Ummm… It very clearly says assorted on the box.

Cost effectiveness isn’t the only consideration. My area isn’t how they move the power around but I know that plays a role too.

I guess the point is that they’re working on better batteries, right? Ones that can get better efficiencies and all that? I am not an expert in this area of course, but I’m also not able to build you an SMR, so again, idk what technology will eventually win out (in terms of cost effectiveness or overall viability) I just know it’s something everyone’s talking about.

There’s a great story from the Fukushima response that is basically this exact thing. Plant operator (I think it was…) got told by some bigwig not to put seawater in the ractor because it would scuttle the reactor and it could never be used again. Guy ordered it done anyway because they didn’t have fresh water and the reactor needed water over it to prevent total meltdown.

I think that’s a somewhat narrow view on how energy works.

It is confusing! I’ll add my understanding and it will probably be different than other things you’ve heard, but I’ll add it anyway.

The NRC (for the US) is the regulator. They have ultimate authority to inspect all nuclear power plants. Sometimes the state does as well, depends on the state’s agreement with the NRC. But ultimately it’s the NRC. Every power plant has an NRC inspector whose job it is to look for infractions and make sure the plant is doing all the things. They obviously can’t be everywhere at once, so there’s a bunch of other stuff the plants have to do to prove they are following all the rules. There is currently a huge regulatory burden on nuclear power plant operators and owners. Good. It should be that way for small modular reactors but it remains to be seen of they’ll be able to get away with less safe practices (my bet is yes, at least under the current administration).

Waste is complicated. The US government made a deal a long time ago with the utilities building the plants that they’d provide a place for waste storage, and they haven’t, so they’ve been sued. They’ll just keep getting sued and have to pay the utilities back (the utilities pay for the waste location by paying the gov… It’s weird). There are some attempts being made to have a private company (or companies) take over storing the waste. It’s complicated, and still requires us to transport the waste, which is also complicated. That being said, the DOE has been doing transuranic waste transportation for ages (irradiated junk in barrels) It’s called WIPP and they move all the contaminated crap to a salt mine in NV. It’s not easy, but it can be done.

As for loosing any of the waste… Yeah, if you lose the actual waste that’s very bad and NRC very mad at you. But the irradiated junk? Eh, the government loses shit all the time. Irradiated junk isn’t great, but it’s probably not killing you. Probably not.

And as for who’s profiting? Who knows? It’s like George Carlin said. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

It’s safer than living next to a coal fired power plant!

By a very very large magnitude. And when you factor in stuff like mining deaths and industrial accidents, nuclear kills less people than wind (per kwh) but solar is slightly better than nuclear.

This is absolutely my main concern too (and the specific area in which I work, so the thing I feel lost comfortable commenting on). I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight shift or anything. What I think will happen is that the US will step away from standard international practices when it comes to how much radiation a person can receive (and therefore how much the general public can receive) and while nothing will change right away, eventually nuclear plants will cut costs somewhere and not filter out as much material as they have been required to up til now. Any increases in cancer 20-30 years from now will probably get blamed on something else though, knowing how our system works. For nuclear workers, the effects will probably be more noticable and quicker, but again, attempts will be made to hide any negative health consequences. Lord forbid we have a release incident during that time though. And even worse if regulations relax to the point where the utility doesn’t have to carry the burden of fixing the problem they created (which is where I see things going over the long term). Right now, if a plant releases radioactive material they are legal responsible for that material. If that eroded what incentive will they have to make sure they don’t lose it?

This isn’t my exact area, but my understanding is that this is also a political will thing. There are concerns about reprocessing because some of the reprocessing could make bombs and we’re scared of it getting stolen? I think? Idk, not my area. But as I understand it, other places in the world already do reprocessing. I’m not sure we will ever get there. We can’t even get a storage facility!

It’s not about energy density. It’s about base load issues. One of the big items that the nuclear industry harps on is that they handle base load energy requirements when wind and solar aren’t producing as much. But a good battery system would also solve that problem, by allowing excess wind and solar energy to be stored for use when the base load is high but wind and solar aren’t able to produce that amount of energy at that exact time.

They’re not cunts. They lack the depth and warmth.

I’m nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:

1. Renewables are the future. Nuclear power is expensive and takes a long time to build, mostly because people don’t like the idea of a reactor near them. While that’s also true of things like wind farms, the lawsuits on those don’t take as long, I guess.
2. Small modular reactors may have a place in our future energy landscape, but the specifics remain to be seen. SMRs are (obviously) smaller, so they have less fuel in them, generate less waste, and would be easier to build (like modular homes, they’d be all made basically the same in a factory and shipped to their site). They are in a race against good enough battery technology to carry the base load. Who will win? Well, nuclear is getting a lot of extra support currently, but still, who knows?
3. Nuclear power is so much safer than people assume. Nuclear reactors have reactor buildings which are big thick concrete monstrosities (part of the reason they’re so dang expensive to build). It’s quite hard for them to leak, so releases will end up being little amounts out of limited area. Yes, even Fukushima, which while very bad and very expensive to clean up, wasn’t the thing killing people. One person officially died, years later from lung cancer. Cancer he might have gotten anyway; we can’t know. In the US at least, a lot of money goes into emergency preparation at nuclear power plants, trying to mitigate the impacts of any kind of event, but the concern is cancer, not radiation poisoning. 3.5 interestingly, SMRs will probably not get big thick concrete structures around them, or at least not as big or as thick. It’s because the risk is lower in those designs but also because there’s just not as much material that could be flung around. This may have changed though (this is not my specific area, just something I hear a lot about). Maybe it will be more akin to naval reactors or something. Those are very small, and very very safe.
4. Nuclear waste storage is a political problem. The nuclear industry has been paying for a long-term storage solution for decades and recently sued the US government over it. We absolutely built a house without a toilet, but we could change that with enough political will. Until then, the waste sits at the plant under guard. It’s not great but none of the plants are going to run out of room or anything.
5. The US government is going away from certain standards that are generally recognized as being the safest approach to radiological exposure. This, quite frankly, may be disastrous, but likely not immediately. Eventually I could see it leading to eroded safety culture and that could be a problem long term. But I’m a notorious pessimist, so…
6. Renewables are the future. Anyone telling you anything different is selling something. Probably stock in an SMR company.

It would have to be a pretty big bomb. After 9/11 they did a bunch of research and it turns out a reactor building can take a hit from a 747.

Renewables are absolutely the future, but people really don’t get how the nuclear industry handles safety. If we could regulate every industry as well as the nuclear industry has been since 1980 (which the current administration is trying to strip away, of course) we would eliminate a heckuva lotta risk in our society.

Yes, but realistically most Americans do not live in a place where that is possible.

You mean there’s a sucker reborn every day!