Yeah… I call bullshit…
That would be great but I doubt it will happen by 2026 considering no such reactors have been successfully built. One significant problem that the DOE needs to resolve is long term secure spent fuel storage. No matter where a proposed location has been, the NIMBY’s always come out in full force. As a result, nuclear waste is stored in everyone’s backyard (at nuclear powerplants).
That is certainly an issue. Easiest political solution I see for that is to pay France to take the small amounts of waste. They have a massive nuclear program and have this shit down.
The other thing we need to solve with nuclear plants has been the inability to mass produce them due to overregulation. Every one built now is a bespoke design, rather than one design built hundreds of times, where workers, knowledge, and spare parts are all interchangeable. It balloons costs as every plant is unique. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The over-regulation courtesy of oil companies (via ill-informed environmental groups in the 70’s) is a major issue.
Then for some reason* people see the Three Mile Island incident as a failure rather than the fail-safe success that it was, and seem to see it in the same light as Chernobyl which was the opposite in every way: design, process, oversight, management, leadership.
*That reason is partly informed by the dumbass movie “China Syndrome” which was outrageously wrong on how reactor safety is designed everywhere except the Soviet Union.
I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand I understand nuclear is generally safe and all, but on the other hand I’m having a harder time trusting anything made or managed here in America.
I just assume this is a grift, given the impossible timeline.
I think it will give a lot of money to new companies and slow-track some progress with real industry. Probably nothing to be seen until 2030s, if that.
