Going from renewables to nuclear...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Interesting video... Maybe not really suitable for the tl;dr crowd.

Yeah, I know... no politics and stuff... But fuck it, really. You need to wake up, you've been conned... That whole experiment with proto-facism you're engaging in is getting out of hand. Maybe start really doing something against it, before it's too late...

[Steve Guttag]

It's a good video. The one he posted on his Conextras channel omits the epilogue with the political rant. If I were him, i would have flipped it. Let the main channel be "clean" and let the extras channel have the extras.

Where I would differ with Alex is he deemphasized putting solar on one's roof. I think, particularly for single-family homes and duplexes and such, putting solar panels up make a lot of sense. It takes that power demand off of the grid (or reduces it, even in winter months) and makes the a more distributed system rather than relying on one all powerful central creation point. I don't believe in looking for the all perfect single solution. And, truthfully, I think excess home production should always be sellable back to the grid (at similar rates). Then again, I think people should be able to store (batteries) their excess production so they have power when the sun isn't out. Again, if we get residential to the point that it is less of a drain on the grid, it reduces the needs for having such capacity by the grid.

This could be expanded. If you want to build you AI server farm...put a solar farm next to it and batteries too. If solar really is in the 25-year life-cycle status (and that is in 2026...perhaps even better as we go), then a business can budget around the life-cycle...just like a roof over the building.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's a good video. The one he posted on his Conextras channel omits the epilogue with the political rant. If I were him, i would have flipped it. Let the main channel be "clean" and let the extras channel have the extras.

I've watched many of this videos over the years and his efforts are pretty respectable. While most of the stuff he put forward is pretty common knowledge, he does a good job of explaining it and I've learned quite a bit of new stuff over the years from his videos. For example, it's due to him I've changed my dishwasher habits...

None of his previous videos I'm aware of, have been politically loaded, so his political rant was completely unexpected for me. The reason why he put it on his main channel is probably because there comes a time at which it's quite impossible to keep silent and his main channel has far more hits than his "extra's" channel. And I tend to agree with him, the time to keep silent has passed. What I'm seeing is exactly what I've learned in history lessons and I don't want this stuff to repeat. When hard, scientific facts become malleable propaganda, we're past midnight and you better wake up or hell is coming for you.

Regarding his video: I think the part where he skips over lightly is the battery question. While a lot of research has been done and a lot of progress has been made over the years, we're still missing some serious breakthroughs. While you could run a big AI datacenter on a giant solar farm on a sunny day, the rainy day and night problem remains. Unless, of course, the world would be a far happier place... We nowadays DO have the technology to wrap the globe not just in fiber, but also super-high-voltage DC power cables. So, technically we could build the one-and-only global power grid and get cheap, solar power from wherever the sun is shining at that moment. Unfortunately, reality has shown that technology isn't the limit here, but rather the political reality around the globe.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Not sure why all the talk of if... The fact is it can happen today with SMR,s if people agree to pay the price for it. If you don't mind your electric bills going to 5 or 6 times the present rate you are paying today. Utah had a half dozen municipalities signed up for Small Modular Reactors until the cities found out how expensive it was going to be, then they backed out. Today a home owner can still be independent, and make some money back by installing panels and power walls. A neighbor here in Nashville has a system and he charges his Tesla every day, plus gets credits from NES for power he generated and put back on the grid. All this fuss for nothing. The sad aspect is that technology gains crawl in at a snails pace. We, the public can only tag along on new developments.

[Steve Guttag]

I think the biggest takeaway from his video is not just that with solar, we don't burn away the resource is that the recyclable content involved with solar, including the batteries are so recallable, we could have, essentially a sustainable cycle where mining for new raw materials is no longer needed (get the lithium or sodium back out of a spent battery to make a new one. We don't lose the material as we do with fossil fuels.

He has also resigned himself to an electric only future. I've never found that single-sourcing anything to be a safe place to be. There are a lot of places where electricity makes sense. However, as one moves to a single source where supply is limited and demand is 100%, you get into an unsustainable financial model...unless everyone also resigns themselves to such government regulation that it takes the profit motive out of the venture in the name of humanity/society. That wouldn't preclude investment and advances but it would put heavy restrictions on pricing on all aspects of the venture. This is clearly getting into societal and political philosophies and I don't want to dip my toe too far in that water in this forum. I'm just noting that having a single source supply that touches that much of society necessitates removing normal market forces that would escalate prices.

