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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   23789 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Amazing that this is coming on the heels of the US Senate voting 98-2 on a huge nuclear bill.

Of course no media coverage, despite this being both significant and bipartisan.

It being bipartisan is probably exactly why it got little coverage. The media did write about it, but the stuff that reaches front pages and gets spread all over social media is the stuff that people actually share. Ragebait gets way more clicks than good news.

The legislation directs the NRC to examine its licensing process for new nuclear technology and study ways to speed it up. It also sets aside federal funding to cover licensing and permitting costs for the first advanced nuclear power operator to successfully deploy its technology

Strengthen its workforce by allowing the NRC chair to appoint up to 120 exceptionally well-qualified people into the excepted service at any given time, plus up to 20 more into term-limited positions in any fiscal year.

Looks like a handout to investors who got caught by all those startups with ideas out of a physics class weed circle. The Super Conductive Americium Metamorphosing reactor is 100% proven to work on paper, get in at the ground floor of our high tech pyramid-shaped funding scheme!

That and jobs for the boys nonbinary individuals who come to work in stolen women's underwear. Throwing money at the democrat-captured grant-consuming academic do-nothing wing of the nuclear industry.
And they got Republicans on board just by saying it was pro nucular.

Call me when they're making it possible to build more copies of actually working plants instead of one-off prototypes.

Way too much culture warring. You've been told before to check your seething.

When nothing gets built and 120 useless parasites get paid $400,000 sinecures to have meetings about the next thing that won't get built... I won't even bother saying I told you so because it's pointless to show you evidence.

You are making the same mistake culture warrers always do - when I tell you to actually discuss things instead of waging culture war, it is not because I actually have an opinion one way or the other about your viewpoint. Your evidence is irrelevant because I am not disputing your evidence, nor do I care how objectively correct you are when you're being intentionally inflammatory in making your point. You could say something I agree with 100% and I'd still mod you if you were a prick about it. I have done this many times, in fact, but people like you only notice when you (or people you agree with) are modded and assume it's because I have sympathy for "non-binary individuals" blah blah blah.

Uh, yeah, so Gen 4 nuclear reactors have some factually very great promise, such as increased safety, ability to reuse waste as fuel, and lower maintenance costs, but have struggled for consistent funding. It's not some pie in the sky, ultra left wing liberal conspiracy. I'm not sure what on earth nonbinary people have to do with anything.

I actually think Kirk has a point here. The Gen IV reactors are great and fine, and what they lack is not really funding but reactors. There has been numerous funding events for decades, which has been almost entirely consumed by people not building things.

ETA: This is not a problem limited to nuclear power development. There is a serious, IMO possibly terminal problem of construction sclerosis in this country such that we can't build reactors, railroads, transmission lines, or nearly any other major engineering project that isn't a freeway, except at increasingly impossible high costs and timelines.

Too many veto points. NEPA was the original sin (thanks Dick), community review, greenhouse gas review, endangered species act review, ADA review, millions of industry-specific regulations, and lawsuits associated with each one. It's a Gordian knot, the Democrats like it (and can bypass it whenever they want something) and the Republicans are temperamentally against cutting.

Thanks, that's exactly what I mean. In twenty years the same people will be getting grants to talk about the generation 5 reactors they're not going to build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Brinton

Like I said, the theory-crafting academic wing of nuclear that gets all the policy seats because they're with the DC in-crowd. Not the guys who actually run existing nuclear plants and know how to make more of them.

We keep getting these grants to fund "studying pre-prototype next generation technologies" with no intent of building them, because all-consuming parasites like they/them steal all the money.

You’re just salty at anyone that succeeds.

Another crab with crab mentality.

This comment adds nothing. Personal jabs and sneering like this are inappropriate.

And sneering at The Super Conductive Americium Metamorphosing reactor and jabbing at "democrat-captured grant-consuming academic do-nothing" or obsessing over someone's choice of appearance?

There's a whole host of people that have accomplished nothing with contempt for anyone trying to do anything.

... he's clearly joking

What in the actual world is this comment?

  • -10

More effort than this, please.

If you have a substantive complaint, share it. If you don’t, downvote and/or move on.

Pretty realistic summary I think. They're giving Bill Gates 2 billion dollars for his pixie dust reactor project, and now they're going to pay for all his permitting too. At the same time as they pay the anti-nuclear activists to oppose the license, of course!

It's just another slush fund to make busywork for professional procedural manipulators, not a serious attempt to bring back the nuclear industry.

I'm a US citizen and I have no idea what you're talking about. I'd love it if someone would give a writeup.

Yah, see, no media coverage. Thanks to /u/ToaKraka for the link -- although you could have just searched "2024 Senate Nuclear" to get a few token media stories.

I've said for years that Congress itself needs a public relations campaign. Most people think congress only passes like 4-5 bills in an entire year. Of course they have had some difficulty recently, but they still pass usually a lot (2023 was a suuuuuper bum year with "only" 27, but 2022 for example they passed over 200)

Reuters picture caption:

Xcel Energy's Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, the site of a leak in November which was not made public for four months, as well as a newly reported recurring leak, is seen in Monticello, Minnesota, U.S. March 27, 2023

Perhaps not very subtle about what they want you to think.

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