4 ms·
India's third home-built 700 MWe nuclear reactor achieves criticality
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoAwesome!! Let's shut down some coal plants and let people enjoy the blue skies. I hope this effort expands across the country.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoYeah, it was amazing how clean the skies got during Covid…
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoI was in Delhi then. I saw one of the photos in my memories the other days. Even now it felt otherworldly. All my other memories there had hazy skies. It was even more eerie because the Diwali before had aqi > 1,000 and even indoors was so hazy you couldn’t see the other side of the room clearly (well my flat wasn’t sealed great but still)
- dyauspitr 2y agoIndia is actively building 9 reactors right now to come online between now and 2027. Article says 16 though so there’s probably more coming.
- akmittal 2y agoIndia also added 15GW of solar in first half of 2024. It's great to see India radically moving to renewable energy sources.
- cinntaile 2y agoNuclear is not considered to be a renewable energy source.
- preisschild 2y agoDepends. Most nuclear reactors are not considered "renewable", but breeders are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_renewable_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_rene...
- survirtual 2y ago"Nuclear is not considered to be a renewable energy source." Nuclear isn't renewable in the same way directly building your own artificial sun isn't renewable. It is orders of magnitude the better way to produce energy for a large, growing, and thriving society with multi-planetary aspirations. The "renewables" aren't actually. They rely on a sun that has a bit over 4 billion years left, and they put a hard cap on our planetary energy consumption possible without negatively impacting the environment (image a planet covered in solar panels for an extreme). Nuclear energy is in a different tech tier not far off from the sun itself. The order of magnitude of unleashing energy directly from atoms is the end game of energy production for humans. It allows for space travel to every planet in this solar system and beyond. It allows for thriving colonies on other planets and trade between them. It will allow for an explosive growth in innovation, trade, and economic activity. And, it will open up access to resources orders of magnitude larger than what is possible on Earth, with the asteroid belt alone -- all without harming the Earth's precious ecosystems. Most importantly, it gives the next generations hope. Hope of a better future, of extreme progress, of something to feel pride in our species for. This is what creates life in human civilization. We, as a species, can eventually offload ALL manufacturing from Earth to other, ecologically dead planets. Mars is a great candidate for this. And at 1/3 the gravity, activities like drilling into the ground and building large, shielded warehouses will take significantly less energy than Earth. Energy should be the foundation of currency, not whatever our current currencies foundation is. Energy capacity and usage is the truer measure of a civilization's productivity. The sooner we all realize this, the smoother our planetary transition to the next phase will be. If curious, there are more "foundational measures" -- computational capacity (cumulative of neurons and artificial compute), and attention (what the compute is targeting), but that's another thought.
- cinntaile 2y ago
- bamboozled 2y agoSuch wonderful news. Congratulations to India!