First U.S. Small Nuclear Reactor Design Is Approved

Messugga said:
What are you on about? The fact of the matter is, nuclear doesn't tick all the boxes for a sustainable solution. It's one of the better solutions at present, but is it good enough? No.
Fusion reactors would be significantly better than nuclear, if we could crack them.
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There is no such thing as "sustainable".

Nature work in cycles of growth and decline.
You can either increase/build or break and destroy. There's no fixed amount of something that can ever just be sustained.
 
Nicodeamus said:
Comments like this just shows economic illiteracy and the deeply ingrained flawed Malthusian thinking.

The first law in economics is scarcity.
Every other resource is limited, but thanks to human innovation we have more resources available today and we have a higher yield, this includes fossil fuels, mining etc.

Read on the Simon Abundance index to explain this.
humanprogress.org

The Simon Abundance Index 2020

humanprogress.org humanprogress.org
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And it's posts like yours that display Dunning Kruger.
 
Ponderer said:
And it's posts like yours that display Dunning Kruger.
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Nicodeamus is 100% correct here.
In 1968, Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims, so proposed a wager, telling Ehrlich to select any raw material he wanted and select "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen. Chromium, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.[2]

As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favour.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon–Ehrlich_wager
 
konfab said:
I think just being able to make them in a factory rather than making them on site will eliminate a lot of problems and make things like maintenance much easier. One of the reasons why France has a good nuclear program is because all their reactors share a common design, this allows them to fix design issues quickly and across all the stations.
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This also makes training to work at the power-plants easier and will help to reduce cost and faster build times.
 
Messugga said:
While not a fossil fuel, nuclear still isn't a renewable, so not a perfect solution.
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Human progress has always been done with small, incremental changes. This is very good news. Coal stations are the biggest polluters on this planet.
 
rietrot said:
Overpopulation myths date back even much futher than your link.
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and so does resource depletion myths yet today we have more fuel available than at any time in human history.

The same goes for all these predictions that fuel X Y or Z aren't long-term sustainable. Predicting the future is what we used to call prophecy. Today it is called scenario planning.
 
Emjay said:
Human progress has always been done with small, incremental changes. This is very good news. Coal stations are the biggest polluters on this planet.
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Coal power stations are still being build on South East Asia and most likely it will drive Africa's development.

Here is more on the doomsdaying predictions. Coal at one stage was predicted to run out, then oil, now Nuclear..


 
Ponderer said:
The fuel is limited.
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More Malthuasian thinking...

If the fuel gets scarce then the price will shoot up meaning we will just invest into different ways to extract them.
Uranium can theoretically be extracted from seawater but it is currently expensive.
 
Nicodeamus said:
Coal power stations are still being build on South East Asia and most likely it will drive Africa's development.

Here is more on the doomsdaying predictions. Coal at one stage was predicted to run out, then oil, now Nuclear..


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I am not sure what your point is. I am not concerned about scarcity. Never have been. And I don't see overpopulation as problematic. Human ingenuity has proven to overcome quite easily.

As always, this new technology will get refined by early adopting and forward thinking countries, and the developing nations will be able to take it up later, for much cheaper.
 
Ponderer said:
The fuel is limited.
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Land for renewable energy is limited.

Nuclear fuel is highly energy dense unlike renewable energy, which means you need to spend less money to move the same amount of materials to generate a certain amount of power.
 
Emjay said:
I am not sure what your point is. I am not concerned about scarcity. Never have been. And I don't see overpopulation as problematic. Human ingenuity has proven to overcome quite easily.

As always, this new technology will get refined by early adopting and forward thinking countries, and the developing nations will be able to take it up later, for much cheaper.
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I posted that to support your comment since we are basically in ageeement.

I wanted to point out that the biggest threat to development has always been those who believe that the resources are limited.
 
Emjay said:
Human progress has always been done with small, incremental changes. This is very good news. Coal stations are the biggest polluters on this planet.
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If you can eliminate the polluting gases it is not bad. CO2 in itself is not harmful.
It's a bit fringe theory, but interesting non the less, where an argument is made that it would be a net positive if CO2 levels increase since the northern hemisphere has more arable land that is currently too cold to use. It also mentions the increased plant growth due to the abundance of CO2. Unfortunately good for the planet is not always so great for our unmoving societies :)
 
konfab said:
Land for renewable energy is limited.

Nuclear fuel is highly energy dense unlike renewable energy, which means you need to spend less money to move the same amount of materials to generate a certain amount of power.
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I am not decrying the use of nuclear energy.
Just saying that it's not the "holy grail" that some think it is.
 
konfab said:
Land for renewable energy is limited.

Nuclear fuel is highly energy dense unlike renewable energy, which means you need to spend less money to move the same amount of materials to generate a certain amount of power.
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Also renewable is not that recyclable at the moment. It also seldom last as long as advertised. There are some interesting research on artificial photosynthesis
 
Ponderer said:
I am not decrying the use of nuclear energy.
Just saying that it's not the "holy grail" that some think it is.
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No one said it was the Holy grail, but it is the best we currently have. Combine the reusable space rockets in the future and it is even better
 
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