In the ever-evolving landscape of energy logistics, Russia is exploring an unconventional approach that could redefine the transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Imagine this: massive nuclear-powered submarines quietly carrying LNG beneath the icy waters of the Arctic, bypassing traditional shipping routes and geopolitical hurdles. This ambitious idea, proposed by Russian experts, might seem like something out of a science fiction novel, but it reflects a bold strategy to navigate a challenging economic and political environment. //

The proposed submarine model would weigh a staggering 180,000 tons and boast a draft of under 14 meters, making it capable of navigating areas that conventional LNG carriers cannot. The ability to traverse beneath the Arctic’s frozen expanse presents a tantalizing opportunity to shorten shipping times and bypass traditional chokepoints. //

The design isn’t just impressive—it’s revolutionary. Equipped with three Rhythm-200 nuclear reactors, the submarine would rely on 30 MW electric propellers, allowing it to reach speeds of 17 knots (about 31.5 km/h). At 360 meters long and 70 meters wide, the vessel’s size rivals that of the world’s largest oil tankers. More importantly, its operational capabilities would cut transit times between Arctic gas fields and Asian markets from 20 days to just 12.

This innovation isn’t solely about speed. These nuclear-powered giants could safely operate year-round, including during the harsh Arctic winter months when sea ice renders many traditional shipping lanes impassable. //

Russia’s largest LNG producer, Novatek, recently announced plans to acquire 16 ice-class LNG carriers. Yet sanctions and technological barriers have stymied progress, highlighting the difficulties of expanding Arctic shipping routes. By turning to nuclear-powered submarines, Russia hopes to sidestep these roadblocks while reinforcing its sovereignty over the Arctic.

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

In October, I wrote about how five of the country’s 10 largest coal-fired power plants had retirement dates. Today, I’m revisiting the list, providing some updates and then taking a few steps back to look at US coal plants as a whole. Consider this the “before” picture that can be judged against the “after” in four years.

Some coal plant owners have already pushed back retirement timetables. The largest example, this one from just before the election, is the Gibson plant in Indiana, the second-largest coal plant in the country. It’s set to close in 2038 instead of 2035, following an announcement in October from the owner, Duke Energy.

But the changes do not constitute a coal comeback in this country. For that to happen, power companies would need to be building new plants to replace the many that are closing, and there is almost no development of new coal plants. //

The United States had about 176,000 megawatts of coal plant capacity as of October, down from about 300,000 megawatts in 2014.

The coal plants that do remain are being used less. In 2023, the average capacity factor for a coal plant was 42 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a plant has generated relative to the maximum possible if it was running all the time. In 2014, the average capacity factor was 61 percent.

Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends. //

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush's EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA's encouragement.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden's inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.

All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration's EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they'd have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.

The State of Alaska filed a lawsuit against the federal government, alleging a violation of a congressional directive mandating the development of oil and gas resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s (ANWR) Coastal Plain.

Known as the Section 1002 Area, the 1.5 million-acre stretch of Alaska’s northern coast was designated by Congress in 1980 for potential energy development.

In 2017, Congress explicitly directed federal agencies to open the area for oil and gas leasing.

But a December, 2024 decision by the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management significantly curtailed this directive.

The World Bank’s mission has been subverted by green ideologues who assert that a low-carbon world benefits the world’s poor but fail to acknowledge that making energy much more costly increases poverty. The World Bank tags itself as ‘working for a world free of poverty’ … In making its choice between development and sustainability, the World Bank has decided it is going to try and ‘save the planet’ on the backs of the poor.

By abdicating its founding principles for alleviating global poverty, the World Bank has taken a lead role among multilateral financial institutions in denying vast financial resources to poorer countries. It has hypocritically vetoed the right of developing countries to adopt the path of economic growth and environmental improvement that the now-rich countries had taken up successfully since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. The World Bank’s obsessive support for intermittent, low-yield renewable energy such as solar and wind power comes at the cost of its central charter to help the poor, an outcome that can only be described as egregiously unjust.

Unfortunately, Trump cannot undo Biden’s executive order.

Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), a law established in 1953, states, “the President of the United States may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

Trump needs Congress to change the law. That could happen since the GOP controls the House and Senate.

