The RBMK from 1980s Chernobyl is hardly a "modern" reactor. That's from ancient history. Even the RBMK reactors that were operating in the 1990s are hardly like those operating in the 1980s, after the Chernobyl incident the remaining RBMK reactors were decommissioned or updated with new safety systems.

Does anyone claim that a Tesla car could explode because of reports of exploding Fords and Chevys from decades ago? Does anyone claim that an electric car can't go more than 80 miles on a charge because that's all the GM EV1 could do? While I know someone will want to point this out as yet another bad car analogy but given the huge gains in safety, efficiency, and more in cars in only 30 years, and compare that to gains in nuclear power technology over the same time there's many parallels.

It's mind boggling that you believe a 40 year old meltdown in the USSR is somehow relevant to nuclear power safety in the USA today.

Who is listening to this BS any more? What makes anyone believe that the meltdown at Chernobyl is any kind of argument against building next generation nuclear power today?

I'm seeing huge shifts in the public attitude on nuclear fission power in the last decade or so, with perhaps the most notable shift around about 2020 when Andrew Yang was advocating for new nuclear power plants during his campaign for POTUS in 2019/2020. Yang obviously didn't win the election but he did force Democrats running against him to comment on the issue. Those outright opposed to nuclear power dropped out first. Those that supported nuclear power hung on a bit longer. The last to hold out were those that offered stupid "split the baby" options like keeping old nuclear power plants running but not building any new plants.

It's thinking like that that created the fear of nuclear power from Fukushima. TEPCO had new reactor units 7 & 8 planned at Fukushima to replace the older units 1, 2, & 3, the units that self destructed after being hit with a tsunami. Had those units been closed as originally scheduled, and units 4, 5, & 6 been in a maintenance shutdown as they were at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, then we could have expected units 7 & 8 to keep operating through the event as they were designed to hold up to such an event. People opposed to nuclear power like @phantomfive are creating the safety problems in nuclear power that scare them so much.

We aren't going to close down nuclear power in the USA any time soon because it produces nearly 20%, or about 100 GW, of the electricity in the USA and there's no quick and easy path to replacing that. KEPCO built about 5.5 GW of new nuclear power capacity in UAE over about 12 years, not including the planning time before that. What would it take for renewable energy construction companie to produce similar amounts of electrical output in the same time period?

What's your plan for generating electricity, or energy more generally, for the future? More of the same with wind and solar? I see more nuclear fission power in our future, or more energy shortages and the rising energy costs that come with those shortages.

That's not relevant unless the pollution and other problems of other options are also considered. Someone could give some kind of volume, mass, or cost for mitigation on the waste and pollution produced from nuclear power but that would be meaningless. We'd have to consider how much of this downside is produced when compared to upside (such as the watt-hours or dollar value of energy produced) then compare that to other options like solar, wind, hydro, or simply doing without this energy.

Most any thing can "potentially" happen. What we have now is over 50 years of experience with 2nd generation nuclear power, something like 30 years of experience with 3rd generation nuclear power, which means we can apply that experience to produce 4th generation and "3-1/2" generation nuclear power for even greater safety, efficiency, and reduced costs.

I watched some YouTube videos in the last week that laid out how new rules from the US NRC should reduce costs of future nuclear power beyond just that achieved with new technology, this is because a large part of nuclear power costs are from regulation than that from materials and labor. Current rules on nuclear safety are from a time when there were very high standards on safety because the real risks of nuclear power were not understood as well as they are now. We benefit from this somewhat today because the over engineered reactors built at the time can now be expected to run for 80, 100, or possibly more years with exceptional safety margins remaining. Spreading out the cost of construction over this amount of time means we are likely to enjoy very low energy costs in the future, we need only use the new proposed rules based on evidence and science than the old rules based on speculation and superstition.

It's been clear to me for some time that the majority of people that frequent Slashdot are deeply opposed to new nuclear power. They maintain this opposition by believing that future nuclear power will be something like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island. While most people will claim that the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl wee 2nd generation I could make an argument that it was instead a late 1st generation plant. Chernobyl lacked the containment dome that is nearly the definition of 2nd generation. The RBMK, as designed at the time, was a "dual use" reactor built with the intent for producing weapon grade plutonium than produce power, and such dual use ability was a defining feature of 1st generation reactors. The failed reactors at TMI and Fukushima were 2nd generation reactors built at about the same time as the RBMK at Chernobyl and so lacked so many safety features that would have come later on, such as a number of passive systems that when combined would make what we consider 3rd generation. Nobody has built a 2nd generation nuclear power plant for some time. We've yet to see a 3rd generation power plant produce anything close to the kind of safety issues that 2nd generation has produced. Anything new would be built to the higher safety standards of 3-1/2 or 4th generation nuclear power.

