The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn’t mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they’ll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman’s knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can’t melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.
We fixed the glitch.
The meltdown that happened in Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement. Yes, there were design flaws in the system, but lots of rules had to be broken before the design flaws were triggered.
Nah, mismagement happened yes, but any other nuclear plant wouldn’t have exploded, they used a old technology even for that age, for cust cutting or faster to build idk that’s why it exploded
A safer design is insurance against bad management long after all of us are dead.
If development continues on this path
If we continue down the path of wasting energy and polluting to produce useless shit humanity is screwed.
There is a whole universe of resources and our needs for them will never be fully satisfied. Every step towards cleaner, more sustainable energy is a good one.
After they decide to abandon their AI project can we use them for something meaningful?
Probably not… It’s a pretty outdated energy source already.
The single most energy dense source of power we have that uses the least amount of land including mining and refining compared to everything else, and still preferred method by NASA for powering anything bigger than a camera… is outdated? Yeah okay.
While I agree with most of your statements, the RTGs that NASA uses (assuming that’s what you are referring to) don’t really have much of a connection at all to Nuclear power plants. They are very useful for small scale projects like rovers but really have no commercial uses for anything near people. Plus I think NASA generally prefers solar power whenever they can use it as it’s far cheaper and safer to get into orbit.
Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They’re also really useful in situations where renewables just aren’t an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven’t seen any nuclear container ships yet but that’s mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.
With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn’t be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.
Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.
While! I love nuclear’s possibilities. I’ve seen commercial, shippings safety and maintenance records. I don’t think that would be a good idea
Eh, it’s honestly safer than you’d think. The size of the reactor plays a huge role in safety.
A reactor sized for a container ship would be literally incapable of melting down, because there just isn’t enough fuel to get to those temperatures. You could then limit the ship’s speed, and over build the reactor a bit, so that the reactor is never truly stressed during normal operation.
Then for refueling, you just remove the entire reactor and replace it with a new, fully fueled one every 10 years or so.
That’s where you want your controls.
Other than that, yeah it would be safer than oil. A crash just means your reactor casing gets wet.
The main worry is someone cutting into the reactor to take out the spicy rocks… and there are easier ways to get spicy rocks.
Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective.
No, it isn’t. The nuclear industry wants this to be true, but an overview of the benefits and problems with wind, solar, and nuclear put it to rest.
What nuclear is really good at is providing baseload power; it runs for 30+ years at the same output with relatively little maintenance and fuel costs. Wind is good at being cheap when the wind is blowing. Solar is good at being cheap when the sun is shining.
The problem with nuclear is it has incredibly high up front costs, which need to be amortized over its lifetime; you can ramp it down, but you’re cutting into your profits by doing so. The problem with wind is that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine.
Solar and wind are both incredibly cheap when they work. So cheap that we wouldn’t want to use anything else if we can avoid it. Meaning we’d need to ramp down what nuclear and anything else is doing. Except now we’re just making nuclear’s up front cost issue worse; we can’t amortize the cost as well when it’s ramped down. You could try adding storage capacity so you can run all three at once and use it later, but then we could just use that storage for wind and solar on their own.
What you can do is take historical data on wind and sun patterns for a given region. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn’t shining, and vice versa. We have lots of data on that, and we can calculate the maximum length of lull when neither will provide enough. So what you can do is put in enough storage capacity to handle that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
This ends up being a lot less storage than you might think. Getting to 95% renewables would be relatively cheap; Australia almost has enough storage capacity under construction right now to pull that off. That last 5% is harder, but even getting to 95% in industrialized nation states would be a big fucking deal.
Add in HVDC lines to this, and you’ve really got something. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and is 1300 miles long. That kind of distance in the US would mean solar panels in Arizona could power Chicago, and wind in Nebraska could power New York. At that point, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and sun is always shining somewhere else. You can also take advantage of existing hydro pumped storage anywhere you like–there may be enough of it right now that we wouldn’t need to build any other storage.
Your opinion is not really appreciated here with the nuclear industry trying to capitalise on the renaissance that seems to be fashionable these days. But I fully agree with your assessment, China is of course building nuclear plants, but have also seen the light in the sense that they are building more renewable generation capacity than all other generation sources combined.
Nuclear will not make a full ‘come back’, literally no one in their right mind is going to invest in 15 year projects when grid connected battery capacity is tripling every 6 months.
