Comments by "jeppen" (@jesan733) on "Innovation Has Limitations (We're About to Find Them) || Peter Zeihan" video.

Agree, but nuclear has been available for mass production in various sizes for 50 years. It's always politics and red tape that stand in the way.
5
@davocc2405 Germany shut down its last reactors this spring after a brief lifetime extension. So it's all being decommissioned now and Germany has officially exited the civilian nuclear power club. Fully agree on fashion and the influence of Putin. But sadly I don't think the Germans will return to nuclear power anytime soon, so it's fairly long-lived fashion.
2
The regulatory and business environment is incredibly important for these things to happen at scale and fast, probably much more important than demographics. The Chinese are researching reactor tech very broadly and could conceivably put SMRs everywhere, but perhaps the US will beat them to it. Germany won't, that's for sure. Anti-GMO laws in Europe and many other places may hold us way back. And so on. We very much need to be faster than China in all these areas, so we need to make sure that our regulatory frameworks go hand in hand with progress.
1
@titanicisshit1647 just as an example, China has commissioned an LFTR, a Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor. According to SINAP documents, the reactor aims to test pyro-processing, refueling, and continuous gas removal techniques, study the stability and safety of its operation, and experiment with a thorium-uranium fuel cycle. Of course they're building on old American know-how, but they're also doing further R&D to clear various engineering hurdles and throwing a lot of PhDs on it. I think it'd be foolish to underestimate them.
1
Germany doesn't do nuclear. Sweden has an innovative lead-cooled concept. Of course France and Russia have designs too, and the UK. But that's kindof it, in Europe.
1
@davocc2405 afaik Siemens built all of the reactors in Western Germany. But Siemens has been withdrawing from nuclear since 2011, just honoring some old obligations and wrapping up things, and I don't think there's much left and I'm very sure that they have no active SMR programme that will compete in the market with NuScale and others.
1
@YAMAHA1 the European grid is pretty integrated nowadays, so it's rather that Germany hurts Europe as a whole when high energy prices bleeds into e.g. Sweden and France, but this integration also reduces the woes in Germany specifically as it's de facto supported by everybody else.
1