A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
I thought I'd mention that ship supplied short power has been a thing for ages. USS Daniel Webster even trained for this for new years eve apocalypse nothingburger. And its almost always been used for only powering something critical. Today's subs are <10MW. Nothing for utility scale. I can't imagine the economics are ever good. More of a: we've already got this boat.
Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.
At least Russia is doing fine with SMRs, thought the fuel enrichment level is around 20%. They are building new reactors all the time and they seem pretty efficient. E.g. they have even floating nuclear plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.
> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
Yes, as a Portuguese with some patriotic feelings (but also self critical when needed), I was impressed myself with the quality of this report given the time frame.
The US Constitution? (lot of assumptions of locations here, insert your charter of freedoms/other guarantor of rights here if parent comment OP is not in the US)
Everything is a matter of degrees. Could regulation and rules be taken to an extreme? Sure. The opposite is true, as well. There are several libertarian utopias with no functioning government on the planet, but it is telling that Free Staters move to New Hampshire and not Somalia
The answer is yes, we should be mandated to do things that help the greater good. If we're going to have a society and function as a cohesive population with common goals and morals and the idea that we are going to improve ourselves, you're going to have to force some people to come along
It's insane that preventing polio is being compared to a "nanny state" at this point
Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
Everything at Microsoft is seen primarily as an AI platform, but especially developer focused stuff is all AI. They've rolled up all the Azure stuff on our account team to be represented by our "Cloud and AI" specialist, even though we aren't using AI in any of our PaaS/IaaS Azure usage
Eh, I don't think so. They've realigned basically everything to have some kind of AI component, or the dev story to be AI heavy but if AI evaporates tomorrow Azure is still there, Microsoft 365 is still there. It would be a hit to their growth story but they wouldn't be out of business
This is correct. “AI” has simply been stapled onto a bunch of established properties, and injected into a bunch of places without permission. I have several clients who are small healthcare providers, and I have had to beat Copilot off with my HIPAA-shaped stick, but it’s not been easy, as it just shows up in some other place (or even gets reinstalled entirely), so now update Tuesday has become “scan-endpoints-for-copilot-again-Tuesday” (Taco Tuesday and Two For Tuesday on 99.7 FM remain unaffected).
I think it’s really telling that AI could disappear tomorrow, and aside from a gigantic hole where half a trillion bucks used to be, not much would really change.
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