This shit is largely what this voracious drive for more power is helping build. Even crypto wasn't this shitty, since at least its fundamental application wasn't nearly so broadly parasitic. Yet now I hear very little about uselessly burning vast loads of energy.
I guess if the companies responsible for the above trash heap are largely the same ones that hire or indirectly subsidize the jobs of so many people in the tech world as represented by a site like HN, then the whole dumpster fire is okay.
I'm also fairly sure that OpenAI, Microsoft and others would happily burn baby seals in coal furnaces if it meant powering their precious AI data needs. It's only for PR that they make useful noises about using clean power.
Ah yes, the ‘noted’ Three Mile Island. I wonder why this particular plant enjoys a degree of fame? The name certainly is familiar…
Seems like a rebranding might have made sense - like the UK switched Sellafield to Winscale.
Yeah, as shown by this very thread (and that your comment is greyed out).
Nuclear energy is good. Whether or not AI consuming that energy is good or not, depends on how much you value AI as a technology. No one cares about how much energy gaming PCs or refrigerators uses, because their existence is not currently controversial.
See: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.
ESG is a huge thing. Some of it is greenwashing, some is outright scam, some is legitimate pressure to make better environmental decisions.
But insisting that ESG proponents can’t make suboptimal individual choices is silly.
Or just hope. AGI is a capitalist's wet dream: it would completely undercut labor's power or allow it to be replaced completely, and it could also allow the developer to muscle out a large fraction of other capitalists from the economy.
Even though AGI would be terrible for the rest of us, it's got so much upside for VC types they can't help themselves.
Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Albert Gore, Barrack Obama and high schoolers are impressed, but not the mom and dad working jobs that are teetering, driving beaters and facing pressure from cheap labor. They see these people jet-setting being hyper-overconsumers and think, what the hell? They see these people increasing their wealth promoting change, but they don't change. Why should I change, they're not changing, they're adding more!
I literally explained it. I straightforwardly applied the technology to our existing social/economic structure.
And changing the social/economic structure is probably harder than developing the technology and requires precisely the kind of power that a successful AGI technology would remove (e.g. workers can't strike to keep their jobs when the boss is planning to lay them all off).
> It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
Honestly, the "AGI will be so great/everything will be fine" assumption relies less on facts and more on sci-fi fantasy than anything I said.
Yes, both sides of the debate use scifi as facts, I agree. I don't think the other side does it more than you do, though.
If you think that, the problem's on your end of the connection. The most charitable read of your comment is you're expecting a level of exposition that is not actually required, especially given the common context of what exists now.
Personally, I think you're actually doing more of what you're accusing me, for instance your sibling comment of:
> The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
You're basically hand-waving a future and saying "everything will be fine." And you're also misunderstanding some significant things in a kind of black and white way. E.g. I never said "everyone [would be] irrelevant [to the economic system]," I said labor would be. That's a lot of people, but not everyone.
AGI in an internet connected world is capitalism end-game. Once you have AGI, labour (both physical and intellectual) becomes redundant, humans have a "value to the system" approaching zero.
Our economic system is built on a series of assumptions that fundamentally cannot survive AGI, and nobody is really even trying to grapple with that fact.
What do you do when "demand" for human labour drops to zero and "supply" stays at >8 billion.
No account of tinkering at the edges is going to fix that. We're in a much deeper fundamental problem than you might seem to think we are.
Nuclear fission is the answer.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions.
Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514).
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data.
You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.
Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
Exactly. And everyone is putting their heads in the sand over this calculation.
Seasonal energy storage is simply not a problem we have even begun to solve yet. We know the numbers, we're just not talking about them.
Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).
Build all of it.
Anything alive after that wouldn't be human and wouldn't be worried about electricity.
Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.
But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.
Question though... do we understand the tail risk from volcanos on solar outputs, either natural-occurring eruptions or maliciously-triggered ones?
Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week
We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.
You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.
