No! No! This has nothing to do with Hannibal! Nothing at all!

I know some people are going to say that Hannibal took elephants across the Alps all those years ago. The same people who talk about the Medieval Warm period.

Well I am just telling you, this has nothing to do with Hannibal! There is a reason why the Guardian's coverage of the Climate Crisis and pending Climate Catastrophe doesn't mention Hannibal, its because he has nothing to do with this. So stop criticizing the Guardian for not mentioning him!

Yes, its so tiring, would you people all stop talking about Hannibal, and also you can stop talking about the Medieval and Roman Warm periods too while you are at it. Thank you. I will go back to reading the Guardian now, and its independent journalism, which I really would like to be able to do without being threatened in slashdot with violence from Hannibal and having slashdot made an unsafe place on account of this Hannibalistic Exxon funded denial of the ongoing Climate Crisis and Catastrophe.

Thank you.

You doubt this, look up the Clark County debacle. Just one example, but it shows you the nature of the creature. Are we reporting on the US election? Or are we trying to get the right candidate elected? Or do we even understand the question?

Its another of these endless number of stories slashdot carries now from the UK Guardian. The UK Guardian isn't a trustworthy source of news. It isn't even primarily a news organization. Its an activist organization which publishes an in-house news journal. Its aim is not to report on how the world is, but to change the world to how it should be, and editorial policy and news coverage and reporting are managed with that objective. You can no more expect objective journalism from it than you could from Pravda, and for the same reason.

They have never read Orwell and so with a straight face proclaim this as 'independent journalism'. Independent from journalism maybe.

I know, and it's disheartening, but I still remain optimistic. Even if much of the human population doesn't "get it" -- they at least are starting to, and the manipulation techniques of the past several decades seem to be wearing quite thin, and they don't seem to be able to come up with new ones anymore. Maybe 'cuz they're using AI?

This is just insanity marketing. "AI" doesn't need "safety". That's ridiculous. It's the same argument for censorship that gets trotted out all the time "We can't have kids reading the Anarchist's Cookbook!" In this case it's even more disingenuous: it's a combination marketing ploy (our AI is so good it's scary!) and demand for regulatory capture (Our competitors AI will be even scarier without government stepping in and giving us the only keys!). The fact is that "AI" by which I mean LLMs, has become an actual useful tool in a few niche areas for people who understand how to use tools, and that *always* cuts both ways: for better AND for worse. The niches will expand and the technology will merge with older technologies (reinforcement learning in particular) and life will go on. Pandora's box is already fully open (yet again).

When the bubble pops, and hardware prices crash, if the global economy survives, everyone (that cares to) will roll their own LLM rig and can run whatever models they want with whatever "guardrails" they want, or none at all. People will spend years training their own models, avoiding the "dump in everything!" models we have now. Having been trained on mostly good stuff, they'll be actually good at (some) stuff, and might (or might not) become at least sort of actually intelligent. The sky will not fall, the wolves will not eat all the children, and 12-year-olds will (probably) not build nuclear reactors in their backyard. It'll be fine. At least compared to the status quo (which, to be absolutely clear is DEFINITELY NOT FINE!)

The thing is that the incumbent AI companies *desperately* don't want that to happen and they're operating under the delusion that they can prevent it. Most of them are run by a bunch of high-functioning sociopaths and psychopaths (like most global megacorps) who want nothing but more and more money and power, and they see "AI" as the "One System to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them". Spoiler alert: it probably isn't, but I'll carry the metaphor further anyway:

So the question is: will we willingly accept the nine, the seven and the three, and let them rule until they successfully destroy our co-created Human world (which is exactly what they and the rest of the wannabee trillionaire club are doing, whether they know it or not) that they so desperately want to control? I remain hopeful that at least most of us aren't going to blindly accept that, despite literally every day seeing copious evidence to the contrary...

