When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.
My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.
Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?
The Salt River enabled the Phoenix area to be an agricultural power house long before Columbus arrived in America. The Pima practiced irrigation agriculture and were using their crop surpluses to trade far and wide.
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
> What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
This is entirely an artifact of arcane water law in the US. Any rational allocation would make alfalfa untenable there.
During WW2 the US leveled 1/3 of all buildings in Japan including most of the manufacturing industry. That didn't stop Japan from rebuilding and coming back stronger. The same is true of Germany, except East Germany turned out to be an abject failure.
Agreed, I stopped reading at that point. You can't take yourself seriously to create a report and use LOC as your measure.
I feel like we humans try to separate things and keep things short. We do this not because we think it's pretty, we do it so our human brains can still reason about a big system. As a result LOC is a bad measure as being concise then hurts your productivity????
We're careful not to draw any conclusions from LoC. The fact is LoCs are higher, which by itself is interesting. This could be a good or bad thing depending on code quality, which itself varied wildly person-to-person and agent-to-agent.
Which buyer are you referring to? Consumers paying cash can negotiate as much as they want, and often secure large discounts. Commercial health plans also negotiate hard with their network providers, although some of them play unethical tricks with PBMs to artificially inflate prescription drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid don't really negotiate with providers, they just set rates by arbitrary fiat and providers can take it or leave it. Medicare does have some statutory limitations on how they can negotiate drug prices, though.
Which doctors? Some specialists do quite well but many primary care physicians earn less than software developers, especially once you account for education expenses and ongoing mandatory professional expenses. What is the correct amount for them to earn anyway?
> Doesn't that violate all kinds of compliance controls?
Technically, only if it causes some kind of security, privacy, availability or accounting issue. The risk is high but it can be done.
Half of our customers do not have anything resembling a test environment. It is incredibly expensive to maintain a meaningful copy of production in this domain. Smaller local/regional banks don't bother at all.
Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
The public sector unions do represent a much larger share of the population than the CEOs but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending. Given they are being rewarded with huge amounts of tax dollars from the party they help keep/put in power, the concern that there's a systemic pay-to-play dynamic at work is very justified.
> but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending
Uh... Just no? Public spending? That's défense, health care, entitlements etcetera etcetera
I'll actually back it up with some numbers too:
> That’s 1% of gross domestic product, and almost 5% of total federal spending. The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP, Kettl said.
> Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
Not sure what you're basing that on but there's this too
> The statistic is used to show how unequal things have become in the U.S.: Some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay for an unexpected bill
Disposable income is essentially just income after tax. It’s the amount you have where you get to direct where it goes / how you dispose of it. It’s not money after essentials.
There are many ways to slice it but the US median income is high.
Your $400 stat is about liquidity and balance-sheet fragility; it doesn't tell you the cross-country level of median PPP-adjusted disposable income. OECD Figure 4.1 is the relevant comparison.
Generally, countries with more government social spending have lower savings rates, because people irresponsibly rely on the taxpayer as their backstop, so I'm not surprised at all. The U.S. actually has very high levels of social spending, despite the stereotype of it being a very free-market-oriented economy. That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Since you took the data for federal and state and local, you end up with 22.51 million employees[1].
Out of a total number of employed people of ~160M that's 1 in 8 employees. If you're calling 1 in 8 'a small share' the we just disagree there.
As to the $400 statistic, let me just point out that this
> That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Is very much an opinion, not a fact.
Maybe there's also that for the low income earners there isn't any money left after paying for housing, food and such. And I'm not even talking about health insurance.
Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
Iter is a research project that Europe is a part of, along with the rest of the world. That has nothing to do with building power plants, at least not anytime soon.
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
Yup. Europe can absolutely still build reactors, just not at a price that is economically competitive.
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety.
They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z
Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases.
Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets.
Rather than being dual use I think it’s more that countries want to keep their strategic industrial capacity around in terms of the nuclear engineering expertise in firms and universities that can potentially be redirected if needed.
The problem is that we insist on building nuclear plants like cathedrals, when we need to build them like Model T Fords.
Small modular reactors need to be rolling out of a factory ready to go, so we can do large redundant arrays of them, put them on trains to transport them around, etc.
