somebitch1 [she/her]
A nuclear engineer Mark Nelson claims almost reactor designs even including Soviet RBMKs can be maintained indefinitely through good management and retrofits EXCEPT British reactor designs. Hope Rolls Royce don’t repeat that fuck up.
Imagine building hundreds of nuclear plants that your descendants will probably run on thorium and plutonium.
What is so important about these high temperature reactors is that they will be replacing coal and gas boilers in all sorts of manufacturing processes and to produce hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer and fuel.
Good. Rosatom is their only chance of reducing emissions.
The world as we know it was built on cheap fossil fuels. Those material conditions will probably never be replicated even because fossil fuels are so malleable. Natural gas could be converted to fertilizer and oil to the best performing fuels still known to man and plastic so cheap they are dominated the oceans. People have to start thinking about the over a billion engines that will have to be replaced. The land use for renewables or the limited sites available for fission/fusion cooling will never sustainably replicate this kind of energy without risking mass extinction by industrializing the whole planet.
We really need to be brave an re-imagine the world. It will be very unpopular but if we want to phase out fossil fuels then people and industry are going to have migrate to become rail adjacent in really dense cities designed to stay cool. This is what will separate the willing from the libs.
Better still. Get off the internet and organize around the real needs of those around you
We are now playing Russian roulette of eventually developing long covid. People in wheelchairs because of fatigue and heart problems. People almost starving to death because food tastes like rotten sewage. People developing fucking type 1 diabetes. All the while services and welfare are collapse and inflation is being used as another vehicle to abolish these things like in the old Ron Paul days.