What's slowing down the AI buildout

This is completely BS. There were no deaths from Fukushima from radiation exposure itself (one worker's lung cancer death was later linked to it, but the dose in question makes even that contested), and the deaths that did happen in Fukushima came overwhelmingly from a botched evacuation, not radiation. Elderly patients dying from disrupted care and panic, not fallout. And Fukushima only happened because of multiple natural disasters aligning in the most unfortunate way possible, including a fucking tsunami hitting the plant directly.

Chernobyl was a disaster caused by Soviet incompetence combined with an RBMK reactor design that literally had no proper containment structure. That's the worst case that has ever occurred, nothing like it has happened since, and it can't really happen again with any reactor built with a real containment vessel, which is standard everywhere outside the old Soviet bloc. Three Mile Island is the perfect example, a partial meltdown caused by a mix of mechanical failure and operator error back in 1979, and the containment held. Zero deaths, zero meaningful radiation release. Even with human screwups and old tech, the actual design of the reactor kept it from becoming a Chernobyl.

And even taking Chernobyl as the worst case scenario we've ever seen, the exclusion zone covers about 2500 km^2 of land area, which isn't small, but it's not "large swathes of land" either. You get irradiated from flying in airplanes more than walking around most of the exclusion zone these days, obviously other than around Pripyat itself. Hell, you can take a walking tour through the zone, I'd very much recommend it (after the war concludes :p)

Meanwhile the reality right now is that fossil fuel sources are polluting the entire planet actively. Coal plants release more radioactive material into the environment through fly ash than nuclear plants do under normal operation. Coal is far from clean in terms of radioactivity on top of everything else it's doing, and it's actively making the world uninhabitable at a much larger and faster scale than nuclear ever has, but yet we're holding nuclear to some higher standard due to years of propaganda.

It's not a perfect technology obviously, but it sure as hell is better than basically all fossil fuel sources.

Nuclear power only makes sense long term. There needs to be 50/50 investment in nlong term nuclear and short term renewables

I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear. The actual position is that we need a mix of both nuclear and renewables while ramping down non-renewable sources as fast as possible, because you need both intermittent cheap generation and reliable baseload that doesn't care if the wind stops blowing or clouds roll over the panels.

The pricing story remains unconvincing to me. LCOE comparisons measure the cost of producing a unit of electricity, but they don't account for what it costs to actually integrate that electricity into a working grid. Solar and wind are cheap on paper, but they still need storage or backup generation to cover the hours they're not producing, and that cost gets left out of the simple dollar per MWh number. Once you factor in grid balancing and storage, the gap closes a lot, and in some studies it disappears entirely depending on the region's wind and solar resources. Obviously things have to be considered in the context of where we're putting these power plants, Norwegians can probably afford to rely a lot more on offshore wind and hydro than a place like Serbia could.

Nuclear plants will obviously be expensive to build, and will likely always be more expensive than renewables to initially build just due to the sheer complexity involved when compared to renewable sources, but I can't think of a better use of that money personally, especially compared to how much gets spent on far worse things like chucking a billion dollars worth of missiles at Iran[0] for quite literally no reason and especially benefit to anyone (other than arms industry I guess) whatsoever.

Also, already built and paid off nuclear plants are consistently some of the cheapest electricity around, often profitable without any subsidy at all. 70%(!!!!) of France's electricity comes from nuclear. They exported more electricity last year than countries like Belgium consumes in an entire year. They enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in the region because of their historical nuclear fleet, and had people had the same attitude back in the day (looking at you, German "green" party), that fleet would've never gotten built. Letting your offspring enjoy the shade of the tree you plant today and all that stuff, it'll always be too expensive until we actually hunker down and just build the bloody things.

And yeah, new builds like Flamanville have been a mess on cost and timeline, that's a fair criticism of new construction, but it doesn't erase what a mature nuclear fleet does for a grid once it's actually built, and can generally be applied to pretty much any infrastructure project anywhere in the world.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845514 - US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

I love how you think that is my primary argument. Want to address the openrouter point?

In US at least much of the high cost is completely self inflicted, driven by Byzantine bureaucratic processes mostly unrelated to the actual engineering requirements necessary for building a safe reactor.