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The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy

by munk-a 1y ago

The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.

potato3732842 1y ago
> It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic. It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences. Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002). Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
- PeaceTed 1y ago
  Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.
votepaunchy 1y ago
> embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
- rtpg 1y ago
  There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list. My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints. Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
  - xethos 1y ago
    > a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity). > it's hard to make the whole thing profitable Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
    - rtpg 1y ago
      > This is presumably intentional It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something? > Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is" Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere". It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out. And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market! I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
- PeaceTed 1y ago
  That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for. Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world as a dumping ground for our excess.
- golem14 1y ago
  I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s). Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the current path. Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason. But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
  - chrneu 1y ago
    I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for the down periods. It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
    - Ericson2314 1y ago
      Don't forget to count storage and grid updates.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Nuclear doesn’t work in a market based electricity market. The capital costs are high and it’s difficult to make money if you aren’t paying down those expenses. IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out. In what world do you think our energy needs plateau? I'm always so surprised to see this 1970s hippie attitude making a comeback, especially since it makes less sense today than ever before.
- kulahan 1y ago
  This is the worst part. Wind and solar don't come within a thousand miles of being sufficient unless we massively improve our generation density, invent new magical batteries that aren't even on the horizon yet, and build out hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels and windmills.

by munk-a 1y ago

potato3732842 1y ago

> It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic. It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences. Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002). Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.

PeaceTed 1y ago
Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.

votepaunchy 1y ago

> embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.

rtpg 1y ago
There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list. My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints. Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
- xethos 1y ago
  > a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity). > it's hard to make the whole thing profitable Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
  - rtpg 1y ago
    > This is presumably intentional It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something? > Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is" Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere". It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out. And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market! I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
PeaceTed 1y ago
That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for. Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world as a dumping ground for our excess.
golem14 1y ago
I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s). Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the current path. Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason. But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
- chrneu 1y ago
  I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for the down periods. It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
  - Ericson2314 1y ago
    Don't forget to count storage and grid updates.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Nuclear doesn’t work in a market based electricity market. The capital costs are high and it’s difficult to make money if you aren’t paying down those expenses. IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.
- kulahan 1y ago
  Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out. In what world do you think our energy needs plateau? I'm always so surprised to see this 1970s hippie attitude making a comeback, especially since it makes less sense today than ever before.
kulahan 1y ago
This is the worst part. Wind and solar don't come within a thousand miles of being sufficient unless we massively improve our generation density, invent new magical batteries that aren't even on the horizon yet, and build out hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels and windmills.