If there's one thing that you should compromise on when it comes to nuclear power it's definitely safety.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Hey good news everyone, instead of 40 years to build a new reactor, it’ll only take 39 years. What a relief. Good thing we didn’t fall for all that free sunlight and wind bullshit!
Hey, maybe nuclear plants can run on clean coal!
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.
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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.
not renewable
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/
According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total. [...] First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
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:
Some rough estimates (you can dig up more accurate numbers): The oceans contain about 321 million cubic miles of water (source: http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html), or 3.5e20 U.S. gal.
1 gal seawater contains roughly enough deuterium to provide the same energy as 300 gal of gasoline (maybe slightly less - that's the part for your homework!), so the oceans are equivalent to 1.1e23 gal. gasoline.
Conversion factors: 1 gal. gasoline = 1.24e5 Btu; 1 Btu = 1055 J; 1e15 Btu = 1 quad; U.S. annual energy consumption is a little under 100 quad; world annual consumption is about 500 quad.
So, the oceans contain about 1.3e28 Btu = 1.4e31 J of fusion fuel, which is 1.3e13 quad, which is enough to supply energy at the current rate of consumption for 26 BILLION years.
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.
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great idea, nothing wrong will come from pressuring the nuclear power regulators. nuh uh.
It really depends on what these reactors are going to be used for. Are they going to be licensed to private corporations to power data centers, or are they going to provide power to citizens homes?
Individually alot of his ideas could be good, with proper care and planning. Instead he does them all at once without any sort of considerations, its wild to witness this train wreck.
Idk how tariffs work but I like to imagine in our economic toolbox they are like a hammer. Can a hammer be useful, absolutely. But is it useful to throw 10,000 hammers at the rest of the world like trump is doing?
I am sure making consideration of climate change impacts illegal during the approval process won't have adverse consequences. When the water used to cool the reactor dries up, we'll have plenty of money and foresight to just pump it in from somewhere else, right?
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We need to work on permitting of New plants. Not new construction of Old plants.
But I get it, Don likes towers.
Quite glad that America is far away from where I am.
Soviet quality nuclear plants. Great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
Great, more power at unrealistic prices in… 2045.
Don't fret, these will never become operational anyway.
If the nuclear industry is going to be quadrupled, and gas and oil are similarly enlarged, and renewables are at least not shrinking, what are people supposed to do with all that extra power in such a short time? I mean, I get that induced demand is a thing but... a quadrupling of long-standing industries? Is there any intention for this plan to be realistic?
Trump doesn't do realism.
I seem to remember something going wrong before when corners were cut with nuclear...
Probably, the comapny behind the reactors (the only one who has a financial benefit) promised to build a Trump tower instead of the cooling tower, so 2 companies/families benefit now and 99.9% have to pay for that.
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