial operation".

"While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about
nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least"

If it's overblown why it's not a solved problem already? Nuclear power
currently is not safe, waste storage is a problem, and it's not by any means
economical.

~~~
opo
>But it's not,

Reprocessing is done in various countries around the world though right now it
is cheaper to refine new ore.

>...Also it would make the whole nuclear energy economically unfeasible.

The fuel cost is a small part of the cost so I am not sure why you think it
would be "economically unfeasible". Over time it will likely become cheaper
and as we continue to use uranium, that price will likely rise so the
economics will likely shift.

>...From your linked article: "At present there are no Integral Fast Reactors
in commercial operation".

Sigh. I was hoping that you were actually interested in having a dialogue and
understanding the current state of things and where they will be in a few
decades. When you ignore what I write and cherry pick responses, it looks more
like you have a deeply held belief and it really doesn't matter what anyone
says to you. What I wrote was "Soon it will be possible to use most of the
waste as fuel:" \- I did not say a 4th gen reactor that could burn waste was
running right now. Most of the designs being worked on are generally not
expected to be available for construction until the 2020s. Do you have any
evidence that we can't store nuclear waste on site until a 4th gen reactor
would be available?

>...Nuclear power currently is not safe, waste storage is a problem, and it's
not by any means economical.

NOTHING is "safe" the way you define it. Walking across carries some risk,
flying in a plane carries risk. The only thing you can do is to compare
something it against its alternatives - flying a plane to go across the
country is definitely safer than driving. When making a choice you need to
worry about relative risk - rather than stay away from airplanes because they
aren't "safe". Waste storage from any industrial process is a "problem" \- the
difference between nuclear and coal is that the industry and its regulators
take the waste issue seriously and make sure no one is hurt by it. "and it's
not by any means economical." \- citation needed. France gets a majority of
their power through nuclear power and has lower rates for electricity than its
neighbors:

>...France enjoys one of the lowest electricity prices in Europe; at 14.72
euro cents per kWh, the average cost of electricity in France is 26.5% cheaper
than the EU average (20.02 euro cents per kWh).

[https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity-
co...](https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity-cost)

(France also reprocesses nuclear waste.)

Your original comment was "When you show me how to safely store radioactive
waste for the thousands of years that are required to make it safe, I consider
nuclear power as a safe effective and economically viable option."

I have given you evidence that your original premise is false - we won't need
to store high level wastes for "thousands of years". As I said, while there
are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is
greatly overblown to say the least. Hundreds of thousands of people have died
from hydroelectric accidents, literally millions have died from burning fossil
fuels, etc - in comparison I've never read of anyone who died from nuclear
waste.

------
drallison
Nuclear energy has a small carbon footprint when compared to fracked natural
gas. It is insane to cancel and abandon two reactors because natural gas
prices are low.

Doesn't anyone think long term anymore? How much CO2 will be dumped into the
atmosphere due to this cancellation? What will be the collateral damage due to
the inadvertent release of methane in fracking.

Nuclear power is clean and safe relative to fossil fuel power generation.

~~~
marze
But why not compare to other carbon free options?

A $18B budget buys a lot of solar panels. At the current price of $0.50 per W,
you get 36GW. A 1GW reactor has a 80% capacity factor, solar more like 20%, so
it is 7.2GW average vs 0.8 GW average for nuclear.

Of course, you need to install those panels, so you might end up with 2GW
average output. And no fuel cost and minimal operation cost.

There is a reason solar installations are growing at 100% per year and
existing nuclear plants are shutting down. It is economics.

~~~
sliverstorm
(And maybe the Federal tax credit)

~~~
cma
Nuclear plants get something similar. Their liability is capped at $12.6
billion. A meltdown near a major population center would cost a lot more, but
they don't have to insure against much of because of that cap.

------
someone443
I live in the service area for this power company and toured the construction
site last year. During the tour they told us that the reactors were "twins" of
reactors under construction in China. In fact, they took regular trips to
China to learn from the team there because they were further along in the
construction process. I wonder how the Chinese project is coming along.

A lot of people were laid off yesterday and that's a tragedy. But even more
tragic is that these reactors were supposed to be the solution for meeting the
regions rising energy demands. Now what? There was no plan B.

note - this is a burner account for privacy reasons

------
madengr
It's right here:

"We’ve let our nuclear industry atrophy for 30 years, and we’ve lost the
robust supply chains and expertise needed” in building reactors."

This can be said for lots of things. You put it on hold for a generation of
engineers, and pretty much need to start from zero again. Imagine all the
knowledge lost, as tradecraft is not recorded.

------
ricw
I see a lot of technocratie on this site bemoaning the dying of nuclear. We've
tried for 70+ years and have as yet not succeeded to use nuclear as a
financially feasible energy source. Anyone trying to argue against this please
answer this:

Why has a nuclear facility never been able to be fully privately insured
without government backing?! The answer is simple: nuclear is too risky as a
technology such that even some of the largest companies in the world are
unwilling to take the risk.

