Stanford’s Questionable Study on Spent Nuclear Fuel for SMRs
PNAS SMR waste study rebuttal
Ted Nordhaus's rebuttal

The second rebuttal includes a link to a NAS Used Nuclear Fuel Meeting video, which features committee members Allison Macfarlane, Rodney Ewing, and Ed Lyman among others questioning presenters, proving that they have intentionally misrepresented and excluded SMRs in their paper. It is striking how ignorant and biased these "experts" are, and their treatment of the presenters is appalling. (eg. the referenced talk/Q&A)

"Be careful" should probably be limited to precisely accounting for the whereabouts of fissile, and ensuring that it is making energy and not weapons. Other than that, nuclear accidents have really only proven how safe the technology is, and how absurd the regulations and licensing process are. There are countless chemicals used in industrial quantities that are far more dangerous.

The LNT regulations are not based on science, and limit exposure to levels 1000x below that of any detectable harm. They also prevent beneficial use of low-dose radiation for medicine, including an effective COVID treatment, so the regulations are costing lives measured in millions today. That and anyone and their dog is given the opportunity to file frivolous lawsuits which obstruct investment and construction, with the inevitable result that hydrocarbons are burned instead.

Given circumstances, I'd suggest dismantling the NRC entirely; even a complete regulatory vacuum (for nuclear) would be less harmful than the status quo. Since the NRC has begun arbitrarily rescinding licenses already granted, it no longer functions anyway. In its place, create a simple watchdog, enact some reasonable science-based limits at the EPA, and watch nuclear flourish.

Mark Nelson has made it his mission to provide accurate information to balance the mainstream media stoking baseless hysteria about nuclear in Ukraine. Also very interesting and informative are his various interviews on the Decouple and Power Hungry Podcasts.

The same goes for US weapons being expended; we are almost completely reliant on China for various resources and manufacturing, and arguably it's even worse than Europe's energy dependence on Russia. If energy and resource policy aren't fixed soon, the US too will become a vassal state of China in the (not so) long term.

Russia's supply of cheap gas and funding "environmental" NGOs to oppose fracking, has encouraged the west to pursue the mirage of green energy. China has also been subsidizing wind and solar for export, while building reliable and abundant coal and nuclear domestically. Doubling down on the same policies that failed Europe so spectacularly is not wise, but the greens are demanding exactly that: kill all fossil fuels, and install ever more unreliable energy, to compensate for not having enough reliable energy. (and source it all from China of course; it's brilliant, what could possibly go wrong?)

Fossil fuels are crucial to our prosperity and essential for lifting billions in the developing world out of poverty, and the crusade to eliminate their use before viable substitutes are available is extremely dangerous. Alex Epstein makes the moral case for fossil fuels convincingly enough that the Washington Post is now engaging in a baseless smear campaign to suppress his ideas and upcoming book "Fossil Future".

The crucial missing piece is permission, but that will not be forthcoming from the anti-energy Biden administration. The NRC issued licenses for Nuscale and some other life extensions to 80 years, then they recently revoked them all over some bullshit. Nuscale has already spent $500M to engage with the NRC, for what is just an ordinary conventional reactor at a small enough size to make passive safety trivial, and this is the result (in the US). Since its inception, the NRC has not licensed a single new reactor to successful operation; it should be renamed the Nuclear Rejection Commission.

The other problem is that wind and solar are so heavily incentivized, that they can place bids at zero or negative prices at RTO auctions. They make their money by harvesting subsidies and selling carbon credits, which are then purchased by jurisdictions which have enacted renewable mandates. This is a scam which allows the purchasers to claim they are "100% renewable", without having to spend on storage. In reality, they just use whatever mix of fossil or imports are available to make up the difference, since it isn't actually possible to meet demand without reliable generation somewhere.

The deregulated RTO markets are completely dysfunctional, and structured in a way that provide zero incentive to build reliable generation. For details, see Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith Angwin, or watch her interviews on The Power Hungry Podcast.

