Those trucks do not claim to have a 500 mile range on a single charge like the Tesla Semi. If the Volvo examples given could get 500 miles on a charge while retaining a cab-over design then you would have a point. They claim 700 km, or about 435 miles. That might be only a 15% difference but I have a suspicion that it would be enough to force a significant redesign of the truck to get to 500 miles, to the point that it could no longer retain the cab-over format as it is currently understood/defined.

Maybe we could see some new battery chemistry that can allow for all kinds of new capabilities but this will come at a cost, and not necessarily a monetary cost. In the search for batteries with increasing energy density we are seeing batteries that are made in ways that make them increasingly more delicate, and should there be damage then they can burn in ways that are difficult to control. This has lead toward a trend in battery-electric vehicles to use battery chemistry and construction that give up energy density so as to be more durable, use less expensive materials, and address other concerns. It is because of these trends I'm suspicious of battery-electric long haul trucks seeing success in wide adoption.

I recently saw a video on YouTube singing the praises on gains being made in "solar fuel" technology. This is the same fuel synthesis technology that has existed for something like a century now but this time the heat and electricity for producing diesel fuel, jet fuel, or whatever, comes from sunlight. Is the goal to move cargo by battery power? Or move cargo in a manner that doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere? Solar fuels will allow using the same diesel trucks we have now but with carbon neutral fuel than fossil fuel.

I believe we should be looking at new fuels than new trucks. Solve the fuel problem and we make all existing vehicles carbon neutral than set ourselves up for trying to replace what took us a century to build in logistics and infrastructure. Change the fuel and we could reach carbon neutral in a decade or two. Changing to all battery-electric vehicles will likely take more than a century. If I were to make a bet on which comes first then I know where I'd put my money.

That worked well for the time because routes the trucks took were short so the range requirements were minimal. Then is that with deliveries being in the early mornings, while people were still asleep and wanting milk with their breakfast, being quiet was important. The load needing to be carried was relatively small and light and so no real concern on the battery-electric milk truck being so big that navigating tight corners in residential areas could be a problem, or so heavy that there could be a concern on breaking the pavement.

Does any of this apply for the Tesla Semi? A Class 8 vehicle? These are trucks meant to haul 20+ tons of cargo over hundreds of miles. These trucks are not meant for tight confines seen in residential areas but the wide open highways, no need for the shorter cab-over designs common in Europe. It might be difficult to make a practical cab-over battery electric Class 8 truck given the volume the battery required for the range and power demanded of the vehicle.

Isn't there a rule that allows electric trucks to exceed the normal weight limits for Class 8 trucks? I recall it is about an extra 2000 pounds over the limit for a diesel truck. I expect this was necessary or the Tesla Semi would be dead on arrival. Without that allowance for extra battery weight then the people operating the trucks would have to make up for it by reducing the mass of the cargo carried. Since trucking runs on moving cargo mass over miles that would make a dent in profits that few companies and owner-operators would tolerate.

I have my doubts that any Class 8 battery-electric truck will prove successful. Had this been something like a Ford Transit or GMC Topkick, Class 6 vehicles at most, then I would have higher expectations for success. These are trucks that would do the kind of work that the old milk delivery trucks would do, as in short hauls with "light" loads (at least "light" when compared to Class 8) and long periods of being idle for a recharge. Short haul semi trucks are certainly a thing but these are also the cab-over trucks that tend to be popular in Europe because these are the kinds of trucks that make that "last mile" delivery to grocery stores and such, and so need to be able to navigate in tighter spaces. The size of the battery, as I mentioned before, is certainly incompatible with this shorter cab design.

The United States Postal Service tried to experiment with battery electric delivery trucks. The problem they ran into was getting enough electrical capacity to the overnight parking lots to charge all the trucks. Issues like that could pose problems for wide adoption of the Tesla Semi and similar vehicles.

Where? I'm guessing here that we'd start with new reactors at existing nuclear power plants. Then we'd likely see old fossil fuel plants get converted to nuclear, these are places with existing wires, rail lines, water, and so on to minimize cost for new nuclear capacity.

Similarly I expect new nuclear reactors built on land owned by hydroelectric operators, there's typically a lot of land around the dams that's been set aside for matters of facility security, future expansion, and so on that could accommodate a nuclear reactor. Also, like with conversion of fossil fuel plants to nuclear, a hydroelectric dam will have things like wires, water (a lot of water), rail, and so on already in place to make new construction almost trivial.

