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Jumbojets are hugely complex with hundreds of kilometers of pipes and wires and yet a thousand of them are in the air right this second. Complexity is a nothin

Jumbojets are hugely complex with hundreds of kilometers of pipes and wires and yet a thousand of them are in the air right this second. Complexity is a nothingburger.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.
- rstuart4133 4y ago
  > A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams. The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed: > a thousand of them are in the air right this second. If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme. But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns. Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Dam disasters don't render the entire region indefinitely uninhabitable. Nuclear accidents have only been so small and infrequent because of the constant vigilance against allowing them to gamble with millions of lives. > Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant. The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed. Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.
tomcam 4y ago
Sounds like you have it under control. I suggest you take your business plan to YCombinator and make some serious money.
- dylan604 4y ago
  To be fair, complex is solvable compared to complicated. You just break each of the complex steps into components that are easier to solve individually. This is part and parcel for software peeps. As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate
- willis936 4y ago
  I'm too busy working at an energy startup I think is the best path forward for energy security: something that takes a bit more effort than being an armchair quarterback.
  - robfig 4y ago
    Where? Oklo or Radiant?

Jumbojets are hugely complex with hundreds of kilometers of pipes and wires and yet a thousand of them are in the air right this second. Complexity is a nothingburger.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.

rstuart4133 4y ago
> A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams. The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed: > a thousand of them are in the air right this second. If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme. But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns. Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Dam disasters don't render the entire region indefinitely uninhabitable. Nuclear accidents have only been so small and infrequent because of the constant vigilance against allowing them to gamble with millions of lives. > Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant. The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed. Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.

tomcam 4y ago

Sounds like you have it under control. I suggest you take your business plan to YCombinator and make some serious money.

dylan604 4y ago
To be fair, complex is solvable compared to complicated. You just break each of the complex steps into components that are easier to solve individually. This is part and parcel for software peeps. As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate
willis936 4y ago
I'm too busy working at an energy startup I think is the best path forward for energy security: something that takes a bit more effort than being an armchair quarterback.
- robfig 4y ago
  Where? Oklo or Radiant?