A nuclear power station making a couple MW should cost maybe a few million tops once we have the ability to make hundreds of them a year from a factory instead of creating these 20 year projects for gigantic facilities that are all bespoke
It’s far from certain that SMRs will end up having lower costs than large nuclear reactors. Maybe they will work out but there is a huge amount of hype.
Funny, the Finns are super happy with their "uneconomic" nuclear reactors. Current approval rating for nuclear is now 81%, up from 77% last year.
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
Existing nuclear reactors produce incredibly cheap power. The German decision to stop theirs before coal should be considered an environmental crime.
Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!
As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.
Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).
Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.
> Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas
Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.
But then also be honest that nuclear can't solve that problem either. It's extremely slow to ramp up and down so it cannot keep the grid stable either.
So the only way to power your grid with all nuclear is to produce at the daily peak load + margin all day. Every day
This is completely false. Nuclear plants can and do ramp up quickly, thought not from/to 0, but that's generally not necessary.
And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.
> And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.
We already have grids operating without traditional baseload. This is a 2015 talking point.
See for example South Australia keeping either 40 MWe or 80 MWe fossil gas in standby (I would presume this is the lowest possible hot standby power level for said plants). They are aiming to phase this out in the near future as storage comes online.
Inertia is trivially solved in 2025. Either through grid forming inverters which today are available off-the-shelf or the old boring solution of synchronous condensers like the Baltic states used to have enough grid strength to decouple from the Russian grid.
This truly shows your ignorance. Please show curiosity rather than redditesque comments like this.
First. The final report of the Iberian blackout is not completed yet. It is taking longer than expected due to how complex the situation was.
They did release an interim factual report in which they specify the facts. The full root cause analysis and recommendations on how to prevent similar events is coming in Q1 2026.
From the factual report we learn that:
1. The cause was a lack of voltage control. Do you see inertia here?
2. They did expect traditional power plants to provide this, without verifying.
3. They did not expect renewable power plants to provide this, therefore they did not.
In about all other grids like, like for example the US, renewable plants are expected to provide voltage control. It is trivially done by extremely cheap off-the-shelf components.
But if the expectation does not exist then it will not be provided since the cost is non-zero.
My point was that, just like with renewables, a 100% nuclear grid doesn't work either.
They can adjust power but they're typically used as he load with some other source dealing with the peak load needed a short time a day. Typical peak capacity can be off in the middle of the night for example. Nuclear doesn't like that.
> At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion.
2 things, 10 pence is a lot. Not for retail but no power plant gets anywhere near that. It's mostly like 6 or 7.
Aside from that, the money you put in today is not spent on other things so there's an opportunity cost there too. That 40 billion at 2% interest is 60 after 20 years for example
> And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
What do you mean? Plenty of renewables are built without any government backing..
Have you looked when they started construction and what their projected end date was?
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote:
> Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
Those are not really great construction examples, are they? Both projects took 15+ years to complete with huge cost overruns. And for those two "successful" projects, you can find 2 or 3 that failed.
The Finnish reactor had one delay because the concrete used for the containment building wasn't of the 'nuclear grade'. That's why those regulations thankfully exist.
Building more will help though. This whole thread started about how we had lost important knowledge
It applies to most private residential and small-scale business electric use. Rationale would be getting quite political, as you might imagine. But I suppose there are several justifications that are given.
One is to offset the cost to the consumer for phasing out fossil fuels. Coal has been shut down and wind and storage and new nuclear is being built. Politically it has been presented as a matter of fairness; poor people are least able to pay for increases or to retrofit. A kind of wealth redistribution. (Though when you remember large corporately-run farms are included in the subsidy it's maybe not the most progressive form of redistribution.)
In Quebec where they have a great surplus of hydroelectric they also partly subsidize residential electricity with the profits of the surplus sale to the United States. The energy is so cheap there than resistive heating is cheaper than natural gas for home heating. Avoiding dependence on oil and gas imported from either the US or western Canada, or rather trying to lessen that dependence, is a standing issue for both Quebec and Ontario.
The argument against deregulation of energy prices is that poor people won't be able to afford it. But if you create a program that subsidizes some reasonable amount of energy per person per month the price of electricity can go as high as it needs to. I don't know if that was rationale in Canada but it's one possible rationale why government might want to aubsiduze energy usage.
From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves.
Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best
reply