Nuclear is dying for a reason.

Ps: thanks for the downvotes on stating facts

~~~
tptacek
Nuclear is failing in the US currently because we have historic low natural
gas prices. They spent 9 billion dollars on these plants. They didn't give up
because of insurance. They gave up because they can't outcompete fossil fuels.

~~~
ricw
Gas has actually been this cheap before, and for a long time so. 20 years ago
oil cost less than a third than it is now, and yet then fossil fuel prices
weren't an issue.

The real reason is deeper than that. Nuclear is simply put very very expensive
and has a high risk attached to it.

~~~
jessaustin
Back then lots of politicians were willing to steal from taxpayers and
ratepayers because of some nebulous idea that we needed more nuclear weapons
and nuclear power was somehow related to that. Now, that's less true.

------
thephyber
> If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that
> the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might
> be bearable.

This assumes that the costs are paid by the same group of people. The people
who live within range of a meltdown might consider the threat of a meltdown a
much larger threat to their future than the threat of a much more evenly
distributed disaster. Alaskans didn't feel personally threatened by the
partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, but there certainly were New Yorkers
who felt affected.

Also, "pose a threat" on the time scales of (Nuclear Power plant lifetimes and
climate change) is as much about perception and values as it is objective
fact. Different people and societies are likely to perceive different levels
of threat from different sources. For example, rural Americans who fear ISIS
and terrorism are least likely to be directly affected by it or to have
actually seen it in person (excluding those individuals who sign up to be
shipped to the place where those are actually existential threats), yet they
overwhelmingly value policies which prioritize defense against terrorism over
defense against climate change.

Discussions of nuclear power accidents and climate change generally should
(but don't) include {probability, impact, and duration}. A nuclear power
incident is likely to be low probability, high impact (within a state-sized
region), and quick. Climate change is likely to be a high probability (of
unknown effects), wide ranging impacts, and affecting many different regions
of the world over a long timescale (perhaps longer than a lifetime).

------
mattbierner
Unfinished nuclear power plants are not uncommon and for anyone in Washington
State, the Satsop plant near Olympia is worth a visit. The massive unfinished
concrete containment buildings and cooling towers are awe inspiring, and on a
quiet morning the place feels almost like some ancient monument. But then
again, I'm a romantic.

Some photos from Satsop a few years ago:

\- [https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Power-
Pla...](https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Power-Plant-Eve)

\- [https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Plant-
Mor...](https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Plant-Morning)

------
willvarfar
Are there any technical solutions solving the nuclear waste storage problem
yet?

Before following the HN crowd and becoming pro-nuclear-power, I'd like to
understand what problems it is leaving to our children and their children and
so on.

~~~
briffle
Yes, reprocessing fuel has been around since the 70's.. its just not
'politically feasible' to reverse the ban President Carter put on it in the
US.

~~~
ckozlowski
Correct. The problem is that the fuel cycle involves stages where you have
large amounts of plutonium sitting around for long periods of time.

Ironically enough, it's also mastery of that fuel cycle that enables the
neutralization of weapons-grade material. France has mastered this cycle, and
they're one of a few nations who are capable of reprocessing nuclear weapon
primaries.

------
exabrial
Very sad to see. I see nuclear as the future *

Despite this however, I also recognize Nuclear is failing because of the
Central Planning fallacy :( Instead of small, modular, flexible modules, we
have one giant plant. I think we need to scale down, not scale up.

* = as in, if we're every visited by aliens their ships won't be powered by windmills :)

------
dmritard96
From an environmental perspective - I have always felt the failure to adopt
nuclear power was a result of environmentalists that undervalued global
pollution relative to localized pollution. Of course the safety concerns
whether or not they are actually warranted may be just as big or more so the
real culprit in the lack of nuclear dominance, but given the costs of
switching the grid to solar and wind (the costs are as much the slow roll out
as the actual dollars), nuclear seems reasonably priced. Cleaning up our
atmosphere is going to be one hell of an endeavor.

------
jartelt
I have to give the two utilities credit for pulling these projects. Sure they
wasted $9 billion, but it would have been easy for them to keep building given
the large amount of money and time already spent on the project. By cancelling
the project, they avoided passing another $15 billion in costs onto rate
payers. With this $15 billion saved, they can buy a hell of a lot of wind,
solar, and batteries.

------
SoMisanthrope
As a project management professional, I have to wonder why these project so-
often fail to meet their objectives of cost, scope, and schedule? It makes you
think that there have been so few of these projects, in the past 40 years,
that any "lessons learned" from former projects are unavailable. Plus, the
duration of such projects probably causes loss of knowledge via retirement of
the smart people.

If you want to make these projects work, I would recommend spending much more
time on planning and give project control to the project managers. My guess
is, that since this was a "state owned project", they took a typical "state
run" mindset, which always displaces the liability of incompetence and failure
onto the endless bank account of the taxpayer.

------
rsync
What kind of nuclear reactors were these ?

Were the new molten salt reactors that require no cooling source ? Or were
they the same old westinghouse models that require external cooling (and
external power) and have the capability of melting down ?

