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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Nuclear is nothing bog standard. If it was, it wouldn’t take 10 years. Almost every plant is a boutique job that requires lots of specialists. The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design was meant to get around this. It didn’t.

    The experts can stay where they are: maintaining existing nuclear power.

    Renewables don’t take much skilled labor at all. It’s putting solar panels on racks in a field, or hoisting wind blades up a tower (crane operation is a specialty, but not on the level of nuclear engineering).


  • Then we just move the problem. Why should we do something that’s going to take longer and use more labor? Especially skilled labor.

    Money is an imperfect proxy for the underlying resources in many ways, but it about lines up in this case. To force the issue, there would have to be a compelling reason beyond straight money.

    That reason ain’t getting to 100% clean energy in a short time. There is another: building plants to use up existing waste rather than burying it.




  • No, you just pay out the nose up front.

    If I had money to invest in the energy sector, I don’t know why I should pick nuclear. It’s going to double its budget and take 10 years before I see a dime of return. Possibly none if it can’t secure funding for the budget overrun, as all my initial investment will be spent.

    A solar or wind farm will take 6-12 months and likely come in at or close to its budget. Why the hell would I choose nuclear?






  • Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they’ve proven otherwise. Can’t prove otherwise until you’ve been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.

    Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.

    Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don’t want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.









  • Hardly a stretch. The comparison isn’t to the power density of gas, but overall curb weight. EVs are roughly 10% heavier than an ICE equivalent. Batteries are the main reason for that (electric motors and the electronics to support them aren’t that much). Batteries have also been improving Wh/kg by 5-8% per year. It only takes a few years of improvements to get there.

    In fact, since the 10% number has been the case since around 2020 or so, the battery tech might already be there and we just need to get them into new models.