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Comment by beefman | Hacker News Reader

Not small, modular, or new. But certainly a decent reactor. They clearly want something to slot in against the GE BWRX-300. But they would probably be better served by going all-in on their eVinci reactor, which is small, modular, and new

https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-mi...

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Fascinating that any superficially for-profit entity would want to compete against something that has never earned one single dollar from revenue production. I find the whole industry quite unusual. It is possible that there are engineers who started at GE (or Hitachi) decades ago working on the simplified BWR, worked on it their whole careers, and retired without anyone ever building one.

There were people that worked on flight their whole lives without an airplane ever being built.

That's the way it goes sometimes.

Fusion energy will be a reality at some point.

Tons of people worked their entire lives on it and retired and died without seeing a reactor built.

Interesting acceleration of technology.

It's been possible for decades for people to build/buy and fly their own planes. Nowadays it's possible for an individual to put up a satellite or get a chip made. I wonder if in the future kids will achieve fusion.

I realize this isn't what you meant, but fusion is readily achievable, and has been done by children: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson. It's energy positive fusion that's hard.

In a similar vein, cold fusion's also possible, it's just not energy-positive, and not a power source. But the mere mention of those two words together means no one read the rest of that sentence.

Sorry, it looks like your comment might have gotten cut off, was there more after "similar vein"? :-)

Who worked on flight their whole lives without ever building a plane, 50 years after the airplane had been demonstrated? Even in fusion, people are usually building machines. It seems to me the "paper reactor" situation in fission is rather unique. The only precedent I can think of is perhaps the abandonment of shipbuilding in Ming China.

Friends worked at NASA with people who went their entire careers without ever having a project build any hardware...

It's a shame your comment was downvoted, jeffbee. I thought it was insightful and I upvoted it. There has indeed been tremendous loss of knowledge with two (and counting) generations of engineers working on this technology and retiring with their work mostly lost to time, both at our national labs and in the private sector.

Lots and lots of Venture Capital coming to this direction will sway management quite fast.

What would security requirements for a real-life installation be like? The concept photo shows a plain-Jane barbed wire.

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