No currently operating civilian nuclear power reactor is capable of a "China Syndrome" as posed in popular culture, or a rapid steam explosion as seen in the RBMK. Nobody would dare build such a reactor today since no such design would be licensed, or if somehow some people could build a reactor without some kind of government oversight they'd not be built simply because that puts the reactor at risk of self destruction when well documented designs that avoid these risks can be built with no real added costs in construction. We know how to build better reactors now, fears of repeats of events from 40 years ago are unfounded. Fear of nuclear power today would be like fear of buying a new Tesla car because of reports of gasoline explosions from Ford cars and Chevy trucks from decades ago. Because of new technology, and a better understanding of radiation safety, we need new rules. It appears we are finally getting new rules, and from that I expect lower costs and higher safety. It's not like nuclear power was "unsafe" before, it is merely that we better understand the risks and so can provide higher safety with lower costs because we are putting our money and efforts into places where it counts than waste it on places where it does not.

Who is suggesting any nation get 100% of their electricity from nuclear? I certainly made no such suggestion.

I've seen similar claims before, I have my doubts on the practicality of running a national electrical grid with that level of renewable energy sources on the grid. The reason I have doubts is those that make a counter claim would show their work while those that argue for all renewable have a more "trust me, bro" attitude on the calculations. Another reason to have doubts is the recent Iberian power outage, an outage that impacted a lot of people with an over reliance on renewable energy as the primary suspect as the cause. Certainly there was a human factor in this, likely people that wanted "bragging rights" on reaching some kind of record on renewable energy on the grid. The human factor could instead be improper training and/or protocols on managing the grid that were lacking in some way.

If it were that simple to run a grid on 90+% renewable energy then I would expect some nation would have made it work by now. Wind and solar power isn't new, it's not like there wasn't time in the last 50 years or so to make that happen. I'm picking 50 years somewhat arbitrarily, this is about the time when concern over pollution and such from energy really got going as well as about when solar PV was something that was low cost enough that it found uses beyond powering satellites in orbit. This is also about the time that Three Mile Island had a meltdown and created opposition to nuclear power among the general public.

50 years have gone by and nobody has made it work. Those that made the most effort on an all renewable grid have seen rising energy costs and blackouts.

It's not just oil and natural gas impacted by blocking off trade bottle necks like Hormuz. Oil and gas can't get out while also nothing can get in. Well, it would appear that there is allowances for food and medicine to get in as the war is with the leadership in Iran than the innocent citizens of Iran. Which gets to the next point...

If China does something stupid that could cause nations in the region to blockage ships carrying solar PV panels and battery-electric vehicles then there could be all kinds of issues getting energy in any form. France decided long ago to build a large fleet of nuclear power plants as they have very little in fossil fuels, not much in hydro, and so on. They needed to reach some level of energy independence or see their national wealth evaporate from having to export cash for energy imports. It's the same motivations driving China to build dozens of nuclear power plants at a time.

There's only so far that buying solar PV, electric cars, and such can go in reaching energy independence. It would be impractical to run a nation on only wind, water, sun, and geothermal. Nuclear power will have to be included as part of the mix of energy sources, it is a need to have technology than a nice to have technology. One hurdle to avoid fossil fuels and nuclear fission is like France where they lack the geography, geology, climate, and so on to rely only on renewable energy sources.

I expect to see large reductions in CO2 emissions as something of a happy accident while nations wake up to the need to reach a point were disruptions in trade won't leave them in the cold and dark. Nuclear fission, onshore wind, hydro, and maybe also geothermal, are all options that have proved to be competitive on price with fossil fuels. I'd expect someone to reply on the costs of nuclear power not being competitive if I didn't point out what should be obvious, as the global trade in fossil fuels are restricted due to blockades the price will keep rising until it reaches whatever cost people believe nuclear power costs. We can plot out the costs of fossil fuels to nuclear fission over time on a graph as blockades impede trade in fossil fuels, when those two lines meet then it would be economic suicide to not build nuclear power plants.

