Environment & Energy

...destroy American nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, thus threatening the future, but it's not like it's a big industrial secret to build these pressure vessels.

In fact, as this is my son's field for his Ph.D. thesis - I just read his thesis proposal - this may be time for new classes of alloys. In the 1960's and 1970's the United States dominance in steel technology was lost because newer alloys required retooling industrial plants both in size and type.

In countries that had newer infrastructure, either as a result of wartime destruction or simply because they were entering a new field, the ability to create infrastructure to address new materials was incorporated into the design. This made larger, older facilities, noncompetitive.

It follows that the construction of new infrastructure offers the possibility of building superior manufacturing systems based on the most current technology.

This represents an opportunity, assuming we can restrain idiots and grifters.

The fact is that nuclear reactor materials, owing to the vast energy density related material and environmental superiority of nuclear energy over fossil fuel and so called "renewable energy" junk, will not require all that much material, and thus not all that many capable plants.

There is a never ending parade of course, of whiny antinukes raising specious - and usually ignorant - objections to claim the use of nuclear energy is impossible, representing relative trivialities as if they were insurmountable.

Meanwhile, in China, where since the year 2000, 56 new reactors have entered full commercial operation and 35 are under construction, blowing some rather huge holes in the rhetoric of what is and what is not impossible. China started with essentially no infrastructure in 2000 and now possesses the best infrastructure in the world.

I would note that my son is working on the frontier of a new approach to nuclear materials - real as opposed to hyped - additive manufacture. This will allow for preparing types of materials previously inaccessible by other means. He is working to understand the radiation related properties of materials that are decidedly "out of the box."

Additive manufacture, (aka "3D printing" ) is especially useful for building small reactors. There is a lot of hype around small reactors, and many programs will fail, but those that succeed - and succeed they will - will be in the catbird seat. My impression is that they can be built on a continuous basis running plants around the clock, plants powered by the small reactors they will produce.

By the way, fascist owned "X" is not a place to learn about nuclear technology or, in fact, any engineering or technical subject. Any idiot can write anything there, and often, as we know, idiots do write there and sometimes read there.

The success of ignorance cheering sales pitch of antinukes of course, has limited the scale of what is left to be saved by nuclear energy, but it remains the best, and really, only shot we have. We'd better get to it.