In the short run, sure. In the long run, cheap power builds its own demand. A country that commits to a certain amount of nuclear baseload, even if run at a loss in the short term, is injecting a very real industrial subsidy into its system. (The way to ensure you don’t get a dog is to subsidise long-term loans for private borrowers. They still need to make a profit someday. But you reduce the time value of money for them.)
The investment doesn’t make sense for a non-nuclear power. But if you’re already producing nuclear waste at scale for your military, it’s a little silly to pretend you’re safer without a civilian reactor in the middle of a desert while all manner of subs and ships patrol your coast.
EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.
The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.
In a rational environment you run your nuclear at 100% 24x7. The cost of the fuel is not material running at 10% vs. 100%. Letting parasitic intermittent power sources screw this up is simply financial engineering by largely bad actors. At least currently.
Then you use intermittent power sources to provide your peak loads during the day, and any excess you ideally start putting into storage - whatever that may be. If you have effectively free marginal power during certain peak times, I'm positive industry will find a way to turn that into money.
I still have hope sanity returns to the energy discussion, but it likely won't happen in the US during my lifetime. The cost of solar and wind is entirely politics - the storage cost is literally never considered when reading articles on the subject. The hidden costs are likely 10x or so what the marginal cost per kwh everyone loves to spew. Lots of folks getting massively rich off this disinformation so there is huge inertia behind ignoring it - even from very smart people that should absolutely know better after a few hours of reading on the subject. Just look at many of the posts here at HN.
The environmental costs of methane (natural gas) are simply not being considered. The methane leaks into the environment are underestimated by at least 10x if not much, much, more. Pivoting from nuclear and to natural gas has been an utter environmental disaster.
They pulled the green crowd along for the ride hook, line, and sinker.
See also: the 2001 California electricity crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
See also: Enron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
If we have designed our markets to price cheap, reliable electricity out of the market and instead prefer expensive unreliable electricity, we've really f*ed up.
Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.
> We are at 20% nuclear,
Doesn't this prove the parent comment's point, that the best mix of energy is renewables supplemented by a base of nuclear power?
> Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA
This feels unnecessary. Spain has done an amazing job building an energy base, let's talk about how we can export to different countries and climates instead of putting people down.
You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value.
If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them.
China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024.
That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.
I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect.
> If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid
But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".
An energy mix is the answer.
One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up.
So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece.
Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy)
So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own.
Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.
All of those things, to me, mean that it should be a large part of the mix. Nuclear should be the backbone of our energy production, and should be sufficient to supply our baseline needs.
That said, in places where hydro or geothermal are practical, those should be used in preference to nuclear. They're cheaper, more reliable, and just better in almost every way.
Solar, wind, tidal, wave action, and so on should be what we build on top of that baseline. They should be cheaper to build and operate, but far less consistent.
If you want to train a huge LLM, or smelt metals, or do anything that's energy-intensive but not very time-sensitive, you schedule those loads during times where energy production exceeds existing demand.
... and you know when that happens by pricing energy based on availability. Electricity should be cheapest when we have more than we need, and more expensive when the inconsistent sources listed above aren't producing. In other words, market forces are sufficient to make this happen.
In fact, one of the cool things about solar and wind in particular is that they are so aggressively cyclical that it's possible that energy prices could actually go negative - not often, or regularly, but possible. That opens the door to all kinds of use cases that would otherwise never be profitable, and using those types of technologies often leads to efficiency gains that can eventually make them more efficient than the current alternatives.
> No.
> An energy mix is the answer.
Maybe that “No.” was unnecessary.
Gas peakers are cheap compared to nuclear, and arguably much more appropriate for the foreseeable future when it comes to making up for renewable energy's inconsistency problems.
I mostly disagree with your initial assertion as well. A sufficiently large and diversified grid will largely cover itself, and when it doesn't, that's what peakers and so on will handle.
It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity.
That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.
I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material.
I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
Basically, yes most fears of nuclear power are irrational. But that's part of the problem—even if nuclear power polluted in a manner similar to coal power and there wasn't the risk of acute disaster, I still think Americans would be quite wary of the technology purely due to cultural priors.