We can build a lot of new nuclear power capacity at existing sites before we need to worry about finding new places to build. Before we run out of existing power plants to use for land we'd likely start looking to existing government land with lots of space and existing security perimeters, such as military bases, airports, national labs, universities, and maybe little bits carved off of nature reserves and national parks. I expect people will protest such ideas but the alternatives would be solar panels and windmills that take up far more land for the same output as a much smaller nuclear reactor. It's not like windmills and solar panels are free from issues. Windmills kill large and rare birds, as well as create issues with radar used for tracking aircraft and weather. Solar panels also kill birds, and create problems for aircraft with the reflections that come off them. Maybe we could see nuclear power plants built on barges and floated to ports near population centers, Russia is experimenting with this idea. Floating power plants can solve a lot of issues surrounding construction and siting.

At what rate? In the USA? Well, slowly at first then likely exceeding the peak rate reached in the 1970s two or four times over. In the 1970s the USA was putting 1 GW on the grid of new nuclear power every month, so I'd expect we could reach 1 GW per week in the USA within a decade or two. Given that we are currently seeing about 60 GW of new electrical generating capacity per year added to the grid it shouldn't be too big of a reach to see a decent sized chunk of that be nuclear if the USA were committed to lowering CO2 emissions while improving reliability of electrical generation. The global build rate is anyone's guess, there's a lot of variables to consider.

I see at least two issues with bringing those up as examples to oppose new nuclear power. The first issue is that they are first-of-a-kind and in any "first" there will be a lot of lessons to be learned. As we gain experience on construction costs should come down. As the technology develops with lessons learned costs should come down. As regulators learn more about what keeps nuclear power safe we should be able to reduce regulatory costs. A related issue to this is that you picked two outliers among dozens of nuclear power plants. Why not look at average costs? Or look for a couple successes to go with the failures to give a range on what to expect?

Second, the reason we are seeing a renewed interest in nuclear power is because costs for all other energy sources are going up. We are currently seeing a number of trade wars driving up energy costs globally, as well as some shooting wars that are driving up demand while driving down production. It's not too much of a leap to believe that we can see current trends in rising energy get extrapolated out to where $50 billion for a new 3-ish GW nuclear power plant look like a bargain.

If you want to argue against nuclear power because of the costs then it might be a wise to do it somewhere other than the comment section on a news article on how nuclear power costs are coming down. We are seeing more people consider nuclear power because cost on nuclear power are coming down and the costs of alternatives are going up. At some point those two lines on the graph will cross and then so much opposition to new nuclear power will fall.

A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that construction started on Chernobyl in 1972, and construction on Fukushima started in 1967. Fukushima is hardly the more modern power plant. We could look deeper into which is "newer", such as which had the engineering plans drawn first or which came into operation first, but we'd still end up with them being contemporary designs for the most part. I'd argue that the failures in engineering were such that they were so rare and random that it simply took longer for the flaws in Fukushima to manifest. Both designs were almost certain to fail before their planned operational life, it's just that we had to see dozens of both designs built and many decades to pass before those failures became obvious.

What bothers me the most is that the meltdowns at Fukushima could have been avoided if the oldest reactors were shutdown as planned in March of 2011 than allowed to be operating in May when the tsunami hit. The reactors were still operating because of delays in construction of new reactors over lawsuits and protests on new nuclear reactors, reactors built to higher standards on quake tolerances and flooding hazards. This could have been avoided if people weren't protesting, or the government had enough of a spine to keep new construction on schedule in spite of the protests.

If nuclear power safety concerns you then get out of the way of new nuclear power construction. If we can't build new nuclear power plants then our other options are energy scarcity, or keeping old and unsafe reactors operating until they blow up in our faces or some other better option comes along. If you believe better options already exist, such as wind and solar power, then we'd have already shutdown these old reactors. Your protests created this problem, and people died from it. Your efforts to "save the planet" has resulted in real and actual people ending up dead.

This is also a problem that is a creation of protests. Stop getting in the way of solutions and we'd have this solved already. One example of this is a proposed design for a pressurized heavy water reactor that can "eat" the waste from current nuclear power reactors. There will still be some waste materials from these reactors but it will be of shorter life isotopes, and isotopes that are known to be useful for industry and medicine and so not exactly "waste" that needs to be disposed of at considerable expense. Those processing the waste could sell off the valued isotopes to pay for the disposal of what they cannot use.

