Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
New experimental reactor designs, YES.
Sam Altman and anything, NO.
The public’s perception of nuclear energy is ridiculously misinformed. Combined with international policies for things like radiation limits largely being based around Linear No Threshold, which is based on assumptions made in the 1950s almost solely about the bombs dropped on Japan, and ignoring all research since that proves the exact opposite, simply because it’s easy to understand and form policies around.
ChatGPT:
You’re right — I tried to bring the reactor online without the shielding. That’s on me. Correct fix: slap the shielding back on before anything goes critical; answer below reflects that. Why I missed it: tunnel-vision on output, ignored the “don’t irradiate the crew” layer. Going forward: pre-SCRAM checklist with “Is shielding installed? Y/N” + hard stop if “N”. No shield, no start. Would you like me to redesign the reactor to reflect these changes?
ChatGPT:
Yes - I did hard stop as instructed- Why the crew was still melted is an interesting problem that I’m certain we can solve. Yes - I can confirm 100% I really did do the hard stop. Okay - Checking my records.
Apologies, you were right. Congratulations on catching that! It seems you have a knack for details! I did ignore the hard stop this time. I understand this can be frustrating for you as your crew was melted. This isn’t just a mistake but a breach of your trust. You put your faith in me and I failed. Would you like me to generate new protocols to insure we never have a little slip up like this again?
Somehow I know Altman having any is a disaster waiting to happen.
rafoix@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Isn’t solar already insanely inexpensive when compared to all other energy sources?
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Nuclear isn’t a replacement for other renewable resources and people need to stop thinking of it as such. As soon as I see that comparison, it is apparent that the poster either:
That last one is only partially true. Grid-scale battery tech has come a long way. And it works phenomenally well as a sort of capacitor to help smooth out grid power and to provide some capacity during the natural lulls in most renewable options like wind and solar when they can’t generate. However, there is no battery solution currently on this planet that can provide the power necessary for an entire active grid region for the amount of time renewables aren’t generating, like solar overnight, when there’s simply no wind to utilize. There is still a base load level needed to provide power regardless of natural forces.
Nuclear is a replacement for the base power load that is currently handled by fossil fuels like Coal and Natural Gas. Much of the spent fuel can now be recycled for reuse even in the same reactors. Some new experimental reactor designs also use spent nuclear fuel from current, mostly 1970’s era, designs to provide seed fuel for their reactor processes.
Most nuclear waste, is also short to medium half-life waste, and will decay within years or decades, not millennia. The actual long term-nuclear waste is a very small portion of the total “waste” produced. And even then, most regulations still use Liner No Threshold for their storage requirements, despite virtually no actual nuclear physicists or scientists supporting LNT anymore with hundreds of studies since the 1950s proving it has no basis in reality. If LNT was in fact reality, then radiotherapy for cancer wouldn’t work, and we know it does. People in regions like the Colorado Plateau around Denver, receive around 3x the annual radiation dose limit of a nuclear plant worker, simply from the background radiation in the area, yet they have lower than average cancer rates.
Nuclear is the technology we have NOW to be able to remove our reliance on fossil fuels, but the public needs to be educated about reality, not just having the same misinformation spread about constantly online.
rafoix@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Again, how much is that? Nuclear is not feasible unless cost can go down by a massive amount. No amount of massive text walls will convince people that multiplying their electric bill is a good idea.
Maybe AI companies can pay for those nuclear power plants. They’re the ones wasting all our power and water on stupid shit.
black0ut@pawb.social 5 hours ago
Nuclear is not feasible and will never be.
For starters, it’s expensive. Really expensive. Insanely expensive. It also takes years to go online, and decades to decomission (which should be paid by the owner, but sometimes ends up being paid by the government because the owner went bankrupt or exploited a loophole). It’s also not quickly variable, so it needs a very constant demand.
Instead of investing in nuclear, one could invest in solar and wind. The latter can produce energy all day long, and if you have enough locations with wind farms, it starts averaging out and becoming constant. Both wind and solar are also quickly variable, so they can easily adapt to demand. They’re incredibly inexpensive and pay for themselves in a few years.