So finally, the real question: will we collectively create a world in which everyone can have their basic needs met, so no one has to *constantly* scramble for survival in this "dog eat dog" world? The answer isn't needing this or that particular socioeconomic system. That's very 19th/20th century. We need to actually come together as a species and tell the handful of psycho rich fucks that run everything and their propagandists to STFU, then just ignore whatever they do, and decide to just actually live our lives.

Used fuel can't leak. Leaking implies a liquid. Used fuel is a solid. Go drink some shit!

Used fuel is a heavy metal encased in ceramic. It can't leak DF

That's the dumbest thing I have ever read. And that's hard to do since anti-nuclear scumbags are dumb as shit.

What a crock of shit. Here are some facts about used fuel(aka nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant)

It has a total kill count of zero. Yes zero. Meanwhile, 8.7 million people die annually from the waste from fossil fuels and biofuels.

It is a solid metal encased in ceramic. The Simpsons' caricature of green goo is false.

There isn't a lot of it. We could put all of it(yes, all of it) in a building the size of a Walmart. France keeps all of theirs in a room the size of a high school gym--that people walk on.

Cask storage has been perfect. It has a 100% perfect record. Put it in my backyard.

Cask storage is cheap. It's just cement and steel.

All those claims that it's dangerous for thousands of years are untrue. The amount of radiation released from used fuel follows an exponentially decaying curve. All the highly radioactive isotopes decay completely within 5 years (which is why they keep it in water for 10). After the medium-radioactive isotopes, cesium and strontium, completely decay within 270 years, you can handle used fuel with your bare hands.

Weapons waste and medical waste are not used fuel. Used fuel is the material produced by a nuclear power plant. They are different. It's like saying we should ban oranges because apple seeds are bad for you.

Weapons != energy

Climate change could have been averted if we properly pursued nuclear energy.

To date, zero countries have deep decarbonized their grids with solar and/or wind.

France: 29 g CO2 per kWh with its nuclear baseload.

Sweden: 21 g CO2 per kWh, using nuclear and hydro.

Germany: 334 g CO2 per kWh after spending 15 years and hundreds of billions of euros on its energy transition.

Nuclear will be a necessary part of the solution. The only countries to have deep decarbonized their grid did it with hydro and/or nuclear. And since hydro is location-dependent and environmentally destructive, it won't scale. Atoms before Dams!

STOP THE FEARMONGERING LATIMES

Remember, all antinuclear activists are fossil fuel simps.

China is burning and mining more coal than the rest of the world put together.

Its emitting about 12 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. That is a bit under one third of the global total.

It is financing and building coal fired generation plants all over the world.

The US is emitting 5 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.

That is less than half what the Chinese are emitting.

Wake up!

"The results are a wake-up call, and its imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worlds climate goals less and less likely."

The world has no climate goals nor any policies either. You have the COPs, which most of the high emitting and fastest growing emitters attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any agreement on stopping growing or reducing. In which they have been very successful over the years.

Then you have some Western countries adopting what they try and position as national action plans. However these plans never address the total of even national emissions - the only thing they propose is to build wind and solar generation of electricity, which is a minority of emissions. The proposals also, while they are sold as net zero, in fact do not go near eliminating even all local emissions from power generation.

And even if they did, the countries doing this only account for a tiny percentage of total global emissions.

I read these pieces containing comments like the one quoted at the head of this comment and shake my head. These people are living in a dream world - the world in which sending tens of thousands of people to the COPs every couple of years to decide nothing is supposed to be making some difference to the worlds climate and weather.

In the real world the furthest advanced on thee national plan of moving to an electric society powered by wind and solar is the UK, and its failing. They are incurring huge costs to bring the generated wind power from the north coast of Scotland to where demand is, in the south and Midlands. They have no plans for dealing with intermittency of the resulting supply other than gas plants. The cost estimates for the transmission are rising ominously. People are not buying heat pumps anyway. Their latest effort to deal with the so called migration is to allow for the electricity companies to do rolling blackouts. Its beoming an election issue and net zero will not survive the next couple of elections.

