He needs to make a deal deal.
Posted on 05/24/2025 10:55:43 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
Today, President Donald J. Trump took a series of executive actions to unleash nuclear energy in the U.S. as part of the administration’s effort to secure the energy future of America and unleash American energy dominance.
Joining President Trump were some of the top leaders in nuclear energy:
Get ready. Here come the Leftist Greenies to block any new power generation construction. Yet, remember the rolling blackouts in CA? I wonder how many who were demanding the governor to restore power were the same asshats on the picket line at the power construction sites.
Yes Yes Yes!!!
Long term.
Wealth creating. Cheap and reliable power is a force that helps create wealth.
More independence / national sovereignty.
As we create more and more power from nuclear, suddenly electric powered “whatever” really does become cleaner. What you had before was coal, natural gas, and in some cases even oil generated electricity, with fools claiming their electric device was zero emissions (it was simply displaced emissions).
Once you go nuclear, even the most die hard EV critic like myself loses the argument at that point.
That’s the problem with this Presidential directive; it can all be derailed by Liberal Judges run amok while doing the bidding of environmental groups or the next President could be a Democrat and kill off anything Trump starts, remember the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump got it going, Biden immediately killed it and no company will start it back up anytime soon.
he’s gone fission
I wonder how much of this will be “micro” reactors
NNE is up 30% on Friday.
They are involved in all the process of the Modular Reactor.
Something called laser uranium enrichment.
I suspect a lot. The beauty of small reactors is they can be scaled up as needed by simple putting another on site. The big Mega reactors take years to build and can not be scaled up. Small reactors can be built off site and trucked in as needed.
He needs to make a deal deal.
It’s good to have a President who isn’t in it for the money. Thank you President Trump!
“Yes Yes Yes!!!
Long term.”
.
Until the next Democrat administration puts a halt to it...
The criminal reality is this thread being done at #11.
The problem is the industry has historically seen regulatory delay.”
...while the US Navy sails onward and upward hogging truly fantastic developments while We the People get zip, zero, nada.
This is the way...
Sodium cooled using fuel that is meltdown proof it’s so safe we let graduate students play with running it. You can pull all the control rods and let it just sits there it won’t overheat or go fast crit. Emergency heat removal and decay heat are air cooled walk away safe for indefinite time. Sodium also opens up dry cooling towers, and fast spectrum metal fuels that breed more than they burn allowing 20-60 year core lifetimes basically the whole PPA period. It’s a nuclear battery then. The waste heat is high quality off sodium you can desal with it ,district heating and most importantly district cooling.
They plan at scale to build these in a factory already open in Austin with its first reactor in testing now. They plan on 90 DAYS from request to behind the meter electrons. It’s plug and play with a 99.99% uptime in a N+1 reactor set up.
This is the future of nuclear energy.
https://www.aalo.com/post/announcing-the-aalo-pod
UT Austin has a reactor under it’s JJ Pickle campus that run on TRIGA fuel and yes graduate students get to run it this former engineering student did.That’s how safe the fuel is. In a pool.config you cannot melt it down or fast crit it.
UT Austin also has one of the largest microgrids in the USA it powers the whole campus plus heats and cools 240+ buildings and dorms. It’s 138 MW CHP and 62 megawatts peak electricity...a single 6 reactor Aalo pod set-up could replace the billions of BTU of natural gas they currently burn for that plant. You could even keep the same steam.driven adsorption coolers and steam turbines sodium cooled reactors run at 560C plenty hot for either application in fact you should cascade them the exhaust from the power turbines at 120C is ideal for adsorption chillers.
https://www.aalo.com/post/announcing-the-aalo-pod
This absolutely is the way.
Texas grid right now today is 70% wind and solar during the day a lot.of.days and every day when the sun is out over 30% solar every single day. So you already lost the argument. Texas will be adding 25,000MW of power storage by 2030 and 30,000 more MW of panels at least thats what is already financed and declared to ERCOT.
Texas is 58% solar and wind today. It was 60% at 1130 this morning. At night there are times frequently no where 75+% of ERCOT is wind they start to negative wholesale rates at those times. They keep spinning reserves for inertia only that’s why it won’t go over 80% wind at night, plus the nukes never ramp down so 3500MW is always coming from nukes.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
“Something called laser uranium enrichment.”
laser enrichment is probably a no go in the USA it produces weapons grade U235 in a single step at high volumes too. U235 responds and ionizes to a higher energy state at a different frequency of light vs U238 this allows you to in a single electromagnetic step to pull all the U235 and ONLY U235 from the UF6 gas stream by ionizing the U235 and using magnetic fields to move it away from the U238.
Laser enrichment also works with any actinide that forms a gas with fluorine...Pu Np,Am all also form gasses with fluorine. You can use the same lasers to separate Pu239 from 238/240/241...This is bad..BAD as pure PU239 is what we dropped on Nagasaki.