Nuclear has the potential to fulfill all this future growth in energy requirements. The fundamental problem of nuclear is not safety, or waste, or proliferation. It is cost. And this is a solvable problem. The total cost of the 4 Barakah reactors you mentioned was $32 billion, or $5.7 billion/GW. The cost of utility solar is about $1 billion/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, while the capacity factor of nuclear is about 90%. So $5.7 at 90% is still a bit more expensive than $1 at 30%, but if the cost of nuclear goes down by a factor of 2, it's at the same level as solar. And there is no reason to think such a reduction is not possible.
I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available most or all of those days.
The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices.
Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability.
Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.
The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance.
The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.
Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!"
Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear.
Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.
Nothing is 100.0% safe - but as far as I can find nuclear comes incredibly close[0] even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I don't quite understand how this makes sense financially for Microsoft. A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion [1]. The Gemini Solar + Battery Storage Project in Nevada is about 1.1 billion (690 MW + 380 MW battery). [2]
With solar, wind and battery prices continuously trending downwards, how does it make sense to invest in nuclear which nearly always has cost overruns, bad PR and unknown potential future costs?
[1] https://businessnorway.com/articles/cost-of-wind-turbines [2] https://commercialsolarguy.com/americas-first-gigawatt-solar...
The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.
> If you're an AI hater, it's frustrating to see what you consider a useless technology growing to take up more and more of our energy mix, eating into climate gains being made from the immense growth of renewable energy. If you're an AI maximalist, on the other hand, the significant energy use projected for AI is a small price to pay for a technology that you think will revolutionize our lives much more than technologies like air conditioning, refrigeration, or the automobile ever did.
> The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the long run, AI's energy use will likely level off at a significant but not grid-melting level that's roughly commensurate with the collective economic value we as a society get from it. Whether the trade-offs inherent in that shift are "worth it" involves a lot of value judgements that go well beyond how much electricity a bunch of servers are using.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
We might have a severe lack of people who can work in the field at plants and tech getting involved is probably a good thing on making that field more prominent for new students than it currently is.
"Nuclear Engineer for Microsoft" is a cool title.
Reading the commission report, they have about $733m in the decommissioning fund, while decommissioning is projected to cost $1B. Active demolition projected to start 2046, completed in 2052. They've started some work on debris demoval, but it looks they're going to take a break 2030-2046 to let the fund accrue (at expected 2% real RoR) enough to get the fund to $1B.
Isn't that insane? So from 2030-2046, it will just sit there "mothballed" with a minimum spent on security and so on, just for the fund to gain value?
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3...
If this story shocked you, do yourself a favor and check out Erik Townsend's docuseries on the need for nuclear to even come close to filling humanity's need for energy in the coming decades.
Or is Microsoft just buying power from the plant's owner on the energy market?
A lot of renewable energy projects were financed through similar agreements, called PPAs.
There are pros and cons of each approach, market-based is a little less intuitive but not necessarily worse, it depends on the application.
They are better for the corps communication and worse for anyone else.
Transporting electricity over distance has a non trivial cost in $ but also ressources and energy, as well as relocating an industry near a clean energy source or optimizing the production units.
Carbon-matching systems are great for entreprise wanting to claim they don’t produce carbon (24/7 carbon neutral) while they do. It does not depict the CO2E one (entreprise) did product de facto.
Wait, it literally was.
So someone is paying massive insurance premiums on this right?
Not "privatize the profits, socialize the costs" right?
Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recommissioning being on time and budget?
The delay is usually heavily on the permitting/legal challenges/etc. stage, not actual concrete-pouring and equipment installation, so an already-once-permitted site will probably do better relatively, too.
Extra reactors at exising operating sites would make even more sense, though. Putting 2-4 extra AP-1000 at ~1GW/ea at each of the 54 facilities operating today would be huge and minimal incremental risk, and if there were a shortcut one time permitting process for it...