Stop getting in the way of new nuclear power plants and we'd have these problems solved already.

Right, we can't allow new nuclear power plants being built because that could mean people investing in solar power could see their investments tank.

Electricity from nuclear fission is really only a threat to solar power. Fossil fuels don't see nuclear power as a threat because most of their money is in liquid fuels and chemicals, until we figure out how make airplanes fly over oceans on battery power there's going to be demand for fossil fuels. Wind and hydro don't fear nuclear power because there's little reason to expect nuclear power to be lower cost and/or scale as well as they can. Solar power has a very powerful lobby, to the point that they make more money from government subsidy than they do from actual useful energy.

So much of what is holding nuclear power back is FUD. 40 years of rising energy costs is making people reconsider nuclear power as an option. So much of what anti-nuclear people complain about are problems they constructed by regulation and protests. As people learn this the barriers to new nuclear power will fall away. We will get more nuclear power plants, you'll just have to deal with that.

It appears to me that you are conflating two issues. There's protections from failures in technology and operations versus that of security against deliberate attacks. Has there been deliberate attacks on nuclear power in the USA? I mean other than Greenpeace trying to "prove" how vulnerable nuclear power plants are to attacks. We could make nuclear power much safer in the USA by declaring Greenpeace a domestic terror organization, because that is what they are, and having law enforcement act as they normally would towards any domestic terrorists.

Really? Nothing has been learned since Chernobyl?

Assume for a moment that nothing has been learned. How should we act to resolve this? If you want to take the aviation example then consider how we make safer aircraft. We'd likely start with making prototypes, then test them to failure in a controlled environment. It's a bit difficult to prove any new nuclear power plant design as "safe" if the NRC requires that safety be proved before a license to build is issued. Would the NRC, and the general public, accept computer simulations to prove a design is safe? Part of the problem with simulations is that they need real world information for the simulations and if all the data we have is based off of designs from the 1960s then we could be getting garbage out because the simulation was fed garbage data. We can't get good data on safety if we don't experiment on new designs. It appears to me that the only "out" on this is getting data from other nations, nations that aren't so afraid of their shadow that they will build new nuclear reactor designs so as to get good data on safety. If the only nations willing to build new nuclear power plants are closed nations like Russia, North Korea, and China then we will see them gain in nuclear power technology while we sit around and wait for either them proving us the fools with what little information that leaks out, or enough people wise up on the catch-22 we put ourselves into and issue permits to build some nuclear power plants.

If you want to see people learn about nuclear power then we need to allow people to build real and actual full scale and operational nuclear power plants. There isn't any suitable replacement for real world experience.

I call bullshit on that. There's no money in a nuclear power plant that falls apart, blows up, or has its permits revoked for failing an inspection.

As usual the opposition to new nuclear power plants is the same recycled nonsense from the 1980s. If the problems of nuclear power plants in the 1980s bothers you so much then build new nuclear power plants that use different technologies and operational structures. We learned how to make aviation safe because we didn't give up on the entire industry because of some failures here and there due to bad design or some companies having management issues. Chernobyl was a power plant built off a flawed design from the 1960s, built hastily in the 1970s with substandard materials, operated by poorly trained people in the 1980s, and so resulted in a large scale disaster that we must still deal with. We don't operate nuclear power like that in the USA, we never did, but people still bring that up as some kind of excuse not to utilize nuclear fission power in the USA. An aviation analogy might be like grounding Boeing aircraft in the USA because some Soviet-era passenger jet crashed 40 years ago. The Soviets used different aircraft designs, different training for aircraft crew and maintainers, etc.

If you have a problem on how the USA operates nuclear power then use failures in the USA as examples. What do you have then? Three Mile Island? That was 50 years ago, a lot has changed in technology and operating practices since. Oh, and while the reactor was considered a total loss the impact on health and safety to the area should be considered theoretical, mythical/psychological, or at least debatable. Three Mile Island proved nuclear power safety. It was not proof that nuclear power is any kind of threat.

Keep up the FUD if you like, it's not working any more. We will see more nuclear power plants built regardless because the general public is learning that we don't have much in other options. If anyone opposes nuclear power then they need to be prepared to offer viable alternatives. Without a better option there's going to be new nuclear power plants built. Deal with it.

