Nuclear Energy’s Bottom Line | Seawater: Untapped Bounty of Critical Metals | A Guide to Content Moderation for Policymakers, and more

Nuclear Energy’s Bottom Line  (Rogé Karma, The Atlantic)
Nuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.
But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.
Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.
In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.
There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse.

Elon Musk Dominates Space Launch. Rivals Are Calling Foul.  (Eric Lipton, New York Times)
Elon Musk aggressively elbowed his way into the space launch business over the past two decades, combining engineering genius and an entrepreneurial drive with a demand that the U.S. government stop favoring the big, slow-moving contractors that had long dominated the industry.
Today, it is Mr. Musk who is dominant. His company, SpaceX, is the primary provider of launch services to NASA and to the Pentagon. His rockets carry far more commercial satellites into orbit than anyone else’s, including those for his own Starlink communications network. He has set new standards for reaching space cheaply and reliably.
But in one striking way, the former outsider has come to resemble the entrenched contractors he once fought to topple: He is increasingly using his vast power and influence to try to keep emerging rivals at bay, his competitors say, even as his success is prompting qualms within the government about such heavy reliance on a mercurial billionaire.
The new generation of space entrepreneurs trying to emulate Mr. Musk is sufficiently concerned about what they see as his anticompetitive tactics that some of them are now willing to take him on publicly.

How Many EV Charging Stations Does the US Need to Totally Replace Gas Stations?  (Aarian Marshall, Wired)
Buyers curious about making the switch to electric vehicles have made it clear in survey after survey after survey: Charging kind of freaks them out.
In many ways, drivers report, owning an EV is the same if not better than owning a gas-powered car. But fueling an electric vehicle is different, and can be inconvenient depending on where you live, and is therefore sometimes scary to even those interested in buying electric.
The majority of today’s American EV owners charge at home, but more than 20 percent of US households don’t have access to consistent off-street parking where they can plug in overnight. The public charging network, meanwhile, can be spotty, and drivers have complained that chargers aren’t always well maintained or even functioning.

In Seawater, Researchers See an Untapped Bounty of Critical Metals  (Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360)
Researchers and companies are aiming to draw key minerals, including lithium and magnesium, from ocean water, desalination plant residue, and industrial waste brine. They say their processes will use less land and produce less pollution than mining, but major hurdles remain.

Arizona Secretary of State Calls Threats to Election Officials ‘Domestic Terrorism’  (Ramon Antonio Vargas, Guardian)
The rising threats against US elections officials are a form of domestic terrorism, the secretary of state in the presidential campaign battleground state of Arizona has said. “Terrorism is defined as a threat of violence for a political outcome,” Adrian Fontes said in remarks recorded for an NBC Meet the Press episode airing on Sunday morning. “That’s what this is, and … we do have to address it for what it is.” Fontes’s comments came as he formed part of a Meet the Press panel of top elections officials from states whose voters could decide in November whether Joe Biden serves a second term in the White House or Donald Trump returns to the presidency. The Guardian has reported how Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, has taken extraordinary measures to protect its staff and the counting of ballots.

A Guide to Content Moderation for Policymakers  (David Inserra, CATO)
Content moderation represents the policies and practices that companies use to express their own preferences and to create the kind of online space that is best for their interests. Government policies that interfere with these content decisions not only harm the rights of private actors but also are likely to cause harmful unintended consequences and chill innovation. While prominent social media platforms may be biased and imperfect, the government cannot solve these problems and will only make them worse.