Average construction times have been more or less constant the last five decades and are currently at 6.5 years (trend: slightly falling). Median (typical) time is lower.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
(Although to be fair there's been a fair bit of wind and solar subsidized heavily by crypto, as well as flare gas power generation, and a bit of PV solar)
1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?")
2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses.
(You can kinda blame this one on the simpsons, but I do want for Christmas this year a Simpsons Springfield Isotopes Hockey Jersey with the 3-eyed fish. https://jerseyninja.com/springfield-iceotopes-simpson-hockey...)
3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...
These old plants are ridden with hidden costs, and I would bet all of my money no one at Microsoft is aware of the scale of this. I'm not talking "hidden costs" like you didn't do your homework. I'm talking hidden costs like you need to be on the inside, on the ground, to know about. Hidden costs like "everyone subtly nods but doesn't say it out loud" kind of hidden costs.
The NRC has beyond suffocating regulation for nuclear energy. This is maybe a good thing in some regards. But let me put it this way:
Imagine you bought a car from 1975 and could _only_ put in original parts. Need a new battery? Better find out how to get a factory one from 1975. Can't get one from 1975? Be prepared to pay millions, perhaps tens of millions, for a mountain of testing and certification for a new $100 part that is still just an off the shelf battery.
Are you suggesting Constellation will be surprised at the hidden costs?
Edit:
The article linked states:
> Roughly, one could assume that the energy storage portion of the project – 1.4 GWh worth
So, at the 690GW (which is unrealistic) nameplate capacity of the solar field, they are installing roughly 120 minutes worth of energy storage to back it. This is actually a better number than most projects I've seen, but still utterly inadequate and representative of the typical project.
At the moment the goal of battery storage additions to solar plants is to soften their peak power production and broaden the time they provide power to extend to the morning and dinner time.
690 MW.
A 1 GW offshore wind farm does not produce anywhere close to 1 GW most of the time.
A 1 GW nuclear reactor can produce 1 GW 90%+ of the time, with the downtime being _scheduled_ maintenance.
And many of those nuclear down times are for month+ times. Good luck getting enough batteries to get through that!
Offshore wind typically has a capacity factor of ~50%. Add a smaller number of batteries than you would need for nuclear, and it's going to be cost competitive against any new build.
As far as if it's cost competitive with TMI, I'm not so sure. New build nuclear is likely going to be >$190/MWh. Running the numbers being bandied about for the "Pennsylvania GDP increase", which is a really funny way to say "cost of the electricity for 20 years," and you get $115/MWh. Which is really pricy still. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to get TMI going again, just that it's pricy, and there's likely lots of other constraints that went into deciding to do this.
The AI space seems to have weird overlaps with nuclear that I don't quite get.
Not sure if it's just the social circles the AI people run in.
Zuckerberg was all excited on a podcast about how energy was the limiting factor for AI, waited for him to say something about how cheap and fast rollouts of renewables made sense but no, nuclear. Even this refurb is talking minimum 4 years to get going. All very strange.
Also maybe good for PR?
But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow... [2]: An inter-agency analysis concluded that the accident did not raise radioactivity far enough above background levels to cause even one additional cancer death among the people in the area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Nuclear power plants, in contrast, very rarely have issues: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami)
Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl.
Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others.
There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of the art Airbus.
That would not be a problem. FAANG controls the OSs and the media. /s
The representative democracy does attempt to solve this problem; you pick a representative you understand is aligned with your interests on the issues you do understand and trust they and their experts will do well on the rest.
It's not a perfect system, but unless the populace can be given free time and education to consider individual policies based on reliable evidence and not hearsay from biased sources, it's the best we can do.
Generally a NIMBY is anti-progress and very selfish, putting themselves ahead of everyone. My dad was called to help resolve TMI during the meltdown and was part of the engineering design group the the Beaver Valley nuclear power station. People were complaining they had cows dying of radiation years before the plant was completed. NIMBYs suck.
That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now.
And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...
