4 ms·

Yea, I don’t think things are hopeless here. What you mention might drop fuel costs by as much as 0.3c/kWh which would be a major step forward, but nuclear nee

by Retric 2y ago

Yea, I don’t think things are hopeless here. What you mention might drop fuel costs by as much as 0.3c/kWh which would be a major step forward, but nuclear needs several such wins and it needs them quickly. People aren’t going to ramp up construction until the economics change significantly and then you’re looking 6+ years out before anything comes online. Meanwhile investors are thinking what will renewables look like in 6-60 years from now? which makes such projects hard to justify without massive subsidies or at minimum locked in pricing for decades.

kragen 2y ago
60 years is way beyond the prediction threshold. in https://dernocua.github.io/notes/backward-exponential.html https://dernocua.github.io/notes/backward-exponential.html i calculated that we can produce 16 earth-surfaces of human living space in less than 30 years, using 0.3% of the mass of the moon 60 years ago was 01962, when moore's law hadn't yet been noted, most people were farmers, there was no energy crisis, global warming was a forgotten 19th-century speculation, nuclear energy was hoped to make electricity too cheap to meter, communism was widely believed to be more efficient than capitalism (and produce higher living standards, if you discounted the gulag), mass imprisonment was a defining characteristic of russia rather than the usa, global thermonuclear war was widely considered survivable, overpopulation was driving inevitably toward widespread famine because the green revolution hadn't happened yet, and electric generation capacity in the usa was starting its last pre-energy-crisis doubling
- Retric 2y ago
  The world doesn’t actually change that quickly. A great deal of energy infrastructure designed or even built well before 1962 is still in use. The hover dam for example was constructed between 1931 and 1936 for ~800 million in today’s money. It’s paid that off over time, but time horizons get really long. People had been evaluating that site for ~30 years before construction began and the project was authorized all the way back in 1928. With nuclear you’re essentially betting that the plant will have an operating surplus long enough to both pay down the initial construction costs plus interest and be able to set money aside for decommissioning. If you predict the nuclear plant will be shut down 30 years after construction finishes that’s a deal killer. Further while people talk about construction timelines but projects start well before construction begins because you need to convince someone to pay for it. So you’re essentially looking out 40 years before the possibility of profit exists.
  - kragen 2y ago
    the vast majority of energy infrastructure in china was built in the last 20 years. actually that was true in the usa in 01962 and 01972 as well. the world is changing much faster now than it was in 01936, when all we had to deal with was the rise of fascism, the end of the millennia-long gold standard, history's deepest recession, communist revolutions around the world, radical overhaul of the economic system in the united states, and the rapid adoption of automobiles and electricity. you probably think i'm being sarcastic but i'm not consider that 20 years ago photovoltaic was too expensive to be a viable alternative to nuclear and fossil fuels, youtube didn't exist (and your isp would often shut down your account if you posted a video on your web page), russia and china were friendly to the usa, friendster and orkut were the hot social networks (because you had to be at harvard to get a facebook account), javascript was too slow for most apps so demanding web apps used flash, gmail was only available inside google (so email was still really distributed), most people in the usa didn't have cellphones, cameraphones were new, the iphone hadn't come out, consequently most people who owned computers had root, orrin hatch was trying to ban the ipod, fast company demanded that you fax them a permission form before linking to their website, most people thought the nsa's worldwide dragnet surveillance was a myth, bitcoin didn't exist and was considered probably impossible, ycombinator didn't exist, neural networks were an interesting failed approach in ai history books, it was the year of desktop linux for the seventh year in a row (but there was no android), the only global pandemic in living memory was aids, the leading semiconductor fabs were in the usa and israel rather than taiwan, one laptop per child hadn't yet made it credible that internet-access computers would be cheap enough even for children in poor countries (who now mostly have one in their pockets), nasa still monopolized crewed spaceflight in the usa (if we don't count spaceshipone; carmack's x-prize competitor went 131 feet high), microphones and cameras in most people's homes reporting to secretive overseas data centers were dystopian fiction, the geforce 6800 yielded 15.6 gigaflops, and led illumination was new.
    - Retric 2y ago
      > the world is changing much faster now than it was in 01936 Hardly. In most ways things were advancing much more quickly in 1936. Look at say medicine, cars, aircraft, physics, nuclear power, even computers and communication systems, and if anything things are currently slower right now than back then. In 1905 the fastest aircraft did 30 MPH and had troubles traveling 30 miles in bad weather, by 1965 we could fly ~1,000x as fast and that’s ignoring interplanetary probes etc. 1935 sat in the middle of that transition but fly somewhere today and there’s good odds you’ll be in a 30+ year old airplane with some new paint an arguably upgraded interior. Walk into a Walmart today and ~99% of the stuff sold had direct equivalents 10 years ago. Most of it is minor improvements on stuff available 50 years ago. That really wasn’t the case in 1935.

