Rising housing and living costs make the pay premium less attractive while friends and family move away because rents doubled while wages/retirement funds didn't. Working from home/anywhere is unraveling this for a whole class of workers but a lot of people are going to be bound to the offices of ever-consolidating industries until they are replaced with software. The housing bubble is bursting so people are moving away. Wherever a new concentration of work arises the same problem will recreate itself and remove the competitive advantages. If it's persistent long enough speculation will consume the entire commuting distance.

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.

Referring to the purchasing of equipment as hiring probably indicates which way it goes.

The difference is the rate of change increases while humans can only learn so much so quickly. Automation and sufficiently advanced AI eventually reduces the value of human labor to zero. That could be utopian or dystopian.

It interferes with the altimeter used for low visibility landings. Small differences in the readings can produce catastrophic outcomes.

They make terraform and other software for managing containerized workloads and devops.

Don't we call these campaign contributions? ;-)

You obviously have a very unbiased opinion not at all formed from war propaganda.

I know they so rudely parked their country next to our aircraft carriers and all but Iran wants nuclear weapons so they don't get invaded and become another battleground in our oil wars. Americans are so smug in their condemnation when the poor relations between our countries are as much our own doing as theirs.

Use taxes primarily exist to prevent resources from moving through progressive taxation to benefit the wealthy.
It was a poor way to finance roads in the first place.
Now would be a great time to change that.