Also you can't really make meaningful conclusions based on that plot due to obvious reasons. It only includes "Number of nuclear reactors shutdown worldwide". The construction peak was ~1980. The oldest commercial plant was opened only 68 years ago and obviously the early plants much less safe and had a shorter lifetime which introduces another bias...
The ballooning of costs is not even significantly due to changing safety requirements, but often due to compliance and environmental requirements. Those are political requirements that could be removed in one fell swoop.
This of course is nonsense because it requires the entire industry to ignore market conditions for no good reason. You can't fight the market, not on a large scale, and especially not in the US. Power plants are only built if they will be profitable in a reasonable time frame. If power was too cheap to meter then nobody would be building new plants, there would be no return on the investment.
This is also why nobody builds nuclear power plants anymore. They are too expensive to build and can't compete on price. Especially not with renewables cratering the price. There's a reason solar installs are outpacing even the most optimistic projections from a few years ago. You can argue theory all day long on the Internet, but the people doing the actual work have made their decision.
During the daylight hours solar is great of course but my point about power averaging out had more to do with the other forms of renewable energy.
Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper.
You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base.
Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.
Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future.
But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US.
TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.
Not arguing, just asking - how is this different from how the Internet works?
And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
Thanks for the correction on GW vs MW. Not a great typo.
Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X. And it's a problem that'll only happen if we solve the global warming problem first.
> right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3.
But we mostly use fuels that are 30% - 60% efficient plus wastage for production, refining and transporting. Over 2/3rds of the energy we use gets wasted as heat. So we've got a factor of 1/3 to cancel out your 3 here. It's not completely efficient so it's actually about 1.2X, not 3X.
> Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person.
Yep, that's a good 3X, if not more there. But unfortunately it's going to take decades to accomplish this.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions
Each launch would then be a 0.00001X, and is approximately equivalent to a trans-pacific plane flight. Thousands of flights per year would not be a significant fraction of the Earth's emissions. Hundreds of thousands of flights would be.
- solar is fine up to around 500X
- which won't happen this century
- when it happens power will be abundant enough that the cost calculations will be radically different
- technology will also be radically different. Maybe we'll use anti-matter reactors or something.
It's difficult to say. We are not running out of land, that's for sure. But we are running out of cheap land. Or rather land where it is economical to build solar. Sahara has plenty of empty land, and it is plenty sunny all year long, but there are civil wars more often than not, various militias, corrupt governments, etc. The US has lots of deserts, but also lots of groups with various agendas that find ways to delay projects, and delays can transform good projects into bad projects.
As a concrete example, take California. California is very proud to be a leader in environmental issues. You can find on the state website the installed capacity per year. For the last 5 years it has been [1], in GW: 1.2 (in 2020), 1.5, 2.0, 2.3, 0.9 (in 2024, so far). The year over year growth rates were 26%, 35%, 10% and for this year -60%. This year is not over, and it's possible the numbers are not up to date, but it's quite unlikely we'll get to match last year's numbers, let alone see a double digit growth.
Or take Texas. Wikipedia has their annual numbers between 2007 and 2023 [2]. I did the math, and between 2007 and 2017 they experienced a 90% annual growth. Nice Moore's law at work there. For the next 4 years the average annual growth was 60%. And for the last 2 years, it was 28%. Nothing to sneeze at, but the trend is clear. Why, if the cost of the panels went down?
> Thousands of flights per year
Elon is not talking about thousands of flights per year. Thousands of flights per day. Millions per year. A million launches of 5 kT CO2e each equal 5 GT CO2 each. That's about 10% of the current worldwide emissions. Or about 30% of the current emissions that come from power generation. If we are to use synthetic fuel instead of fossil fuel, and you have a 30% efficiency of making synfuel (which is what a quick google search indicates), then you have a 2x increase in electricity needs.
People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations.
> People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh.
All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.