~~~
ethbro
From the article: Westinghouse Gen3+ AP1000s with greater passive safety.

~~~
rsync
"with greater passive safety"

Predictable. Old, meltdown-capable reactor designs that are incredibly capital
intensive and overly complex to run.

~~~
ethbro
Citation? Or are you a nuclear or mechanical engineer?

I like to have a little humility that maybe folks splitting atoms and
designing incredibly complex and redundant machines to control borderline
critical reactions for massive power production aren't all lazy / idiots /
shortsighted / unimaginative.

And under that assumption, maybe they're doing the best they can under the
current regulatory scheme and economic organization and we should cut them
some slack and give them respect for the effort they put into what they do.

------
intrasight
Nuclear just can't succeed as long as every reactor is a custom job with
unknown costs. Companies like NuScale are trying to fix this by creating
modular plants with predictable costs. It is unfortunate (especially for my
hometown of Pittsburgh) that Westinghouse didn't pursue a modular design for
it's latest AP1000 reactors.

------
wodencafe
From TFA:

 _The cancellation means there are just two new nuclear units being built in
the country — both in Georgia — while more than a dozen older nuclear plants
are being retired in the face of low natural gas prices._

So what is going to happen when gas prices skyrocket?

~~~
freehunter
Then they'll attempt to put more nuclear plants in, then gas will plummet
again and they'll abandon those plans and then gas will skyrocket and they'll
make new plans and then gas will drop and

~~~
addicted
Which, once again, shows why nuclear is an economic disaster. The extremely
high capital costs, and the long times from conception to completion means
that it's very difficult for it to profitably (after adjusting for financial
risk) compete with fossil fuels, which can be ramped up or down based on their
costs, or renewables, which while also predominantly capital driven, can be
brought from idea to pumping electricity in a fraction of the time.

~~~
15charlimit
"Nuclear" is not an economic disaster. "Nuclear politics" is, and has been
since the technology first appeared.

We have the technological capability to build perfectly safe, high-performance
reactors that spit out low-risk waste products (or no waste products) for far
less than the cost of any current/planned project.

What we don't have is politicians with the balls to push through the political
minefield that come with it.

------
kalleboo
> Demand for electricity has plateaued nationwide as a result of major
> improvements in energy efficiency

How quickly can wide-spread adoption of EVs change this part of the equation?

------
pavement
Oh, come on. Just because old technology is too complicated to repair or
upgrade doesn't mean the entire industry has stalled.

This is pretty much the definition of "cruft." An accumulation of old defunct
artifacts in the face of technological advances. [0]

    
    
      [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cruft.html

~~~
ethbro
For better or worse, the regulatory environment ensures that "old technology"
is the only thing getting built on a production scale. So yeah, it is a
problem.

Since every plant is essentially a one-off * , the economics are doomed to be
terrible.

Honestly, the UN should just annoint a multinational nuclear conglomerate
composed of any volunteering existing nuclear companies. Standardize designs,
share R&D costs across all, then use UN-approval for non-proliferation or
assistance with waste disposal as the market carrot.

It's a bit crazy that for things like space and nuclear technology we're
burning so many resources (physical and human) reinventing the wheel in 5
different places, and telling smaller countries they just can't be trusted
with wheels.

* EDIT: Did some background reading and apparently this is one of the features of the AP1000 and its NRC certification. It's now certified to be built again _as long as the design is not modified_. Not sure if this was standard NRC practice, but the phrasing and context make this sound like a somewhat new approach.

~~~
merpnderp
You're seriously making the claim that NASA is more productive than the
commercial entities blowing its doors off with launch technology, with tiny
fractions of NASA's budget? I can't even imagine how you got there.

~~~
ethbro
I'm making the claim that, f.ex. Africa would be happier if there was RAND
technology transfer of basic spaceflight technology under the auspices of the
UN, rather than having to start from zero because they're not part of the club
of 3 with pre-existing manned spaceflight programs to crib from.

------
wantoncl
James Cameron Presents...

The Abyss Part 2

Coming Summer 2029

------
m0llusk
In my opinion this article is completely wrong. There were problems with many
early reactors. Now there is much exciting design work on fission reactors
especially using Thorium and fusion options are showing promise. If you look
at energy source development over the long term then nuclear power is looking
exceptionally strong now. If anything keeping older iterations operating
beyond their lifetimes would be a sign of stagnation.

~~~
pm90
How is this article "completely wrong"? It is basically reporting the actual
fact that new nuclear reactors are being abandoned because they are too
expensive.

~~~
m0llusk
How is a nuclear comeback more closely related to old reactor shutdowns than
new reactor designs? For a real example of energy generation being abandoned
look at dams which have no new generation of potential replacements causing
discussion.

