What's slowing down the AI buildout

At the time of planning of Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors, were the people responsible aware that their design was in fact not safe? If no, why should it be different today?

And bad weather usually goes along with with significantly increased power generation from wind turbines. Together with battery storage getting cheaper and cheaper, a long term bet on nuclear seems bad both for economic and ecological reasons.

There is significant pollution created while digging up the rare earth materials which are needed to make solar panels, and batteries are some of the dirtiest things we make.

There is virtually zero pollution in a generator which does not typically run. The only waste is the need to occasionally change out the fuel. It’s a rounding error at worst.

This is also ignoring how much safer nuclear is than any other form of power generation, and pollution concerns are ostensibly, at least in part, about improving health and lives of humans.

Bro come on lol.

> To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.

Care to elaborate on what you find funny?

France's energy regulator (CRE) puts the actual cost of running its nuclear fleet at about ~€61/MWh for 2026-2028. EDF's (Électricité de France) own revenue estimate for 2026 nuclear generation is around €66/MWh. They are currently earning a profit on their power generation, the fleet pulls in over €5 billion annually just from selling the surplus to its neighbors. If that's the punchline of your joke I'm not seeing it.

French industrial electricity runs about €69/MWh vs £168/MWh in the UK, as an example.

> The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning

What better use is there of taxes than the running and decommissioning of power plants, nuclear or not? I'd much rather my tax money go to covering all the costs involved with nuclear, from initial construction and everything else involved than pretty much anything else most gov'ts waste their money on.

Who should be paying for it, in your mind?

> To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.

Again, I fail to see how or why this is actually a problem. Power generation is probably the poster child for what governments should be handling and backstopping with tax money. You're also talking as if the large majority of power plants, and I mean coal, natural gas and even renewables aren't also covered by the exact same kind of government backstop.

In the US, nuclear's liability for an accident is capped around $16.3 Billion under the Price-Anderson Act, split across private insurance and an industry-funded pool.

Offshore oil liability is capped by law at $75 million (Yes, only MILLION) per incident, funded by a tiny per-barrel tax, and cleanup costs blow through that number constantly, which is why e.g. Deepwater Horizon needed a special one-off arrangement to handle at all. TVA's 2008 coal ash spill cost over a billion dollars to clean up and got passed straight onto ratepayers because TVA hit its own debt ceiling. And right now, in 2026, the EPA is actively proposing to weaken coal ash cleanup rules, meaning the backstop on coal's mess is getting worse, not better, while it's still being burned at scale.

So no, nuclear doesn't get some unique golden treatment here. Every energy source with real catastrophic tail risk gets a government backstop, because no private insurer on earth prices genuinely catastrophic low-probability events without one. The only difference is nuclear's cap is a known, bounded number attached to an industry with an extremely good actual safety record in reality, while coal's backstop is open-ended and attached to something that poisons rivers and drinking water on a rolling basis without needing a single accident to do it.

Because of super energy density of uranium you need to mine only small amounts of ore, per GWh. Uranium enriched is currently done by gas centrifuges, geopolitically sensitive technology. In future it could be done by laser isotope separation, much more efficient technology, but also geopolitically much more sensitive technology. (Exactly because laser isotope separation doesn't require large amounts of energy and space, it could be easier hidden). There have been demonstrated fast neutron reactors that can run on natural uranium without enrichment, can burn plutonium, but for geopolitical reason this programs have been stopped in US and US discouraged other governments from developing this technologies. With fast neutron reactors we already have enough uranium in stockpiles to power world for centuries.

Carter administration - Fast reactors and nuclear nonproliferation problem

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245230381...

The biggest CO2 impact of nuclear energy is from the steel/concrete used to build the containment building. Because of the aircraft impact rules, nuclear containment building has to survive the impact of a fully loaded large aircraft. These buildings are the strongest non-military facilities in existence, no other civilian industrial plants (even chemical plants with very nasty stuff) have this level of protection. Personally, I think much steel/concrete could be saved by moving nuclear reactor deep underground, but this would require changes in regulation. Again, deep underground nuclear facilities, geopolitical questions...

> because there is no realistic path for nuclear reactors to compete with PV+batteries

It's not that in Northern climates, it's PV+batteries+Natural Gas turbines, because PV doesn't supply enough power for winter heating. In more tropical locations, you're correct.