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You made a categorical statement, yet provided no reasonable argument to back it up, so please don't be upset if I'm inclined to not enthusiastically adopt your
by bborud 4y ago
You made a categorical statement, yet provided no reasonable argument to back it up, so please don't be upset if I'm inclined to not enthusiastically adopt your position.
I've spent much of my life listening to what people say various things can't be done. And then either seeing people do what was "impossible" or, in a few cases, participating in doing what other people said couldn't be done. It is the same kind of mental pitfall that magicians exploit: the audience fail to imagine the amount of effort that can be brought to bear and hence make assumptions about what is possible within a scope that wasn't as limited as they thought.
It doesn't happen often, but it happens often enough that I'm disinclined to dismiss possibilities before they have been properly explored.
I'm not saying fission can be accelerated to, say, a sub decade path to realization. I'm saying that categorically stating this timetable can't be accelerated is a bit premature before anyone has made a serious attempt.
So what do I mean by "serious attempt"?
If you look at investment in fission over the past decade, in my book that qualifies as the world not having made a serious attempt. The level of investment needs to be perhaps on the order of 2-3 magnitudes higher for it to be a "serious attempt". And it doesn't have to be a null sum game in the sense that it would all have to come from reallocating investments from other energy sectors - it could be that we allocate more resources to the energy sector.
- ncmncm 4y agoWe have many decades' experience with fission projects. The most reliable prediction, historically, has been that they were lying about costs. No fission project has ever been gone forward without massive public subsidy. There are no projects in progress now or proposed that do not rely on massive subsidies. These go back to the first "too cheap to meter" claims.
- bborud 4y agoWe have decades more experience with electrical cars. And for over 100 years, electrical cars were a curiosity. For at least half of the time we've had nuclear power we've also had people saying that electrical won't have a chance at displacing ICU cars. "Experts" being far more adamant than laypeople because they "know" it isn't going to happen. And yet, this appears to be happening. The thing is, arguing that "X can't happen because X hasn't happened before" isn't a proper argument because everything around you has spent more time not happening than happening. A compelling argument is one that argues how X can't happen for reasons we can know. For instance if we bang up against hard limits imposed by natural law that we just can't get around.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere is no record of electrical car promoters systematically lying about their costs. Electric cars were not, in fact, a practical prospect until lithium battery technology improved radically. It was not the prospect of electric cars that drove the improvement. It was cell phones. As soon as the batteries got good enough, practical electric cars started to be offered, cash on the barrelhead, what you see is what you get. Nuke experience resembles this in exactly zero details. It is frankly weird you thought otherwise.