[Frank Angel]

I remember when I was in High School, every month they passed out these Science Ahead magazines that contained articles about current science developments and the theories about how science would change the future. I remember quite vividly the stories they ran over the course of many issues, about wonders of nuclear energy and how much energy could be extracted from enriched Uranium. I remember it distinctly saying that because the fuel was so abundant and energy rich, electricity would be free! We see how lots of factor can totally derail theory.

I thought electric cars were the cat's meow when I first heard of such things. When they first became available, I was sure my next car was going to be a Prius...though I though, I'll even put up with how clunky it looks.. That is until is I realized it would need to be charged regularly. Oh.wait, me thinks, THAT's going to be a problem. Like a few million other people who live in New York City (Brooklyn, actually), I reside in an apartment building. There simply is no electrical infrastructure available for apartment dwellers in the majority of older apartments that have no parking garages and I don't see any viable way that could easily be remedied. Every street in the city every night is lined with parked cars and there is no place to charge those vehicles overnight as all those with homes take for granted -- oh, just "plug it in" they think. That is a major impediment for too many people which will make the combustion engine remain pretty much a very long-term necessity, at least in all the major cities.

[Leo Enticknap]

The "nuclear electricity will be so cheap to produce that it'll be free to the consumer" claim in the '50s seems to have been widespread. When I ran a small regional film archive in the early '00s, we held a 16mm promotional movie made to celebrate the opening of Windscale (later Sellafield), which cheerfully made exactly that claim A few months after it was produced, this happened. The film also featured the infamous Jimmy Savile as the voiceover narrator, although when I was showing bits of it in village halls and schools in the north of England, the cause of his infamy had not yet become public knowledge.

The bottom line is that electricity production using nuclear fission is simply too dangerous and too expensive. I recently read this novel from the 1970s (thrift store acquisition shortly before a long flight). What it predicted was essentially what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the only difference being in the detail (it was necessary to evacuate the surrounding areas rather than burn them, as in the book). A fission reactor is a fundamentally fail deadly technology, and we've seen at least twice that however many redundant safety systems you put in place to prevent that failure mode (a runaway reaction with no remaining way to cool the reactor and/or insert control rods), it is possible for them all to fail.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'm not against nuclear technology by definition, as long as you acknowledge the potential dangers. I firmly believe that many of those dangers are manageable, but it it's increasingly hard to create a "climate" in which they are. I think, for example, that commercialized nuclear power is a mistake. Corporate targets and nuclear safety will simply never fully align. On the other hand, political climates also have been proven to be fragile. So, I'd say that, the problem with nuclear around the globe also is mostly politics and not so much the technology itself.

The result is that too little money was and still is being spent on replacing old plants with much safer, newer plants, while not being able to shut down the old ones, due to lack of alternatives. Playing political hot-potatoes with nuclear waste also made that into an unsolvable problem. Meanwhile, we could've put those efforts into something more useful: trying to close the nuclear fuel cycle, which would allow us to run our planet with current known resources for centuries to come and would reduce nuclear waste to an absolute minimum...

[Steve Guttag]

Leo, that would be thrice. Don't forget Three Mile Island (and happening so close to The China Syndrome release). The success to failure rate of nuclear is pretty high (e.g. France and all of the other sites). The USSR had the other issue of it being a penalty whistle blow on things at every level.

Marcel, I think the thing that bothers me about his position on the politics is that he phrases it such that everyone must vote for group B even if he thinks that they are problematic too. This gets us into single issue voting and it also puts people in power thinking that the populace really wanted them and their ideas more than they didn't like what they currently have. It slams us to extremes, which very few people want. I believe we (and others around the world, it isn't just a USA thing though we have a bit of the poster child for it) have what we have right now because the "other side" pushed their agenda so far and hard, people voted that they didn't want that. I think the majority of people around the planet would prefer moderation on most things rather than being slammed into one ideology or another.

I'd rather have rational discussions and evidence based decisions (that yes, may indeed change, as evidence guides us) on how to best power societies. When I troubleshoot a projection or sound system...sure I come in with a set of beliefs...call them hypothesis...based on past experience. However, I quickly start following the evidence as it presents itself to me. I have zero problem dropping my original thought if the evidence points me to the most likely problem/problems. It has served me very well in most fields for decades and decades.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Marcel, I think the thing that bothers me about his position on the politics is that he phrases it such that everyone must vote for group B even if he thinks that they are problematic too. This gets us into single issue voting and it also puts people in power thinking that the populace really wanted them and their ideas more than they didn't like what they currently have. It slams us to extremes, which very few people want. I believe we (and others around the world, it isn't just a USA thing though we have a bit of the poster child for it) have what we have right now because the "other side" pushed their agenda so far and hard, people voted that they didn't want that. I think the majority of people around the planet would prefer moderation on most things rather than being slammed into one ideology or another.

