>We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive.
Refusing to build nuclear for decades makes it more expensive. If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.
>the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
I would find this more persuasive if there were no new investment in carbon sources, but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar, and global carbon emissions remain at an all time high. There's demand for baseload energy.
Building nuclear power stations includes a lot of labor-intensive hard to automate tasks like construction. Baumol's cost disease means it's getting even more expensive: rising general productivity leads to higher wages and higher costs in fields that cannot increase productivity as much as the general economic growth. That's why it's also still cheaper in countries with access to low-cost labor.
SMRs are a try to get out of it by building more but smaller reactors. The reality is however that nuclear has an issue with scaling down. Output goes down way faster than costs and most SMR designs have outputs far greater than what initially counted as an SMR.
Investment in renewable energy already greatly outpaces investment in fossil energy. The economic decision to keep using a fossil system is a different one than having to choose a new one. There's still problems that have no economically competitive renewable solution yet, but a lot of what you are seeing is inertia.
Base load electricity is simply an economic optimisation: demand is not flat, but the cheapest electricity source might only be able to create a relatively flat output. You'll need more flexible plants to cover everything above the base load. If you have cheap gas, base load does not make any sense economically.
For the last two years more than 90% of new power generation capacity added globally was renewable. Est 95% in 2025. So no, new carbon sources are not competitive.
Highly misleading stat. That's referring to capacity expansion, not new construction.
Prior energy assets go offline and are replaced each year. The report you cite is discounting all of that, looking only at expansion above the baseline, then taking total renewable construction and calcuating renewable total construction's share of expansion. Apples to oranges.
If you look at the chart in your own link you'll see that carbon construction investment exceeds renewables still.
Chart: "Annual energy investment by selected country and region, 2015 and 2025"
I would love for what you say to be true but it just isn't, even by that agency's own stats.
Not sure I understand your point. In the plot you mention what the OP said certainly holds true for China and Europe (less so for the US). Also the Charts plot investments not just new capacity investments, I'm not even sure how you distinguish between the two?
The OP said new carbon sources are not competitive.
ANY investment is by definition creating capacity that would not be there without the investment. If carbon were not competitive it would not get investment.
If you sum up all of the carbon and compare to renewables in the chart there's more new carbon investment annually globally than renewables. (Comparing the dark lines vs the green line)
Also this is ignoring "low emission fuels", which are still carbon sources, natural gas and the like.
If you check the chart "Global electricity generation of zero-carbon sources vs. fossil fuels, 2000-2024" you can see that carbon sources were at an all time high in 2024. Growing slower is still growing.
We ought to be shrinking these to zero. I'm very glad to see solar and wind growing but my point is nuclear is worth supporting as an non-carbon energy source that could replace some of this carbon load because of its baseload characteristics.
It's better than carbon. And solar + battery requires more carbon to produce than nuclear energy as there's a lot of mining and physical construction involved + you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources.
All for building solar. Do not understand the constant need to denigrate nuclear in favour of carbon sources while doing so.
(If carbon sources were at zero this would be a different conversation)
Nothing inherently wrong with steam, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with spinning rust hard disks or punch cards.
We are at the end of the tech curve for steam, we have pushed it hard and made some super impressive technology, but it's not advancing anymore. Supercritical CO2 might have some advantages, or other fluids.
We have zero-carbon tech that uses non-steam principles, and is currently on a tech curve that's getting cheaper than any thermodynamic cycle. We have storage tech now which is an even bigger revolution for the grid than cheap solar, because a huge limitation of the grid has always been the inability to store and buffer energy.
I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
(BTW denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources, because they use the same mechanism, except for some natural gas turbines)
What is this, the hipster approach to technology evaluation? Steam conversion efficiency doesn't make sense as a metric for nuclear because (AFAIK) fuel consumption per watt isn't the primary driver of cost for that technology. Or am I mistaken?
> I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
I doubt name calling is a sensible basis for policy decisions.
It's actually hipsters that are into steam, you know, the steam punks.
I don't care about steam conversion efficiency as much as I care that steam Rankine cycle engines are a solved problem so there is no more technological advancement. One of the biggest advancements over the past decades is using a Britton cycle in front for natural gas, ie moving away from steam engines.
> I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
If I understand you, yes of course use the more competitive technology. Sticking with steam when there are cheaper alternatives is a poor idea. But moreover as we look to what people choose as technology improves, we will find that steam usage will be relegated to things like geothermal, which like nuclear has essentially free fuel, but doesn't have to go down for a month to refuel, has the potential for more variable generation instead of undesirable constant generation, and is far less complicated.
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
The critique is not name calling, it's pointing out that the technology is mature and not improving, unlike the technologies that are recolutionizing grid energy right now across the world. The number of applications that use fuel to generate electricity via steam are shrinking. Perhaps hydrogen in the future, if electrolyzers ever come down the cost curve, but it's pretty speculative.
Horse buggies still exist, but mostly as novelties. Steam generation is headed the same direction.
> Nuclear is expensive even after the reactor is build.
Solar panels and wind turbines need maintenance too. And they have much shorter operational lives than nuclear power plants, meaning they'll need to be expensively replaced much more frequently.
> And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy
Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power? Is it purely aesthetic, or is there some inherent downside to steam turbines that I'm not aware of? Also, concentrated solar power systems that concentrate sunlight and use it to boil steam[1] are significantly more efficient than direct photovoltaics.
> Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power?
My guess would be that you're taking energy that you burn, you then boil water, water then goes through a number of turbines, then to a generator and then you might have electricity. Every step in that process is not 100% efficient.
Direct PV is, sunlight, cell that generates current, current gets transformed into whatever the grid needs. So it's fewer steps.