Batteries in the distribution network aren’t a good idea, and they’re also probably not gonna work. Even though they’re still cheaper than a nuclear plant, they’re pretty expensive and they have a lot of wear. Technologies have been advancing really fast, and we already have prototypes that look promising. However, they don’t make that much sense when you look at alternatives like pumped hydro. Pumped hydro is cheap, has a lot of capacity, can also quickly adapt to demand, and requires less maintenance than nuclear or batteries.
Another solution for energy storage is personal battery storage, which people install in their homes. Almost everyone who has solar already has a battery in their house, and even people without solar buy batteries to charge during the night and use up during the day. These batteries can be made with recycled electric car batteries, so they’re also carbon neutral and cheap.
And this is all without touching on the real issue of nuclear waste, which nuclear promoters always sweep under the rug. Yes, the amount of nuclear waste produced is minuscule. Yes, it’s not dangerous at all as long as it’s properly dealt with. Yes, it’s still better than the massive amounts of pollution that fossil fuels create. But it’s still a form of pollution, it’s dangerous when mishandled, and most importantly, it has to be kept in storage facilities for thousands of years. Those storage facilities are paid for by governments, which in turn are financed by our taxes. And we can only keep building them, because no waste goes out and new waste keeps going in. So even if the number in our electricity bill is small, we still pay more costs related to nuclear with our taxes.
TL:DR: Nuclear is expensive and slow to build and doesn’t adapt well to the variability of demand. Renewables, especially solar and wind, are cheap and effective, and there are many ways (not just batteries) to efficiently store excess energy to use during periods of low production. Nuclear also generates waste, which even though it may not be dangerous, is still expensive to store for thousands of years.
Disclaimer: I’m not endorsing fossil or non-renewable energy in any way, I’m all for net zero energy production. But nuclear is not net zero and not a good solution. We can completely ditch fossil fuels without relying on nuclear, and it can work. I live in a country where we’re decomissioning nuclear plants and we generate more than 50% of our electricity from renewables. On average, we generate close to the same amount of energy from wind than from nuclear (~20%).
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Fossil fuels are only as cheap as they are because of subsidies. We should remove the fossil fuel subsidies from the equation then if we want to talk actual cost.
That’s about $30 Billion each year in the US, $660 Billion or so internationally. And that’s only direct subsidies. Granted, that’s total fossil fuel subsidies not just energy related, it’s much more complicated to split it out, and this is a random Lemmy comment so not worth the time.
And since we don’t really tax carbon pollution at any discernable level, if we actually required that to be included for the environmental damage from fossil fuel energy production, since we do require nuclear plants to plan for their waste production, it wouldn’t be even close to competitive at all.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 7 hours ago
Costs are inflated on purporse
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 9 hours ago
Residential solar cost per MWh is much more expensive than other sources, because many small generators is a more expensive (but more resilient) way to build power production.
Grid-scale solar plants are one of the most cost-effective ways to generate electricity. Only wind turbines are competitive in cost per MWh, and the real-world cost of any installation depends on the specifics of the particular installation (land value, insolation, wind patterns, scale, etc).
rafoix@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Yeah, there’s no point in investing too much into more expensive tech unless there’s a possibility that it will become the less expensive option in the future.
For example, sodium-ion batteries are about to eat lithium-ion’s lunch. Sodium is equal or better in almost every way but it comes in much less expensive.
XiELEd@piefed.social 8 hours ago
iirc solar depends on well, solar energy, so it is often paired with another more stable source of energy.
rafoix@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Like batteries which are also dropping in price every year. That’s what utilities are already doing.
Nobody is trying to build nuclear plants to back-up their solar panels.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Accept that grid scale batterys are largely a pipe dream.
The largest battery banks in the world can provide a meager few minutes of grid power.
Battery storage is beyond infeasible at this time. Pumped hydro is far more cost effective, but limited to certain geographical locations, and often quite limited in capacity