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Alright I want to talk about nuclear.
Ever since I studied it in high school I've been into nuclear, and shocked as to why we don't build more of it. Trump and Elon discussed nuclear energy in their discussion, and JD Vance apparently endorsed it during the VP debate.
Let's say Trump wins the election - what are the odds his administration actually gets some new reactors built, or at least started? I'd like to say I'm optimistic, but given the US track record for building things it's hard to believe it could actually happen.
People who are more familiar with the process of building these things, please let me know - what chances do we have?
Everyone else - how do you feel about nuclear energy? Are you surprised it's finally a CW topic?
EDIT: as a commenter mentioned, this discussion is happening in Europe as well.
Skibboleth alluded to this point below: the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago when the cost/benefit made sense. In the intervening decades, money has poured into solar, wind, and more niche renewables, such that they are now well ahead in terms of marginal cost per unit of energy, even taking into account the intermittency downsides.
There's probably a ton of room for research into fission to produce similar advances, but the question you have to ask now is why? Renewables are already there. Other than an aesthetic preference for major engineering projects or a desire to poke greens in the eye, the only benefit is just to cover intermittency, but there are plenty of alternatives for that as well
Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths. (Also, the environment is too important to leave to the Greens.)
Not from a national security or domestic security perspective, they aren't. For the former, no Western country controls its own supply chain of solar panels or [to an extent] wind turbines; for nuclear, you can reprocess fuel (and don't even need much of it in the first place) and construction can't meaningfully be outsourced.
For the latter, I don't trust my political enemies not to intentionally destroy the alternatives to intermittency (because they're already trying to destroy the ability to build new natural gas turbines, which is the problem they're meant to solve) and turn the West into South Africa in service of their death cult. Not that nuclear isn't immune to this (since it's been done many times before in the US), but it's not something that obviously funds my political allies like coal/oil/natural gas does, so even if those things go away I believe my enemies are more likely to feel forced to continue funding a power grid that still works after 5 PM in the winter.
But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.
Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.
It's not an area of expertise for any Western country, either. So in 20 years when China has figured out that "hey, now that they're completely dependent on this product, and most of the PV panels we've sold have dropped below the replacement threshold for power output, time to jack up the price", now that cheap product has become a massive liability, just like how the natural gas supply in Europe was sacrificed to further US foreign policy goals in Ukraine.
Considering the US goes out of its way to encourage that domestic security issue in other Western countries, I agree- it's going to affect them more.
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The best time was 30-40 years ago. The second best time is now.
"Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
There's also the land use issue. A 1.21 GW nuclear plant takes up a lot less land than 1.21 GW of solar farms or wind turbines.
Unfortunately, the numbers don't add up for any of them.
Yes, but at least for solar that's not that big a deal. There's a lot of big, empty, sunny land in the US. Thing is, environmentalists don't like building on it; I used to joke they'd complain about changing the albedo of the planet, but it turns out they actually do complain about that, along with the fragile desert ecosystems. And of course they don't like transmission lines either, which are kinda necessary to get the power to where you need it. And if you could get around the environmentalists, why would you bother with renewables? They're the ones blocking everything else, too.
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Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.
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I think it's suffered from the same sort of Baumol's cost disease and general bureaucratic incompetance that have plagued all large infrastructure projects. So while it's tempting to say "we made a bunch of nuclear plants back in the 70s, we should be able to keep making them now" that might actually not be true. For the same reason that it's now impossible to build bullet trains, subways, or skyscrapers in western countries, at least not without spending absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even then, that might not be enough- California has spent $33 billion so far and not laid a single piece of rail. I imagine them trying to build a new nuclear plant these days would go similarly. Hell, even large solar installations get protested to death and cost overruns.
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I work in tax credits, amongst which are renewable energy tax credits(ITC/PTC) although I mostly work with the LIHTC group and in more of a build the investment management tools role than anything that gets real deep on the finances. I remember around when the IRA came out there were some pro-nuclear provisions and some excitement around maybe having that come up as a new product type but haven't heard much of it since. Although I will say the numbers were being run, if they come out right I do think investment is possible.
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I've been skimming the NRC documents looking for any plan they might have. It all looks like, "make the NRC better," with no statement anywhere I've seen about increasing or reducing nuclear power anywhere. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2207/ML22076A075.pdf
This was what I was looking for: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-small-modular-reactor-design
A coworker had a friend working on the project that got approval. It's the first approval in something like 50 years.