It clearly was if you look at forward trends. In his podcast mentioned revenue was going down by a fixed amount per month, meaning an increasing percentage per month, and they had crossed the line to six months of runway before layoffs.
With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
There might be a business model for Tailwind here. I was looking at buying Tailwind Plus after reading this news, and my first question was how to get AI to use it efficiently.
That's not quite correct. There's a lot of NIMBY pressure in cities, where land is scarce and there's lots of people to attend planning meetings to block building.
However, if you want to build a datacenter, you don't need to build it in downtown Manhattan. You can build it anywhere, and some places make it easy to build data centers.
By definition local restrictions apply locally. If you want more housing in Manhattan then Manhattan nimbyism really matters. But if you want to build a data center somewhere you have a lot of options. There's no nationwide vote on allowing datacenter construction.
While that’s true, and there are several locations that are using their local authority to perform those actions; but, *all* of that is power wielded by elected officials. The smaller the location the less “who voted for this” likely means anything because the decisions that are made that impact all of us are made by a smaller and smaller number of people with less and less authority, but it is still voted for.
> Electricity prices near data centers go up, right?
I hear this a lot, but the most comprehensive study I've seen found the opposite -- that retail electricity prices tend to decrease as load (from datacenters and other consumers) increases [1].
The places where electricity prices have increased the most since 2019 (California, Hawaii, and the Northeast) are not places where they're building a lot of new datacenters.
What fixed costs of the grid? In Northern Virginia, we’re constantly adding substations and transmission lines because the grid isn’t a fixed cost when you’re building data centers constantly; it quickly becomes a variable cost.
The only two armies skilled at modern drone warfare are Russia and Ukraine. An army without drone experience could get ripped to shreds facing either one.
Contrary to typical narratives my understanding is that the Russians are somewhat ahead on drones. They pioneered fibre optic drones and have more ability to mass produce them with Chinese support.
Ukraine has fought incredibly well and my hope is at some point Russia can't sustain its offensives due to domestic issues. Russia is very definitely straining.
But they shouldn't be underrated. In Ukraine they face a battled tested, fortified frontline and a society mobilized for war. Russia in turn has set itself for ongoing war. Europe is still in peacetime mode.
>An army without drone experience could get ripped to shreds facing either one.
there would be no trench warfare in a NATO-Russia war. we already saw what happens when Soviet/Russian tech meets F35 and B2 - Israel and US bombed the shit out of Iran with impunity, suffering no losses whatsoever.
People were extremely aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My father mentioned at school they were doing active under desk drills in the event it escalated to nuclear war.
It is easy to underrate the past. The 20th century had mass communication, high literacy and an active and well funded press corps with committed newspaper readers and news watchers.
OP is specifically talking about seeing unfiltered, on-the-ground footage of what’s happening as it’s happening, directly by the people being impacted. This is very different than prior conflicts which have been ostensibly filtered for various reasons.
If the population of dead drivers with over the limit THC is 40%, and this dramatically exceeds the population average, that would strongly suggest the THC level IS an indicator of either:
1. Impairment from THC, or
2. Worse than average driving and risk management skills in those who use the drug
Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?
It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.
This is a knowable thing, it just needs to be studied (I'm actually surprised it's not been TBH). Give people a standard set of coordination tests and then draw their blood to see what the THC level is.
If we were just interested in outcomes (in an accident or not), we should just be measuring that. But I guess if we can’t measure that, a litmus test is better than nothing.
The expected number seems to be about 20+% (depending on assumptions) so this is higher than expected but not drastically so.
Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.
I would say that anyone who smokes anything (cigarettes, vapes, cannabis, crack) is indicating that they're at best not health conscious and are acting in a nihilistic way. It seems entirely logical that their risk-tolerance and judgement will be accordingly different to the general population whether they're high or not.
It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.
I can't make sense of it mathematically. A statistical distribution fitting these characteristics does not exist.
If non-weeders have an average seat belt wearing, and if weeders also have an average seat belt wearing, then the proportion of weeders inside of the seat belt non-wearing class is just equal to the proportion of weeders inside the whole population.
How are people not wearing seatbelt? I've never seen a car that doesn't make a constant annoying noise if you're not wearing it while driving. Do they mod the car to disable this safety system? That seems too far stretched...
Older cars don't have these systems. Also they are easy to bypass with a dummy buckle. There are counties where seatbelt usage is far less common than the US.
My parents disabled a couple by pulling a fuse or cutting a wire, but a lot of their use of the vehicles was off road at walking speeds. They wore seat belts on the road.
I read comment as "don't resist our egregious power, our business is to keep becoming more powerful by arguments with different persuasive power".
I have to admit, the car safety argument is among the most persuasive, like do you want to get harmed? But in reality the question is not about "harming and nothing more", the question is about growing the egregious power AND caring about the tax payers simultaneously.
The seat belts comment is so apt. We should be looking at the full population of drivers involved in accidents, not just those that went through a windshield.
Restraints play such a pivotal role in crash safety, but not wearing them isn't a meaningful indicator of impairment status.
The people who don't wear seatbelts are in my observation old folks who grew up without them or before using them was mandatory. It's just their habit.
I've almost never seen a person under about age 40 not using a seatbelt.
No. I don't know a lot of people that don't wear seatbelts, but they all smoke weed. All of my friends that died in car wrecks weren't wearing seat belts and would have definitely tested positive for THC.
I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.
The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.
While I do not commonly ride in cars driven by people outside my family, my experience has been quite the opposite: when I do ride in cars with older people, they buckle up as a matter of course, while when I ride with younger people, they are much more likely not to.
Refusing to build nuclear for decades makes it more expensive. If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.
>the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
I would find this more persuasive if there were no new investment in carbon sources, but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar, and global carbon emissions remain at an all time high. There's demand for baseload energy.
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