[HN Gopher] White House Accelerates Development of Mini Nuclear ...
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White House Accelerates Development of Mini Nuclear Reactors
Author : clouddrover
Score : 27 points
Date : 2021-01-17 05:03 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedrive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedrive.com)
| kk58 wrote:
| What's with the sudden activity ins space related defence
| initiatives.
|
| What's the angle here? Colonization of space aka the expanse?
| Beached wrote:
| dissolving relations with Russia, china increasing space
| capabilities, and few if any western friendly country capable
| of preserving western allies space interests means US
| investment and ramp up. the only other capable space program to
| fill the void and protect western allies interests is the EU,
| except they are farther behind and are showing no interest, and
| instead are insistent that there is little need and that china
| and Russia will never even dream of restricting access or
| hindering space activities.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I could see mini nuclear reactors working out cheaper for power
| generation than factory scale ones.
|
| Sure, nuclear is far more efficient at scale from a physics and
| engineering perspective, but this is probably outweighed by the
| political costs of spending billions of dollars to relearn how
| to build nuclear facilities.
|
| If on the other hand we can make container scale reactors and
| just truck them into places, we can deploy power anywhere with
| very little political cost.
| [deleted]
| robnado wrote:
| People want to start mining asteroids for their precious metal
| content.
| Valgrim wrote:
| You can also mine large amount of non-precious metals and
| keep it in space as construction material for large orbital
| structures.
| mchusma wrote:
| It's been an exciting year or so for nuclear in the US. (1) the
| democratic party switched stances to support nuclear energy (2)
| the US allowed several small nuclear reactor designs to move
| forward (3) fusion research got extra funding (4) pushing some
| work from government to private sector (5) encouraging NASA and
| the DOD to cooperate on small reactor work.
|
| It's reasonably likely that in 10 years we have nuclear energy
| that is near the cost of other energy sources, which has always
| been it's blocker.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > It's reasonably likely that in 10 years we have nuclear
| energy that is near the cost of other energy sources, which has
| always been it's blocker.
|
| You will not get nuclear energy that is near the cost of other
| energy sources in 10 years because they route they chose to
| achieve it is incorrect.
|
| They can't get the cost of nuclear power down by making
| reactors smaller, because doing so increases its cost, not
| reduces.
|
| I can't fathom how anybody with above high school education can
| come with an idea easily provable wrong in 10 minutes of work
| on handheld calculator. When you see somebody obviously aware
| of such mistakes pretending that there aren't, don't assume
| goodwill.
| DataWorker wrote:
| That assumes the incentives and policies do not shift. Is that
| a good assumption? I hear very antinuclear sentiments all the
| time.
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(page generated 2021-01-17 23:02 UTC)