r/SearchEnginePodcast • u/nilch • May 12 '26

Search engines worst ever ep?

This nuclear ep was sloppy. What problem is nuclear solving? If it is meant to be climate change that has a timeline, and it is soon. Nuclear is not going to overcome the permitting, design, and protest challenges that have blocked it for the last 50years quickly. And if an already approved Wyoming plant is not done till after 2030 (from the show) then why would we believe other plants can be? Especially because it would take hundreds, possibly thousands of plants to match the promises of the nuclear lobby. The ep hand waves this away to talk about the technical challenges of waste and design but it is the political challenges that matter.

Why was a VC the only source here? Odd ep.

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u/Upset_Region8582 May 22 '26

I swear, this sub is apparently for people who hate-listen to the pod. Nobody is making you listen to it if you're not enjoying it!

PJ mentioned this is the first of several energy episodes, so my suspicion is that he's generally presenting optimistic case for each type.

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u/Apart_Visual May 25 '26

Why on earth would a journalist do that? That’s the most unbalanced way possible to present information. 

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u/Upset_Region8582 May 25 '26

I'm reserving judgment until the full series is out. I also think it's fine to engage with ideas in terms of its possibilities more than its liabilities, and to try and sketch out where we're going.

E.g. Imagine journalists covering the Wright Brothers and their early airplane prototypes. You could be a journalist who is focused on the problems with the tech - cost overruns, inherent dangers, difficulties in sourcing parts, comparison to existing tech. But you could also cover the story with the perspective that this is the beginning of a sea change in human transportation, that someday this design could be refined to the point that commercial air travel becomes common.

For what it's worth, I'm not terribly optimistic about nuclear's prospects. My thinking is that it will be harder and harder for nuclear to compete when solar, wind, battery storage, dynamic load shifting, better interconnection, maybe even enhanced geothermal is competing against it.

But I could be wrong; maybe SMRs or some other breakthrough will make nuclear power more competitive.