Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
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We're still awaiting charging stations from the billions in congressional spending.
Obama had Solyndra, we'll see if Biden can one up his predecessor.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nuscale-layoffs-nuclear-power_n_65985ac5e4b075f4cfd24dba
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nuscale-uamps-nuclear_n_654c317ce4b088d9a74d17db
https://hbr.org/2023/03/capital-is-expensive-again-now-what
These articles mention cost overruns as well. At the same time, of course, costs of wind and solar, as well as energy storage are dropping steadily.
As an aside, if this technology efficiently removes CO2 from the air, I wonder why we can't just power it with coal, and pump those emissions into the ground along with the other carbon it removes. Wyoming where this project is located has immense coal reserves that can be produced at low cost, of course, it is the nation's largest coal producing state.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/52/2/jamc-d-12-0110.1.xml
This would require a few hundred gigawatts of energy to be made available, this could be done by windmills as he suggests, nuclear power plans, or perhaps by beaming the energy from space in the form of microwaves onto special receiver arrays, using orbiting solar arrays - there could perhaps be other options as well of course,
The CO2 would then be placed for long-term storage in insulated landfills, there might be a low rate of overall sublimation due to insulation of course, which would be easy to deal with.
It does require some intrastructure construction in antarctica but the amount needed could be relatively minimal.
It does look especially feasible if undertaken by many countries rather than one, which would make sense anyways due to the treaties in place around antacctica.