So, no different than anywhere else.

And why does that make bike racks not exist at destinations?

Last time it was attempted to build new full size reactors was in 2009. The plan got abandoned when the estimated cost was $26billion.

There's your "Best Freight Railroad in the World". Can't give employees basic sick days, can't pay for maintenance, can't pay for any upgrades, can't ship anything on time, can't follow the law and yield to passenger trains. But hey, they are making record profits so that means everything is fine.

That's because the military doesn't release the full costs of their reactors. Naval reactors are almost guaranteed to be even more expensive because that's how the navy works.

Wait, what? Nuscale is working on more than one reactor design? That defeats the whole purpose of mass production using a single design. Time to abandon this horrifically expensive one and stick with the design that's been approved.

The way you do that is a hydraulic piston. Make the piston out of some really heavy materials, and then pump in water underneath to lift it. That's the only potentially feasible way to do gravity storage that isn't a traditional pumped hydro storage.

It's amazing how slavery is only a problem for renewable energy, but the oil industry totally manages to avoid it with their definitely ethical supply chains. /s

The biggest scaling problems with nuclear are that we are building basically none of it right now so scaling it up means pretty much building the industrial base up from scratch, and the lack of qualified people which will need decades to train enough. It takes years to train up qualified nuclear technicians, and you'd need to scale up the schools too.

Meanwhile, the industrial base for wind and solar are massive now and increasing almost exponentially, and educating new workers takes months at most because there's nothing really complicated about them.

And neither is space based solar.

Wind and solar are winning on the economic front. Batteries are just about good enough to solve the intermittency problem. Geothermal and/or tidal are likely to become cost competitive soon enough.

Another interesting idea was to use deaf astronauts. Certain types of deafness make a person immune to motion sickness, which could be ideal when using centrifugal gravity.

And because not literally everybody can use a bike, you think that the bike shouldn't be an option for anyone.

The coasts are more than dense enough to support high speed rail. You don't have to connect Butfuck Iowa with the high speed rail system. Connect the busiest routes first, then expand the network from there ad necessary. ACELA should go down the entire east coast.

In the short term, solar displaces gas during the day which can massively decrease the amount of gas being burned. In the long term, more diverse network of renewables and storage will displace gas entirely.

Every country that has a government that isn't owned by the gas companies is already replacing gas and coal with renewables, because renewables have already been cheaper for a few years.

A cult has formed around thorium so down votes are unsurprising. A lot of people believe way too much about the possibilities of a reactor type that only functioned in one research lab for like a year in the 1960s.

I can't let you do that, Dave.

None of the existing or under construction reactors can be fueled with thorium, so the abundance of thorium is irrelevant.

Hey, that's not fair. USA started construction on 3 different reactors within the last 20 years, VC Summer and Vogtle 3+4, and absolutely nothing went wrong during construction.

The real problem with the mass production strategy for decreasing costs is that the "mass" is going to have to be extremely large for it to overcome the loss in efficiency by using smaller reactors. Likely they would need to be produced in the thousands to really drive the cost down by a significant amount, and I can't see the market being that large. It's going to be pretty much impossible to scale up that production.

The Westinghouse reactors Poland is buying are the same ones that have been under construction recently in the USA at VC Summer and Vogtle 3+4.