Just for another angle on the problem: baseload generation (nuclear) is most efficient at its highest possible output, but it has to maintain that output 24/7. It can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the demand curve, and it can’t be ramped up above the minimum overnight demand.
To increase its efficiency, utilities push large scale consumers like steel mills and aluminum smelters to overnight shifts. This artificially increases the overnight demand, allowing the baseload generators to ramp up their relatively efficient production. This reduces the need for less-efficient peaker plants during the day.
That overnight demand can’t be met with solar, and wind generation tends to fall overnight as well.
What nuclear can do is help level out seasonal variation, between the short days of winter and long days of summer. If you want to contemplate a truly pie-in-the-sky scenario, there are provisions for tying large ships, (like aircraft carriers and hospital ships) to shore power, and backfeeding the local grid to support disaster relief efforts.
Imagine a fleet of nuclear generation ships, sailing to northern-hemisphere ports from November to April, and to southern-hemisphere ports from May to October.
Pumped storage is also essential, but extraordinarily limited. We can probably run essential overnight loads on pumped storage, but it does not make sense to keep an overnight load on pumped-storage that can be shifted to solar/wind directly.
We need to take a look at demand shaping rather than supply shaping. We need to shift load to times we can produce, rather than shift production to times of demand.
Sounds like demand shaping is already done, but not in a way that’s helpful to renewables.
Will energy prices become negative when the AI bubble bursts?
No, EVs alone require 10 times the current installed energy production. We’re not even close. Expect energy rates to quadruple. The price will increase until people can’t afford the commute with their entire day’s paycheck.
EVs alone require 10 times the current installed energy production.
No they don’t.
The UK national grid estimates there needs to be a 4-5% increase each year, for roughly 15 years. That’s achievable.
The US won’t be too different.
Expect energy rates to quadruple
Why quadruple. Where are you getting this from?
The price will increase until people can’t afford the commute with their entire day’s paycheck.
They obviously won’t.
Fossil fuel power plants don’t count. EVs running of fossil fuel make no sense. Remove them from the equation and my prediction becomes extremely optimistic.
EVs are currently running partially on fossil fuel just fine and generating less pollution than ICEs because power plant efficiency is still better than combustion engine efficiency.
That is nowhere near enough. It’s 33% versus 40% difference between co2/kWh . we need zero co2/kWh or else it’s all a waste of time.
It’s only acceptable if we are transitioning to zero emission grid. If we stay on natural gas then it won’t even move the needle.
We are transitioning towards it, but in the meantime, switching to EVs still reduces CO2 output and because the grid is getting cleaner, that means EVs get cleaner even after being manufactured and sold, whereas ICEs can only get cleaner through R&D and only get worse over time as they age (once they start burning oil, etc)
A few percentage points reduction in co2 emission isn’t going to move the needle. The whole grid has to shutdown fossil fuel energy production for this transition to make sense.
In what world don’t they count?
They can power EVs. And running an EV on fossil fuel electricity is still far less polluting than running a petrol or diesel car.
One large generator at its most efficient setting is far more efficient than tens of thousands of small ones starting from cold multiple times per day, that aren’t necessarily maintained well, and are constantly going through their rev range.
Where are your sources for any of what you’re saying?
No , if you run EVs off a grid fossil fuel generator, that’s the difference between 33% and 40% efficient. It’s not enough to move the needle. It doesn’t even pay for itself in terms of emissions.
The energy source absolutely has to be ZERO emissions as well. If not then it’s just climate cope.
What the hell are you talking about? That’s not how people charge EVs.
EVs on their own are typically 90%+ efficient. Although some are as low as ~85%.
Even running on a generator, though, they’d still be more efficient than any ICE engine found in a car, aside from a Formula 1 engine.
EVs are far cleaner, even if ran on a fossil fuel energy grid.
fossil fuel power plant are tops 40% efficient while ice powered cars are around 33%.
If you power you EV off a fossil fuel power plant, then that difference, minus the grid losses, the charging losses and then the inverter and motor losses, is how much co2 emissions you are saving.
Of course that’s assuming your driving habits don’t change, with that high upfront investment and relatively lower per mile costs compared to using gasoline.
And that’s not to mention the one time emission from the production of that EV amortised on its 15 year hoped-for lifetime.
