I like the formulation of 'the amount of information we don't know about a system that we could in theory learn'. I'm surprised there's no mention of the Copenhagen interpretation's interaction with this definition, under a lot of QM theories 'unavailable information' is different from available information.
There are amistics - the voluntary non-use of technology once it's available - which all cultures engage in to greater or lesser degrees. All technology has a price and sometimes it's not worth it - see leaded gasoline for an extreme example.
But in the general sense, I think it's tautologically correct to say better models always lead to better predictions, which always give an edge in competitions on an individual or societal level. So long term I do believe learning trumps ignorance, not in all cases but on average.
I'm sure benefitting energy companies is the real reason... but if everyone had a battery backup and they all started charging at the same time, I suppose it could make it harder to reboot the system after an outage.
Oh god no, that’s definitely in the cynically written in bad faith hacky partisan politics category. Maybe it just hasn’t aged well, but I couldn’t get through it.
This is (to me) a strange comment. I assume it refers to the fact that some right-wingers have latched onto Orwell. But that happened long after his death.
Orwell was a British Socialist, and the people he's attacking in the books are totalitarians, whether fascist or Stalinist. So it's neither bad faith nor partisan unless you count anti-totalitarian as a party, though I guess hacky is in the eye of the beholder.
"1984" is a quintessential example of literature that challenges and provokes, embodying Kafka’s idea of a book that serves as "the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
I appreciate the sentiment, but territorial boundaries are enforced by violence among almost every species on the planet and we're not that much better than any of them. Law is something we use to put hard limits on violence and sometimes it's inadequate to ensure the obviously right outcome. I do hope that leads to a modulation of where the limits are placed rather than a loss of trust in the whole endeavor.
That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.
The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.
Right now everything looks set for continued exponentially-shaped curves on renewables deployment, which will drive coal and eventually the majority of fossil generation out of the grid. None of that is happening in nuclear, unfortunately.
UK is a misleading example since they’re also using 20% less electricity since the 1960s (https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom), probably due to their struggling economy. By comparison the US has increased its consumption by 1.6x. And even UKs data will turn out to be worse if they actually switch to EVs because that’s going to increase demand on the grid.
Yes, solar can supply a lot of daytime power as China has demonstrated. But all that daytime power generation is wasted for nighttime power needs. So overbuilding solar in that way will mean super cheap clean energy during the day and super expensive dirty energy at night (because that dirty energy will no longer have daytime demands). And the dirty power will be dirtier since it’s going to be plants that can spin up quickly instead of the baseload ones that are always on. Think about it logically - if solar was solving all their needs, why is China investing in turbocharging their nuclear industry? Answer: because baseload and a reliable backstop to the grid is super important and valuable and batteries won’t cut it to completely decarbonize the grid.
Renewables are popular because fossil fuel companies don’t find them objectionable - it’s a much gradual off ramp from fossil fuel dependence in the grid than with nuclear. And unlike nuclear, fossil fuels remain in use to handle low energy cases from renewables until batteries magically get good enough for the grid.
Then why are you here? If nuclear doesn't need subsidies, why aren't you just investing in the next great nuclear project and proving me wrong that way?
Because regulatory burdens have killed the US nuclear industry. That’s why China is 15 years ahead of us and pumping out fission stations at half the time.
Nuclear power needs a serious overhaul of the regulatory framework in the US and that starts with a broader swelling of support to overcome all the misinformed propaganda.
China installed more solar PV and wind generation in the first 9 months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear power stations under construction will provide (already adjusted for capacity factor.)
It's true that China is beating the rest of the world on nuclear construction. It is also unfortunately true that current-gen (non SMR) nuclear doesn't scale the way factory-built solar PV and wind tech does. Again reposting this very illustrative chart: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...
