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Nuclear cannot be deployed anywhere, it needs a source of water. It also needs staffing, and it needs to be kinda near to people who need electricity.

This last point is important because nuclear plants generate a lot of power, so you cant easily build a plant “just” for 500 people in the same way you can for other energy sources.

I am fine with nuclear in principle. There are real reasons nukes are expensive and not the ideal option in many situations. We have to be clear eyed about this.

Molten salt reactors don’t need a source of water, as much staffing, and could be used for industrial and other purposes given their improved safety profile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

I want to believe with MSRs but the it’s had 80 years to prove itself and I have a hard time believing its large scale feasibility at this point. Lobbying only explains away so much. Remember, France is a large industrialized nation still building nuclear power plant. There’s gotta be some real reason they didn’t pick up MSRs.

Also as was seen in France this summer for instance, one of the interesting edge cases of water cooled reactors (really any generation that needs a lot of water) is that they can get basically thermally throttled e.g. the inlet water is too warm, you might be limited on how much water you can discharge to curtail affecting local ecology.

I guess it makes sense to me that the conditions that spike electric demand also stress generation and transmission, but I do find it astonishing how universal it is, solar/wind/hydro/nuclear included.

There is at least one (I would say rather nice looking!) nuclear power plant that was build in arid climate & is cooled by evaporating treated waste water:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

Also you can reduce the heating requirements to use some of the waste heat for district heating. Modern heating pipelines have negligible losses even over dozens of kilometers, you you can heat even quite distant cities. Such a project is now in the works here in Brno:

https://energycentral.com/news/czech-nuclear-plant-dukovany-...

Though its just an older project that has finally been restarted:

https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:13700211

https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:20085810

> The same economies of scale that have made solar+wind so cheap also apply to nuclear tech.

They really don’t. Nukes are fundamentally extremely complex pieces of technology, that also happen to benefit from being physically large. They will never be simple. Solar is brain dead simple in comparison, which is why it’s so amenable to manufacturing efficiencies

> Right now, it's an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of a problem because the mining happens in poor countries. How many cobalt and lithium mines have been approved in the U.S?

Mainland USofA is relatively mineral poor wrt economic feasibilty.

There's a reason the bulk of US Cold War yellow cake came from Africa, Canada, etc and very little from the "weak tea" leach mines in the contiguous US.

( 'Relative' meaining exactly that, the US does of course have a 64 year prospect for copper (and other resources), it's just that other parts of the world have higher grades of most things that are cheaper to extract. )

Lithium you'll find is mostly mined in Australia - mining isn't the dirty part, it's the post processing of the spodumene concentrates - this currently takes place in China, Malaysia, and elsewhere.

The US is currently building at least three spodumene concentrates facilities - one in Texas for use by Tesla.

If you think we oil enriched uranium out of thin air, I’ve got news for you about uranium mining. You can reuse lithium and cobalt from batteries over and over, but you can only use the same nuclear fuel maybe two times. I would love more nuclear, I was a trained nuclear electrician in the navy for a short time, but it’s not feasible in many ways, and the biggest today is its cost.

Breeder reactors are something like 100x more fuel efficient than conventional reactors, and produce much less waste.

According to wikipedia, we already have enough fuel to produce enough energy for the entire planet for 5 billion years (assuming 1983 global energy demand):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

The main issue is that they produce and then consume weapons grade material as part of the reaction, and you have to periodically re-refine the reactor's contents. That makes it hard to prevent people from stealing the weapons grade material.

I've long thought that we should build robots to maintain the facilities, and a second fleet of robots that stay near the plant and shoot anyone they see on sight.

That reduces the security problem to programming the fuel-handling robots.

That’s some dystopian shit right there, robots to shoot people near nuclear reactor/weapon fuel stations.

Put them on short extension cords. What could go wrong?

So, your answer to “why do they have to preach” is… preaching? This is like someone posting, “Ban cars! Bikes are better!” every time someone mentions a breakthrough in, say, EV tech. It is both off-topic and everyone here knows it will derail the discussion into mudslinging, just like how all EV discussion gets derailed. It only adds noise.