Good news, everyone! The Three Mile Island power plant, site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history, is restarting to power AI for Microsoft! [Press release; Washington Post, archive; Bloomber…
There’s a specific kind of online commentator that’s a carrier of the meme that the public turn against nuclear power was the final nail in the coffin for Western civilization. I don’t have any proof of this, other than cultural. Nuke fondlers tend to be culturally and politically conservative, generally with engineering or science degrees, and seem to pine for the idealized 50s so present in tradwife media nowadays (although nuke love precedes that by decades).
Opposition to nuclear power was sort of a death knell for the ideal of the technocrat.
Now of course nuke enthusiasts tend to be libertarians too, and they run smack into the fact that nuclear is really capital-intensive and expensive to insure. Thus the pipe dream of the inherently safe “container reactor”.
Sweden’s current gov is driven a lot by opposition to all things Green (both the party and the ideas) and pushed for the construction of 10 new reactors. It turns out that the industry has been burned by vacillating govs before and required hard financial guarantees, as well as a iron-clad price floor for electricity, to commit. So the pitch to the public would be: there’s no way you can lower your per-unit power cost for 30 years, and in return you get 10 items widely perceived as ugly and dangerous.
Nuclear at least doesn’t pump out CO2, so a lotta people who aren’t like you describe consider it worth considering. 850MW of nuclear is better than 850MW of gas on this scale.
But the economics just completely fuck it. TMI unit 1 shut down cos it couldn’t compete economically and only an IRA tax break makes it even plausible.
There’s a big thing in Australia at the moment where the LNP, beholden to some donor or other, is pushing economically nonviable nuclear hard. And even a lotta the green side is saying “nice idea, now make the numbers work in this universe.”
There’s a specific kind of online commentator that’s a carrier of the meme that the public turn against nuclear power was the final nail in the coffin for Western civilization. I don’t have any proof of this, other than cultural. Nuke fondlers tend to be culturally and politically conservative, generally with engineering or science degrees, and seem to pine for the idealized 50s so present in tradwife media nowadays (although nuke love precedes that by decades).
Opposition to nuclear power was sort of a death knell for the ideal of the technocrat.
Now of course nuke enthusiasts tend to be libertarians too, and they run smack into the fact that nuclear is really capital-intensive and expensive to insure. Thus the pipe dream of the inherently safe “container reactor”.
Sweden’s current gov is driven a lot by opposition to all things Green (both the party and the ideas) and pushed for the construction of 10 new reactors. It turns out that the industry has been burned by vacillating govs before and required hard financial guarantees, as well as a iron-clad price floor for electricity, to commit. So the pitch to the public would be: there’s no way you can lower your per-unit power cost for 30 years, and in return you get 10 items widely perceived as ugly and dangerous.
Nuclear at least doesn’t pump out CO2, so a lotta people who aren’t like you describe consider it worth considering. 850MW of nuclear is better than 850MW of gas on this scale.
But the economics just completely fuck it. TMI unit 1 shut down cos it couldn’t compete economically and only an IRA tax break makes it even plausible.
There’s a big thing in Australia at the moment where the LNP, beholden to some donor or other, is pushing economically nonviable nuclear hard. And even a lotta the green side is saying “nice idea, now make the numbers work in this universe.”