As nations build nuclear power plants to replace electricity from fossil fuels their CO2 emissions will go down. As nations gain experience in building nuclear power plants the costs for nuclear power will go down. Concern on CO2 emissions is a luxury, something that a nation will only look to addressing once more important issues have been dealt with. The same goes for opposition to nuclear power, that's a luxury that can only be maintained so long as energy costs are tolerable.

To those that believe nuclear power plants take "too long" (in scare quotes because that is subjective) I can make two points on that. First is that we've seen nuclear power plants go from planning to putting electricity on the grid in under four years, which is near parity on the build time for large solar and wind projects. Second, if there wasn't the irrational fear of nuclear power then we could have plausibly seen many nations able to be relatively unconcerned about fossil fuel prices, even if we assume a nuclear power plant takes more than a decade before it puts power on the grid. The need for nations to maintain some level of energy independence isn't new, what is new is that the fears of restrictions on the global energy trade has become real.

Those trucks do not claim to have a 500 mile range on a single charge like the Tesla Semi. If the Volvo examples given could get 500 miles on a charge while retaining a cab-over design then you would have a point. They claim 700 km, or about 435 miles. That might be only a 15% difference but I have a suspicion that it would be enough to force a significant redesign of the truck to get to 500 miles, to the point that it could no longer retain the cab-over format as it is currently understood/defined.

Maybe we could see some new battery chemistry that can allow for all kinds of new capabilities but this will come at a cost, and not necessarily a monetary cost. In the search for batteries with increasing energy density we are seeing batteries that are made in ways that make them increasingly more delicate, and should there be damage then they can burn in ways that are difficult to control. This has lead toward a trend in battery-electric vehicles to use battery chemistry and construction that give up energy density so as to be more durable, use less expensive materials, and address other concerns. It is because of these trends I'm suspicious of battery-electric long haul trucks seeing success in wide adoption.

I recently saw a video on YouTube singing the praises on gains being made in "solar fuel" technology. This is the same fuel synthesis technology that has existed for something like a century now but this time the heat and electricity for producing diesel fuel, jet fuel, or whatever, comes from sunlight. Is the goal to move cargo by battery power? Or move cargo in a manner that doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere? Solar fuels will allow using the same diesel trucks we have now but with carbon neutral fuel than fossil fuel.

I believe we should be looking at new fuels than new trucks. Solve the fuel problem and we make all existing vehicles carbon neutral than set ourselves up for trying to replace what took us a century to build in logistics and infrastructure. Change the fuel and we could reach carbon neutral in a decade or two. Changing to all battery-electric vehicles will likely take more than a century. If I were to make a bet on which comes first then I know where I'd put my money.

That worked well for the time because routes the trucks took were short so the range requirements were minimal. Then is that with deliveries being in the early mornings, while people were still asleep and wanting milk with their breakfast, being quiet was important. The load needing to be carried was relatively small and light and so no real concern on the battery-electric milk truck being so big that navigating tight corners in residential areas could be a problem, or so heavy that there could be a concern on breaking the pavement.

Does any of this apply for the Tesla Semi? A Class 8 vehicle? These are trucks meant to haul 20+ tons of cargo over hundreds of miles. These trucks are not meant for tight confines seen in residential areas but the wide open highways, no need for the shorter cab-over designs common in Europe. It might be difficult to make a practical cab-over battery electric Class 8 truck given the volume the battery required for the range and power demanded of the vehicle.

Isn't there a rule that allows electric trucks to exceed the normal weight limits for Class 8 trucks? I recall it is about an extra 2000 pounds over the limit for a diesel truck. I expect this was necessary or the Tesla Semi would be dead on arrival. Without that allowance for extra battery weight then the people operating the trucks would have to make up for it by reducing the mass of the cargo carried. Since trucking runs on moving cargo mass over miles that would make a dent in profits that few companies and owner-operators would tolerate.

