‘GenAI for Nuclear Licensing’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW9lusiwMz8&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251118-vibe-nuclear-lets-use-ai-shortcuts-on-reactor-safety - podcast
time: 6 min 24 sec
‘GenAI for Nuclear Licensing’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW9lusiwMz8&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251118-vibe-nuclear-lets-use-ai-shortcuts-on-reactor-safety - podcast
time: 6 min 24 sec
It’s not even trying to solve the right problem. In the US, the NRC has given out licenses for new reactors. They’re sitting there without the funding needed to go forward.
I have no doubt that licensing is a long process. It should be. That’s how we keep fission power safe. But the more fundamental reason they’re not getting built is because they reliably blow their budget and schedule.
Hell yeah.
Nuclear energy isnt a technical problem, it’s a human problem. Specifically, the real expense in US nuclear construction is that there are only a handful of contractors who have the tribal knowledge to actually do nuclear construction e.g. pour concrete, install old-fashioned non-networked electrcal control systems, big switchgear, pipefitting, startup V&V, an so on.
They’ll all gladly monkeywrench, slow walk, and re-work every step because they know there’s no real competition for fleet-wide contracts, and no one from the CEOs to the craft on the ground want the job to end, so you get it decades late or not at all.
One more piece of evidence that prompt fondlers are not serious people.
Source: am person of nuclear
Yeah, even before the techbros showed up, there was this industry push to try to convince people that regulation was the problem. If we loosened the bolts just 10%, everything would work out, they think. Attacking the “linear no threshold model” seems to be the latest strategy.
It’s almost like there’s a reflexive need to blame government regulation on all the problems.
@frezik @dgerard but when did they ever even identify an actual problem?
Even ignoring AI datacenter builds, we still need clean energy. I would be all for nuclear fission if it were at all economically viable. It just isn’t.
@frezik there is an economic case for three nuclear reactor applications.
Medical isotopes need to come from somewhere, and so far as I’m aware, you can’t do all of them with particle accelerators.
Marine power; your 250,000 DWT bulk transport or large container ship pollute significantly, can’t go solar, and marine nuclear is not obviously a bad technical option. (They can maybe go with some sort of fuel cell, but that’s not developed tech.)
High-latitude baseline power.
@kgMadee2
Medical isotopes don’t necessarily need to be created in power reactors.
High-latitudes is a very limited application. Very few people live in areas where solar isn’t viable. They also tend to have a lot of space for wind power and some potential geothermal. Long distance HVDC lines shouldn’t be discounted, either.
Marine power is where I hope SMRs actually work out.
helps to be the US Navy and not be worried about costs
ship-sized SMR power is quite expensive!
The conclusion of the NS Savannah was that it would have been economical after the oil crisis of the 1970s caused a price spike in fuel costs. Ports also need facilities and training to handle nuclear fuel. Once you have that, it’s perfectly viable.
Unlike energy generation on land, there isn’t a lot of alternatives for decarbonizing marine transport.
yeah, even the green case for nuclear - which has been around for a long time - falters on wind and solar with battery just being hilariously cheaper. At this point the funding problem is interconnects.
@dgerard @frezik
The problem is alway interconnects.
(There aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be scaled for fossil-fuelled power stations, probably 1MW being the smallest unless there were CHP setups with a grid feed.)