I still have my Zip drives from that time, none were USB though. I bought a Zip 100 SCSI drive and a Zip 250 FireWire drive but have something like a half dozen more because they were given to me by others as they moved on to CD-R or whatever and I'm a pack rat with a 'tism for computer tech.

I had a number of Mac computers during this period of Zip drives being popular and found the experience very pleasant. 100 MB was enough to install MacOS and some games or whatever so I could boot from the drive and do stuff without much worry of messing up my hard drive. I recall Windows not being nearly as seamless, some of this being from the user expecting too much from the technology. An example of Zip drives creating a problem was my older brother asking for help with his computer, I discovered he had his Zip drive, printer, and scanner all daisy chained off the parallel port on his PC. That was asking a lot from a port created exclusively for a single printer. Then was having Windows not exactly supporting USB all that well, to the point that if a USB Zip drive was unplugged from the system the OS went into a fit of removing drivers and rearranging drive letters.

I remember Zip 750 being a thing but by that time CD-RW had made Zip drives pretty much obsolete. I wasn't about to invest in yet another iteration of that technology since DVD-RAM drives, or some variation on that technology, seemed to be less expensive and more capable if perhaps not quite as speedy on data transfer rates.

When attending university as a computer and electrical engineering major I would come across a number of students in computer science and I was a bit astonished at just how ignorant they were at writing good code or comprehending basics of engineering. As an example a CS student friend I was working with on an assignment with talked about dynamic allocations of memory while we were working on an assignment of computer hardware. There's no creating new memory chips in software, you get to use only the hardware that exists.

This is a matter of science vs. engineering. There are chemists and chemical engineers. There are physicists and mechanical engineers. Since I went to a university in the Midwest USA there were agricultural engineers vs. majors like horticulture and such. CS teaches the science and fails in producing software engineers unless the student seeks out a course plan that instructs them in engineering. I'm not surprised in seeing CS fail in attracting students since employers are learning that CS majors generally suck at writing good code.

What I noticed in my studies is that most every STEM discipline today involves writing code. If you study biology at university then you can expect at some point to be put in front of a computer and be expected to produce some kind of computer code to work out the statistical analysis of some study. That's writing code. It might not be in C++ or Java but it is still code. I took such a course and while I forget the name of the tools and/or language I recognized that this was a programming language inside a statistical analysis tool. I was programming. This wasn't "computer science" in the strictest sense but to get a good grade I needed to "engineer" efficient and mathematically correct code to get a good grade.

I made the realization that to get a job writing code you needed to do one of two things. The first was to be good at turning requirements into code, that means studying software engineering. The second was to be good at a specific discipline, such as biology or thermodynamics, that you can translate that into useful code for analysis, study, or whatever, which means things like taking a biostatistics course and crushing it at coding.

While the engineering college inside the university I was attending was creating a software engineering program the business college was also getting into teaching students how to code. The business college had "business information systems" or some such on teaching business majors how to code. Can anyone name path to a BA or BS degree where a student is not taking a single course where they are required to learn some kind of computer programming? There's your death of the CS major right there. Computers are so prevalent now that it is simply assumed that a university graduate will have some knowledge in writing code. Why take on CS as a major unless your goal is to teach CS? If you are looking for a job outside of academia then you will study something like engineering, physics, chemistry, medicine, or tend toward some kind of science or technical education.

I did contract work for a while and one of my contracts was at a place that did tax software. I met a young lady that was typing out code and we got into a conversation. I learned she studied accounting at university and was working on code for the company. Most of what she did was look through the code and adjust numerical values here and there to reflect changes in tax code but she still had to have some kind of understanding on what the code meant to find what needed to be changed and suggest changes to the code for the "real" programmers to fix the next day.

Most everyone is writing computer code today, it's no longer some kind of specialty. The study of computer science is not likely to go away, I expect that instead it will revert to where it came from. That means computer science will likely fall back to its roots in turning human experiences into something a machine can process, then turn the results of that processing back into something humans can understand. That is a very narrow field, a field that requires few people specializing in it.

We could have headed this off by embracing nuclear fission as a source of low CO2 energy. Instead we had people that decided nuclear power was more dangerous than global warming, more expensive than global warming, or some other bullshit as an excuse to allow this damage to the climate than use an energy source that has a history of being lower in CO2 emissions than wind power, safer than solar power, more abundant than hydro power, and so much else in favor of its use.