I have my doubts that any Class 8 battery-electric truck will prove successful. Had this been something like a Ford Transit or GMC Topkick, Class 6 vehicles at most, then I would have higher expectations for success. These are trucks that would do the kind of work that the old milk delivery trucks would do, as in short hauls with "light" loads (at least "light" when compared to Class 8) and long periods of being idle for a recharge. Short haul semi trucks are certainly a thing but these are also the cab-over trucks that tend to be popular in Europe because these are the kinds of trucks that make that "last mile" delivery to grocery stores and such, and so need to be able to navigate in tighter spaces. The size of the battery, as I mentioned before, is certainly incompatible with this shorter cab design.

The United States Postal Service tried to experiment with battery electric delivery trucks. The problem they ran into was getting enough electrical capacity to the overnight parking lots to charge all the trucks. Issues like that could pose problems for wide adoption of the Tesla Semi and similar vehicles.

Where? I'm guessing here that we'd start with new reactors at existing nuclear power plants. Then we'd likely see old fossil fuel plants get converted to nuclear, these are places with existing wires, rail lines, water, and so on to minimize cost for new nuclear capacity.

Similarly I expect new nuclear reactors built on land owned by hydroelectric operators, there's typically a lot of land around the dams that's been set aside for matters of facility security, future expansion, and so on that could accommodate a nuclear reactor. Also, like with conversion of fossil fuel plants to nuclear, a hydroelectric dam will have things like wires, water (a lot of water), rail, and so on already in place to make new construction almost trivial.

We can build a lot of new nuclear power capacity at existing sites before we need to worry about finding new places to build. Before we run out of existing power plants to use for land we'd likely start looking to existing government land with lots of space and existing security perimeters, such as military bases, airports, national labs, universities, and maybe little bits carved off of nature reserves and national parks. I expect people will protest such ideas but the alternatives would be solar panels and windmills that take up far more land for the same output as a much smaller nuclear reactor. It's not like windmills and solar panels are free from issues. Windmills kill large and rare birds, as well as create issues with radar used for tracking aircraft and weather. Solar panels also kill birds, and create problems for aircraft with the reflections that come off them. Maybe we could see nuclear power plants built on barges and floated to ports near population centers, Russia is experimenting with this idea. Floating power plants can solve a lot of issues surrounding construction and siting.

At what rate? In the USA? Well, slowly at first then likely exceeding the peak rate reached in the 1970s two or four times over. In the 1970s the USA was putting 1 GW on the grid of new nuclear power every month, so I'd expect we could reach 1 GW per week in the USA within a decade or two. Given that we are currently seeing about 60 GW of new electrical generating capacity per year added to the grid it shouldn't be too big of a reach to see a decent sized chunk of that be nuclear if the USA were committed to lowering CO2 emissions while improving reliability of electrical generation. The global build rate is anyone's guess, there's a lot of variables to consider.

I see at least two issues with bringing those up as examples to oppose new nuclear power. The first issue is that they are first-of-a-kind and in any "first" there will be a lot of lessons to be learned. As we gain experience on construction costs should come down. As the technology develops with lessons learned costs should come down. As regulators learn more about what keeps nuclear power safe we should be able to reduce regulatory costs. A related issue to this is that you picked two outliers among dozens of nuclear power plants. Why not look at average costs? Or look for a couple successes to go with the failures to give a range on what to expect?

Second, the reason we are seeing a renewed interest in nuclear power is because costs for all other energy sources are going up. We are currently seeing a number of trade wars driving up energy costs globally, as well as some shooting wars that are driving up demand while driving down production. It's not too much of a leap to believe that we can see current trends in rising energy get extrapolated out to where $50 billion for a new 3-ish GW nuclear power plant look like a bargain.

If you want to argue against nuclear power because of the costs then it might be a wise to do it somewhere other than the comment section on a news article on how nuclear power costs are coming down. We are seeing more people consider nuclear power because cost on nuclear power are coming down and the costs of alternatives are going up. At some point those two lines on the graph will cross and then so much opposition to new nuclear power will fall.

A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that construction started on Chernobyl in 1972, and construction on Fukushima started in 1967. Fukushima is hardly the more modern power plant. We could look deeper into which is "newer", such as which had the engineering plans drawn first or which came into operation first, but we'd still end up with them being contemporary designs for the most part. I'd argue that the failures in engineering were such that they were so rare and random that it simply took longer for the flaws in Fukushima to manifest. Both designs were almost certain to fail before their planned operational life, it's just that we had to see dozens of both designs built and many decades to pass before those failures became obvious.