There's also this: https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-announces-900-million-accelerate-deployment-next-generation-light-water-small-modular
I have a feeling nuclear is not out of the fight yet and what you will see is something closer to municipalities, small regional utilities and large businesses investing in their own power generators using small scale modular reactors. I'm no expert though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Yeah, that's a lot of the more frustrating bit around this stuff. For all that Sam Brinton turned out to be a creep and a kleptomaniac, even beforehand there was a pretty damning problem where Brinton was just another seat-filler anywhere it mattered.
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Very low. On top of various regulatory burdens, nuclear has a major NIMBY problem where even people who like nuclear power often don't want it near them. Nuclear waste disposal facilities are even more contentious.
I think we should continue researching nuclear technology and keep active plants running. I have unreasonable hopes for the future of SMRs as well, but I think old school nuclear power's moment has passed and owes more present support to aesthetic preferences for mega-engineering and hippy-punching rather than practicality. We should have been building these plants 30 years ago, but as of right now solar + grid batteries is a vastly more fruitful line of investment (and that would remain true even if we magically slashed all the superfluous red tape (which we won't) and got a wizard to cast Protection from NIMBYs - a properly built nuke plant is still very expensive).
Is that really true (or a practical problem)? When Sweden started seriously investigating the viability of building nuclear power after the most recent election they found that willingness of counties to host nuclear power plants really wasn't a problem. Plenty were very willing, both counties that already had plants and others.
Obviously not everyone wants to have nuclear in their county but that doesn't really matter.
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His admin personally? Low. Someone else building reactors because his admin slashed permitting regulations? Pretty decent.
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Big reactors are gonna take decade+ time periods to get built no matter what the President says. There's definitely spaces on the margins to have impact -- President Obama's NRC Chair was hilariously bad, in particularly two-faced ways given the early Obama admin's pretense of creating nuclear jobs, and more subtly a number of pinch points in later construction are downstream of the US just not having the sort of large manufacturing capabilities outside of SpaceX. But the way the NRC works as an organization is built to make building big plants hard and slow, and like Ted Cruz or Rick Perry found facing the DOE, there's just not the political will. The EU is in a similar boat, maybe worse: the extent Germany has been taken over by complete anti-nuclear fever-dreams is hard to understate.
Actual small modular reactors... maybe. Even if the paperwork side can't be stripped down that much, the greater simplicity and lowered energy density should make them much faster to actually construct and to deploy. I'm not optimistic about the NRC recognizing pre-fab nuclear plants in my lifetime, but even getting it down to the level of something like an experimental kit aircraft would be a massive win. They won't be anywhere as efficient or showy as the big plants, but the distributed baseload capabilities actually have a lot of secondary benefits.
The tradeoff is that SMRs are a clusterfuck: a lot of the high-profile variants depend on new or novel technologies that may not survive first contact with the enemy, and a lot of the more boring technologies aren't getting enough of a time advantage to really focus resources on them.
I'm not an uncomplicated nuclear booster -- there are some genuine limitations to the technologies, and the early days of the US nuclear power world were Not Great Bob -- but it's been a culture war item for a long time, and it's tough to figure out why it broke down like it did. The Standard explanation for the United States is a combination of environmentalism, anti-war philosophy, and Soviet funding anchored it down among the Left, but these come across a little too pat: you don't see just the Soviet-suckers or hardcore environmentalists doing it, and people willing to buck them on other matters come crawling back to the roost when it comes to nuclear power. Instead, anti-nuclear power activists are bizarrely well-connected in specific ways that others from the same sketchy background aren't; we don't have people who fired rockets at pizza shops getting mid-level political appointments.
((Yet. Growth mindset.))
I think there's a lot of it's an accidents of history thing -- particularly successful anti-nuclear weapons activists pivoting through non-proliferation concerns into general anti-nuke power, Carter getting scared out of his gourd, the early atomic energy groups being particularly untrustworthy and caught in it. But that doesn't really help much.
Changing the rules so that the reactors can be build much quicker is possible and I'd like to see much more effort put into that, but the main issue is that elections still happen. A nuclear plant is a huge investment that will take decades to pay off, and at any point a Democrat who wants to make the green lobby happy (or just one who views nuclear as a Red issue and wants to stick it to their enemies) can come along and pass new regulations and mess everything up. You cannot build the reactors without investment, and you cannot get the investment if the whole thing can be wrecked next election. Even if they somehow got everything fast tracked instead of needlessly slowed down and you could go from zero to operational in 4 years (meaning you could get it done before the next election) changes to operating regulations would still be a major risk.
