American nuclear energy just reached a milestone decades in the making. Is the ‘renaissance’ finally happening? - The Lion
A nuclear energy startup beat the clock by a month when its advanced reactor reached a milestone pivotal for safe operation, advancing a goal set by President Donald Trump last year. Trump signed a series of executive orders in May of 2025 that called for ...
As to the regulation issues pointed out. It’s likely long past time those change. But at the same time it’s not like American Companies don’t have a long and fairly extensive track record of lying about Medical Issues and long term effects of their products and procedures. As well as hiding or obscuring evidence of such effects.
So changes to Nuclear regulations will be a rather delicate procedure. Especially because the effects of cutting corners or other things corporate America does to save a nickel. Could have effects far beyond people’s immediate health when it comes to doing it with Nuclear Reactors.
As to the question in your title. Potentially. Most of it depends on how quickly they can scale up production and produce reactors as well as bringing them online. Not to mention dealing with the States. As some State Governments are liable to cause rollouts problems and feud over turf and whose precisely in charge of what.
The linear no-threshold (LNT) model needs to be thrown out. There is ample evidence of a hormesis (healing inducing) effect at very low levels. At a specific low level, the net effect of radiation is beneficial, not detrimental. (The argument is that at a lower level, radiation stimulates the immune system to be more active than otherwise. At higher levels, radiation causes more damage than the immune system can nullify.)
It says it "non light water" but how is it cooled? Where's the beef?
Lived next to two reactors for nearly 5 years on board the IKE. Had a dosemeter hanging on the wall next to my rack. Also had a dosemeter hanging in the sun outside the bridge. The dosemeter outside the bridge registered more radiation. The one by my rack never budged from zero.
fission, not fusion. oh well
Fission works. Fusion has been the world's oldest pipe dream, and the idea that it is waste-free is baloney. No reaction "ash" to speak of, but the reactor components (first wall) are subjected to long term, intense neutron flux and become radioactive over time. And one of the nuclear fuel components (tritium) must be manufactured in fission reactors.
As for fission reactors, the U.S. Navy's nuclear reactors have logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operations. Hardly anyone knows this. The government has been standing in the way of extensive safe electric power for half a century.
"subjected to long term intense neutron flux and become radioactive over time."
A professor of mine from an undergraduate physics class I took (a long time ago) said exactly this. Since that time, you are the first person I've come across to repeat the claim. One certainly does not hear about fusion being "dirty" from the mainstream science press, or from directors of fusion projects.
" The government has been standing in the way of extensive safe electric power for half a century."
I believe that. But what do you suppose is the reason? The left reflexively blames Big Oil. There may be something to that. But military and department of state concerns about fuel supply lines and nuclear weapon proliferation risk, I suspect, are an even stronger force of containment.
Much of history was set when Admiral Rickover chose Pressured Water Reactors for submarines to the exclusion of anything else, including molten salt designs. Military was the priority and he did not want money, manufacturers, and R&D resources split.
The First Wall Problem has that name because it is well known in the community. It is something the enthusiasts don't want to acknowledge, because it upsets their sales pitch. Nor do they admit that the only fusion fuel we know how to burn is both rare (deuterium) and produced from fission reactors (tritium), while the planet is lavished with uranium and thorium.
Government obstacles come quite clearly from the political influence of the environmental movement, and the fearfulness of those who are uneducated about radiation. There is no shortage of fuel, if reprocessing is used (as the French do). And the recalcitrant radioactive waste can be "burnt up" in a fast-flux reactor by intense neutron bombardment. We just don't do it...presumably in order to keep the charade of a waste disposal problem alive for the public to worry about.
Rickover placed highest priority on safety. He entertained a different reactor concept in the SSN Seawolf (NaK coolant), but the system proved troublesome and coolant leaks were hazardous, so the reactor was replaced by a pressurized water reactor. The PWRs worked just fine. Molten salt reactors were studied, but the supposed advantages were just not worth the trouble. There is a lot of guff propagated by the enthusiast community, few of whom are nuclear engineers.
We have had other reactor designs, such as gas-cooled reactors with graphite moderators. No "China Syndrome" problem and the coolant is helium, which basically cannot become radioactive. These have actually been build for commercial use. There are also boiling water reactors. Jolly fun, I suppose.
When I was a younger lad, absorbing counter arguments to the Environmentalist movement such as Dr. Petr Beckman's The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (in original red cover) I tended to view the 70s Environmentalist movement as an ideological offshoot of the 60s New Left, itself an ideological development tracing back to the Reds of the 30s, etc. In other words, as the organic evolution of bad, anti-human ideas. Later I tapped into the reality that environmentalism was a deliberate creation of the Club of Rome. The penny dropped when I realized that the Club of Rome was not some fringe group of far left idealists who somehow gained traction in academia and later public consciousness, but was a planning subcommittee of some of the world's most powerful men. Looking back I have come to suspect that all those anti-Nuke protests - reactors or warheads, take your pick - were as grassroots as today's No Kings protests. At the time they received very heavy coverage on TV, in magazines, and newspapers.
In the 90s the Environmentalist movement put itself in a position of facing a deep reckoning. Global Warming and CO2 emissions was declared existential threat number one. Granting the premise for sake of argument, nuclear fission energy was the obvious solution. Yet being anti-nuclear was the founding DNA of the movement. A few honest leaders such as Patrick Moore resolved the contraction by stepping out. But the fact that the majority plowed on undeterred proved a lot about the nature of their agenda, and their nature as a movement.
Shifting topics a bit, you kind of make me want to study nuclear engineering as a retirement hobby, or at least pick up a couple books. Intuitively I always felt that neutron bombardment should solve the radioactive waste problem. There's got to be decay pathways that can turn the stuff into nice happy little isotopes.
P.S. I'm with you that the "free energy" promotional material of Col. Thomas Bearden is not just nonsense, but has all the classic hallmarks of the writings of a crank. A lot of people on GAW fall for that kind of crap, and it saddens me.
Hear, hear, brother! There's no question that radioactive "waste" can be reduced to stable isotopes by intense neutron irradiation. It only takes the willingness to build the fast-flux reactors necessary for that processing. (They should also be able to burn U-238 without moderators, thus no enrichment required. But they are a bit challenging.)
"...recent Gallup polling found Americans are now more likely to want a nuclear power plant built near them than an AI data center."
That certainly says something about nukes, AI or both.