What bothers me the most is that the meltdowns at Fukushima could have been avoided if the oldest reactors were shutdown as planned in March of 2011 than allowed to be operating in May when the tsunami hit. The reactors were still operating because of delays in construction of new reactors over lawsuits and protests on new nuclear reactors, reactors built to higher standards on quake tolerances and flooding hazards. This could have been avoided if people weren't protesting, or the government had enough of a spine to keep new construction on schedule in spite of the protests.

If nuclear power safety concerns you then get out of the way of new nuclear power construction. If we can't build new nuclear power plants then our other options are energy scarcity, or keeping old and unsafe reactors operating until they blow up in our faces or some other better option comes along. If you believe better options already exist, such as wind and solar power, then we'd have already shutdown these old reactors. Your protests created this problem, and people died from it. Your efforts to "save the planet" has resulted in real and actual people ending up dead.

This is also a problem that is a creation of protests. Stop getting in the way of solutions and we'd have this solved already. One example of this is a proposed design for a pressurized heavy water reactor that can "eat" the waste from current nuclear power reactors. There will still be some waste materials from these reactors but it will be of shorter life isotopes, and isotopes that are known to be useful for industry and medicine and so not exactly "waste" that needs to be disposed of at considerable expense. Those processing the waste could sell off the valued isotopes to pay for the disposal of what they cannot use.

Stop getting in the way of new nuclear power plants and we'd have these problems solved already.

Right, we can't allow new nuclear power plants being built because that could mean people investing in solar power could see their investments tank.

Electricity from nuclear fission is really only a threat to solar power. Fossil fuels don't see nuclear power as a threat because most of their money is in liquid fuels and chemicals, until we figure out how make airplanes fly over oceans on battery power there's going to be demand for fossil fuels. Wind and hydro don't fear nuclear power because there's little reason to expect nuclear power to be lower cost and/or scale as well as they can. Solar power has a very powerful lobby, to the point that they make more money from government subsidy than they do from actual useful energy.

So much of what is holding nuclear power back is FUD. 40 years of rising energy costs is making people reconsider nuclear power as an option. So much of what anti-nuclear people complain about are problems they constructed by regulation and protests. As people learn this the barriers to new nuclear power will fall away. We will get more nuclear power plants, you'll just have to deal with that.

It appears to me that you are conflating two issues. There's protections from failures in technology and operations versus that of security against deliberate attacks. Has there been deliberate attacks on nuclear power in the USA? I mean other than Greenpeace trying to "prove" how vulnerable nuclear power plants are to attacks. We could make nuclear power much safer in the USA by declaring Greenpeace a domestic terror organization, because that is what they are, and having law enforcement act as they normally would towards any domestic terrorists.

Really? Nothing has been learned since Chernobyl?

Assume for a moment that nothing has been learned. How should we act to resolve this? If you want to take the aviation example then consider how we make safer aircraft. We'd likely start with making prototypes, then test them to failure in a controlled environment. It's a bit difficult to prove any new nuclear power plant design as "safe" if the NRC requires that safety be proved before a license to build is issued. Would the NRC, and the general public, accept computer simulations to prove a design is safe? Part of the problem with simulations is that they need real world information for the simulations and if all the data we have is based off of designs from the 1960s then we could be getting garbage out because the simulation was fed garbage data. We can't get good data on safety if we don't experiment on new designs. It appears to me that the only "out" on this is getting data from other nations, nations that aren't so afraid of their shadow that they will build new nuclear reactor designs so as to get good data on safety. If the only nations willing to build new nuclear power plants are closed nations like Russia, North Korea, and China then we will see them gain in nuclear power technology while we sit around and wait for either them proving us the fools with what little information that leaks out, or enough people wise up on the catch-22 we put ourselves into and issue permits to build some nuclear power plants.

If you want to see people learn about nuclear power then we need to allow people to build real and actual full scale and operational nuclear power plants. There isn't any suitable replacement for real world experience.

I call bullshit on that. There's no money in a nuclear power plant that falls apart, blows up, or has its permits revoked for failing an inspection.

