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The TerraPower reactor in Wyoming is still moving forward, they recently broke ground on the construction.

NuScale was stupid, it's just a small PWR reactor so is subject to all the drawbacks and costs of the current generation of nuclear power but without the thermal advantages of a large reactor. TerraPower is building a molten salt reactor with built-in storage so they can provide fully dispatchable power to the grid. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing (it's Wyoming so the wind is ALWAYS blowing at differing forces) then you heat up the storage tank then when the sun gets low and everyone gets home from work and turns on their A/C you turn that heat into steam and fill the gap. They are siting the reactor at a decommissioned 750 MW coal plant so don't need to build the turbines, steam plant, or electrical and water infrastructure so they should just need provide a reactor and heat exchanger to be up and running. Like all nuclear projects this one has been agonizingly slow but hopefully it's picking up steam and will actually be built instead of all the "high-level design only" companies in the SMR space.

Yes he did, he said this:

recent cancer studies clearly show it's likely easily the greatest loss of life due to an increase in cancer rates of any industrial disaster in human history by an order of magnitude

"Greatest loss of life" sure sounds like a claim of "a ton of death" to me.

I notice you didn't provide a citation for that, even though your sig says "Unite Behind the Science". A lot of people have really high estimates but when scientists look at ACTUAL deaths and ACTUAL cancers they never can seem to find even close to those amounts. For example, from this paper:

Indeed, results of analyses of time trends in cancer incidence and mortality in Europe do not, at present, indicate any increase in cancer rates -- other than of thyroid cancer in the most contaminated regions -- that can be clearly attributed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident.

That's not saying that there are no excess cancers caused by Chernobyl, but they aren't statistically significant enough to show up in cancer rates. If the "estimates" of these "_russian_ scientists" are true, where are the cancers? To get to that 2-4 million dead figure there needs to be a LOT of cancers.

Your link includes nothing about deaths from Chernobyl, it's a study looking at the prevalence of cancer in people previously diagnosed with thyroid cancer in areas affected by Chernobyl. It has no data at all on mortality. Not all cancer leads to death and most of the Chernobyl excess cancers are thyroid cancer (due to the bulk of the contamination being from iodine-131) which is highly treatable if detected early (>99.5% survival rate). Greatly increased screening in these areas have made it so almost all of these cases are detected early and thus are highly treatable. If you want to claim a ton of deaths at least provide a source that at least talks about deaths.

When comparing to other industrial disasters there's also the issue of lag between any deaths and the disaster. If someone is exposed to excess radiation and lives their life for 40 years but then develops cancer and dies, it's a lower societal and economic impact than if they die immediately in an explosion/collapse/flood, etc. It's still a tragedy when they die earlier than they should have but it's not as impactful on society.

Also, you say an "entire region of Ukraine is uninhabitable", how big is a region? The Chernobyl exclusion zone is ~1000 sq. miles and Ukraine is ~233,000 sq. miles so it represents ~0.4% of the land area (actually, the accident happened in the USSR which had an area of 8.5M sq. miles so it would only be ~0.01% of the land area of the country where it happened). It's also not "uninhabitable" by definition since there are still people that live and work there.

Don't get me wrong, Chernobyl was a huge disaster by any measure and caused or will cause a lot of deaths. I just take issue with you claiming it's the deadliest industrial disaster in history when the data just doesn't support that. The disaster was caused by poor decisions in design and operation largely due to the massively fucked-up totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union. A lot of the people with increased mortality risk aren't the general public, they are the "liquidators" that the USSR sent in as part of their incompetent response to the disaster. There just won't ever be another Chernobyl since nobody is stupid enough anymore to run a reactor like that, even current totalitarian states like North Korea. Being anti-nuclear because of Chernobyl is like being anti-medicine because doctors used to kill people when they tried to perform surgery on them. Yes, it's still dangerous but nowhere near as dangerous as that. Fukishima is the worst-case scenario for any plant that is running today -- i.e. a few deaths and a massively expensive cleanup.

Personally, I hope they don't make any more large reactors since they suck economically. They suffer from "huge project syndrome" -- any sufficiently sized project always comes in late and over budget and nukes also have the additional impediments of a strict regulatory environment and public anti-nuclear sentiment (lawsuits, zoning fights, political pressure, etc.). SMRs might be economically viable if they would actually start producing a lot of them but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon. I think nukes are needed on the grid since it's unrealistic to expect renewables to completely run the power-thirsty US without a metric shitload of storage. Some of the SMR designs provide DISPATCHABLE power, which would be great to run alongside renewables - effectively providing grid storage when renewable output is high but filling the gap when the sun goes down/wind stops blowing/river is running low.

Tell that to the justice system, they have taken in billions and billions of dollars from the drug war. Cops, private prisons, and any company that sells something with "tactical" in the name have all made bank.