Beside capturing government subsidies and the arbitrage saving from using temporarily cheaper electricity as fuel, I don’t see EVs making much sense either from an economic or a saving the planet standpoint.
Without a zero emission energy production as the source, EVs don’t make sense beyond hype and cope.
All fossil fuel electrical generation, and that includes natural gas, has to be shutdown. Or else it will not make a lick of difference.
I have no issue with the safety of nuclear power plants, however: fissile material is no more renewable than fossil fuels even if it’s much greener. Also, in terms of more localized ecological damage, uranium mining is a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
Maybe Google should focus on building its plants near geothermal hotspots instead if it’s forced to suck up vast amounts of power for AI no one wants.
Had me excited there for the first half, ngl…
Great, so when they abandon the nuclear project in 18mths who will maintain them?
And what happens when you kill a sack of puppies you monster?
They are planning to buy or maybe just electricity from a new reactor type, which has never been built, starting 2030, when conventional nuclear power plants, with known technology take twice as long to built.
So if they stop the project in 18months, it has just been a waste of money.
although you gotta admit it’s gonna be funny seeing “Google Reactor” on killedbygoogle.com
They are planning to buy
So far so good
or maybe just electricity
Uh oh
For some reason this doesn’t feel like good news.
One step closer to the Fallout games becoming reality, which is at least potentially cool in some ways.
Any nuclear adoption is good news. This WILL help destigmatize them and help reduce cost by production at scale. Overall, while it’s extremely questionable, depending on how many companies get on board it could be net positive
This WILL help destigmatize them and help reduce cost by production at scale.
I’m not saying this won’t have any benefits. I’m saying that I don’t trust Google or the AI craze much, let alone huge corporations in general.
So I’m worried that there might be unforeseen fuckups or “savings procedures” or other ways of squeezing out profit until something breaks.
And those fuckups can easily outweigh the benefits.
If we had good governments and reliable regulation, this would be absolutely thrilling. But we don’t, do we?
Except nuclear does not scale, especially not downward. Because any safety measures that have become standard, are required also on the smaller reactors. Except there, they cost relatively more per kWh output when compared to large plants.
I don’t really see this going to work, renewables are continuing to become cheaper and cheaper, and do scale.
But, I’d like to be pleasantly surprised.
This makes it sounds like Google is building their own nuclear plants
What could go wrong?
They will suddenly stop supporting them after a few years
Emergency shutdown link hidden behind UI menu after UI menu and constantly changing locations weekly.
Nope, they have a partner that’s doing that and the partner is going to be providing small modular reactors. Although we are not sure according to the article whether Google is going to be running them directly to their data centers or whether they are going to be providing energy to homes and buying renewable energy credits or something. Either way, small modular reactors should bring down the price of nuclear.
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The power required for this level of AI won’t be used for faster delivery of pizzas. It will be used for surveillance and control. For world domination shit.
I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
I think the negativity is more about it being used for AI than to solve any important problems with the world.
Expecting corporations to “solve important problems in the world” is foolish though. You should expect your government to tax them fairly so that they can work on people problems and maybe it takes corporations a few years longer to afford their own fleet of nuclear power stations.
Man imagine a world where that could have been what we were voting on next month.
Governments aren’t going to solve these problems either because they’re 100% for sale. Only we can solve them, through direct action.
Why? It just sounds nice bouncing around your head for a few seconds?
I would love to see large and small scale nuclear reactors become more common.
So because it makes you feel happy when you think about it?
You did reply with the reason you support these reactors right?
I would like to see nuclear power grow in use.
I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
Like people asking “why do we need to go to the moon?!”.Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.
Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.
GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.
This time it is commercial.
I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.
Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it’s Google. So… Kind of a win?I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources
Is nuclear not?
I forgot what I was trying to say there.
I think it’s along the lines of “I’d rather we didn’t need a ridiculous amount of new power, but at least it’s being covered by non-carbon sources”.
How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI fad was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?
Exactly, and it seems like that is a realistic outcome.
Are there no emissions during mining and at eol digging and maintaining a storage?
Are you implying there is a form of energy that doesn’t?
Do they store wind turbines after EOL? I thought they’d just get scrapped and recycled.
The turbine blades are made of fiber glass or carbon fiber. There is no process in effect to deal with them. Too big to crush, not worth scraping or recycling. They all go landfilla.
