24 Responses

1. Since 1948 the federal government has spent 95billion dollars on Nuclear research R&D? That’s very inexpensive compared to how much money we’ve spent on oil from foreign lands! These guys are actually really inexpensive if you compare this to how much the foreign oil industry is going! WAKE UP TYT! Nuclear is needed now more than ever. You should be supporting these energy companies not bashing them! The liberals are to blame for making the industry impossible to grow.

2. But instead they made it cost more limiting us to U235 which is as rare as platinum. Not allowing reprocessing centers in fear of proliferation even though we can do it without making bombs and not allowing the Yucca mountain repository to be open. For years we have had to Buy from the Russians to get Nuclear fuel, it’s not the republicans fault it’s the democraps!

3. Nuclear would be sustainable if the libtards would try to make building new ones allot simpler. For the last 30 years 27 reactors have been licensed but not a single one has been built because the libtards have regulated the shit out of it to a point there is no free market! Maybe if companies were GUARANTEED AN OPERATING LICENSE FOR THEIR BILLION DOLLAR INVESTMENTS the market would be more open.

4. YES, COME WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

5. I want world war 3 with nukes and kill people for tacos, yes, I WILL KILL ANYTHING FOR TACOS.

6. i agree

7. welfar wtf is the nukes on wick

8. nuclear WELFARE?

9. How much carbon do nuclear plants produce? Oh yeah, ZERO. We can’t survive in our current level of power consumption on wind, solar, and hydro power. All three of which are not angels either BTW, having major negative effects on animals and fish. The amount of land you’d need to produce major amounts of power from those is like the size of Delaware. There is no perfect power source. Well run and regulated nuclear away from cities is a fine solution.

10. For us, the NRC and other political hijinks into the nuclear industry have meant several things:

    – We now have a waste problem, because A) waste reprocessing was made illegal by Carter due to falsely substantiated proliferation concerns, and B) repository of wastes is constantly held back by political appointees (see Jazcko killing Yucca Mountain).
    – We have old, inefficient, and less-safe reactors than we should.
    – We limited ourselves to Uranium-235 as our fuel, which is as rare as platinum.

11. So for current nuclear industry giants, the NRC’s regulations aren’t that big of a deal compared to the security these companies are getting as a result. And they also have options such as standardization, which should reduce regulatory costs and the timescale of building new reactors depending on the NRC’s favor-ability.

12. You will notice that when the NRC does consider new nuclear designs, they are ALWAYS pressurized water reactors that run on uranium-235. This is not an oversight, it is a product of a very old technological lock-in on nuclear power technologies. This is why things like the Integral Fast Reactor and Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor cannot even get research acceptance in the US through the NRC.

13. There are several reasons why this type of regulation is benefiting the old nuclear industry giants. The first thing is that even without regulations, decommissioning and rebuilding plants requires a large initial capital cost (which is 5 times higher with regulations), something no one is comfortable forking over. Power plants also stop making money when they’re being decommissioned and rebuilt.

    Most importantly, it clamps down other nuclear initiatives, like new designs by upstarts.

14. The result of all that was an increasingly inefficient regulatory system, costing the industry a lot of time and money when it came to everything required to build and decommission nuclear plants (but not so much in maintaining and fueling them!). Today, the NRC is in fact “cozy” with the industry, allowing old decrepit plants to continue operating well past their lifetime.

15. Nuclear regulation in the US is a prime example of one of those things politicians need to keep their dirty greedy hands out of.

    It started in the 80s with the ER act of 1974, which dissolved the AEC and created the NRC because politicians concluded that the AEC got too cosy with the industry. However this was a thinly veiled attempt for politicians to get a foot in the door of the nuclear industry and later enact all kinds of bullshit policies through politically appointed positions in the NRC

16. Keep in mind that all of those subsidies were put into nuclear DURING the cold war and much of it went towards plutonium breeders for nuclear weapons-grade fissile material production. As far as fission nuclear for peaceful power applications is concerned, it’s the least subsidized form of energy per GWe out of every other energy source in the world.

    In the US, it’s also regulated to hell and back which is why decommissioning and replacing old reactors with new ones is prohibitively expensive.

17. The problem is that the reactors are antiquated.

18. 95Bn since 1948? That is NOTHING. The near future for America should be Thorium Reactor due their relatively low cost to build/maintain and relative safety when properly engineered. Followed by Fusion, which we should get behind en masse.

19. But nuclear power is cool. :)

20. LFTR has been studied since Nuclear energy has been studied(early part of the Cold War). Even Russia was looking into this but abandoned it when they made a design to create fusion reaction.

21. No, because even with the current technology uranium power plants have to be under extreme pressure and even then don’t get a fraction of the energy that Uranium has.

    I am for nuclear energy, but I am not because they are for profit. To be honest I think that the government should be in control of power plants(yes I have a communistic view about this) but it would be way cheaper to build and the energy would cost way less than from a private company.

22. I’d never heard of LFTR before your post here, and it does looks as promising as solar or wind did ten years ago.

23. You’re comparing 50 year old nuclear tech to today’s nuclear tech. If I we were comparing against 50 year old wind turbines, we’d be arguing over which one could mill more grain.

24. And even nuclear energy isn’t the safest energy. Ever heard of LFTR? That is the safest and there is no chance of a meltdown, and it can be made into a generator for a house. LFTR is the best technology that we should invest in.