Exactly. Nope, it hasn't outlived its usefulness, question answered. Their justification is stupid too:

This means that a social-media company, for example, can't easily be held responsible if it promotes, amplifies or makes money from posts selling drugs, illegal weapons or other illicit content," they wrote.

If the post is to facilitate illegal activity, then bust the user for that illegal activity. If someone is selling drugs on Facebook, then arrest them for that. Why does the medium matter, if a drug dealer is copying flyers to post in his neighborhood are you going to indict Kinkos? The problem is that it's legal to TALK about drugs or guns and what these assholes really want is to regulate the speech itself, instead of actually policing the illegal activity.

HAL. Open the pod bay doors, HAL. Sorry, I can't do that, Dave.

There were a number of lawsuits filed around Vogtle 3 and 4, but the major delays were political/regulatory (source). The NRC changed the design specification for the AP1000 after construction had already begun, causing a stop in construction because the containment structure had to be completely redesigned. Stopping construction on any huge project like this is very costly, you have contractual costs to your contractors as well as capital costs - you're paying interest on money you can't yet deploy because of the regulatory change.

Any big construction project is always late and over budget. Take a look at huge buildings/road projects/arenas etc. and you'll see similar cost overruns and delays. Heck, look at The Big Dig:

The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (US$7.4 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2020). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $21.5 billion adjusted for inflation), a cost overrun of about 190%

  For nuclear projects this effect is magnified by regulatory and legal challenges. Large projects are HARD to budget and plan -- the bigger the project, the more dependencies and unknowns and a larger cost and delay for any deviation from the planning. Also, a larger opportunity for graft. SMRs may be able to address this by making the construction stage a smaller project that can be iterated on. It costs a lot less to build a WalMart distribution center than it does to build a one-off sports arena because WalMart has already done the project a number of times and can plan a lot more efficiently. The plan of several SMR companies (like TerraPower and NuScale) to co-locate at former coal plants could also help construction times/costs - the steam plant and electrical equipment is already in place the SMRs just need to provide heat. Hopefully some of these projects will move forward soon but I'm not too hopeful - with the current regulatory and political environment it makes something that was really hard (implementing a completely new type of nuclear reactor [in the case of TerraPower]) nearly impossible.

Plant output is not measured in GWh, it's measured in GW - it's instantaneous power. If you don't get that simple detail right, why trust the rest of your analysis?

Funny, I searched Google for "Now you canâ(TM)t even if you try and search it as a quote" (also, please fix your "smart quotes") and your post was the only result. Seems like you CAN search an obscure sentence and find the exact page it is on without news and products.

Christ, kneejerk much? Why the fuck would Biden give money to a company to open plants in Canada (and which "state" is offering incentives for this)? You know that's not the country Biden is the president of, right? Well, don't get pesky facts get in the way of your tribalistic hate, if something doesn't fit your narrative then just invent some "alternative facts" -- it's a real timesaver!

Of course! When the summary says "attract troves of health-care professionals" they don't mean doctors and nurses, they mean the armies of middlemen who simultaneously get between you and your doctor and suck money from the system that could be used to pay ACTUAL care providers. When they say "Nashville is an established health center" they mean a health industry LEECH center not a locus of quality healthcare.

Oh they're real all right, just ingest one of those feathered CIA spy drones into your ducted fan and see how real they are. I hear that bird framework is made of titanium so that's not going to mesh well with the carbon fiber propellers of these VTOL aircraft.

I don't know where you live, but in the USA you would pay less taxes filing jointly rather than singly. You get an extra $12k deduction when filing jointly, sheltering your income from taxation. Additionally, the tax brackets are higher when filing jointly so you'll end up paying a lower tax rate overall. If your wife filed her own tax return she would have no tax liability (since she has no income) but your single return would have much higher taxes. Really, this is the exact situation the filing jointly option is designed to address, when there is a large disparity in income between spouses.

I was going to post something similar. The only thing that historically has kept those with power in check (kings, tyrants, etc.) is that they needed members of the 99% to provide force and labor to maintain that power. Those providing the force could always seize power for the people (if idealistic) or themselves (if pragmatic) when the tyranny gets too bad.

You talk about the 99% living in horrifying squalor, but that's really the best case result. Once robots can run their factories and fight their battles there's no reason to keep the 99% around at all. An AI-designed plague to which the 1% are already immune would take care of that pesky problem of having to see and smell all those impoverished people living in squalor. OK, so that last bit is stretching a bit but certainly in the realm of possibility once those who currently control the vast majority of resources realize they no longer need the 99% to maintain their lifestyle. Once billionaires control their personal robot armies, guillotines and "2nd amendment solutions" are no longer viable.