Starting in the late 2000s China began investing in nuclear, renewables and storage all at the same time. The original (optimistic) plan called for nuclear to peak at 18% of their electricity generation by 2060. But that was before the recent breakout expansion of renewables and cost decreases in battery storage. Since then China seems to have pulled back a lot on nuclear [1], coinciding with huge price decreases and deployment surges in solar PV and wind. Even adjusted for capacity factor, new wind+solar are seeing about 60x the installed capacity of nuclear (as of 2023) and that number has been on an upward trend.
[1] "It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW between a new GW scale reactor and a 200 MW small modular nuclear reactor." https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
> However, teething troubles mean that power grids are still struggling to absorb the huge capacity expansions and it will be a while before the new plants meet viable levels of actual power generation
> China's renewable capacity growth is yet to reflect in electricity supply, with coal still occupying nearly 60% of the country's generation mix
So basically China built a bunch of solar power plants that aren't connected to anything. Given how little transparency there is in China, it's entirely possible the plants were built because the country was generating way more solar panels than was useful globally & thus had to purchase it to prevent an absolute cratering in solar PV price.
> The country's solar power expansion is slowing due to tighter curbs on supplying excess power from rooftop solar into the grid and changes in electricity pricing that are denting the economics of new solar projects.
It's really starting to look like 2023 was a fluke and solar projects are running into the headwinds everyone's been saying they will - no grid is set up to switch to solar and the more solar you install the more you destabilize the grid. And since panel prices have dropped so low because of global subsidies to rooftop solar, existing policies around rooftop solar turn into another headwind which slows down growth of grid solar & should see panel prices start to rise back up as people stop installing rooftop solar, pushing solar projects back out of profitability at either end.
In other words, we've kind of hit "peak solar" in the near term and the outlook for grid solar displacing fossil fuels is very cloudy.
Except that China is on pace to exceed 2023 deployment in 2024. They've already installed 45.7GW in the first quarter. You're drawing a lot of inferences from a phrase in one article. They're also installing massive amounts of grid-stabilizing storage: 35.3GW in just Q1 of this year, which exceeds the 22.7GW they installed in all of 2023.
You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are. It's a strange thing to be comforted by; in any case, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to become attached to.
> You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are
No, I'm concerned that for all the amount of renewables they're deploying, almost none of it is getting connected to the grid and the amount of fossil fuel usage is unaffected by all this solar capacity they've installed. I'd love it if solar actually helped us get the grid to net 0 by 2050. The problem is that right now we're way off track to achieve that goal.
> Growth in China's battery storage capacity could slow down in 2024, according to an industry association, as energy storage struggles with low profitability.
Confusingly other sources claim that they installed 10 GW in 2023 so it seems like for all of this concrete reliable numbers may be hard to obtain. Anyway, the point still stands - battery + renewables remains a pricing challenge vs fission and renewables alone cannot supplant the equivalent amount of fossil fuels in the grid due to how complex the grid is & gris are fundamentally not designed for intermittent sources like renewables & the more you install the more unstable & expensive it gets trying to stabilize it.
Thus my concern remains that solar has failed to demonstrate a power to actually displace fossil fuels within the grid reliably at scale whereas nuclear has a demonstrated track record of doing so consistently. I worry that deinvesting in nuclear in favor of renewables is going to continue to pour good money after bad and thus result in a prolonged decarbonization plan. It'll be the irony of ironies when we'll end up buying Chinese nuclear reactors so that we can actually decarbonize our grid.
You realize the irony of replying on a thread about an article saying we’ve grossly underestimated by 3x the amount of battery materials we’ll need? And that’s just for EVs, not grid batteries. Yes, there’s the far out idea of maybe we can use car batteries to do that role but our grid is not designed for it and there’s all sorts of other problems of that.
Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.
That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.
Because France didn’t over regulate the nuclear industry at the behest of the coal industry like as happened in the US? Or are you making a blanket generalization about France without knowing anything about their government because you’ve associated socialism and regulation and France in your head?
As for solar companies stock prices doing great, how is that relevant at all?
It's relevant because you challenged me to put my money where my mouth is, as I'm challenging you. And I have.
