this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
34 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2295 readers
84 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kgMadee2@mathstodon.xyz 3 points 1 day ago (19 children)

@frezik @dgerard but when did they ever even identify an actual problem?

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago (18 children)

Even ignoring AI datacenter builds, we still need clean energy. I would be all for nuclear fission if it were at all economically viable. It just isn't.

[–] graydon@canada.masto.host 1 points 22 hours ago (14 children)

@frezik there is an economic case for three nuclear reactor applications.

Medical isotopes need to come from somewhere, and so far as I'm aware, you can't do all of them with particle accelerators.

Marine power; your 250,000 DWT bulk transport or large container ship pollute significantly, can't go solar, and marine nuclear is not obviously a bad technical option. (They can maybe go with some sort of fuel cell, but that's not developed tech.)

High-latitude baseline power.

@kgMadee2

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

high latitude is sort of served by hydro because there's lot of river per person in some of areas that are in any significant way populated (norway, russian north)

medical isotopes are research reactor thing because of frequent loading/unloading - either that or some kind of channel reactors so either CANDU or RBMK. neither are exactly industry standard

marine power requires small reactors = way more enriched than usual sub 5% = expensive and a lot of diplomatic noise about proliferation

[–] graydon@canada.masto.host 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

@fullsquare Sub reactors use enriched for service life (and some compactness); having to get things through the pressure hull is such a pain you will pay high upfront costs to not do it. A reactor designed to push a large cargo vessel around doesn't have those constraints and could be designed for easy refueling. (There are some marine thermal siphon designs with very few moving parts, come to that.)

High latitude hydro has "and it froze" issues, same after anything else outside up there.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

either sub or aircraft carrier reactors might be somewhere around 50 to 220MWe, panamax might need 60MWe tops, regular land based PWRs are more like 300MWe and up. the smaller you go, the higher enrichment you need, but also military propulsion has different priorities, they use 90%+ enrichment in part because they can, and in part because this gives them massive excess reactivity, which means power level can change ridiculously fast. tradeoff is that spent fuel has much more useful uranium, and it's overall expensive, but you also don't skimp on your doomsday ride so it's all fine. commercial powerplants are physically capable of doing slower load following, but it's more economical most of the time to just use full power in order to best utilize fissile material. what you're proposing would have all disadvantages of both, because no way in hell this thing will run on standard, low enriched fuel for PWRs, it might need something maybe more than 5%, maybe closer to 10%, perhaps more, which means problems, because it means worse proliferation risks than with normal fuel and it's already fuel that goes around, and can be taken over in some unfriendly waters; higher enrichment also means it'll be much more expensive, both because of more SWU needed, but also because it's a specialty product that requires extra licensing; and it also won't be as compact and responsive as military reactor, because civilians don't get to play with HEU like that; and also it will require refueling after some time, maybe longer than regular-sized PWR (refueling every year to three) that probably will require visit to manufacturer to do refueling there, which would be, everything else equal, a bit harder than in regular powerplant because it needs to be done in a drydock

it has all disadvantages of SMRs but also you can steal them on high seas and it's probably great for diplomacy if some random ass pirate get hands on that

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago

but also military propulsion has different priorities

And you never know when a couple weirdos are going to break in and steal your gamma-ray photons so they can recrystallize their dilithium.

load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)