Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

As someone who got from an organ transplant, I'd still push for self-driving car and safer cars. My hope is pig organ transplants make it through trials soon. That could push a 7 year wait for kidney transplant down to a year which is a big deal because the long time on dialysis can have a lasting impact.

Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds.

For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GW. Whereas, the cost of the Vogtl plant was $15 billion per GW.

Renewables proponents point to the cost of Vogtl (or similar) when they say that Nuclear has a higher cost than renewables, which is dishonest. The incremental cost of new reactors is far lower when you built many of them. The recent projects are mostly learning curve costs because of how long it's been.

The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. You don't want to stop during the 2/3rds of the day when the sun isn't shining, and you don't want to run them at reduced power during winter. Treating solar as baseload requires downrating it's capacity to winter time capacity, and adding batteries to increase it's baseload capacity, which blows renewables LCOE out of the water.

It's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear.

The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.

That's certainly a funny phrase, since it ought to mean that too much engineering effort was put in to getting something right but what it's actually used to mean is that someone got the trade-offs wrong.

In this case it's being used to mean that the regulations are overly restrictive or complicated, and impose higher costs than are reasonable for the benefits they provide. (Or potentially that being overcomplicated actually makes them less effective than if they were done properly.)

Even if you account for chernobyl and fukushima the death count from nuclear is orders of magnitudes less than the death count from coal, oil, solar, etc. We overregulated nuclear because the risk of nuclear disasters feels scarier than the real risk of deaths downstream of airborne particulates. There are tradeoffs to every safety regulation on nuclear and those tradeoffs include more climate induced disasters, a sicker population, long term higher energy costs, etc.

Specifically, the current regulatory framework requires not just minimization of accident, but also minimization of radiation (to levels well below that of other powerplant types like coal). There probably could be a pretty notable cost savings in nuclear plant construction if they were allowed to regularly leak as much radiation into the environment to that which we already consider acceptable from other power sources.

"better safe than sorry" is the definition of a slippery slope.

but I'm curious: what event do you think taught us that?

IMO, there's far mode damage being done to the world by, say, mercury in batteries than by nuclear accidents (of which chernobyl is the only serious one).

Big tech is building data centres. Data centres pollute. Environmentalists are part of the left wing coalition.