There currently are processes to deal with them, multiple companies are working on the problem.
Current solutions include shredding them and reconstituting into some sort of alternative building material, chemically separating the parts of the composite and creating recycled resin, and mechanically separating and sorting apart the different materials which are then recombined for alternative use.
This is a good place to look at recent american efforts, but there is more recent information available elsewhere: https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/wind-turbine-materials-recycling-prize
Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.
The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.
What’s the grand scheme of things mean to you? If we average it out over 40 years? How does nuclear even fit in when solar and wind are cheaper? Nuclear plants don’t provide on demand energy to fill in the gaps, they provide energy constantly.
The only reason it works for microsoft is because they plan to use all that energy consistently. But besides that why should we trust a for-profit company to do anything safely in the first place? Do we have a long history of companies being regulated well or self-regulating well?
The nuclear industry is heavily regulated by the government via the NRC, but they impose even stricter regulations upon themselves. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they are less reliable. A grid comprised of a mix of solar and wind, bolstered by nuclear is the most effective and least environmentally harmful option that we currently have.
Lol, now just let AI manage the reactors, then give it access to manufacturing tech and we have every machine takeover scenario ever.
At last, we’ll be seeing nuclear reactors being created using Agile! Fail early, fail often, hopefully don’t kill everyone!
Amazon has a space program with rockets, Google is acquiring the nuclear facilities, will Microsoft develop a weapons manufacturing facility?
Microsoft already acquired a nuclear plant.
Ah I see don’t know about Microsoft’s 22 billion dollar HaloLens contract with the Department of Defence.
https://www.techspot.com/news/94353-dod-oversight-agency-warns-22-billion-microsoft-hololens.html
They don’t need weapons to support genocide.
Who had Atompunk on their 2024 Bingo card?
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The high price of nuclear power comes from it being a stagnant and obsolete technology for 30 years.
As well as being choked to death in red tape.
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Well one easy one, in my country it is that nuclear plants need to emit zero radiation from their core, like nothing. This is incredibly expensive to achieve, a more sensible value would have been similar or less than normal background radiation.
Nuclear has a lot of advantages that are really low hanging fruit of producing safe clean energy that is perfect for a grids baseload.
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South Africa, you can read up on us if you want to learn about a country that really fucked up its energy supply, but that is a different story.
You do need a baseload, this is not something an argument of saying we do not really need a baseload can wish away, industries that run 24/7 like a smelting operation where if you cannot shutdown, or hospitals or traffic lights, there is a certain percentage of baseload that has to be generated.
Solar and wind are amazing and I really wish to see these systems play a major role in power generation, but you say the nuclear and coal plants are very inflexible. I do not know who this guy is but Nuclear and coal can very easily ramp up their power generation, both these are basically steam engines, both nuclear and coal can very quickly heat up and generate a lot more steam that powers generators, like an car engine but more accurately a steam train that you give more power to go faster. Solar and wind cannot ramp up on their own, cannot ask the wind to blow harder or the sun to shine brighter suddenly when the system requires it, they need costly backup systems like methane peaker plants or energy storage, be it batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen electrolysis the list goes on. These things added to solar and wind plants are usually not allocated to the cost of generation, a total cost of generation including these additional backup systems are a better indicator of solar and wind systems cost.
Now what about waste. I agree coal is messy and is causing global warming and needs to be phased out. But nuclear waste is a solved problem, it has been for decades, the spent fuel is usually stored deep underground where it will never interact with the world again. Solar on the other hand, if it costs about $20-$30 to recycle a panel but like $1-$3 to send it to a waste dumps, what do you think will happen to the solar panels. https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power Harvard business did an article about how solar recycling has really been a point of weakness, where nuclear we have set guidelines on how to environmentally and safely dispose of nuclear waste currently. I am willing to bet you the environmental impact from pollution from nuclear, including all the disasters will be negligible compared to the waste impact from solar panels and batteries currently.
So my point is not to dismiss solar or wind, really where wind and sunshine are naturally plentiful it will be a waste not to harvest these resources, just like where geothermal resources are available it will be wasteful not to utilise it.
But nuclear, even with its high initial capital cost and long build time, still does provide energy cheaply and will last for a lot longer than solar panels and wind turbines, nuclear can be easily and quickly ramped up or down depending on the load required.