As usual the opposition to new nuclear power plants is the same recycled nonsense from the 1980s. If the problems of nuclear power plants in the 1980s bothers you so much then build new nuclear power plants that use different technologies and operational structures. We learned how to make aviation safe because we didn't give up on the entire industry because of some failures here and there due to bad design or some companies having management issues. Chernobyl was a power plant built off a flawed design from the 1960s, built hastily in the 1970s with substandard materials, operated by poorly trained people in the 1980s, and so resulted in a large scale disaster that we must still deal with. We don't operate nuclear power like that in the USA, we never did, but people still bring that up as some kind of excuse not to utilize nuclear fission power in the USA. An aviation analogy might be like grounding Boeing aircraft in the USA because some Soviet-era passenger jet crashed 40 years ago. The Soviets used different aircraft designs, different training for aircraft crew and maintainers, etc.

If you have a problem on how the USA operates nuclear power then use failures in the USA as examples. What do you have then? Three Mile Island? That was 50 years ago, a lot has changed in technology and operating practices since. Oh, and while the reactor was considered a total loss the impact on health and safety to the area should be considered theoretical, mythical/psychological, or at least debatable. Three Mile Island proved nuclear power safety. It was not proof that nuclear power is any kind of threat.

Keep up the FUD if you like, it's not working any more. We will see more nuclear power plants built regardless because the general public is learning that we don't have much in other options. If anyone opposes nuclear power then they need to be prepared to offer viable alternatives. Without a better option there's going to be new nuclear power plants built. Deal with it.

I still have my Zip drives from that time, none were USB though. I bought a Zip 100 SCSI drive and a Zip 250 FireWire drive but have something like a half dozen more because they were given to me by others as they moved on to CD-R or whatever and I'm a pack rat with a 'tism for computer tech.

I had a number of Mac computers during this period of Zip drives being popular and found the experience very pleasant. 100 MB was enough to install MacOS and some games or whatever so I could boot from the drive and do stuff without much worry of messing up my hard drive. I recall Windows not being nearly as seamless, some of this being from the user expecting too much from the technology. An example of Zip drives creating a problem was my older brother asking for help with his computer, I discovered he had his Zip drive, printer, and scanner all daisy chained off the parallel port on his PC. That was asking a lot from a port created exclusively for a single printer. Then was having Windows not exactly supporting USB all that well, to the point that if a USB Zip drive was unplugged from the system the OS went into a fit of removing drivers and rearranging drive letters.

I remember Zip 750 being a thing but by that time CD-RW had made Zip drives pretty much obsolete. I wasn't about to invest in yet another iteration of that technology since DVD-RAM drives, or some variation on that technology, seemed to be less expensive and more capable if perhaps not quite as speedy on data transfer rates.

When attending university as a computer and electrical engineering major I would come across a number of students in computer science and I was a bit astonished at just how ignorant they were at writing good code or comprehending basics of engineering. As an example a CS student friend I was working with on an assignment with talked about dynamic allocations of memory while we were working on an assignment of computer hardware. There's no creating new memory chips in software, you get to use only the hardware that exists.

This is a matter of science vs. engineering. There are chemists and chemical engineers. There are physicists and mechanical engineers. Since I went to a university in the Midwest USA there were agricultural engineers vs. majors like horticulture and such. CS teaches the science and fails in producing software engineers unless the student seeks out a course plan that instructs them in engineering. I'm not surprised in seeing CS fail in attracting students since employers are learning that CS majors generally suck at writing good code.

What I noticed in my studies is that most every STEM discipline today involves writing code. If you study biology at university then you can expect at some point to be put in front of a computer and be expected to produce some kind of computer code to work out the statistical analysis of some study. That's writing code. It might not be in C++ or Java but it is still code. I took such a course and while I forget the name of the tools and/or language I recognized that this was a programming language inside a statistical analysis tool. I was programming. This wasn't "computer science" in the strictest sense but to get a good grade I needed to "engineer" efficient and mathematically correct code to get a good grade.

I made the realization that to get a job writing code you needed to do one of two things. The first was to be good at turning requirements into code, that means studying software engineering. The second was to be good at a specific discipline, such as biology or thermodynamics, that you can translate that into useful code for analysis, study, or whatever, which means things like taking a biostatistics course and crushing it at coding.