I'd rather have rational discussions and evidence based decisions (that yes, may indeed change, as evidence guides us) on how to best power societies. When I troubleshoot a projection or sound system...sure I come in with a set of beliefs...call them hypothesis...based on past experience. However, I quickly start following the evidence as it presents itself to me. I have zero problem dropping my original thought if the evidence points me to the most likely problem/problems. It has served me very well in most fields for decades and decades.

Keep in mind that his channel normally doesn't touch partisan politics at all, even though nowadays almost everything can be classified as partisan, even something like discussing the effectiveness of a heat pump for example. But, I've seen other channels I tend to watch doing the same, Coffeezilla, who regularly uncovers high-profile scams on the Internet, crossed that line on his secondary channel a few months back already.

I guess the problem with the bipartisan setup is that there are so few control levers to pull for the average voter. It's essentially binary: you're either pulling the lever to the left or the right, while neither direction is the way you want to, you only know that not pulling the lever or pulling it to the right will end in almost certain doom.

Let's be real here, we've passed La La Land a while back already, we're now full on in pre-2nd World War fascist territory. Any choice, even the choice you'd normally wouldn't take is better than the path we're finding ourselves on. We're not diagnosing a failed sound system anymore, the projection booth is already on fire.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I thought electric cars were the cat's meow when I first heard of such things. When they first became available, I was sure my next car was going to be a Prius...though I though, I'll even put up with how clunky it looks.. That is until is I realized it would need to be charged regularly. Oh.wait, me thinks, THAT's going to be a problem. Like a few million other people who live in New York City (Brooklyn, actually), I reside in an apartment building. There simply is no electrical infrastructure available for apartment dwellers in the majority of older apartments that have no parking garages and I don't see any viable way that could easily be remedied. Every street in the city every night is lined with parked cars and there is no place to charge those vehicles overnight as all those with homes take for granted -- oh, just "plug it in" they think. That is a major impediment for too many people which will make the combustion engine remain pretty much a very long-term necessity, at least in all the major cities.

I currently live in an apartment without dedicated parking infrastructure, that's the reason for me not to choose an electric vehicle as my "daily driver". But I've colleagues that do have such infrastructure and they're quite happy with their electrical commute. Filling up your vehicle at home and at work saves the stop at the gas station.

So, yes, the issue you're addressing is an important one, for me it has been THE primary decision NOT to invest in a pure EV vehicle, ever since I live here and I've driven EVs before, including an early Tesla Model S, back in the day when Musk still had some kind of a reputation left...

[Leo Enticknap]

I guess the problem with the bipartisan setup is that there are so few control levers to pull for the average voter.

Until relatively recently, those control levers existed in the form of significant differences of position within each of the two parties, combined with an internal selection process that generally presented candidates most in tune with popular demand to the electorate. The problem now seems to be that the extreme left and right are dominating their two parties and offering positions that most of the electorate don't want (at least, not the whole package), thereby forcing them to choose between what they perceive to be the lesser of two evils.

However, I quickly start following the evidence as it presents itself to me. I have zero problem dropping my original thought if the evidence points me to the most likely problem/problems. It has served me very well in most fields for decades and decades.

Which is why politicians and activists who claim that a scientific fact related to a policy they are pushing is "settled," and therefore morally indisputable, their implicit claim being that if you dispute it, you are on the wrong side of empirical reality. For over two centuries, most mathematicians believed that Fermat's last theorem could never be proven; hence the reason that the guy who eventually proved it worked in secret and concealed what he was doing from his co-workers, because he believed that it would kill his career if they found out. The Romans believed that steam power had no practical application. The consensus of scientific opinion was that The Earth is flat, well into the Middle Ages. And so on and so forth. New discoveries in the pure and applied sciences uncover bugs in previously accepted knowledge all the time. That doesn't mean that we have to take every crackpot idea that enters the public domain seriously, but neither does it give politicians the right to dismiss any scientist or engineer that challenges their agenda as a crackpot.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Until relatively recently, those control levers existed in the form of significant differences of position within each of the two parties, combined with an internal selection process that generally presented candidates most in tune with popular demand to the electorate. The problem now seems to be that the extreme left and right are dominating their two parties and offering positions that most of the electorate don't want (at least, not the whole package), thereby forcing them to choose between what they perceive to be the lesser of two evils.