I'm not giving up on the modern human species yet. I'm seeing sanity returning to the debate on the use of nuclear fission as an energy source. In the USA we are seeing existing reactors being restarted and refurbished to where we are likely to see 10 GW of nuclear power capacity added to the grid in the next 5 to 10 years. That's not requiring any new reactors, only taking what we have and using them to their fullest potential. I expect that once these projects prove successful that the public opinion will shift and it will be much easier to build new nuclear power capacity. I know there are people that opposed nuclear power because of the long build times but the largest driver to long build times is people opposing the construction and slowing the process down with lawsuits and protests. Stop getting in the way of nuclear power and the problems brought up on nuclear power will work their way out naturally, this comes with time and experience.

I believe the technology behind the PHEV is just getting started, that there's plenty of room yet for improvement to the point that the PHEV could make the ICEV as we know it today obsolete.

Where the PHEV shines is in offering the ability to drive on all electric power for most people's commutes while allowing for the convenience to burn some kind of liquid fuel for the times that there's a longer trip, extreme weather that could impact all-electric range, power outages, or whatever else might interrupt the ability to drive on the electricity stored in a battery. This is a plan to end the internal combustion engine and I believe that will only backfire on the plans to lower CO2 emissions in the long run.

Those that don't want to give up the convenience of liquid fuels could simply keep their ICEV longer as opposed to buying a new PHEV that could be plugged in overnight for an all electric commute the next day. Is is possible that the PHEV owner would choose to drive on fossil fuels than plug in at night? Sure, but I'd expect most people that get a PHEV to plug in most every night in order to save on fuel costs and not have to pay so many visits to a filling station.

The PHEV is such a "no brainer" on lowering our reliance on fossil fuels while removing all "range anxiety" of those that drive them that it amazes me that anyone would put in laws that oppose their sale and use. Not all PHEVs are equal on their ability to free the driver from needing fuel but all are still an improvement from the traditional ICEV. As time moves on I'm seeing more and more features and comforts from the BEV being incorporated into new ICEV models that the line is being blurred on what it means to be a "hybrid". If the vehicle has so little "electrification" as the means to plug in for power to preheat the cabin then that's still savings on burning fossil fuels.

What we are seeing is hating on the internal combustion engine. The problem is not the engine but the fuel. We can still have the internal combustion engine without burning fossil fuels. We can synthesize hydrocarbons. I'll see people argue against synthesized hydrocarbons based on assumptions for costs and energy efficiency that would not likely apply in the future. One such assumption is that the hydrogen used for synthesizing the fuel must come from either electrolysis of water or from natural gas. We know of different processes that are lower cost and have much higher thermodynamic efficiency. We will need liquid hydrocarbon fuels well into the future as our economy has been built upon it for the last century, it would likely take a century to transition to anything else. We can get those hydrocarbons from fossil fuels or we can work to get them from alternative sources, sources that are carbon neutral. That won't happen if there's a ban on the internal combustion engine. We can't expect to see a ban on the internal combustion engine to take effect unless something that provides some improvement upon it, and battery-electric vehicles are not a sufficient replacement.

Banning the PHEV is idiocy. The PHEV is likely a 90% solution to our needs for liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Because it's not a 100% solution we should ban them? That's not going to happen so long as the people have any say in the matter. Maybe in a communist nation like China that could work, but even then the people running the place need to keep the people from rioting. Remember, the problem is the fuel, not the engine. We can fix the fuel problem and negate any need to remove the engine from use. Until then we should encourage the use of the PHEV as a 90% solution, because otherwise we can expect people to keep their ICEVs running, or perhaps some kind of opposition if not worse from the people.

I'll see claims on how we can extract energy from existing sources that would otherwise be wasted but that's just stretching out the inevitable. We can't conserve our energy down to zero, we will still need a source of energy to survive. If we are to maintain our standard of living, and some semblance of a modern economy, then we need more energy than we can extract from wind, sun, and water. That means nuclear fission for energy, a need to have energy source than merely a nice to have energy source.