If you are genuinely concerned about mining, it makes no sense to single out nuclear, which is the single most resource efficient energy source. All of the world's energy could come from a fraction of the tailings of rare earth mining already being done. Rare earth mining is indeed a nasty affair, and a lot of it is being driven by renewables, which use them in great quantities.

That being said, the conventional uranium fuel cycle is 0.5% efficient, and if we are to rapidly scale nuclear, we should develop more efficient technologies. Thorium would be preferable, as it wouldn't require a massive buildup of uranium enrichment infrastructure, and can be used ~200x more efficiently in a LFTR.

Another opportunity to reduce mining, is by allowing the actinides to be extracted from spent fuel, which is a much better source of fissile than ore. Unfortunately in the US, the Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste didn't even consider recycling, even though it is trivial to transform spent fuel into a form usable in molten salt reactors. "Nuclear waste" is only a problem until the politicians give permission for it to be recycled, then it just becomes a fuel reserve.

Preliminary Data Suggests Low-Dose Radiation May Be Successful Treatment For Severe Covid-19 (preliminary data for Covid-19, but decades of evidence for the effectiveness in treating pneumonia)

Millions of lives could have been saved, if not for the misinformed crusade against radiation.

Climate Feedback Unscientifically Confuses "Disasters" & Weather Events & Endorses Pseudoscientific Claim That We Are in A "Sixth Mass Extinction"

[...] Censored By Facebook For Telling The Truth About Climate Change And Extinctions

TL;DR "Fact checking" refuted directly.

This is part of concerted efforts to censor the book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which is endorsed by many leading scientists, and filled with unwelcome facts that don't fit the alarmist narrative. Many establishment greens don't care that their proposed solutions are ineffective; they just want to incite panic so that money flows, as is typical in politics.

There are many reasons to support development of LFTR, but you have buried that in alarmist nonsense, as might be expected of someone citing Gregory Jaczko. See the top Amazon review of his book: Fascinatingly honest account of how much damage one rogue political appointee can do by Rod Adams, and another informed review: Mr. Jaczko Went to Washington, and Look What Happened by Katie Tubb.

It's hard to get excited about an SMR built with legacy nuclear technology, but 60MW is the magic number for LWRs at which safety can be guaranteed, without need for complex and multiply redundant cooling systems. Their inventor Alvin Weinberg raised concerns about the potential of meltdowns at larger sizes, and his competing MSR program was cancelled as a result. Read his autobiography The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer for an informed view on what went wrong with nuclear, and reasons to hope for the future.

Nuscale's main selling point is near-term availability, and it will be a good option for remote areas that often burn diesel for energy, or developing grids which can't absorb output in 1GW increments, but still need reliable power.

By 2050, the cost of desalinated water could be quite reasonable. However, we need to start soon, and incentivize appropriate technologies. Reverse Osmosis plants will always be high maintenance, and use electricity which is expensive and wasteful. Multi-Effect Distillation uses half the electricity of RO, plus some thermal energy, which can be supplied by heat rejected from power plants, that would otherwise go to waste.

The key is to combine the processes, which will decrease the cost of both electricity and co-products like desalinated water. Since thermal plants are typically 30-60% efficient in generating electricity, there are large opportunities for making use of that heat for industrial processes. High temperature nuclear reactors are especially attractive, and offer more options for co-generation, including synthetic fuels and ammonia. This also allows reactors to run continuously at 100% power, while adapting to demand by varying generation of co-products.

The economics favor coupling co-generation to reliable sources of energy. Using excess renewable capacity is substantially more challenging, and of questionable benefit. For such plants to be cost effective, they can't be sitting idle most of the time, waiting for sporadic bursts of energy.

