AI Is Bringing Old Nuclear Plants Out of Retirement
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The revival of old nuclear plants with AI's help has sparked a heated debate about the merits of nuclear power versus coal. While some commenters, like danmaz74 and kouiskas, argue that nuclear is the lesser evil, citing its lower death toll per unit of energy produced, others like rmoriz counter that nuclear waste poses a lasting threat, with sigwinch retorting that coal's pollution is equally persistent. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the conversation is not just about the technology, but also about the values and priorities that guide our energy choices, with some, like hagbard_c, pointing out that nuclear "waste" can be repurposed as fuel in advanced reactors, while others, like pfdietz, dismiss this as economically unviable.
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Coal has heavy metals and traces of radioactive materials in it. Multiply to the thousands tons and maybe they are more harmful than nuclear.
Radiation from nuclear waste is constrained to steel casks in cooling ponds, and the waste can be reprocessed for use in breeder reactors instead of letting it sit.
Nuclear 'waste' is just waiting to become new nuclear 'fuel' in a fast neutron or 'breeder' reactor. Treated this way the volume of nuclear waste can be reduced by 90% while the remaining highly radioactive waste only needs to be stored for some hundreds of years instead of thousands due to its much shorter half life. It also extends the viability of nuclear fission (as opposed to fusion) by a factor of 10 by producing new fissionable material.
s long as nuclear fusion is not available it makes sense to further develop nuclear fission, including the 'waste' problem.
Nuclear power is in trouble because it costs too much. The other issues -- safety, waste, proliferation -- they don't make any difference. Make nuclear much cheaper and we'd build much more of it. Improve any of those other metrics without making it cheaper and it will go nowhere.
Cost also matters because in any situation where choices have to be made between alternatives, you need a way to evaluate the tradeoffs. This can only be done by reducing the alternatives to a metric that can be compared, and that metric is in units of some currency. Even human life is reduced to a dollar value when evaluating choices, the so-called "statistical value of a human life".
Nuclear power is expensive because it is supposed to so expensive not to be viable, not because of inherent problems with nuclear power. If the same regulatory burden had been placed on e.g. wind and solar - treat every turbine as a one-off project in need of approval, use land use approval procedures to stall construction, put a turbine blade recycle burden on the turbine owner, etc - those power sources would be just as expensive and unviable. The same goes for coal, oil and gas plants, hydropower installations - which are starting to be treated similarly where I live (Sweden) since the 'green' politicos decided they don't like small-scale power hydro plants - and any other power source. Regulations can make or break a power source, in case of nuclear it seems to be hell-bent on breaking it.
Nuclear isn't competitive anywhere. Even in China, vastly more renewables are being installed (even taking into account capacity factors.) If the putative excuse you are desperately depending on there is so powerful it applies universally, even in non-democracies, what chance is there it could be overcome?
The same regulatory burden isn't placed on wind/solar because there's no need for it there. Wind and solar are not subject to low probability, very high cost accident scenarios that are the driver for nuclear regulation. And, wind/solar have the advantage of being highly redundant, not being grouped into monolithic units with higher internal interdependency. This makes the renewables far less dependent on extreme reliability of components and their connections, and far less dependent on the skill and consistency of labor and those overseeing construction.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/27/ai-gives-coal-plant...
If it's a stable 24x7 load it would be ideal for nuclear energy, low carbon, but slow to adapt to changes in demand.
Staying that as a genuine question since I'm not sure how the math works out at that scale, you have to weigh that against hardware depreciation of course.
Solving fusion could usher in the golden age that atomic power failed to produce
Call me ignorant, but I’d rather we focus on stuff like increasing photovoltaic cell efficiency (and possibly cost-efficiency) by the 40%-60% we’re leaving on the table keeping them fully loaded and cooking.
Simple physics upgrades, like rotating cones, or lines of panels to swap with each other in Arizona-parking-lot conditions, can take us further, faster, and cheaper.
Nuclear is only safe after and during spending a bunch of money to keep it that way.
That makes me uncomfortable, because we’ve never had more instability in my lifetime, as far as “wildly important things not being addressed”.
If you want to see where energy will come from in a deregulated environment, look at Texas. New grid capacity there is solar and batteries. Even gas isn't being installed much; the Texas state government put down $7.2B to fund more gas capacity yet this money has been mostly spurned, I think < $400M has been taken. New nuclear is completely out of the picture there.
Neither fission nor fusion are going to put any juice on the grid before the AI bubble resolves, and then the financial calculations will be totally different.
For nuclear specifically, this was compounded by post-Three Mile Island regulatory response. This increased the tendency to use bespoke designs, i.e. discouraged standardization, which prevented automation and the benefits of learning curves. That's why Baumol-style cost dynamics took over.
This same pattern shows up in subways and bridges. It’s not that 'big things can’t be built cheaply anymore", it’s that we changed the rules under which big things are built.
The idea that nuclearphobia is to blame is a defensive fantasy.
And I'm sure you will agree there is a great and sorry history of nuclear efforts failing to achieve their cost targets. At this point, it is clear that such targets are sales numbers, not something one should actually believe. One cannot make this history go away just by wishing, as nuclear advocates like yourself seem wont to do.
Even with respect to solar, nuclear has a safer track record. I'm not making an argument that the future should be all nuclear or even any nuclear. I'm simply arguing that right at this moment there's clearly been a misalignment between regulatory burden to risk ratio of nuclear versus other sources of energy, especially hydrocarbon sources, leading to an suboptimal relative mix of energy sources.
could be worse, could be all that effort, energy, talent and now nuclear waste to produce infinite pictures of shrimp jesus
.... oh crap
For some reason TVA keeps building new nuclear sites, never commissioning them, and then selling them at huge losses to private investors (or destroying them). Recently TVA got approval for µfission reactors to be installed... here we go again.
[•] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefonte_Nuclear_Plant> $4B, estimated loss
Suggested (hopefully not Enron-esque) reading: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/0...
AI compute will go to places where energy is cheap
source: Chile National Data Centers Plan | 2024-2030 MinCiencia Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation
note - this is "promoting the sustainable growth of the data center industry" .. you know it has to be sustainable
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for those plans. But it will take 5 to 10 years while China has a 15 year headstart.
You can't print energy and you can't print infra. Nine women can't have a baby in a month.
1) current admins working hand in glove with current AI hypemen safely bring old nuke plants online.
2) they bring it online but cause a meltdown or two in the process. Investor pressure lead to cut corners lead to meltdowns lead to public opinion turning against nuke power...again. Second nuke power winter begins.
3) something else?