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> In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. Ah, the US military, famous for building and operating things at low cost. > Truth is the tech wo
by jmyeet 4y ago
> In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion.
Ah, the US military, famous for building and operating things at low cost.
> Truth is the tech works
Nuclear propulsion works because it has the US military to secure it but more importantly, a carrier or a submarine benefits from not carrying fuel in a way that has nothing to do with economics. You power a submarine with nuclear simply because there's no other way for such a submarine to spend months at sea without refueling.
You say the tech works. OK, but so what? That has almost nothing to do with anything. In fact you're extrapolating the military use case for using nuclear energy for propulsion and saying we should extend that to civilian commercial power generation.
As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality. But really it's a smoke screen because proponents of nuclear power like to talk about operating costs while ignoring capital expenditure (which is massive). From a total cost per kWh over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, it's not really that cheap.
- indymike 4y ago> As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality. Reality: regulatory compliance is the bulk of the cost.
- upwardbound 4y agoI think you're being pretty quick to write off a subject matter expert on a topic that is their own field of expertise.
- ncmncm 4y agoTheir field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis. Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. Strange but true.
- indymike 4y ago> Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis. This is just dismissing the argument without addressing the assertion that the vast majority of cost in building nuclear is imposed by overly burdensome regulation. > Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. From personal experience, ELTs were held to the exact same zero tolerance for lies standard I was. If you were caught by anyone lying you were out. Rank didn't even mater, nor did it matter if they were nukes or not. If you lied and it was caught, nuclear career over. I watched many people end their careers over how many push-ups they completed in a fitness test, covering for a buddy who was out with a girl when they shouldn't have been, lying about getting a tattoo, or even lying about what they ate for lunch. It was absolutely brutal.