science

You know, tiny, it's funny how obvious it is that you've decided to actually look up the talking points to parrot now that I've actually challanged your low quality arguments. Would you like a cracker?

I don't generally learn what I need to know from sales brochures, as engineers are hired to find and resolve issues using the truth, dictated by physics and experience in machine shops. Additionally, there are a number of circumstantial issues that fog the translation between theory & reality. Keep up with me, tiny:

https://www.machiningdoctor.com/mds/?matId=5180 shows what we refer to as machinability, a reference number influenced by both crystal structure, and hardness. The low m/min value shows that it takes a lot of time (which is expensive) to machine a final product, be it a pipe, a valve, valve seat, or the particularly expensive heat exchangers.

Let's continue. What do people like drinking? Fresh water? Hey, you know where we ought to use the limited water supply? In a gigawatt energy storage system! Location needs to be right next to a river, which happens to be right next to a high mesa physically capable of withstanding several million gallons of weight (remember, 8.2lbs/gal of water, tiny). That tremendously limits location. How about problems related to flora and fauna, or the inability to scale the storage plants, or the issues of permeability of the ground, etc? Op-ex on gravity storage systems is almost as low as it gets, and a mechanical system further resolves most pain points, though admittedly adds a few small ones too. Still with me? Stop eating your crayons and pay attention!

Your medical isotopes only come from candu units, which are in limited supply for reasons which are fairly obvious to even tiny intelligences like yours. Very good, we've got Canucks doing a careful job with their reactors, though as with any plant, there have been mishaps and questions at other places. Indian point nuclear generating station, 20 miles north of NYC had a serious problem of unknown amounts of tritium leaking into the local water table, as well as the Hudson. The real problem was that after a decade of perimeter detectors going off constantly, nobody at entergy knew what the primary source was! I have direct experience dealing with this. As a single example,[ here's one of the times it happened.(https://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactors/ip/ip-groundwater-leakage.html). And this has kept happening over the years, to what in the industry was referred to as a model plant.

You need to understand that something can be high risk, low likelihood, and that's still enough of a deterrent to enactment. You're talking about a system which mixes extremely corrosive elements with high-gamma U~232~, making for a doubly-difficult to manage system. There are upsides vs b/pwr plants but both myself and professional industry agree that the upsides don't outweigh the very serious downsides.

I'll clarify that I am ok-nuclear, but only if nothing else works. Got it, tiny?

Nuclear power as we know it might be ok but for that reprocessing issue. The Brits finally had enough of a need that they pushed legislation permitting movement of nuclear waste for the express purpose of reprocessing into useable fuel. They have quality trackage, thorough testing of storage cars, and most importantly a well-heeled rail management office, with a lot of power to ensure the rail operators follow the rules, and Dave real consequences when the rules are broken.

Meanwhile, we've had that recent large derailment of toxic chemicals in Ohio that I'm sure we'll be in people's memory for a while, particularly when we start discussing carting spent fuel around. Currently poor infrastructure in the US? ✔️ Low-value penalties sure to a corrupted political system? ✔️

Look, part of this is more than a technical problem, it's also a risk management and social contract problem. What do we do about a poorly regulated national rail system? How do we reassure people whose property may be seriously damaged by a potential spill that they'll be made fully whole again? This applies anywhere we're doing this, not solely the US.

Things are changing for HVDC, it can in fact be used for national-level distribution backbones with much lower cumulative loss vs an equivalent AC system.

Currently there's a $10 million grant to figure out how to make IGBT-based VSCs cost less, and based on that alone, it sounds like the US is looking at making that exact backbone, running east to west, with branches running north to south. Local distribution would take advantage of existing AC infrastructure, segmented into smaller subsystems.

Energy storage of solar is promising to be cheaper than nuclear

Nuclear powerplants are very, very expensive when you amortize the commissioning and decommissioning costs into the lifetime expenses. There have been repeated attempts to encourage fission adoption over the last 20 years and almost no new plants are being made because the economics just don’t work.