As I keep saying, people need to wake up. If its really true that human emissions are going to bring about a climate crisis, get ready, because its coming. There is no realistic prospect of the world reducing its emissions. China etc are growing their economies as fast as they can, and letting the emissions go where they may. The UK is demonstrating that the plan of moving to wind and solar, and to EVs and heat pumps, will not happen and is anyway not affordable, and even were it to be afforded and done, it would only drop global emissions by a fraction of 1% - an amount China makes up by a couple months of growth.

The usual suspects will mark this post as trolling, but its not, its just the view any rational person will come to when looking at the facts of this matter. I am not persuaded there is any existential climate crisis from emissions. But suppose there is, there is certainly no rational global plan to lower them, and this is the point people need to start from. If you cannot get the Chinese to commit to lowering their emissions by 80%, which you cannot, then start preparing for whatever you think continuously rising emissions will lead to. Because its coming, and expensive programs which are no more than feelgoodery will not help.

Grid scale batteries can do more than deal with the intermittency of solar power.

I recall news about the Tesla Megapack in Australia keeping the electric grid stable after a gigawatt scale coal power plant was somehow suddenly taken off the grid. So, consider how batteries could help in keeping electricity flowing should a gigawatt scale nuclear power plant have an unplanned shutdown, it's not like the electrons behave any different if they come from a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant.

If there's a need for grid scale electric storage then nuclear fission allows for energy storage at lower cost than batteries, and possibly lower cost than pumped hydro storage. Nuclear fission is uniquely suited for thermal energy storage since they can produce temperatures higher than concentrated solar thermal, thermodynamics tell us the higher the temperature in the "thermal battery" the better.

A nuclear power plant with thermal energy storage allows for ramping down power and diverting that heat into storage for using when solar power fades with clouds and nightfall. Thermal energy storage could be little more than a tank on a molten salt coolant loop. Because thermal energy storage is so simple the cost of construction and operation could be the cheapest option for grid scale storage. If batteries prove to be lower cost than thermal energy storage then a nuclear power plant can use batteries instead.

If we are going to be truthful with ourselves about the cost of energy then we should not ignore how batteries could be paired up with more than just solar.

Canada figured out how to build gigawatt scale CANDU nuclear reactors without large steel castings. If getting large steel cast parts is an issue for Americans then Americans could work out a deal with Canada, or develop similar reactors independently. That's assuming we'd want to continue building gigawatt scale reactors. Right now there's a Department of Energy contest of sorts to see who has the best small modular reactors. The winners of this competition would likely need a few years yet to get from these first-of-a-kind demonstration reactors to mass production, which means they can avoid any issues over sourcing large steel castings.

There's more to cost reduction with scale than keep building gigawatt scale reactors. SMRs can be designed to scale with quantity, and that's the sales pitch being used to find utilities willing to fund nuclear power plants.

I am continually baffled on how those opposed to nuclear power keep bringing up problems that have been solved decades ago.

That might be a problem right now but certainly solvable in something like five years. When I was attending university for an electrical engineering degree and planning out which courses to take for the next semester I discovered that the professor for one of the fluid dynamic classes had a degree in nuclear engineering. That made me wonder how many other professors teaching at American universities were nuclear engineers. There's few universities in the USA offering degrees in nuclear engineering, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a shortage of professors willing and able to teach nuclear engineering courses.

If universities see demand for nuclear engineers from both students and the energy industry then they can develop a nuclear engineering program. A nuclear power plant will need people trained in nuclear engineering but only a handful of them as there's plenty going on at nuclear power plants that will not require knowing anything related to nuclear fission. There's clearly enough nuclear engineers for the current demand, because if there were not then I would not see any university with professors trained in nuclear engineering teaching courses ion how to build windmills, they would instead be teaching at a university with a nuclear engineering program, or they'd be applying their expertise designing or operating nuclear power plants.