No one can receive a lease to drill for oil, gas, or other minerals in those areas.

OCSLA lacks language that allows a future president to undo an executive order under Section 12(a).

Former President Barack Obama issued a similar executive order on December 20, 2016.

In April 2017, Trump signed an executive order to undo Obama’s order.

Activist groups challenged Trump’s order.

In 2019, US District Court Judge Sharon Gleason, based in Alaska, overturned Trump’s executive order, leaving in place Obama’s protection of the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea and the East Coast of America.

In 2019, during Trump's first term, a federal judge ruled that OCSLA does not permit presidents to overturn bans established by previous administrations. This means Trump would need congressional approval to reverse Biden's decision. //

Here's the part that really makes Joe Biden look petty and vindictive, not that he didn't look that way already. The outgoing president cited concerns about climate change as a reason for signing the order. If that really was his concern — if he really wanted to shut down energy production on essentially the entire United States continental shelf because of climate change — why did he wait until two weeks before leaving office?

The answer is obvious: This order has nothing to do with the climate. It's all political backbiting and attempted sabotage, pure and simple.

The Biden administration announced Monday that it is banning future offshore oil and gas activity across 625 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf—an area larger than the amount of land included in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803—in its waning days.

The action will shut down future drilling along the East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, 250 million acres along the West Coast, and 44 million acres of the Bering Sea along the Alaskan Coast. The law that President Joe Biden invoked to issue the policy does not give presidents explicit authority to revoke withdrawals approved by a former president, so the incoming Trump administration may have difficulty unwinding the ban as it pursues plans to unleash the U.S. energy sector. //

The White House announcement laying out the new drilling ban suggests that Monday’s actions secure Biden’s legacy on climate and energy policy, and the administration previously moved to cut offshore oil and gas drilling by issuing the most restrictive five-year leasing schedule in modern history in 2023. The 625 million acres affected by Monday’s announcement is a larger total area of land than the 530 million acres bought in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Biden declared a ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters on Monday.

With only two weeks remaining in his term, the current president invoked the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to place restrictions on areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and parts of Alaska's Northern Bering Sea from future oil and natural gas leasing.

In a statement prepared by his handlers, Biden declared any future offshore drilling was "not worth the risks."

"As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren," he announced. //

USA_Proud Big Hairy American Winner 7 hours ago

Actually, it is binding astaire to executive Orders, as it is based on an old law that allowed the President to remove these "lands" from the drilling list, but no authorization to return them. Of course, it can be removed by law, but with a nearly evenly divided legislature, some GOP members of scenic coastal areas, like FL, may not be willing to let any President restore offshore drilling to their coast. It might need to get complicated to target these Biden areas, which takes time.

Jprs Big Hairy American Winner 7 hours ago

Unfortunately, by invoking the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act it does bind future presidents. It will have to be over turned by Congress.

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany. //

When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a field day. He screamed to Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even growing opponents of the Nazi Party.

Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.

Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, warned that its mere mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.

Ex-President Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a premodern, rural peasantry.

But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their “ally” Russia’s Josef Stalin was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Harry Truman administration backed off the plan.

There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.

Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.

Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force. //

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.

The sudden desire to destroy trees for solar panels comes as the state risks failing to meet its own climate goal of 100% “clean” energy by 2040. If it doesn’t increase its development of so-called renewable energy, it won’t meet its arbitrary timeframe.

The 420 acres about to be bulldozed are part of 4,000 acres of public land that will be flattened to try and meet the 2040 deadline. //

Public land, even - meaning, presumably, land that is held by the state government in trust, as it were, for the people of the state of Michigan. Land that would otherwise be available for a variety of recreational uses, as most public land is.

Now, though, it will be destroyed in favor of solar panels that will take up an enormous amount of space to produce far less energy than a nuclear power plant would generate with a much, much smaller footprint.