For a once-in-a-century situation, you can have alternatives other than batteries. For instance, backup diesel generators; any extra CO2 emitted by them in that situation would be insignificant when spread over a hundred years. And once you're planning for once-in-a-century events, you need backup generators anyway, since you can have failures other than just cloudy windless weather.
Also, Spain only has a ~2 GW connection to France to sell their solar power to the rest of Europe.
Trust me, cynicism is well warranted with these ancient plants.
And it may be an "ancient plant" but it was operational 5 years ago, under Constellation's management.
But power needs are increasing whether this datacenter is built or not, so the discussion regarding nuclear has to happen in some context regardless.
People reacting to the name are imagining that this means re-opening the other unit, which melted down in 1979. It's more fun to imagine and react to that than to learn that this was an operational plant until a few years ago.
This. I'm surprised they didn't figure out a way to rename the place first.
And what is "progress"? We both have ideas about what progress is. Are mine the same as yours?
If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
Problem is: raw Uranium is too plentiful (=cheap) for recycling to be worth it.
"Problem"
Like everything, this gets better with practice.
Does that sound more like an nth of a kind project, or a first of a kind project?
(The originally submitted Vogtle-3/4 design could not be built)
In fact, last I checked they had already planned this refurbishment, but could not obtain the funds to do it, and thus shut down the plant instead.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The irony, however, is that it's not all that good for nuclear. When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes. The nuclear plant (or ancient coal, or even hydro) will go below cost price, or even havs to pay to deliver electricity, because they can't not deliver. And in Europe we are having a few times of negatively priced electricty per year recently.
And contrary to what many people think, nuclear power is rather expensive. For a small part that's political (subsidies and all), but mostly it's because running a nuclear plant is expensive; its fuel is expensive as hell (it does burn fuel), and storing its waste "guaranteed" safe for some 5.000 years is expensive (incredible timescales; egyptians building pyramids - to now, timescales). Also expensive is it's cooling facilities: nuclear operates on a steam cycle, so it needs a lot of cooling; many places don't have that (anymore). E.g. in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants. That makes it unreliable, the way hydro, tidal, etc can be unreliable too.
There are just so much problems with nuclear power. Again, aside from the political "opinions" on it: these well known percieved risks and such. But that makes it a difficult part of that mix. I do believe it should be a crucial part, but also am convinced that part should be as small as possible, due to those downsides, costs. And, as you say, indeed, in places where there's alternatives, you'll find these alternatives are almost always a better option, cost, timescale and operational wise.
Negative prices are a symptom that the (day ahead) market is not the real game being played. CfD, production subsidies and renewable credits are the order of the day.
> The nuclear plant ... will go below cost price > its fuel is expensive as hell
The fuel is cheap. https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... estimates 9.33 USD/MWh (2018 prices) for fuel.
> in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants.
https://www.politico.eu/article/when-the-water-runs-dry-why-...
The Bugey plant is also the main reason France must ask the Swiss to let more water through the Seujet Dam. While most of the water is released back into the river, the reactors need a constant, cool flow — and climate change isn’t only making the Rhône’s water scarcer, but also warmer.
Looking at https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/07/13/frances-nuclear-po... it appears power was reduced due to river temperatures, not river levels. That makes it more a regulatory issue, and probably one solvable with more hardware (extra cooling towers or greater extraction).
One might also ask whether it is worth EDF investing to get the extra few percent total output across the year; the solar peaks during hot weather will tend to reduce the price of electricity, so why not just schedule maintenance at that time of year. Thus PV creates a problem that it partially solves.
A friend who makes juices and dried fruits on medium scale, plans his production ahead based on the spot pricing: steaming or deep-freezing can be postponed for days, apparently; I helped him with some dashboards and integrations of the pricing-APIs for this.
What I'm trying to say is: yes, a lot of industry won't be able to profit much from these markets. But many can, if they are just willing to change their current ways a little. Not all: many.
Is this a sign of over-investment?
Is it case that the metric we're using does not show the actual price? https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... shows a way to get "free" electricity on a regular basis, while it still costs consumers a very non-zero amount. In the case of solar, revenue could be achieved through out-of-market payments (CfD, power purchase agreements, renewable energy certificates).