Advocating for nuclear fission as an energy source on Slashdot is getting moderated into oblivion. Apparently there's a group of people that choose to use the "troll" moderation as their way to express disagreement. Well, it appears that there's a general realization that wind, water, and sun will not be sufficient to provide the power we need. We are seeing support for nuclear fission for energy growing. This makes sense since given the options of fossil fuels, energy shortages, or nuclear fission, that people will choose nuclear fission. Nuclear fission isn't a perfect energy source but it is the best we have available today. Maybe in the future we will have some other option but for now it is burn fossil fuels, energy shortages, or nuclear fission.

This technology that can extract more useful energy from heat that would otherwise be wasted could be applied to nuclear fission, making nuclear fission even more valuable for energy than it already is today. We can't conserve our way to zero energy needs. Because we need energy supplies that are reliable, and use as little material resources as possible, people will be attracted to nuclear fission for energy until something better comes along. Maybe nuclear fusion will prove to be a better option but at best that is 50 years away. We will need to start building nuclear power plants today to bridge that gap. No new nuclear power plants means either burning more fossil fuels or energy shortages.

If the issue is that people will believe in this technology when they see it then that goes in favor of nuclear fission for energy. We have something like 60 years of safe, reliable, and profitable energy from nuclear fission. We need only make more of much the same for the future. Not exactly the same as we learned plenty on making nuclear fission safer, lower cost, and more reliable in that time.

I'm pleased to see opposition to nuclear fission for energy fall away. We should move as quickly as we can for more new nuclear power plants for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and improving the standard of living for all humans on Earth.

Maybe the people running the data centers will also own the power plants but I doubt it. We've already seen how this is likely to work with Microsoft and Three Mile Island. A company looking to open a data center will look for places that are looking to build a nuclear power plant, or take an existing closed nuclear power plant back online. They will make some long term deal for the power that power plant would produce in order to secure their supply of power, such as sign a contract for 20 years of power to prove to those offering the loans that there's a good return on their investment.

What I'm seeing from history is that as there's threats of a local nuclear power plant closing, and with it a lot of jobs and tax income lost, the local politicians get really interested in keeping that nuclear power plant operating. As demand for electricity rises so will interest in building new nuclear power plants and expanding the capacity of existing nuclear power plants.

As it is now local governments will give out sweet deals on taxes and permits to attract big building projects like data centers. No greasing of palms required as that's a short term loss on tax revenue in exchange for a longer term income on property taxes and those working in these businesses spending money on homes, food, and so on. A data center might not attract many people working in the area since that's a bunch of computers humming away in a warehouse but a nuclear power plant will have a lot of people working there. With a reliable power plant largely paid for by the data center that can mean attracting light industry or such, people looking for low cost and reliable energy for any of a number of other uses.

I doubt the people running the data centers will own the power plants. That's excepting maybe data centers bringing in their own natural gas generators that can be trucked in and dropped on site, which is likely a temporary fix until new power plants and utility lines can be put in place a few years in the future. Once they have sufficient power lines run in then the natural gas generators can be picked up and trucked away, then that room where the generators sat can be used to expand the data center or leased for some other use.

When competing for market share, and your product or service is much like so many products and services, there will be a desire to stand out in some way. For a long time there was an advantage in advertising as being "greener" than the alternatives, and for data centers that meant showing your data center uses "greener" power than the competition. I suspect that the rolling back of green initiatives isn't as much about being "fair weather friends" as much as there's so many other companies that made the same promises on being green that it's not a differentiator any more. Once the costs on green energy started to rise then maybe "fair weather friends" applied to some extent, people wanted lower cost data services more than they wanted "greener" services. Going "green" costs money and once money got tight then there wasn't the same level of money for the luxury of being "green". I know people will push back on the idea that being "green" is a luxury but when it's a matter of surviving the winter and lower CO2 emissions to survive some global warming decades from now then people will choose surviving the winter because if they don't survive the winter then they don't much care what happens a decade later.

There's a renewed interest in nuclear fission for energy all over the world, and a need for stable "base load" power is certainly a part of that. With concerns on international trade growing there's a lot of nations looking for ways to be free of the near monopolies China has on commodities like solar PV and rare earth metals. There's nothing rare about rare earth metals, it's just a name they picked up for historical reasons. People like to point to China as some kind of leader on renewable energy, ignoring that China is on track to have more nuclear power capacity than the USA and France combined by 2030.

China is going big on nuclear fission while exporting solar PV panels, rare earth magnets for windmills, and other commodities to feed this desire to "go green" around the world. Nuclear power is as "green" as any other option available to us but all too often nuclear power has been ruled out as an option for bullshit reasons. Point that out in the "wrong" places and you'll find yourself shunned, such as on Slashdot where saying nice things about nuclear power gets your karma destroyed. That appears to be changing.