This is ridiculous. //

To sum that up, solar arrays require 38 times more land to produce the same amount of electricity as one modern fission plant. Wind is even worse, requiring 140 times the land to produce that same amount of electricity - enough to power about 775,000 typical homes. That doesn't even take into account the issues with reliability or the necessity of battery backups for times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. //

So, why do these "clean energy" goals never include nuclear power? Fission reactors are everything the climate scolds and "clean energy" types profess to want; modern reactors, including molten-salt and small modular reactors, are safe, efficient, and produce no carbon emissions. //

They are literally destroying the environment to protect the environment. //

ConservativeInMinnesota
an hour ago edited
This is another example of progressive greenwashing. This won’t help the environment, it won’t reduce carbon and it isn’t scalable. It also isn’t base power as it won’t work at night or as well depending on the weather. That means another power plant needs to be built o provide power when this doesn't.

Get real and start deploying nuclear energy. Stop buying Chinese solar panels (based on stolen US IP) and leave the trees alone. The real world pollution will be effectively nonexistent, there will be less carbon and we don’t have to give more money to the CCP. //

Quiverfull
22 minutes ago
The deer and the antelope do not play
In the middle of a gross solar array

Meredith Angwin @MeredithAngwin
·
Dec 23
Grid frequency drifting outside operational limits implies the system is running at the margins. https://watt-logic.com/2024/12/23/gb-grid-frequency/
Thanks to Kathryn Porter for this analysis!
From watt-logic.com

chrispydog @chrispydog
When I explain this stuff to people: "Have you seen when a spinning top starts to wobble, and what comes next?"

Most people 'get it' pretty fast.
4:34 PM · Dec 24, 2024. //

I then analysed the number of 15-second intervals in each winter season for which the operation or statutory limits were breached. The results are in the table below. As can be seen, in the past 4 years, there have been c 500 times the upper operational limit was breached, but in 2017 – 2019 the number was higher. The lower limit has tended to be breached less often – 2022 was an outlier with a very high number of breaches. There has also been a consistent trend of lower limit breaches increasing in frequency, which is consistent with falling grid inertia (see chart). //

This fits with the expected picture that the grid is becoming less reliable. It is also interesting that when individual occurrences are inspected, it is more often the case that frequency has drifted outside the operational range rather than suddenly falling out as would be expected from an outage. This is more worrying as it points to a general difficulty in maintaining stable frequency – things will always break and trip, and the grid is designed to deal with that, but these drifts outside the range speak more to a wider reduction in stability versus what is expected.

The obvious question was, who did it? Four suspects emerged: the United States, Ukraine, an undetermined party probably involving Poland, and Russia. But, as stated in Putin’s PR Machine Throws up Smoke as the Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion Investigation Begins, my personal view is that Russia was the most likely culprit.

1. The pipelines were not producing income; they were costing money to operate.
2. The war forced Nord Stream customers to find other sources, and it was unlikely that Nord Stream would operate again.
3. It made it clear to Germany what the price was for helping Ukraine.
4. It avoided breach of contract financial penalties that would hit Gazprom if Germany desired to re-open the pipeline, and Russia refused.
5. The repair cost of the pipelines was insured.
6. Breaching the pipelines at the deepest part means that the shortest area would be flooded, and the damage would be the cheapest to repair.
   In my view, the bonus was that the explosions took place in Scandinavian fishing grounds, and the first explosion was in the vicinity of a new Norway-Poland pipeline which gave it a “nice pipeline you’ve got there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it” flavor.

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Here's the math behind making a star-encompassing megastructure.

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.

But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere? //

Even if we were to coat the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels, we would still only capture less than a tenth of a billionth of all the energy our sun produces. Most of it just radiates uselessly into empty space. We’ll need to keep that energy from radiating away if we want to achieve Great Galactic Civilization status, so we need to do some slight remodeling. We don’t want just the surface of the Earth to capture solar energy; we want to spread the Earth out to capture more energy. //

For slimmer, meter-thick panels operating at 90 percent efficiency, the game totally changes. At 0.1 AU, the Earth would smear out a third of the sun, and we would get a return on our energy investment in around a year. As for Jupiter, we wouldn’t even have to go to 0.1 AU. At a distance about 30 percent further out than that, we could achieve the unimaginable: completely enclosing our sun. We would recoup our energy cost in only a few hundred years, and we could then possess the entirety of the sun’s output from then on. //

MichalH Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
62

euknemarchon said:
I don't get it. Why wouldn't you use asteroid material?
The mass of all asteroids amounts to only 3% of the earth's moon. Not worth chasing them down, I'd guess. //

DCStone Ars Tribunus Militum
14y
2,313
"But [Jupiter]’s mostly gas; it only has about five Earth’s worth of rocky material (theoretically—we’re not sure) buried under thousands of kilometers of mostly useless gas. We'd have to unbind the whole dang thing, and then we don’t even get to use most of the mass of the planet."