It’s a fascinating concept and about the only way to bulk separate critical Pu238 needed for space probes out of spent fuel. Pu 238 is tens of thousands of dollars a gram because you cannot get it from spent fuel you must make it atom by atom in special targets in a special reactor.
There is no way the NRC not the DOE licences a large laser enrichment set up the weapons use of that setup is too great. Centrifuges take thousands of stages to reach weapons grade lasers do it instantly all at once it should be obvious why this is bad.
SMR also can be air cooled walk away safe for indefinite time. The physics of a small core vs area to dissipate heat. A large gigawatt sized core struggles to not meltdown just from heat natural circulation is usually not good enough you must design the core from the start to use natural circulation.
10MW is the sweet spot for SMR in individual behind the meter cases. A large hospital complex like MD Anderson or Parkland DFW uses around 10MW peak and triple that in air conditioning thermal demands so a CHP pairs perfectly with it.
A large college would use 10-20 MW a really large one like UT Austin uses 62 MW peak. Typical high rise condos use 500KW to 1MW each so a complex of ten condos would need a single SMR. Large golf course community would use 10MW for a three or four course sized community. ERCOT budgets 250 large homes to a megawatt so 2500 home gated community = 10MW SMR.
10MW is also the right size for investor/ owner’s finance think forming a Co-op. ERCOT would label a 10MW co-op run SMR as a SOG which would allow it to sell on the wholesale market excess electrons and buy from said market when peak KVA exceeded what the micro grid could deliver.
Ideally a gated community would get together and buy a SMR and then SOG it with ERCOT each owner has a stake based on how much they invested directly equal to a fraction of the output. If you use less than your cut per day then it’s sold and you get a fraction of the sales minus Opex same if your KVA exceeded tour fractional share you would pay for the additional KVA you used either from the reactor itself via another owner’s share being sold to you or bought off the wholesale grid. Smart meters makes this a second by second metric and easy to bill/pay forming virtual power plants at will all based on smart meters and 5G over the air SCADA data. You can easily integrate rooftop solar and power walls to further form VPPs at will. The whole gated community then forms a grid itself with distributed and nuclear power it would be nearly impossible to make it go dark especially if those smart meters had mandatory demand side limits on the KVA they will pass. No need to go black you demand shed at the meters giving each a limited amount but better than zero.
Just repost this when we’re without power again for (((2 WEEKS))) like 2 years ago in the middle of the winter freezing our ass off and without light in the house because all your “green power” has failed (wind turbines don’t like ice).
ERCOT is no more than a government rationing authority so that like in some third world country you get certain hours or days without power.
The four problems with all alternative power sources is that (1) instead of economy of scale, you have diminishing returns. (2) The need for power storage negates any environmental benefits they could have and as you rely more on these sources storage eventually becomes necessary. (3) They tend to drop off and produce less when you need them most, at night, in the winter. (4) They tend to be extremely expensive per KW/hr.
Nuclear: works 1,800 feet under the ocean, or outside our Heliosphere, for 30 or more years without refueling, 24/7, without any storage need. It produces a massive amount of power in a small footprint (high power density), close to where you need it, CHEAPLY.
But unlike all fossil fuels, no CO2, HNO3, H2SO4, toluene, xelene, benzine... Massive amount of fuel required, sludge residue, etc.
ERCOT... It does not matter what they say.
They are as believable as any other government inflation, unemployment, Covid, or crime statistic.
They skew things to put out the message they want to put out.
You can make all sort of claims of how much power solar and wind create, as long as you have fossil fuels to ramp up with when they don’t produce.
The problem is that these alternatives do not produce when you need them, reliably.
And they do not produce at a cost point that is economically viable (~2 times that of nuclear at an industrial scale).
“Just repost this when we’re without power again for (((2 WEEKS))) like 2 years ago in the middle of the winter freezing our ass off and without light in the house because all your “green power” has failed (wind turbines don’t like ice).”
Thermal power failed, the data is clear on this. 38,000+ megawatts of thermal power dropped off line when the gas grid collapsed. This data is available in the report submitted approved and codified by the Texas legislature. Even if there as zero wind power the electrical grid was going to fail due to the gas grid collapsing. Wind and solar helped while the gas grid was down until the well heads ,gathering lines, and gas processing facilities unfroze. This is all documented , reviewed, approved and legislated fact. Everything else is an opinion. Period full.stop. This is the facts of winter storm Uri. Frankly those of us in the power industry and oil industry don’t care what joe six pack thinks we answer to the legislature not the unwashed masses. The industry was told to winterize in 2011 and again in 2014 the legislature passed a bill without fiscal penalty so it was ignored.
I am a huge fan of nuclear, the regulatory framework in the USA won’t let the industry move at the pace they could. Aalo Atomics they are the very tip of the spear in modular reactors. That just financed and finished their first factory in Austin to Henry Ford 10 megawatt modular nukes. If the NRC will get out of the way they will crank out nukes by the dozens from that factory as soon as they get their approval in the final design which is based off the MARVEL reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. Once that runs at full power the Aalo is just a scaled up version of it.
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