While the engineering college inside the university I was attending was creating a software engineering program the business college was also getting into teaching students how to code. The business college had "business information systems" or some such on teaching business majors how to code. Can anyone name path to a BA or BS degree where a student is not taking a single course where they are required to learn some kind of computer programming? There's your death of the CS major right there. Computers are so prevalent now that it is simply assumed that a university graduate will have some knowledge in writing code. Why take on CS as a major unless your goal is to teach CS? If you are looking for a job outside of academia then you will study something like engineering, physics, chemistry, medicine, or tend toward some kind of science or technical education.

I did contract work for a while and one of my contracts was at a place that did tax software. I met a young lady that was typing out code and we got into a conversation. I learned she studied accounting at university and was working on code for the company. Most of what she did was look through the code and adjust numerical values here and there to reflect changes in tax code but she still had to have some kind of understanding on what the code meant to find what needed to be changed and suggest changes to the code for the "real" programmers to fix the next day.

Most everyone is writing computer code today, it's no longer some kind of specialty. The study of computer science is not likely to go away, I expect that instead it will revert to where it came from. That means computer science will likely fall back to its roots in turning human experiences into something a machine can process, then turn the results of that processing back into something humans can understand. That is a very narrow field, a field that requires few people specializing in it.

We could have headed this off by embracing nuclear fission as a source of low CO2 energy. Instead we had people that decided nuclear power was more dangerous than global warming, more expensive than global warming, or some other bullshit as an excuse to allow this damage to the climate than use an energy source that has a history of being lower in CO2 emissions than wind power, safer than solar power, more abundant than hydro power, and so much else in favor of its use.

I'm not giving up on the modern human species yet. I'm seeing sanity returning to the debate on the use of nuclear fission as an energy source. In the USA we are seeing existing reactors being restarted and refurbished to where we are likely to see 10 GW of nuclear power capacity added to the grid in the next 5 to 10 years. That's not requiring any new reactors, only taking what we have and using them to their fullest potential. I expect that once these projects prove successful that the public opinion will shift and it will be much easier to build new nuclear power capacity. I know there are people that opposed nuclear power because of the long build times but the largest driver to long build times is people opposing the construction and slowing the process down with lawsuits and protests. Stop getting in the way of nuclear power and the problems brought up on nuclear power will work their way out naturally, this comes with time and experience.

I believe the technology behind the PHEV is just getting started, that there's plenty of room yet for improvement to the point that the PHEV could make the ICEV as we know it today obsolete.

Where the PHEV shines is in offering the ability to drive on all electric power for most people's commutes while allowing for the convenience to burn some kind of liquid fuel for the times that there's a longer trip, extreme weather that could impact all-electric range, power outages, or whatever else might interrupt the ability to drive on the electricity stored in a battery. This is a plan to end the internal combustion engine and I believe that will only backfire on the plans to lower CO2 emissions in the long run.

Those that don't want to give up the convenience of liquid fuels could simply keep their ICEV longer as opposed to buying a new PHEV that could be plugged in overnight for an all electric commute the next day. Is is possible that the PHEV owner would choose to drive on fossil fuels than plug in at night? Sure, but I'd expect most people that get a PHEV to plug in most every night in order to save on fuel costs and not have to pay so many visits to a filling station.

The PHEV is such a "no brainer" on lowering our reliance on fossil fuels while removing all "range anxiety" of those that drive them that it amazes me that anyone would put in laws that oppose their sale and use. Not all PHEVs are equal on their ability to free the driver from needing fuel but all are still an improvement from the traditional ICEV. As time moves on I'm seeing more and more features and comforts from the BEV being incorporated into new ICEV models that the line is being blurred on what it means to be a "hybrid". If the vehicle has so little "electrification" as the means to plug in for power to preheat the cabin then that's still savings on burning fossil fuels.

What we are seeing is hating on the internal combustion engine. The problem is not the engine but the fuel. We can still have the internal combustion engine without burning fossil fuels. We can synthesize hydrocarbons. I'll see people argue against synthesized hydrocarbons based on assumptions for costs and energy efficiency that would not likely apply in the future. One such assumption is that the hydrogen used for synthesizing the fuel must come from either electrolysis of water or from natural gas. We know of different processes that are lower cost and have much higher thermodynamic efficiency. We will need liquid hydrocarbon fuels well into the future as our economy has been built upon it for the last century, it would likely take a century to transition to anything else. We can get those hydrocarbons from fossil fuels or we can work to get them from alternative sources, sources that are carbon neutral. That won't happen if there's a ban on the internal combustion engine. We can't expect to see a ban on the internal combustion engine to take effect unless something that provides some improvement upon it, and battery-electric vehicles are not a sufficient replacement.

