This is my nuclear reactor argument which I've had enough times that I'm writing it all out so that it makes sense to anyone that wants to argue about it so I can just point to this and go there, read that. I should mention that I like this argument quite a bit because it describes how you would structure an argument as I've thought it quite a bit. It comes up with all the exceptions and then goes through them one at a time and then describes the position rationally and cogently. When arguing from this sort of position I like to take the position that I'm describing the situation and what I believe to a rational although uninformed person and then making them believe in what I do.

So the reason that I like nuclear is that, provided that it doesn't have an accident (admittedly a big if - but even if you total up all the accidents it's the safest form of power in terms of secondary deaths - coal plants just give people disease that it's hard to track down statistically, whereas nuclear plants explode rather spectacularly), they are the safest form of power per kilowatt hour. Coal is dirty and coal, solar, and wind don't cut it because they require batteries to balance the grid when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Geo thermal and wave energy is not terrible, but they only work in certain areas.

And while solar and wind energy are purely efficient when they're working when the sun and wind aren't powering the machines, the energy has to be stored in batteries. Which are not only incredibly inefficient but also dirty requiring mines to dig up battery material that then wears out and is thrown away.

The problem is one the fucking Simpsons, but two that nuclear has been used in war and fissionable material can be used to make bombs. And the regulation on approving nuclear plant ideas is incredibly onerous and expensive and takes a long time (sometimes as long as ten years!), making nuclear energy particularly pricey. The environment we currently live in is politically strange for a number of technological reasons as well. First, you have AI models that are taking as much energy as possible and so there's a massive demand for power, and you also have this situation in which AI models themselves can be used to create media that can make it look like there is war when there isn't, or a nuclear attack. So there's a race to make AI models that are ever more powerful in order to determine what is true and what is not, which itself is probably a losing proposition. I believe over the long term that people will simply go back to trust networks involving letter writing, but how that works in a world that is MAD and countries wish to retaliate on immediate detection of nuclear attack is difficult to determine. This is most likely why Elon Musk and SpaceX and the rest of the world's super powers are attempting to put as many satellites in orbit as quickly as possible. How else would you know what is happening unless you have a satellite network that can tell you that you trust? This does all sorts of weird things, including giving internet access to a billion people in Africa that didn't have it before as a side effect - whether that was the first order stated goal or not. It also makes it so that personal privacy at the level of what is happening physically in the world becomes much more difficult for the average person.

If it hasn't happened yet (and I believe that it has), satellite based super weapons that can affect weather patterns will become commonplace. It should mentioned that the most likely explanation for the UFO sightings that were captured on radar is that someone was screwing around with several satellites that were able to focus light and then they were making it move back and forth through the air, like you might do with ants with a magnifying glass when you were a kid. Probably some dick with too much crypto currency was able to bribe large numbers of people with satellite networks. Despite what this idiot says - jews or no jews it's hard to argue with the radar imagery coming from an F15 fighter jet, unless both the pilot was high and the radar was malfunctioning (in which case the supply chain for the F15s the US has is screwed because all those chips should be written and flashed to be as secure as possible). So the least scary answer is magnifying glass with someone that won the technology randomly makes you a billionaire lottery.

Over time I believe for nuclear weapons will go down. There will be overinvestment in satellites in order to prove that there isn't a nuclear launch, and at the same time you'll have other weapons that will become more powerful and make the demand for nuclear weapons less. At the same time, the need for more sources of power will go up as AI becomes more a part of everyone's lives - not only for internet sites which is a bit irrelevant in the scheme of things, but for drug discovery and to make general systems (say traffic control? or network routing?) more efficient.

Here are some of the leading small scale nuclear power companies - some of them boast inclosed reactors that are the size of a few shipping containers that can be buried in the ground and can power up to 50,000 homes. This then becomes a subset of the "lego" problem. So what if you took a dozen of these and put it in a submarine that was automated and reseeded coral reefs by just driving around the world? What if you took a hundred of these and put them all along the coast of a country and desalinated water (especially in areas that don't have any)? One of the things that I've wondered (and yes, this comes from the book Dune) is whether you could turn a desert into a rainforest if you had enough water. Desalination is incredibly energy inefficient, but if you had enough nuclear power plants and you had an interest it may be possible to turn Nevada into a rain forest. At that point the water cycle would make it so that the forest would become self sustaining and you could ship the reactors to another desert area. And you could then use the biological material from the rain forest for drug discovery or just as a place for people to live. Once you have enough power that it's more or less free then you then end up mitigating the "smallest pipe" problem . For most things the constricting element is energy.

So what to do about this? Well, before Henry Ford cars weren't cheap because the efficient factory hadn't been invented. So why not make a nuclear factory that just makes nuclear reactors and ships them everywhere? After that almost everything becomes that much cheaper. And the thing of it is is that it doesn't require all that much creative knowledge to do. It requires accurate execution and people that know what they're doing but it doesn't require the kind of leap in logic or creative passion to come up with an idea that no one has had before. We already know how the assembly line works and have a hundred years to perfect the process. Further, it would drastically lower the national debt (exports!) and it would lower the cost of just about everything that requires power (such as food and clothing). That we're not doing this at scale is one of those things that I just don't understand at all.