You'd need to get bipartisan support and I just don't see any path to getting Democrats on board. You'd think "nuclear is the only realistic way to replace carbon" would be a winning pitch, but the left never wants to compromise from its preferred vision, and its vision is solar and wind.
There's also an issue, post-Clinch River, where even if you can handle operating regulations changing, the feds can pull a license for any reason or no reason, and it doesn't count as a taking.
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Anti-nuclear was getting funding from the fossil fuel industry. This is a partial explanation for why generally rather ineffectual watermelons are so much more effective on this one topic.
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You have to somehow get women on board:
Such a Pew Research result is largely replicated by a Gallup Poll at 67% and 42% for men and women, respectively, as to support for nuclear energy.
It's amusing that abortion is viewed as the Final Boss of gendered issues. Meanwhile, abortion views are relatively balanced between the two sexes (at least when compressed to one axis), and something seemingly innocuous like nuclear energy is much more gendered.
Perhaps it's because, in a potentially rare instance of greater female variance, women are more bifurcated when it comes to "think of the babies!" and "her body her choice" such that it somewhat nets out. However, with regard to nuclear energy, women are on average more risk averse and are more memetic in receiving more of their cognitive cues from media and pop-culture, and thus automatically think of anything nuclear as evil and scary.
Source? According to Gallup, the pro-abortion side includes 63 percent of women but only 45 percent of men.
Pew: Respectively 61% vs. 64% for US men vs. women in 2024 for abortion to be legal in all/most cases, and 38% vs. 33% for illegal in all/most cases.
AP-NORC: 59% vs. 63% for US men vs. women in 2024, respectively, for abortion to be legal in their state for any reason.
Vox: Reinforces the similarity between US men and women when it comes to abortion as of 2019, and discusses how in 35 countries (Europe + US) abortion views are largely similar between men and women for abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
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Ahh interesting, didn't realize this was a gendered issue. Another unfortunate result of the 19th amendment, I suppose.
Not that it's a total wash, but still. The gendered breakdown of politics is always fascinating to me.
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The thing about building new nuclear power is that you have to be willing to literally run over protesters. If you aren’t willing to literally run people over, they will physically block you from brining equipment to the site.
You don't need to run them over. You just need to get the jackboots on the ground and forcefully incarcerate all of them.
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Make it a crime punishable by five years in prison. Remove them. Jail them.
Why go through all that trouble when you could run them over once and for all?
This isn’t ‘nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
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Because the train driver will have PTSD for a lot longer than five years.
(There is also the fact that the protester is still a human being.)
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I've heard an entirely sincere theory that a major underlying cause of the opposition to nuclear power in the public is that, when people think of nuclear power plants, their brain immediately goes to Homer Simpson (idiotic, careless, buffoonish, lazy and a habitual drunkard) and Charles Montgomery Burns (cost-cutting, shamelessly corrupt, bottomlessly greedy and unabashedly malevolent). Coupled with the fact that there are, to my knowledge, no well-known heroic fictional characters who work in the nuclear power industry. I honestly think it's a significant contributing factor at a minimum.
Co-creator Sam Simon has even personally apologised for how the show depicted the nuclear power industry.
I don’t think that makes much sense. Simpson’s didn’t help that image, but there are a lot of big scary images of nuclear weapons being used, scare propaganda about the aftermath of nuclear war, which certainly don’t help the public image of nuclear power. Add in a few disasters (Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island) and as a power source it has an image problem that long predates Homer Simpson.
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They should have moved Homer around. Show him working at a Savings & Loan, then a dot-com company, then a defence contractor, then FEMA, then an investment bank, then a cryptocurrency-company....
And it would have made perfect sense, given that it's already a running joke that Homer has had dozens of jobs in the course of the series. They should have moved him to a new "permanent" job every couple of seasons.
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A majority of Americans support nuclear power, and the support has been rising while The Simpsons has been on air.
Perhaps, but the Simpsons started not too long after the lowest point of nuclear's public image (Chernobyl), so it's likely the only direction it could take was up from there, and I would think it possible that support for nuclear should have risen higher and faster if it was not for The Simpsons.