I guess it depends a bit on what you'd call recently. There has been quite some nepotism involved over the last decades:

Bush Sr. -> Bush "W"
Bill Clinton -> Hillary Clinton

Even passing the torch from e.g. Obama to Biden I'd consider "nepotism light".

As for the current ruler of the Republican Party: There is even no remnant of a political process involved, it's all just based on fear. Fear for the consequences if you support the "wrong" leader.

Which is why politicians and activists who claim that a scientific fact related to a policy they are pushing is "settled," and therefore morally indisputable, their implicit claim being that if you dispute it, you are on the wrong side of empirical reality.

If you dispute a well-studied "fact", that since has been reached consensus on, you need to bring evidence and extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Unfortunately, we live in a world, where any change that impacts certain powerful stakeholders' interest will face some significant backslash. Still, the pure science must always prevail, otherwise we're finding ourselves in yet another banana republic.

[Steve Guttag]

There is just about no way to respond to Marcel without getting into politics, particularly his first part. There are families that politics are their brand and what they do...the same way you may see lawyers and doctors or construction workers. This country started with John Adams (#2) and then John Quincy Adams (#6). Each can stand or fail on their own. I, personally, find that both sides of the political spectrum to be equally reprehensible...differently but neither do I feel safe or good about. That is about as far as I'm going to take that.

As to science. There has been perversion on just about every side with it. You get pseudoscience whereby one just has to make a claim, which requires near zero effort, and quickly spreads and then there is evidence based science where it takes a great deal more effort to contradict the pseudoscience and for probably little effect since people want to believe whatever they already believe...particularly if it makes their life easier.

But then there are those on "settled science" which simply does not exist. It is absolute willful ignorance that hasn't seen, particularly in the past 5-10 years where decent isn't tolerated once a narrative is quickly developed. People will lose their jobs for not parroting the same things as what the message is.

I have no problem with scientists coming to a consensus. I do have a problem with outright silencing/canceling decent. Let's take one of my favorites...Flat Earth. There are proponents of Flat Earth when most anyone that can do analytical math will declare that to be nonsense (I'm in that camp, for full disclosure). If a Flat Earther wants to make the claim about Flat Earth...fine, present you data and be prepared to have it disproved/explained by means other than being a flat planet. That is how science works. You have a hypothesis, you gather data, you test your data, you put it out there for others to test/verify and if other believe you to be incorrect with the data they present, you either defend your data or accept what others have presented. Over time, we do, generally, get to a consensus through a preponderance of the evidence. In many cases now, we quickly get to a consensus with no tolerance for deviation.

Every once in a while, that fringe idea turns out to be correct because of one thing or other. It could be an incorrect piece of data at the top caused all of the subsequent data, while repeatable, to be wrong and, therefore all subsequent conclusions to be wrong. So, if you are a flat earther and think we have it all wrong...present your data and be prepared for all of the data that will refute your claim...not by canceling but by just looking at the data. There was a time when Flat Earth was the settled science. There was a time when the Earth was the center of the universe was settled science. As long as science isn't considered settled and people keep asking questions and gathering data, the answers become better and better, in terms of quality. They may not be the answers that one particularly wants but the accuracy should get better.

[Jim Cassedy]

<edited> The "nuclear electricity will be so cheap to produce that it'll be free to the consumer"
claim in the '50s. . .

I graduated high school in the early 1970's. I remember seeing numerous films and presentations
at community fairs and in school about our 'wonderful nuclear future', and I recall well a few of
those 'free energy' predictions. There were variations on this theme though. Another claim often
made was that some day, in 'the house of the future' we'd all have a small nuclear reactor in our
basements, about the size & shape of a common hot-water heater, which would heat our homes,
make hot-water, and produce all the electricity we'd need, using a lump of nuclear fuel about the
size of brick which would only need to be replaced about every 20years.
I have no problem with the concept of nuclear energy. Small reactors work well in submarines and
remote arctic outposts, etc. The problem isn't so much with the science, but with the scientists, or
at least the people who are in charge of building and operating these things, who are subject to
inducing all the foibles and f_ckups of humans into the mix. I remember how, after one inspection
at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant here in California, they discovered that a large number of pipe
hangers and supports had been installed backwards and/or upside down. You-Tube has dozens
of videos about numerous old abandoned reactors in the Soviet Union and the chaos and
contamination some of them have caused. I like the idea of nuclear energy, and perhaps some
day they will find a way to make it more fail safe without causing major catastrophes.

(But even if I live to be 100, I still don't think I'd want a nuclear reactor in my basement!)