If there's one thing that you should compromise on when it comes to nuclear power it's definitely safety.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Hey good news everyone, instead of 40 years to build a new reactor, it’ll only take 39 years. What a relief. Good thing we didn’t fall for all that free sunlight and wind bullshit!
Hey, maybe nuclear plants can run on clean coal!
Individually alot of his ideas could be good, with proper care and planning. Instead he does them all at once without any sort of considerations, its wild to witness this train wreck.
Idk how tariffs work but I like to imagine in our economic toolbox they are like a hammer. Can a hammer be useful, absolutely. But is it useful to throw 10,000 hammers at the rest of the world like trump is doing?
We need to work on permitting of New plants. Not new construction of Old plants.
But I get it, Don likes towers.
Quite glad that America is far away from where I am.
Soviet quality nuclear plants. Great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
If the nuclear industry is going to be quadrupled, and gas and oil are similarly enlarged, and renewables are at least not shrinking, what are people supposed to do with all that extra power in such a short time? I mean, I get that induced demand is a thing but... a quadrupling of long-standing industries? Is there any intention for this plan to be realistic?
Feed the hungry AI, I guess?
If you even get a doubling of power usage that way, I'd be surprised.
One AI datacenter will soon take up the same electricity as a city if we let tech bros keep building.
Instead of admitting the tech has hit a wall they will burn the planet down for diminishing returns on this scam
But what if AI collapses at some point? Approve a load of nuclear reactors and then AI collapses so we can use all that power for the good of humanity.
Why would we make excess power we have to discharge?
It's literally a waste of resources.
Maybe we should build housing and other things people actually need.
Countries that still use coal could turn those off thanks to the nuclear reactors
I feel like you don't understand how spending money to produce extra cities worth of power that we then have to throw away is a bad idea.
Also building nuclear has nothing to do with AI
Trump doesn't do realism.
Great, more power at unrealistic prices in… 2045.
Don't fret, these will never become operational anyway.
I seem to remember something going wrong before when corners were cut with nuclear...
What prevents the approval of the reactors, is it bad designs or just a case of planning permission delays because people don't want a nuclear reactor built. Surprised to see Trump being in favour as nuclear as he normally seems to favour the oil industry.
- they are really expensive
- have a history of costing far more than promised
- nuclear executives have a history of dishonesty, so you need to check absolutely every detail
they are really expensive have a history of costing far more than promised
Because every plant is essentially a unique prototype in a field with very few experienced experts. Building nuclear plants makes building future nuclear plants cheaper and increases the pool of nuclear experts in the country.
The learning-by-doing cycle happened in other areas, but plateaued with nuclear quite a while back.
Yeah. Let's build one. Oh it's costing more than expected because no one here knows what they are doing. But they are trained up now so the next one will be cheaper. Ah, contract cancelled so that training will die out by the time another reactor build is agreed on.
Sure, that's what has been happening due to the high regulatory hurdle for getting a plant cleared. Compared to other countries, it takes a lot longer in the US to get through the regulatory hurdles.
I think that, because of events like Three Mile Island and the influence of fossil fuel competitors, politicians have been using overregulation as a way of limiting the deployment of nuclear power generation and not simply as a means of making it more safe.
Having an administration that is pro-nuclear would probably help the skill decay issue, if we're starting new plants more often then there will be less time for the knowledge to die out so future plants can be built faster, cheaper and safer.
Of course, this is the Trump administration so how much of this is performative and how much is substantial change has yet to be seen.
Probably, the comapny behind the reactors (the only one who has a financial benefit) promised to build a Trump tower instead of the cooling tower, so 2 companies/families benefit now and 99.9% have to pay for that.
If the trump tower exists over the reactor, hopefully he will move in permanently