Banning the PHEV is idiocy. The PHEV is likely a 90% solution to our needs for liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Because it's not a 100% solution we should ban them? That's not going to happen so long as the people have any say in the matter. Maybe in a communist nation like China that could work, but even then the people running the place need to keep the people from rioting. Remember, the problem is the fuel, not the engine. We can fix the fuel problem and negate any need to remove the engine from use. Until then we should encourage the use of the PHEV as a 90% solution, because otherwise we can expect people to keep their ICEVs running, or perhaps some kind of opposition if not worse from the people.

I'll see claims on how we can extract energy from existing sources that would otherwise be wasted but that's just stretching out the inevitable. We can't conserve our energy down to zero, we will still need a source of energy to survive. If we are to maintain our standard of living, and some semblance of a modern economy, then we need more energy than we can extract from wind, sun, and water. That means nuclear fission for energy, a need to have energy source than merely a nice to have energy source.

Advocating for nuclear fission as an energy source on Slashdot is getting moderated into oblivion. Apparently there's a group of people that choose to use the "troll" moderation as their way to express disagreement. Well, it appears that there's a general realization that wind, water, and sun will not be sufficient to provide the power we need. We are seeing support for nuclear fission for energy growing. This makes sense since given the options of fossil fuels, energy shortages, or nuclear fission, that people will choose nuclear fission. Nuclear fission isn't a perfect energy source but it is the best we have available today. Maybe in the future we will have some other option but for now it is burn fossil fuels, energy shortages, or nuclear fission.

This technology that can extract more useful energy from heat that would otherwise be wasted could be applied to nuclear fission, making nuclear fission even more valuable for energy than it already is today. We can't conserve our way to zero energy needs. Because we need energy supplies that are reliable, and use as little material resources as possible, people will be attracted to nuclear fission for energy until something better comes along. Maybe nuclear fusion will prove to be a better option but at best that is 50 years away. We will need to start building nuclear power plants today to bridge that gap. No new nuclear power plants means either burning more fossil fuels or energy shortages.

If the issue is that people will believe in this technology when they see it then that goes in favor of nuclear fission for energy. We have something like 60 years of safe, reliable, and profitable energy from nuclear fission. We need only make more of much the same for the future. Not exactly the same as we learned plenty on making nuclear fission safer, lower cost, and more reliable in that time.

I'm pleased to see opposition to nuclear fission for energy fall away. We should move as quickly as we can for more new nuclear power plants for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and improving the standard of living for all humans on Earth.

Maybe the people running the data centers will also own the power plants but I doubt it. We've already seen how this is likely to work with Microsoft and Three Mile Island. A company looking to open a data center will look for places that are looking to build a nuclear power plant, or take an existing closed nuclear power plant back online. They will make some long term deal for the power that power plant would produce in order to secure their supply of power, such as sign a contract for 20 years of power to prove to those offering the loans that there's a good return on their investment.

What I'm seeing from history is that as there's threats of a local nuclear power plant closing, and with it a lot of jobs and tax income lost, the local politicians get really interested in keeping that nuclear power plant operating. As demand for electricity rises so will interest in building new nuclear power plants and expanding the capacity of existing nuclear power plants.

As it is now local governments will give out sweet deals on taxes and permits to attract big building projects like data centers. No greasing of palms required as that's a short term loss on tax revenue in exchange for a longer term income on property taxes and those working in these businesses spending money on homes, food, and so on. A data center might not attract many people working in the area since that's a bunch of computers humming away in a warehouse but a nuclear power plant will have a lot of people working there. With a reliable power plant largely paid for by the data center that can mean attracting light industry or such, people looking for low cost and reliable energy for any of a number of other uses.

I doubt the people running the data centers will own the power plants. That's excepting maybe data centers bringing in their own natural gas generators that can be trucked in and dropped on site, which is likely a temporary fix until new power plants and utility lines can be put in place a few years in the future. Once they have sufficient power lines run in then the natural gas generators can be picked up and trucked away, then that room where the generators sat can be used to expand the data center or leased for some other use.