Or is it the sign that the nightmare battery dominated grid is starting to happen? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl... Battery operators can choose between strategies designed to maximize revenue, profit, competitive advantage, or competitor losses, over any given timescale and with almost perfect deniability.
(or is it something else?)
> That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
But will electricity cost enough to justify the huge upfront cost of nuclear plants?
If we have the wealth to build capital-intensive projects that are marginally cost effective, it might be easier to build smelters and desalination plants that only run at 40% capacity, when the sun is out.
That doesn’t mean there is no risk. It’s still ok to be scared of nuclear power for new unknown reasons. But let’s not pretend that designs aren’t wildly better now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
The grid came within minutes of overloading and shutting down completely, which would have required a slow and costly black start.
How about https://www.ferc.gov/media/winter-storm-elliott-report-inqui... ?
Even solar still requires various minerals the extraction and processing of which has environmental impact - like tailing ponds of toxic substances that frequently leak, particularly from earthquakes and extreme weather.
But to be clear, the human and environmental impact of solar, wind, nuclear and hydro pales in comparison to that of fossil fuels.
This isn't just counting immediate deaths - else it'd just be ~30 for Chernobyl and ~0 for Fukushima.
In fact, Fukushima's death count seems to primarily be down to that "people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation" - which I feel should at least partially be put on the tsunami that killed 20000.
https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-v...
Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.
But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.
Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.
If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine.
If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.
These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.
It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
Coal also has a much wider low-level impact: for instance, it's not safe to consume more than small amounts of fish from the great lakes because of mercury levels, largely due to coal power plants.
I'm not really answering your question, but it does seem like nuclear NIMBYs are more effective than other ones.
There is a reason all the growth is happening in Asia. Their focus is on improving their wealth and material standard of living.
Far more will die due to other kinds of pollution it emits, and an unknowable number will die due to the effects of climate change caused by CO2 emissions.
My point is that it is not insane. Maybe selfish. Not willing to have risks with potential catastrophic results near your home is the most normal thing.
And with nuclear, the probability is very low, as with planes. Yet it happens. All the time. Our generation went through three once in a lifetime crisis in the last two decades.
German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled.
The "overbuild" is minimal.
Dayjob is in energy market algo trading and DER ancillary services in EU, and I can tell you with confidence this is far from true.
And when the nukes trip for safety reasons - which happens multiple times per year - that’s a GW that just dropped off the grid from one second to the next.
For me, I much prefer the reliability of wind and solar; never seen a correlated failure, and we know their production pattern days in advance.
How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.
Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches.
Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.
You said "Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area" - hydropower is considered renewable. I also did address a similar risk of solar (barely anything compared to fossil fuels, but same applies to nuclear).
Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM
But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
2. A one time event has little to no effect on overall capacity factors.
3. Underinvestment is very easy to deal with: invest adequately.
You actually don't. Not one fit for that purpose, at least without significant investment, permitting hurdles, delays etc etc.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.
As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.
However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.
Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.
Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.
Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...
These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.
China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.
Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality?
Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.
Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.
With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.
Forced labour? Central planning? Requisition? How exactly would that work? Somebody still needs to build and operate those power plants.
Also commercial and industrial users consume >60% of all electricity in the US, should they also be subsidized? Or subsidize residential users?
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
-- John Maynard Keynes.
Once a large number of people stop working, who actually works to grow the food? Who builds the houses?
Communism does not work.
It's interesting that you bring up a large number of people no longer growing food as if that's not the current reality. What do all those people do now that they don't have to work for food?
If the people doing the growing are getting all of their needs met why would they grind to produce food to sell for money when they get money for free?
Why would the vast majority of people in the bottom 50% of the economic ladder work at all if they were getting all of their needs met at no cost to them?
I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things.
The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an urban population. However, not everyone lives in an urban setting and delivering clean water to remote populations can get astronomically expensive.