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Point taken. Ad hoc epicycle: the proportion of Americans who oppose nuclear energy is directly proportional to The Simpsons's ratings, and both have declined steeply in recent decades. Per your chart, the ratio of Americans who support:oppose nuclear power has been more or less constant since about 2010, shortly after the last time The Simpsons truly defined the zeitgeist (the release of The Simpsons Movie in 2007).
Still, as far as I can see The Simpsons continues to have a formidable chokehold in the American meme culture, probably the single most memetic show ever insofar as Twitter/Facebook, at least, seem to be concerned (of course these would not capture the current youth trends).
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Microsoft restarted the three miles island reactor. Energy heavy A.I. data centers will probably make use of nuclear energy to an extend.
The scaremongering is one thing, but practically cost is the bigger issue which might be related with scaremongering and erossion of skills.
The big bet is if costs can come down and if the emerging trend of smaller reactors proves economical enough. Its current biggest competition that is beating it is natural gas. Since nuclear energy lacks the negatives of solar/wind which require other energy sources to be used when they are down, it makes sense to invest in improving its effectiveness in terms of bringing down the costs. Current nuclear reactors are safe so that issue is handled.
The zero carbon agenda is the road to national self destruction. Deindustrialization and shutting down energy sources are a terrible idea. Green parties that have such an agenda must be investigated to see if they are funded by foreign powers which includes things like oikophobic ideology which is also disloyalty to your people's future well being. European countries should not agree that they should subsidize the developing world's adjustment, or that Europe should sacrifice its own energy needs for the sake of climate change goals.
Yeah Europe is really shooting itself in the foot, when it's already stumbling economically. I really do worry for the future of the EU.
I think another reason you don't mention that makes a lot of sense is the time to build, and the political polarization. If another party can get elected and just shut the whole thing down it makes it highly unfeasible.
Well, they have American Fifth Columnists in their country without the cultural antibodies against American Fifth Columnists. Not that the Americans themselves are doing any better resisting them, but at least they're not stupid enough to listen to the watermelon environmentalists in military matters.
The only non-Combloc European country with a major nuclear buildout is the one that had the most cultural antibodies against the US, and remember that they started it under a military dictatorship (though the fact they followed through with it is significant as well).
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The political problem with Nuclear shows one of the main problems with democracy.
When downside risk is a single major event, and not lots of spread out minor events than it becomes a lot more important in people's minds. Even when the costs of the minor events adds up to more than the costs of the major event.
This is clear on a bunch of metrics with nuclear, where the radiation released from a nuclear plant is less than the radiation released by a typical coal fired plant. Other metrics like deaths, safety incidents, spills, and particulate pollution are all the same.
I think this is true.
The anecdote above about Microsoft restarting 3 Mile Island is evidence for it as well.
When one party (Microsoft) gets the benefits of nuclear power, then they have an incentive to use it. But when the benefits are spread out over the population, there isn't the same incentive.
Tragedy of the commons, I suppose.
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I'm generally pro nuclear and think it should be persued as an energy source, but I recall a friend who was anti nuclear saying that there are issues with long term storage of nuclear waste. I'm not by any means an expert, but if we ramped up nuclear production could this be a long term problem?
There were like 40 years ago. These days we have ways of "recycling" the "spent" fuel.
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Exactly how long-term?
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No. The waste byproducts of nuclear energy are, by both volume and mass trivially small. You will see about 1/4 of the way down that link the waste products of 28 years of commercial reactor operation, this is immediately followed by the note that 97% of those waste products are recyclable. You can also see the lifespan of the remaining 3%, the truly nasty stuff that spews hard gamma radiation- 600 years. In 600 years, the nastiest, most lethal chunks of spent nuclear fuel have decayed to a sufficient degree that by current federal law you would require no protection to handle them, you could simply pick them up with your bare hands.
So, while 600 years is not nothing, its also not the "millenia and millenia" of danger that alarmist propaganda spews.
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You can just put it in a secure compound in the middle of nowhere. Places like Russia manage to do this correctly, the US can do it easily(we do not have a shortage of middle of nowhere).
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There was at some point issues like that. Nowadays its more true that if something is releasing radiation, it can be used as a nuclear fuel source.
Similar concept with engines and biofuels. Early engines and modern hyper focused engines need clean perfect fuel for burning. Then along comes the diesel engine, and the fuel requirement is instead more like "will it burn". My loose understanding is that modern nuclear plant designs are closer to diesel engines.