China is going big on nuclear power with efforts like thorium reactors and plans for nuclear powered civilian cargo ships. This is driving nations in the region to also invest in nuclear power, especially in their navy since China is looking to become a global naval power. Australia made a deal for nuclear powered submarines some time ago, and recently South Korea has made a similar deal. Neither nation *needs* nuclear powered submarines to defend their national interests, but if things get kinetic in the region then there will be difficulty in getting fuel for a navy. Nuclear powered submarines are likely the start, nuclear powered frigates and destroyers will likely follow soon.

This is getting beyond keeping the lights on. Nuclear fission is likely to quickly move to powering ships at sea. We've had nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers for decades so that's been a "no brainer" for a long time. There's been some aborted attempts at nuclear powered civilian ships and navy surface ships like frigates, cruisers, and destroyers. Expect to see those experiments get restarted. Russia has had nuclear powered icebreakers for some time, and it makes sense to start such experiments with icebreakers for many reasons. Russia has adapted the nuclear reactors used in icebreakers to make floating power plants, a means to bring power to remote areas without having to support construction crews in these areas then bring them back. Expect floating nuclear power plants to be another trend in the near future.

Build time on a new nuclear power plant that can be a concern. As it is now it takes about 7 years to build a nuclear power plant, or nuclear powered submarine if looking for some analog to building a floating nuclear power plant. I expect that we will see that cut in half real soon. So much of the build time on nuclear power is from issues unrelated to the technology. It's a matter of regulation, funds, infrastructure, skilled labor, and so on. That's largely political, and that can change with the next election. Get the build time for nuclear power under 4 years, so a nuclear power plant can be completed inside the term for POTUS, and it will be far more difficult for politics to drag build times out beyond a decade like we've seen in the past. After that it will be far smoother sailing for lower CO2 emissions and similar concerns to be luxuries, the costs will come down and it will simply be the norm than something people would expect to pay extra to get.

I read the fine article and I'm not seeing what kinds of policies concerning AI these two individuals are fighting for and therefore why they are creating these PACs. What I see as an issue concerning people about AI is how much electrical power is expected to be used in the growth in AI, which is only being made worse with more manufacturing being brought back to the USA after a long time of so much manufacturing being sent overseas.

I had someone knock on my door a week or so ago that was doing some political campaigning where she brought up the concern on how much electrical power is going to data centers. Then is a video published this morning from Peter Zeihan that also brought up this issue:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

To summarize the video there's a need for massive amounts of new electrical generating capacity due to the growth in AI use on top of growing manufacturing in the USA, because data centers run 24/7 they need electricity sources that run 24/7. There's only two options for electricity production that runs 24/7, coal and nuclear fission. While natural gas can technically be a 24/7 source of electricity there's more value in using natural gas for load following. I'd add to that by pointing out that there's a lot of natural gas used for heating and petrochemicals like fertilizers.

We will need more electricity production regardless of how this AI boom goes. If this AI boom goes bust then that just means we can have more electricity production for manufacturing, heat pumps to replace natural gas heating, electric vehicles, or so many other uses that are currently seeing growth. What other concerns on AI are there? I can think of a few but electricity demand seems to be the largest concern and one that impacts far more people than any thing else.

Will these PACs work on energy policy? What positions on energy policy will they hold? That's what concerns me the most, and it appears I'm not alone in this concern.

I didn't read the book but I can recall in interviews with Andy Weir that he kind of handwaved off some of the issues of radiation in living on Mars with The Martian in that the space suits and such had some lightweight material that could protect people from radiation. This discovery of melanin providing protections from radiation puts some science behind that claim. Weir knew this could be bullshit but to make the story interesting he made a few choices that contradicted known science at the time in the telling of his story.

If we are to put people on Mars then I'd expect a staged approach much like we are seeing now with the Artemis Program. We send an unmanned ship with sensors and such to test the technology, maybe sending a probe to Mars in the process to provide some kind of landing simulation. Then we send a manned mission to orbit Mars, maybe again sending an unmanned probe to Mars, but nobody yet sets foot on Mars. Then, maybe, on the third mission, we put people on Mars. If there's people going to Mars in 2026 then it will be to orbit Mars for a bit and then come back to Earth to test a mission abort scenario, as in something goes wrong and they have to return to Earth before the optimal return window in 18 months or whatever. That would be something like the setup for The Martian where an unusually powerful storm on Mars threatens the habitat and they have to leave quick and in a hurry.

