this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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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.
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It's not even trying to solve the right problem. In the US, the NRC has given out licenses for new reactors. They're sitting there without the funding needed to go forward.
I have no doubt that licensing is a long process. It should be. That's how we keep fission power safe. But the more fundamental reason they're not getting built is because they reliably blow their budget and schedule.
Hell yeah.
Nuclear energy isnt a technical problem, it's a human problem. Specifically, the real expense in US nuclear construction is that there are only a handful of contractors who have the tribal knowledge to actually do nuclear construction e.g. pour concrete, install old-fashioned non-networked electrcal control systems, big switchgear, pipefitting, startup V&V, an so on.
They'll all gladly monkeywrench, slow walk, and re-work every step because they know there's no real competition for fleet-wide contracts, and no one from the CEOs to the craft on the ground want the job to end, so you get it decades late or not at all.
One more piece of evidence that prompt fondlers are not serious people.
Source: am person of nuclear
Yeah, even before the techbros showed up, there was this industry push to try to convince people that regulation was the problem. If we loosened the bolts just 10%, everything would work out, they think. Attacking the "linear no threshold model" seems to be the latest strategy.
It's almost like there's a reflexive need to blame government regulation on all the problems.
Linear no-threshold isn't under attack, but under review. The game-theoretic conclusions haven't changed: limit overall exposure, radiation is harmful, more radiation means more harm. The practical consequences of tweaking the model concern e.g. evacuation zones in case of emergency; excess deaths from radiation exposure are balanced against deaths caused by evacuation, so the choice of model determines the exact shape of evacuation zones. (I suspect that you know this but it's worth clarifying for folks who aren't doing literature reviews.)