Storage of nuclear waste fuel is not difficult, unless you choose to make it difficult. Which is what the environmental lobby has been trying to do for a long time.
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But even nuclear disasters aren't that bad. Chernobyl killed a number of people somewhere in the double digits - easily within the bounds of disasters people consider perfectly tolerable for other things.
Nuclear power is the victim of bad vibes, not of anything so legible as its downside risks being localized rather than diffuse. Those bad vibes lead to insanity like the Linear No Threshold model of radiation injury that get you the "thousands dead" headlines - even though that model is, frankly, utter bollocks.
Also, Chernobyl, due to cost, used channel reactors that the West was already avoiding due to safety issues inherent to their design. The most-famous nuclear disaster was entirely avoidable when it occurred. Though I suppose political and economic pressures and human error pose some level of risk anywhere.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've also heard it suggested that the RBMK reactors were distinctly designed to be dual-use for plutonium (weapons) production. I'm not sure if that is somehow more difficult in a Western-style PWR, though. I know some of the (early) Western weapons projects (Oak Ridge, Windscale) used similar unpressureized reactors.
Being able to do partial replacement of fuel rods without shutting down a reactor is critical for bulk weapons-grade fuel enrichment, both to avoid the long cooldown processes from waiting for xenon poisoning to burn off, and because of increasingly bad plutonium isotope ratios caused by continued neutron flux exposure after a critical phase. RBMKs can do that, in ways that most other commonly-used reactor designs can't (while still having enough water pressure to generate industrially useful power, unlike the fully air-cooled Windscale and air-cooled-in-all-but-the-technical-sense X-10). See the Canadian CANDU reactor for a high-pressure variant of enrichment reactor.
While the RBMK wasn't finalized until after the USSR had started scaling back plutonium production, it's very plausible that the administration wanted to keep it as an option, especially as a 'deniable' option. That said, hot-fuel cycling does also have industrial and civil benefits, most directly in being able to provide slightly better uptime even with traditional fuel life cycles. And while some of the necessary compromises (most overtly the minimal secondary containment vessel aka building roof) probably made the disaster worse, most of them didn't make it happen to start with.
On the flip side, it was also much cheaper, and further corners were cut beyond the necessary minima for the design. Chernobyl's best known for the lackluster control rod design, but the extremely high void coefficient was entirely a cost-cutting measure and played a bigger role in the disaster starting. The physical containment being a simple generic building was unavoidable given the requirement for a big refueling crane, but it didn't need to be a glorified warehouse roof. The sketchy SCADA system was a matter of construction and development speed. So on.
If I had to bet, I'd say the costs (and speed of construction) were a bigger driver, but may not have been the only one.
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I am trusting Serhii Plokhy‘s book on Chernobyl regarding the USSR’s preference for cheaper reactors being the deciding factor. I’m not a nuclear engineer, either, so happy to consider additional aspects.
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Yeah I can see this. It's similar to the idea of optics in environmental stuff. If an animal is cute they get orders of magnitude more attention and funding to help preserve them even if they aren't nearly as important to the environment as some ugly bug.
When emotions come into play over large numbers of people things can get pretty wonky.
The US just fed 5 trillion dollars to the fire because of mass hysteria over an uncommon cold and only suffered 20% inflation as a consequence.
If we actually wanted to build out nuclear, we would. We don't, because we can afford not to, and by the time we can't afford not to the US will be sufficiently Brazilified/South Africanized that it won't matter anyway.
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I'm a physicist who's always loved it. I'm surprised. But I'll note that this is not an USA phenomenon. Worldwide attitudes have changed in multiple countries first, UWA is just jumping on the bandwagon.
Personally I think the impetus was Europe getting slapped in the face with the reality of energy shortages. The German Green disastrous shutdown of the German nuclear plant. Following by a European debate (https://www.ft.com/video/864a8145-0862-48a8-a7a9-d3e338d3177e) and an Australian debate (https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-power-in-australia).
Note than Europe it has not progressed beyond vibes and campaign promises. Still, progress that politician promise to build nuclear rather than promising to strangle nuclear.
True, I guess it shows the USA can still "just build" when it decides to.
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Ahh true I didn't think to mention that other countries are discussing it, although the lift seems bigger in Europe than the U.S. Maybe not since they can actually build stuff though.
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