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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

What's with this narrative? There isn't some popular resistance holding nuclear back. The only thing holding them back is their own ineptitude.

> It's all proven technology

Literally none of the things you mentioned exist at commercial scale. It is the opposite of "proven". This technology is purely hypothetical.

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There's a history of protests against nuclear power, so I don't think it's right to there isn't a popular resistance holding nuclear back.

Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.

There was popular resistance to nuclear, and nuclear was held back, but that doesn't mean nuclear was held back by popular resistance. It certainly doesn't explain why nuclear is struggling to compete with renewables globally, even in countries without popular resistance (like China).

McMurdo was powered by a modular reactor in the 60s. It's not "hypothetical" - though I do agree it's not economically scalable, but neither is training an LLM and before OpenAI did it DARPA did it, and you'd better believe the DOD did it too. I'm saying that the technology exists, it's been proven, and it can work - the hangup is political and cultural, and it burdens me with sadness to see conversation focus on things like "omg what if microsoft put clippy on an ICBM" it's appealing to ridicule and we've enough of that tendency these days. Instead we should celebrate this! Explore and discuss it from merit and principle.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...

I want to like nuclear, but it's clear that many of it's proponents are red-eyed bitcoin-maxis with that strange fanatical juvenile vibe going, and it all just turns me off because it's obvious they are spouting BS. It's all just an act to pump a penny stock or because they are an angsty teen.

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