The news Thursday of the first traffic fatality of a driver using the semi-autonomous Tesla Autopilot system highlights a number of important issues. First and foremost is that Autopilot does not magically transform a current Model S or X into a self-driving car. Far from it in fact.  This crash also highlights that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was almost certainly wrong when said last fall, “I don’t think you need Lidar. I think you can do this all with passive optical and then with maybe one forward radar.”

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New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s PNNL and ORNL national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach. And nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power as renewable as solar, hydro and wind. Just the 4 billion tons of uranium presently in seawater would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. But uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously because U concentrations are controlled by steady-state chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. It’s impossible for humans to extract enough U to lower the overall seawater concentrations of U over the next 5 billion years, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy. Of course, humans won’t last anywhere near that long!

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