As rational citizens we must acknowledge this unfortunate reality and figure out how to deal with it fairly and equitably. Profit seeking enterprise has been astoundingly effective at driving down these marginal costs for a whole host of goods for centuries. Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!
You mean governments signaled the creation of a market by printing and lending free money to build those systems ?
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-69f8723dccb62f0572daf...
Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades.
Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for that to ever work. Glad you cleared that up for us.
But to be clear, it wasn't some random "human nature" that caused the underinvestment. It was official government policy, and that government policy has now been changed.
The renewables mafia that is still in control in Germany was also in control in France. That has been taken care of, mostly by being exposed to the harsh light of Reality™.
The law that mandated reduction and forbade expansion of nuclear was repealed March 2023. They are now expanding capacity, build first 6 and then an additional 8 simplified EPR2 reactors.
And there was one more reason for the lull in investment: France did the initial expansion under the Messmer Plan far too quickly. They nuclearized their grid in just 15 years.
Which sounds great, and of course completely puts the lie to those who claim that nuclear is "too slow". But there is a problem: these nuclear plants are not just quick to build, they also last pretty much forever, at least 60 years, many if not most are being extended to 80 years and the experts say there's no reason not to go to 100.
If you have built all the nuclear power plants you need in 15 years and they last 100 years, you have nothing to build for 85 years (or 65 / 45 years if you assume 80/60 year lifespans).
That's a problem, because your nuclear industry will wither and die in that time.
Which it pretty much did.
Poor policy can happen again - such is human nature. So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.
[0]: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mox-use-at-russias-bn-800-r...
But you shouldn't assume that things will just continue on as they were in the past hundred years. Boomers are retiring now, when the busters start going into retirement it's going to be a huge mess. Inflation is how democracies die.
Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.
(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).
There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.
> So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.
This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.
Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
And Brits are not exactly leaping into action about raw sewage discharges into rivers.
99% of the corporations build things to earn money. Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
In many cases, the desire for money, not the need, is the driving force behind the technology. See n startups which are discussed here and categorized as "this is better as X. they're just trying to earn money with no real benefit to anyone".
Did Exxon hide their global warming research to benefit humanity? Of course not. Did Tetra Ethyl Lead added to gasoline instead of Ethanol, just because it was better? No because it was patentable and ethanol was not. Did WV created "better" diesel engines to benefit the humanity? No the engines were only "better" for their bottom line and problematic for every one. Did DuPont hid the effects of forever chemicals because it was beneficial/harmless to the nature? On the contrary.
Companies do whatever they can without breaking laws (or bending them with money) to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I like this take about current (Generative) AI hype:
The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
-- jeffowski (at Twitter/X)I disagree with that to a very extreme degree (also it's a very silly thing to say unless you don't see any value in computers, smartphones, planes, automobiles, washing machines, fridges and other appliances).
The things you listed are generally the exceptions. Also the question is whether society/people benefited from VW, Exxon, DuPont etc. to such an extent that it outweighed all of those things?
Of course it's relative, if we value access to cheap and effective transportation, synthetic clothing, various plastic products etc. more than we care about all the negative externalities that's what we get... It's all down to incentives, corporations are inherently neither good nor evil.
> to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I agree that's true on the whole. But that's why humans do anything at all (replace money with other tangible or intangible benefits). Absolute altruism doesn't scale and isn't in any way sustainable.
This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time.
Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better and saved money and supported local business at the same time.
Germany would have been much better off building nuclear in the 90's. But because they invested in renewables instead, everybody (including Germany) has a much better option of building renewables in the 2020s.
Especially once you take systems costs into account, which you must, but renewable fanbois never do.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
I'm dubious about many of their assumptions but even your source shows that renewables are the obvious choice to power the world.
It's also interesting that the cost drops 50% if you don't need to cover the last 5%. A shame he didn't go further and calculate at 80% and so on like the recent Australian working paper.
I guess that would show that starting the rollout now would provide lots of savings that could be used to deploy the later percentiles.