This is an interesting development that shows that, as predicted by a certain Dr. Ian Malcolm, life finds a way. It shows we could develop better protections for people to survive high radiation environments, such as a trip to Mars. As unfortunate the accident at Chernobyl was it does appear that we could learn plenty from it in the coming years. One thing I expect people to learn is that there's not likely to be a need to contain spent nuclear fuel for thousands of years. As bad as the radiation may be still today that is the radiation from what we consider "medium-lived fission products" like cesium and strontium. These are isotopes with a half-life of about 30 years. It's been long enough now that the worst of this radiation has been more than halved by now. What happens to the threat of radiation in another 30 years? It will be halved again. The long-lived fission products have such long half-lives that they contribute little to the radiation around Chernobyl.

Does this mean we should not fear spent nuclear fuel? Or fear another nuclear power plant meltdown? No, that's not what this means. What it means is that the plans to put up warning signs for radiation that will last more than 10,000 years around radioactive waste sites is bullshit. In as little as 100 years the radiation risks could be quite minimal. In 1000 years the risks of radiation from the fission products we produce today would likely be no more than that seen on a sandy beach rich with monazite sand.

Would it be expensive to keep guard on radioactive waste for 100 years? I guess so, but then that's a minimal cost compared to the value of the energy we can produce from nuclear fission. If we are to put a permanent colony of humans on Mars then we will need nuclear power. To get people to Mars will likely require use of nuclear power. If nuclear power works to keep people alive on Mars then it can work to keep people alive on Earth. If we can pick up a few tricks on minimizing risks from radiation from nature then that just makes nuclear power an even better option.

Nuclear fission for energy is a "need to have" than a "nice to have" for sustaining a nation's energy supply if they wish to have a modern economy. Pointing this out appears to upset some people in spite of the data supporting this. Maybe there's some places in the world blessed with a climate and geography that allows for ample supplies of hydro, geothermal, and onshore wind for a supply of energy that is low cost, reliable, and free from international entanglements but such places will be rare. Even then they'd likely reach a limit at some point in the future where that's no longer enough to keep up with nations that embraced nuclear fission for their energy supplies.

Australia is in a unique position here with nuclear energy. They have ample reserves of uranium to draw from for energy, and active mines to extract uranium for export. There's no issues in Australia on getting fuel for civil nuclear power plants. Those opposed to nuclear power will claim that there's no existing infrastructure or skilled labor to support a civil nuclear power program. That's a solved problem since they are in the process of buying nuclear powered submarines from the US and UK in their AUKUS agreement, from that will necessarily flow people trained in nuclear power as well as facilities for managing nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. So, where's the objection now?

The objection to nuclear power often lies in that nuclear power costs too much in comparison to other options like wind, solar, and hydro. If that were true then Germany would currently be the picture of low cost and abundant energy while France has the highest energy costs in Europe. That is not the case and so it would appear that excluding nuclear fission from Australia's mix of energy sources means they will continue to be reliant on fossil fuels in order to maintain a reliable supply of energy.

Maybe something new will come along in the future to change this but for now the options are fossil fuels, nuclear fission, or energy shortages. Again, there may be a few places in the world where that might not be the case but Australia is not one of them. Australia needs nuclear fission for energy. This isn't because of some need to lower CO2 emissions, though that would be a nice side effect. Australia needs nuclear power plants in order to remain an independent nation as the world fights for energy. A big reason for Australia wanting nuclear powered submarines is for protection against the Chinese navy. China is building nuclear powered submarines. China is building civil nuclear power plants. China is apparently building civilian nuclear powered cargo ships. Why would China do this? Almost certainly because they know that if cut off from energy imports they'd be reliant on what energy they can produce domestically. Is Australia any different from this? No, not really.

Australia needs nuclear power or they could be left in the dark should things get kinetic with China. Or any other adversary in the region. Maybe they can rely on energy imports from the USA and Canada but then that's just choosing who is pulling the strings in the puppet state of Australia. I'd suspect having the USA as the puppet master is preferable to having it be China but Australia can cut those strings by developing a civil nuclear power program.