A Boring Dystopia

naturally. Its like not buying your meth from El Padrino.

So officially it's just ACCESS. You're not carting it away without an escort or a clear idea of where it's going, and it's still technically controlled by the DOE. However, since the levers are all ripped off by the administration cutting everything to the bone and then some, this is effectively a cash injection to OpenAI by financing some terror organizations and rogue states.

There's also just the fact that "weapons grade" just means it's useful for a fission weapon. Nothing's stopping you from taking that cobalt-60 you found in that Therac at Daryl's junkyard, strapping it to an IED, and using that as a dispersal device to give a lot of people radiation poisoning or whatever (the traditional "dirty bomb").

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.

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%).

Costs are inflated on purporse

For grid storage, Ambri has the cheapest possible molten salt battery. The company was struggling.

The MIT Prof who started this is Don Sadoway, he started this 13 years ago and no one gives a fuck in the US. Right idea, wrong country. The US grid is ruled by corruption and middle men reselling electricity -no one wants a cheaper solution.

This guy just gives an amazing lecture.

By 2024, Ambri was bankrupt. Reddit and Lemmy seem to think countries want real energy solutions, which is just not true. Corruption rules the energy grid.

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.

Battery storage is used for smoothing not to provide grid power.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of How much energy is required to provide base load.