As it is now it takes about eight years to build a nuclear power plant from breaking ground to producing electricity. This gives the nuclear power industry time to avoid a future shortage of nuclear engineers. The nuclear power industry can, and almost certainly will, do what they can to speed the process along. While attending university I learned of scholarships from John Deere to get more agricultural engineers. If I had learned of this scholarship earlier then I would have switched to agricultural engineering to see my costs to attend university lowered. Much like that nuclear engineer teaching students how to build windmills the degree doesn't lock people into a narrow field of employment options. If I studied agricultural engineering at university I could find work programming binary load lifters by applying what I learned at university about moisture vaporators. The companies building nuclear power plants today can offer scholarships in nuclear engineering just like how John Deere offered scholarships for agricultural engineers.

Your goto example is 5.6 GW for 32 billion. That's a good deal.

I'd guess the authors of the fine article believed that the age of the power plant wasn't important enough to include. There are plenty of details not in the article since the authors of the article will have a maximum word count from their editors, this is so the readers are not given trivial details that would bore and/or confuse the reader. The editors and reporters will have a point they want to get across, the point I got from the article is that there's a growing demand for electricity which has forced people to reconsider the viability of nuclear fission as a source of electricity. If the reader wishes to learn that detail they can easily find that with a web search using the same computer used to read the article.

I'll save you from the trouble of searching this yourself, construction started in 1970 and the reactor commissioned in 1975 which would make this reactor about 50 years old.

That was in the article. The plant had been damaged by a powerful wind storm, as seen only in a once in a lifetime level of power. The reactor didn't see any damage, the damage was to property around the reactor that turns the reactor heat into electricity and sends that electricity to the local rural electric cooperative. At the time immediately after the storm the plant could not raise the money needed to repair it, while also paying for the refueling and maintenance that was in progress then. Minds were changed on restarting the reactor because of rising natural gas costs.

Just like I commented above there's only so much detail that can be put in a news article while also keeping the word count to something that can be easily processed by the intended audience.

Every nuclear power plant is required to show the NRC they have funds set aside for decommissioning before a license to operate is granted. In the end all Americans are contributing to this fund by electricity fees, taxes, and likely more. It appears you believe that there's better options than nuclear fission for producing electricity. I expect that the people working on restarting DAEC did the math on costs versus benefits and found restarting DAEC was their best option. I'm quite certain that these people know more about the costs and income than you do.

Why should anyone be all that concerned about how long the decommissioning will take? There's all kinds of infrastructure projects that take a similarly long time to complete, why should I think any different about a nuclear power plant?

What you've written doesn't mesh with nuclear power. It appears to me that you are simply ignorant about nuclear power and can't be bothered to do the slightest to educate your self. You clearly have a computer and internet, if you didn't then you'd not be posting comments to Slashdot, which allows you to find answers to your questions in only a few minutes. I'm reminded of a comment that's been attributed to Mark Twain, those who don't read will remain as ignorant as those that can't read.

There's two events that stick out in my mind that demonstrate to me how opinions are changing on nuclear fission for energy. The first event was seeing Andrew Yang advocated for nuclear power in his campaign for POTUS. If Yang believed Democrats would not support nuclear power then he'd not likely run as a Democrat. The national Democrat party platform included support for nuclear power shortly after Yang dropped out of the race for the White House, and I'm of the belief that leaders in the party made this shift because Yang was getting popular as a candidate. Yang speaking in favor of nuclear power, and getting plenty of votes in primary elections, likely got Democrat leaders nervous on their chances to win in that race. Yang forced other Democrats to comment on nuclear power, and those that spoke out against it were losing votes to Yang or Republicans.

The second event that tells me public opinions on nuclear power are changing happened in the last week or so, I'm seeing adverts in favor of nuclear power on YouTube. For something like 50 years Democrats were either openly opposed to nuclear power or were trying to pretend that nuclear power doesn't exist. If there's enough money to produce and distribute these adverts then there must be plenty of people willing to fund these adverts.