How many TikTok "users" are completely passive, never posting and only viewing / listening? I'm guessing most of them.

That's just what human beings do. It's not really even that's going over budget it's that whenever these things are pitched they are under budgeted.

If we got upset every time anything went over budget we wouldn't have a country. We never would have made it out of the Northeast.

You need to build in extra lines and stops because there's a lot of in California people want to go. We aren't at the point yet where we are going to be building expressways. That kind of infrastructure comes later after you have a larger amount of rail installed. It isn't anything we can't or wouldn't do though in the absence of large car companies and airlines screwing everything up for the sake of their own profit.

There is absolutely nothing stupider than having an entire transportation system built around 3,000 lb+ personal vehicles that we all have to be personally responsible for both on and off the road. How many extra hours do we work to pay for these damn things? And if you're okay with that fine but fuck you for dragging me into it so that I have to pay for it too. I'm fucking sick and tired of paying for gearhead's fucking hobby.

It doesn't. What it means is cutting through a lot of big parcels whose owners have big money, so they can be big impediments. There has to be a happier medium than this between respect for individual private property ownership and the needs of the many, but we are clearly uninterested in finding it in this country.

Are you unready or ill equipped for the conversation about making them not stab-happy in the first place? Because you leapt rapidly to throwing away the key.

Oh look, a one-issue sock puppet has shown up to Charlie Kirk the discussion.

So then the hard part is creating the reactors which don't exist, as usual. It's a weakness shared by literally every proposed SMR project.

That's not what "native" means.

Who invented pluggable file formats anyway? The first place I experienced it was AmigaOS 2.0. NeXTStep had reusable controls but AFAIK it didn't provide formats to all installed applications.

I really wish them luck, but there have been so many false dawn's on fusion...

Sure, yes that also. It definitely does not automatically mean "just run rails along the along the interstate"

It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Again though you have to compare it to alternatives. And the fact is wind and solar installations with batteries to make up for the gaps are infinitely cheaper than even well understood nuclear plant designs.

For something like 15 years now. There are plenty of dirt cheap battery solutions like those crazy sand batteries. You don't have to use rare Earth minerals to store energy there's plenty of other ways.

There really is no economic case to be made for nuclear power in America. The only reason we may see any new nuclear energy come online is people bringing up old plants that got shut down because AI has so much money right now.

Which isn't a good thing. I mean we're combining a weak regulatory environment with an old plant that was shut down because the cost of keeping it open was too high with a bubble economy heavily incentivized for low costs.

But even ignoring all that you're not going to see any new nuclear power come online.

I would be curious to get an honest answer from people why they are so obsessed with it. I really do think it's just that it was the cool thing when we were kids. Honestly solar punk isn't really all that cool.

I appreciate the efforts of some of these new nuclear companies but this is starting to feel like VC bait, there's all of sudden more cheap money flowing and everyone is after it no matter how impractical the idea.

I get the idea but we have enough good locations and enough problems to sort out building reactors above ground before we start building them a mile underground.

"Hey, what are the two most expensive infrastructure projects currently available? Deep tunnels and nuclear reactors. Well chocolate and peanut butter go together, why not those?!"

Fuck it here's an idea, just build reactors on the bottom of the sea floor. Now give me money you venture capital dopes.

Also I've always thought there was GenIV reactor concepts for this type of "bury it and forget it" system already, the Lead Cooled Fast Reactor

But the cost of building this installation sounds like it would be prohibitive unless you're using slave labor and letting a lot of those slaves die.

Even then I don't know if you could pull something like this off. This sounds like a scam.

Keep in mind if you are in North America then nuclear is basically a scam right now anyway unless you're restarting an old reactor. That's because the investment cost for wind and solar even with the current administration interfering with your deployment is substantially cheaper than any nuclear reactor you could possibly build, again even with the administration looking the other way on safety.

Japan might have a reason to fire up their nuclear reactors because they have so little viable land. But the one thing America has a fuckload of is land. So it just doesn't make economic sense to build a nuclear reactor in America.

I'm not quite sure why so many people over 50 though are so hung up on nuclear. I guess it was the future when you were a kid and it's a future that never happened so I think a lot of old farts are obsessed with it. Libertarian types seem to be really really into nuclear too and I don't understand why. Maybe the small footprint size of the reactors seems more individualistic? I don't know but it's all kind of pointless when we can just build out solar or wind installations.

Jesus christ, twice now. Interstate means "inside state" not the literal interstate highway system.