Hmm. If we can imagine being able to unbind rocky planets, we can also imagine fusing the gas atmosphere of Jupiter to make usable material (think giant colliders). Jupiter has a mass of about 1.9 x 10^27 kg, of which ~5% is rocky core. We'd need to make some assumptions about the energy required to fuse the atmosphere into something usable (silicon and oxygen to make silicates?) and the efficiency of that process. Does it do enough to change the overall calculation though? //

Dark Jaguar Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
11,066
The bigger issue is the sphere wouldn't be gravitationally locked in place because the sun is cancelling it's own pull in every direction. Heck even Ringworld had to deal with this flaw in the sequel. That's why these days the futurists talking about enclosing the sun recommend "Dyson swarming" instead.

Edit: A little additional note. You can't really get the centrifugal force needed to generate artificial gravity across an entire sphere like you can with a ring. A swarm doesn't negate this. If you orbit fast enough to generate that artificial gravity, you're now leaving the sun behind. Enjoy drifting endlessly! No, rather each of these swarm objects are just going to have to rotate themselves decently fast.

The summer of 2023 may be remembered as an important point in human civilization as the threat to critical and efficient energy supplies began to recede.

Sweden’s government has ditched plans to go all-in on “green energy,” green-lighting the construction of new nuclear power plants. Fossil fuel giant Shell announced it was scaling back its energy transition plans to focus on . . . gas and oil! Specific wind farm projects began to topple due to strong economic headwinds because the cost of the electricity to be generated was deemed too high. //

A little closer to home, Deep Blue California has recently announced the state is delaying the closure of 3 fossil-fuel-based power plants.

The reason? The green energy fantasies are not compatible with actual power realities. //

As has long been the case, the largest single source of electricity in California comes from natural gas.

The amount of natural gas in the state’s mix of energy resources has been reduced by about one-fifth in the past 10 years, falling from 130,995 gigawatt-hours in 2012 to 104,495 in 2022. //

CommoChief in reply to DaveGinOly. | September 1, 2023 at 8:34 pm
One way to actually help the environment is cut down on additional transmission lines. How about limiting imported electricity in each State to 10% of peak demand and tying that to the ability of the State to receive any waivers? So if CA isn’t generating 90% of peak electricity demand (they ain’t) then CA no longer gets to set their own more stringent standards for fossil fuels, types of appliances, airborne particulate matter, fuel efficiency in vehicles and so on. All they gotta do to regain their current ability to disrupt national markets is be willing to generate 90% of their peak electric demand. Maybe add in State refining capacity for special fuel blends as well; not just from already ‘cracked’ product imported from elsewhere but from crude oil. Surely CA would want to do that in their State with their enlightened and virtuous environmental safeguards? Since they’re so much smarter, better, virtuous and more caring than the rest of us. /s?

As we grapple with the twin challenges of energy security and energy reliability, revisiting Nixon’s vision offers valuable lessons. //

In the annals of American energy policy, few moments stand out as boldly as the unveiling of Nixon’s nuclear agenda. His plan, set against the backdrop of the 1973 oil embargo, was both a response to the immediate crisis and a long-term strategy for the nation’s energy security. One allure of nuclear power was its potential to diversify America’s energy portfolio and market, providing a backup in case of a crisis in one sector. Nixon envisaged a future where America’s cities and industries would be powered by the atom, reducing domestic risks associated with dependence on foreign oil. //

However, several factors derailed Nixon’s nuclear dream. During the Cold War, concerns about nuclear proliferation were already mounting, particularly around civilian nuclear programs that could lay the groundwork for weapon development if nuclear energy expanded into politically unstable regions. These proliferation concerns, combined with environmental fears intensified by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and later the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, significantly dampened public and political support for nuclear energy. This climate of skepticism led policymakers to impose regulatory hurdles on nuclear plant construction that ultimately proved insurmountable.