The true path to sustainability involves using more energy and less natural resources. Unfortunately, there is a common yet misguided ideal that we should minimize energy use through conservation and efficiency, and that expensive energy is good because it decreases demand. This kills recycling, desalination, synthetic carbon-neutral fuels/fertilizer, and other sustainability efforts. Worse yet, the preferred "natural" energy sources that are supposedly "free", require vast resource-intensive infrastructure to harness, store, and distribute. The massive environmental harm is tacitly accepted as necessary for saving the world, and if these efforts are scaled up, the results will be devastating.

It is rather remarkable how many have been blinded by dogma and propaganda, and can't even acknowledge the most basic tenet of minimizing resource use and impact on the natural world. Instead, the (fossil-funded) "green" lobby insist that we pave the world with renewables and continue their subsidies indefinitely, all without any plan or even a fund to manage their final disposition. The reality is that renewables only transform fossil energy and natural resources into a new waste stream. How can wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries ever be sustainable if we can't afford to recycle them?

Environmental impact is ultimately a function of energy density. Fission (and fusion) generate enormous amounts of energy from a tiny quantity of material, are produces even less waste, all of which is contained and self-funded by per-kWh fees. Advanced technologies are even more effective, and produce invaluable isotopes for medical and space applications. With rational policy, not only will it be the cleanest energy source, but also the cheapest. Then, economics alone will drive rapid decarbonization. Nuclear is already the safest by any objective measure, and even the very small risks can be virtually eliminated.

I’m just curious how long we will remain in the dark ages because of Imaginary Property. Many are skeptical of the Mill, but suppose it pans out; how would that innovation benefit people in this lifetime? We’d now have a wonderful new proprietary architecture that no one will touch, because there isn’t a second source. So it will remain confined to niches until the patents run out and someone implements the ideas anew, which may only repeat the cycle with a minor variation. Without an open model, I fear the Mill will be doomed to obscurity.

The RISC-V ecosystem has demonstrated rapid progress with community efforts, and while the architecture is more attractive than ARM and x86, it is basically a nice yet open conventional ISA which suffers from the same fundamental drawbacks. Even before entering the nightmare of speculative execution exploits, the hardware security mechanisms have long been lacking. Current in-order RISC-V cores are extremely compact, making them attractive for embedded and many-core applications. However, OoO will reduce security even further, and the performance it offers comes at great expense in complexity, area, and power, sacrificing much of the benefit.

The Mill aims to deliver DSP efficiency and cost on general purpose workloads, and is invulnerable to those exploits and many others. One might argue that the Mill performance advantage is a luxury, but the greatly enhanced security characteristics of a Mill are not; they are basic functionality which is desperately needed by general purpose CPUs. While the Mill is a fascinating novel architecture, the most compelling aspect may be the security model, which will enable efficient microkernels and much greater isolation in applications.

Except that you can't steal ideas, and trying to monopolize them is backward, and not at all in the interest of humanity. We should all encourage the proliferation of good ideas; not only can we all share their benefit at no cost, but then the entire world can freely cooperate to improve the state of the art.

The problem isn't that the US "stole" ideas from Britain, but that they didn't discard the regressive concept of "Intellectual Property" after disrespecting it. In reality, new ideas don't spring forth from a vacuum, they are built upon a mountain of collective experience, and are as much a product of circumstance as ingenuity. Allowing a monopoly on any one can further impede progress by introducing artificial bottlenecks. Everything is a Remix illustrates the concept nicely.

To be fair, this specifically is about trade secrets, but corporate secrets don't stay that way, and it is hard to argue that US monopolists haven't already seen a fair benefit from anything China has "stolen". I'm more concerned about the snowballing monopolies in the US which certainly don't benefit the majority of citizens.

"IP theft" is oxymoron. "Theft" implies that the owner was deprived of the "property", which is impossible with an idea. This line of reasoning is also highly hypocritical considering how much imaginary property America "stole" from England.

The free sharing of ideas benefits everyone and lubricates progress. People believing that it is possible or beneficial to maintain a monopoly on ideas are deluded. The bill will come due, yet it won't be the result of "rampant IP theft", but of your own greed and stupidity, in believing that your ideas have more value than the manufacturing infrastructure to realize them.