by Retric 2y ago

kragen 2y ago

60 years is way beyond the prediction threshold. in https://dernocua.github.io/notes/backward-exponential.html https://dernocua.github.io/notes/backward-exponential.html i calculated that we can produce 16 earth-surfaces of human living space in less than 30 years, using 0.3% of the mass of the moon 60 years ago was 01962, when moore's law hadn't yet been noted, most people were farmers, there was no energy crisis, global warming was a forgotten 19th-century speculation, nuclear energy was hoped to make electricity too cheap to meter, communism was widely believed to be more efficient than capitalism (and produce higher living standards, if you discounted the gulag), mass imprisonment was a defining characteristic of russia rather than the usa, global thermonuclear war was widely considered survivable, overpopulation was driving inevitably toward widespread famine because the green revolution hadn't happened yet, and electric generation capacity in the usa was starting its last pre-energy-crisis doubling

Retric 2y ago
The world doesn’t actually change that quickly. A great deal of energy infrastructure designed or even built well before 1962 is still in use. The hover dam for example was constructed between 1931 and 1936 for ~800 million in today’s money. It’s paid that off over time, but time horizons get really long. People had been evaluating that site for ~30 years before construction began and the project was authorized all the way back in 1928. With nuclear you’re essentially betting that the plant will have an operating surplus long enough to both pay down the initial construction costs plus interest and be able to set money aside for decommissioning. If you predict the nuclear plant will be shut down 30 years after construction finishes that’s a deal killer. Further while people talk about construction timelines but projects start well before construction begins because you need to convince someone to pay for it. So you’re essentially looking out 40 years before the possibility of profit exists.
- kragen 2y ago
  the vast majority of energy infrastructure in china was built in the last 20 years. actually that was true in the usa in 01962 and 01972 as well. the world is changing much faster now than it was in 01936, when all we had to deal with was the rise of fascism, the end of the millennia-long gold standard, history's deepest recession, communist revolutions around the world, radical overhaul of the economic system in the united states, and the rapid adoption of automobiles and electricity. you probably think i'm being sarcastic but i'm not consider that 20 years ago photovoltaic was too expensive to be a viable alternative to nuclear and fossil fuels, youtube didn't exist (and your isp would often shut down your account if you posted a video on your web page), russia and china were friendly to the usa, friendster and orkut were the hot social networks (because you had to be at harvard to get a facebook account), javascript was too slow for most apps so demanding web apps used flash, gmail was only available inside google (so email was still really distributed), most people in the usa didn't have cellphones, cameraphones were new, the iphone hadn't come out, consequently most people who owned computers had root, orrin hatch was trying to ban the ipod, fast company demanded that you fax them a permission form before linking to their website, most people thought the nsa's worldwide dragnet surveillance was a myth, bitcoin didn't exist and was considered probably impossible, ycombinator didn't exist, neural networks were an interesting failed approach in ai history books, it was the year of desktop linux for the seventh year in a row (but there was no android), the only global pandemic in living memory was aids, the leading semiconductor fabs were in the usa and israel rather than taiwan, one laptop per child hadn't yet made it credible that internet-access computers would be cheap enough even for children in poor countries (who now mostly have one in their pockets), nasa still monopolized crewed spaceflight in the usa (if we don't count spaceshipone; carmack's x-prize competitor went 131 feet high), microphones and cameras in most people's homes reporting to secretive overseas data centers were dystopian fiction, the geforce 6800 yielded 15.6 gigaflops, and led illumination was new.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > the world is changing much faster now than it was in 01936 Hardly. In most ways things were advancing much more quickly in 1936. Look at say medicine, cars, aircraft, physics, nuclear power, even computers and communication systems, and if anything things are currently slower right now than back then. In 1905 the fastest aircraft did 30 MPH and had troubles traveling 30 miles in bad weather, by 1965 we could fly ~1,000x as fast and that’s ignoring interplanetary probes etc. 1935 sat in the middle of that transition but fly somewhere today and there’s good odds you’ll be in a 30+ year old airplane with some new paint an arguably upgraded interior. Walk into a Walmart today and ~99% of the stuff sold had direct equivalents 10 years ago. Most of it is minor improvements on stuff available 50 years ago. That really wasn’t the case in 1935.