You say you haven't because of onerous regulations and it's true, I associate France with a heavier regulatory burden than most Anglophone countries. If it's the coal lobby that killed Nuclear's profitability in the US, I have two questions:
1) why are you attacking renewables rather than the coal industry? If you think Nuclear could compete on an economic basis with renewables, surely you could make common cause with my side of this debate to properly price fossil energy's negative externalities and let the market sort out the winners once that's achieved.
2) Why not build a nuclear reactor in Mexico and export the power to the US? Or in any of the other low-regulation countries with a neighbor looking to import power? If it's regulations that make nuclear unprofitable, surely nuclear investors could regulation-shop.
1. I’m not attacking renewables. I’m highlighting the failing track record of renewables on the grid failing to displace fossil fuels. They have demonstrated an ability to absorb energy growth and displace fossil fuels within that growth, but the more renewables are installed, fossil fuels remain a requirement to try to keep the grid stable (not just at night time, but during the day too). I have no problem with fossil energy’s externalities getting priced in and we share a goal of getting rid of fossil fuels. I just believe nuclear is the only technology that’s actually demonstrated that for grid energy. You also seem to be pretending like solar isn’t receiving subsidies when it’s receiving significantly more subsidies than nuclear - like estimates are that by 2040 we’ll have pumped in nearly 5T worth of subsidies. Nowhere near fossil fuels but significantly more than nuclear. And also keep in mind that increasing energy prices will also mean that costs across the board rise which will be politically unpopular for taxing fossil fuels more.
2. There’s a few problems with your proposal. Mexico has even less experience than the US building nuclear power and gen IV reactor designs (which is what we should be building) are just exiting into real world plants. Also, Mexico isn’t a nuclear power and it’s permission to build nuclear power plants comes from the US and falls under the US regulatory framework anyway:
> Under the PSAs, each nuclear transaction from the United States to Mexico was an exceptional case to the legal requirements of the Atomic Energy Act. In addition, where the PSA nuclear cooperation required the explicit consent of the IAEA, as well as Washington D.C. and Mexico City
I’m not aware of any other low-regulation countries near the US - are you? As for regulation shopping in Europe, again the same problem. The US has exported its nuclear regulatory framework to many Western countries. France is about the only one that managed to evade it and generates a surplus of energy (with no nuclear accidents by the way) that it then exports to its neighbors. This isn’t something nuclear investors can fix - it needs a top-down shift in nuclear policy and pushing politicians in Washington to fix the regulatory requirements. The US used to have the most forward nuclear industry until they killed it in the 80s and it’s taken 40 years for China to buck the worldwide regulations that the US has been using to lock things down due to their concerns about proliferation weakening their advantage they’ve had on force projection.
I think - with 5G warfare being what it is - that we need to go more granular. Democracy is a given when information is a weapon [1]. What kind of democracy serves our interests best?
I like the theory behind liquid direct myself, but it would need extensive field testing before it's the de facto governance model for, say, Mars.
Have you talked with the average voter? Most don't even know (or care) who their representatives are. Direct democracy works for small countries with high education and social cohesion, like Switzerland. And even there it's only used for specific hot issues like pensions.
direct liquid democracy still has vote delegation, it's just possible to reassign your vote in real time. Representatives vote on issues based on how many people assign them their vote, but people can reassign their vote any time.
I actually favor something with a more Bayesian twist that I haven't heard a catchy name for, where I could delegate my vote to different people depending on the subject up for debate. Essentially fantasy sports but for cabinet ministers. That would also be good because someone I trust on most issues might delegate both our votes to someone they defer to in a particular field without me needing to study whose expertise I trust in that field. If someone's heard of a name for that system I'd be interested to hear it. Hard to research innovation in a field when you don't know the buzzwords.
I've found anything that puts the spine in tension (hanging by hands or hips) helps with spinal pain. 'leaf pose' from acro yoga's especially great for my partner and I (YMMV)