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Wouldn’t emitting radiation, even at background levels, lead to an increase in radiation as it’s in addition to background stuff?
Yes. But a single flight across the US exposes people around 4 times ground level background radiation.
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No, red tape is death by a thousand cut. Each one sensible and modestly priced.
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power.
At variable scale, based on time of year and weather. Nuclear is much better for base-load, particularly at the scale of GWs. You know exactly how much electricity you’re going to get 24/7, and the fuel costs aren’t exposed to a market that can vary by 150-300% annually.
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So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn’t replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that…cool
It’s almost like our population has continued to increase for the last 30 years
It’s almost like you have no clue what you are talking about lol. The global population growth for the last 30 years is 50%, while the global GDP growth is 500%. Not only that but the wealth inequality in the world has been steadily rising for the last 60 years. In the US alone (that we have data on) the wealth of the bottom 80% has been roughly stagnant since the 1990s while that of the top 1% has skyrocketed - it’s basically them that have absorbed this economic growth profit.
So yeah, you got a lot of confidence in things you clearly don’t know about.
You weren’t talking about wealth, you said that our energy consumption continued to rise.
You have to understand that GDP and energy demands are intrinsically tied. That’s a fact, both theoretically and empirically verified with historical data. When the GDP rises, energy demands rise. And the reason why energy demands rise is not to meet people’s needs but because the 1% seek to increase GDP (through individual corporation stock values) which in turn increases their profits, since like I said they absorb all of it. That is why it is relevant, because it’s a matter of wealth accumulation by the 1%, not because people need more energy. That is backed both by the fact that the common people don’t get anything out of the increase in economic production(the bottom 80% like I’ve said have had a stagnant wealth since the 1990s in the US, although the global GDP has risen 5-fold, even though the population has risen and hence the people in that 80% has risen as well) and by the fact that the population increase has been just 50% and the increase in wealth ten times that.
So our population has increased by 50% and you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease? All countries have increased energy production, including China, I’m not sure why you’re making this sound like a US centric problem.
What in the world do you mean “you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease?”. What does expect mean??? I don’t expect anything, I’m stating what needs to be done if we want our planet to remain habitable…have you heard about climate change or…? Also how do you keep ignoring the fact that our wealth has increased by 500% in the last 30 years and the 1% gets all the profit? We don’t need to increase our economic activities for all the people to be able to live comfortably, we need distribute wealth fairly and when we get to a point where everyone can live well, (in the West we are way past that point) then we need to scale down unnecessary economic activities, if we want to meet the scientific guidelines to avoid the 3 degrees by the end of the century, which would spell absolute irreversible disaster.
I never said it’s a US problem, and I didn’t make it sound like so, I was only using some data from the US for convenience. It’s a worldwide problem, but the US dictates the trajectory and policies of a very big part of the world including Europe, Canada, Australia and the gulf countries, all of which are essentially controlled by them. Also the US has by far the most CO2 emissions historically, making that country the single biggest contributor to climate change, again, by far. So it bears the biggest responsibility of any country. But you are right, it’s a worldwide problem.
The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.
Yes it’s obviously better than using fossil fuels, nobody’s arguing that. What I’m talking about is the direction the global economy and the people making the decisions are taking.
No matter how much nuclear energy you use, you are still putting a lot of additional strain on the environment. It’s not just the CO2 emissions that matter, that’s just one of the problems. It’s the increase in extracted materials for data centers, reactors and nuclear fuel, which causes the destruction of multiple ecosystems and the contamination of waters and soil from the pollutants produced(even radioactive waste in the uranium case).
It’s also that Google could have been taxed more(I’m sure they can take it) and the money the government gained could be directed to investments on nuclear plants that would actually replace fossil fuels instead of adding energy demands on top of them. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2024 we categorically cannot be talking about not increasing fossil fuel consumption, we have to be talking about how to reduce emissions drastically every single year and why we are already tragically behind on that regard.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs
Hopefully.
But the cynic in me is always concerned when shareholder owned companies are operating something that has the potential to go very wrong very quickly if/when they cut too many corners in the pursuit of that extra 0.5% of profit.
For what it’s worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.
Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that’s the case, but it’s not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you’re making it out to be.
Not familiar with the current US situation, but AFAIK, in my country the governments have a stake in the operation and maintenance of nuclear facilities.
