nuclear power
Fission as an energy source: what it costs, what it risks, and whether anything else can do the job.
FilterEveryone, all time35 from 16 people
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Their wordsNuclear fission power is the greatest disappointment in the history of technology
- 7 days earlier
- YB
Yoshua Bengio quoted
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate
Their wordsFrontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies; medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy, to incentivize safe development.
↗Professor Yoshua Bengio’s speech at the UN Security Councilyoshuabengio.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 10 days earlier
- TL
Tobias Lütke quoted
Co-founder and CEO of Shopify
Their wordsThe best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
- 12 days earlier
- TC
Tyler Cowen quoted
Economist at George Mason University
Their wordsYet each time, we drastically overreacted, letting ourselves get swept up in a climate of fear after one emotionally vivid incident
- 2 weeks earlier
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics
Their wordsNow, nobody died, right? Uh in fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh it was sort of a optics and PR situation um that was mismanaged in many many different ways and the public uh became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 2nd of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordswhat was missing is that people did not realize that you're going to have to pursue that model through hardware iteration. And that's where really where Valor is unique is that yes, we believe in SMRs, we believe in reactors that are manufactured, but we also know that in order to get there, you have to do it through hardware iteration.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 3rd of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsif you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation uh industry. Like when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's like nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of. And you kind of look under the cover. It's actually a modeling and simulation company, right? They produce um very very precise what we call paper reactors which have really good predictions of how a theoretical thing might behave.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 4th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsit's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 5th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsNuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 6th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsThe alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence, right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds uh are stochastic, right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's still going to happen, right? like just something's going to come out of left field and you can't predict everything.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 7th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsI would make one big division in nuclear companies and it is people who believe that nuclear is essentially a hardware execution problem and people who believe that it's a design problem. Um Valor is solidly in the camp that we believe this is a hardware and execution problem.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 8th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsBut the problem of nuclear today is like the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like we don't want to make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. Um and actually that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right?
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 9th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsUm and we will get it down to minutes. Um this company will get will will get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 10th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsif you look at the um the economics of nuclear it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants right the uranium is very cheap right the the fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply?
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 11th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsif you're looking at the nuclear space today, you don't expect people to have this problem solved in 2031. In fact, I would say even 2035, a lot of these companies are still not going to get there because they have the wrong mindset.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 13th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsUm everywhere in nuclear is like this. There are uh totally fake costs from an industry that is just totally anemic and doesn't know how to build anything anymore.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 14th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
startupsAmericaphysicsventure capitalinvesting
Their wordsAnd the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is um, we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world.
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 15th of 18 in this recording
- IT
Isaiah Taylor quoted
Their wordsI know that nuclear fision will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. somebody will do that and it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's going to be in the future decades or the future centuries
↗How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Tayloryoutube.com 16th of 18 in this recording
- 2 weeks earlier
- HW
Hillel Wayne quoted
Writer and consultant on formal methods
Their wordsbut I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.
↗Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com 10th of 24 in this recording
- 9 months earlier
- PK
Paul Krugman quoted
Trade economist, Nobel laureate in 2008 for his work…
Their wordsBut politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
↗The Rise of Renewable Energypaulkrugman.substack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
- MB
Miles Brundage quoted
Independent AI policy researcher
Their wordsI think computing supply chains are much easier to monitor than nuclear ones - there is only one TSMC and one ASML, but there are nine and maybe soon ten nuclear powers
↗Iran and the opportunities and limits of an “IAEA for AI”milesbrundage.substack.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
- ML
Michael Liebreich quoted
Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance
Their wordsThe inconvenient facts are that SMRs has so far disappointed, and look like being as slow to get through the permitting process as GW-scale reactors, and even more expensive.
↗Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
- MH
Molson Hart quoted
Manufacturer and founder of Viahart
Their wordsWithout the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.
↗America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Backmolsonhart.com 6th of 16 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
- DP
Dylan Patel quoted
Founder and chief executive of SemiAnalysis
Their wordsSo, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.
↗DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459youtube.com 31st of 44 in this recording
- 10 months earlier
- AV
Austin Vernon quoted
Engineer and investor who writes quantitative posts…
Their wordsSome efforts, like nuclear-powered data centers, are reminiscent of Toyota's hydrogen push.
↗How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site 9th of 9 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
- SA
Sam Altman quoted
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
Their wordsA lot more people have died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example. But most people worry more about living next to a nuclear reactor than a coal plant. But something about the way we’re wired is that although there’s many different kinds of risks we have to confront, the ones that make a good climax scene of a movie carry much more weight with us than the ones that are very bad over a long period of time but on a slow burn.
↗Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419youtube.com 11th of 20 in this recording
- 2 weeks earlier
- SP
Serhii Plokhy quoted
Ukrainian-American historian
Their wordsAnd then guess what? A few years later, the Soviet Union collapses very much also thanks to the mobilization of people over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy.
↗Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415youtube.com 25th of 30 in this recording
- SP
Serhii Plokhy quoted
Their wordsBut next accident would actually expose new vulnerability. You deal with Chernobyl and then tsunami comes. You deal with tsunami and then war comes.
↗Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415youtube.com 26th of 30 in this recording
- SP
Serhii Plokhy quoted
Their wordsAnd each major accident, that means global freeze on the nuclear reactor production for at least another 10 years. So that’s what I mean that nuclear industry is politic, not just in terms of technology and not just in terms of radiation, impact on health, but also politically a very, very unreliable option.
↗Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415youtube.com 27th of 30 in this recording
- 13 years earlier
- GM
George Monbiot quoted
Guardian columnist and environmental writer
Our reading · no longer heldNuclear power is the wrong technology for cutting carbon: efficiency and renewables can do the job without it.
No longer holdsThe crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
SaidAtomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small.