Every major advance in human technology, in human standard of living, has come with increases in energy density. From wood to charcoal to coal to oil to natural gas to fission power, the arc of progress in energy has always been toward greater, not lower, energy density. That is until the green energy types came along with their insistence on low-density sources like solar and wind.

So, with nuclear fission reactors providing the highest energy density available today, the question arises, "Where do we go from here?" What energy source can provide greater energy density than fission power?

The answer is fusion power. But the problem is that it's a few decades away, and has been since the '50s:

Meta believes it will need one to four gigawatts of nuclear power, in additional to the energy it already consumes, to fuel its AI ambitions. As such, it will put out a request for proposals (RFP) to find developers capable of supplying that level of electricity in the United States by early 2030. //

But while Meta plans to continue investing in solar and wind, hyperscalers seem convinced that harnessing the atom is the only practical means of meeting AI's thirst for power while making good on its sustainability commitments.

SpaceWeatherNews @SunWeatherMan
·
Trying to shoot a hole in this argument. Can’t. Any takers?
prayingforexits 🏴‍☠️
@mrexits
He is kind of asking the right questions here

There exist magic rocks that can boil water.

Boiling water gives us energy.

We stop using magic rocks because they exploded that one time.

Are we re*ed? Imagine if pre historic (sic) peoples stopped using fire because some red burnt his house down once.
10:54 AM · Dec 2, 2024

It's an interesting question. It's also a great illustration of the irrational thinking in some quarters when things like climate change are concerned. The fact is that nuclear energy is safer, with a lower rate of injury, than any energy method other than solar.

Climate scolds, people who want to keep the earth at some human-approved level, are all about "clean energy." They love the intermittent, low-energy-density sources - windmills, solar power - but can't abide and will not discuss nuclear power or "magic rocks." And when it comes to energy density, there just isn't any comparison. One fuel pellet of uranium in a light-water reactor produces as much energy as 1.3 tons of coal, 250 gallons of oil, and 34,000 cubic feet of natural gas. In a breeder reactor, the numbers are much higher: 22 tons of coal, 4,350 gallons of oil, and 590,000 cubic feet of natural gas. //

Forget what climate scolds claim to want. Look at what they are in favor of: You (not they) reducing your standard of living to meet their claimed goals. Look at the actions of the high-profile members of the opposition: Jetting around the globe in private jets, living in huge mansions a few feet above the tide line in the oceans they claim are rising out of control. They expect you to pay the price they aren’t willing to.

Do you want clean energy? This is clean energy. It's safe energy. No “still just thirty years away” fusion boondoggles are required. Not that fusion wouldn’t be even greater if we can make it work on an industrial scale, but how long have various organizations been trying to make that happen? This technology, nuclear power, especially the promising small modular reactors, is a technology we have now.

The new, improved small modular reactors described above could and should be built today. Technological societies like ours are dependent on abundant, cheap energy, and nuclear power has the ability to provide that power. Throughout our history, every major technological advance in power – from animal to machine, from wood to coal to oil to gas – has had one key characteristic in common, and that is increased energy density. Nuclear power represents just such an increase over generating electricity with coal or gas. Solar and wind power run in just the opposite direction, which is why they don’t scale up. //

anon-j5pd
a day ago
I’m an engineer and was a nuclear operator in the Navy. I’m a big supporter of nuclear power.
My dad used to work at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in AZ. It’s the biggest nuke in the country.
Just for fun I calculated the area of solar panels required to match Palo Verde’s output. It would require a field of panels 25 miles on a side, 625 square miles of panels. I used the power conversion factor and highest rate of sunlight incidence on the panels.
Palo Verde churns out the same amount of power day and night and isn’t impacted by dust. //

They Call Me Bruce
a day ago
Can't argue with a word of this.

As for safety, I used to be fond of pointing out that more people died in Ted Kennedy's car than in every civilian nuclear accident in the US combined.