re: "Manhattan Project 2" for Nuclear Energy Push

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“If we don’t unleash American innovation and American entrepreneurs and American construction and bold moves, we will lose Manhattan Project 2.”

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Manhattan Project would not have been successful without highly intelligent university professors from all around the world.

Trump is actively trying to kick them out of our country.

Just like trying to make China his sole foreign policy boogeyman but taking an isolationist stance and distancing ourselves from allies that could potentially help us isolate China.

We can't have goals and enact policy to contradict them.

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Nuclear still faces one fundamental problem: cost.

Natural gas is so much cheaper.

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Yep. Nuclear LCOE is something like 2x combined cycle natural gas LCOE.

That could change over time if massive demand (either from power or from LNG exports) leads to huge increases in the price of natural gas, but we aren’t seeing that yet.

It could also change to some extent if there is a major effort to remove red tape / government oversight requirements for nuclear generation.. but that kind of undermines arguments about the safety of nuclear power in the US over the past ~40 years.

Not to say that we won’t see a resurgence in nuclear. We very well might. But it’s not the cheap option many people think it is, for whatever reason.

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The order is expected to fast track the development of nuclear power stations in the United States, which would then supply the huge data centres required for AI.

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Technology companies including Microsoft and Google have embraced nuclear power as a way to meet their expanding energy needs as the US government seeks to catch up with the boom in demand.

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Cool. Let them foot the fricking bill. Taxpayers should not pay for their energy needs.

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Funny how just a week ago or so people were complaining about DOD loans to fund nuclear projects because it was done by Biden

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I said the same thing then: If Big Tech needs more energy they need to take some of their billions and build some plants.

Remove the nuclear subsidization, then put up some phony action that won’t do shite. Pretty typically of our govt.

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That could change over time if massive demand

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Highly unlikely. The two biggest drivers of nuclear’s bonkers LCOE is cost of capital and o&m. You’re not going to economy of scale yourself out of those two. And the only way anything else gets close is a complete destruction of global commodity supply chains.

Modular nuclear reactors. Wright was at y-12 a few weeks ago.