Imagine a future 2032 where all BTC has been mined ahead of schedule and Alphabet is the world’s largest lender after reorganisation into a banking platform.

Bitcoin is dead it’s all about digital pogs now

sadly, I have a moral compass. I’m not sure where I put the damn thing, but I have one.

These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.

Certainly doesn’t sound like an idiot with no marketable skills to me. You’re coming up with creative ideas and finding ways to try to prove them out in disciplines that you aren’t terribly familiar with. You’re really selling yourself way too short here and should be A LOT more compassionate towards you.

Really, it sounds like you are in a similar place to Product Management.

The way that you are approaching things is about diametrically opposite to the sort of problematic behavior that the corpos using LLMs to bludgeon labor are participating in.

Makes sense. Sometimes only once out into reality then only we’ll know if it is a great idea, or not. But it doesn’t hurt to have the tools to try. Those who want really high quality stuffs can go to the humans (and pay them good money) to make it even better.

While I agree with most of your statements, the RTGs that NASA uses (assuming that’s what you are referring to) don’t really have much of a connection at all to Nuclear power plants. They are very useful for small scale projects like rovers but really have no commercial uses for anything near people. Plus I think NASA generally prefers solar power whenever they can use it as it’s far cheaper and safer to get into orbit.

While! I love nuclear’s possibilities. I’ve seen commercial, shippings safety and maintenance records. I don’t think that would be a good idea

Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective.

No, it isn’t. The nuclear industry wants this to be true, but an overview of the benefits and problems with wind, solar, and nuclear put it to rest.

What nuclear is really good at is providing baseload power; it runs for 30+ years at the same output with relatively little maintenance and fuel costs. Wind is good at being cheap when the wind is blowing. Solar is good at being cheap when the sun is shining.

The problem with nuclear is it has incredibly high up front costs, which need to be amortized over its lifetime; you can ramp it down, but you’re cutting into your profits by doing so. The problem with wind is that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine.

Solar and wind are both incredibly cheap when they work. So cheap that we wouldn’t want to use anything else if we can avoid it. Meaning we’d need to ramp down what nuclear and anything else is doing. Except now we’re just making nuclear’s up front cost issue worse; we can’t amortize the cost as well when it’s ramped down. You could try adding storage capacity so you can run all three at once and use it later, but then we could just use that storage for wind and solar on their own.

What you can do is take historical data on wind and sun patterns for a given region. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn’t shining, and vice versa. We have lots of data on that, and we can calculate the maximum length of lull when neither will provide enough. So what you can do is put in enough storage capacity to handle that lull, and double it as a safety factor.

This ends up being a lot less storage than you might think. Getting to 95% renewables would be relatively cheap; Australia almost has enough storage capacity under construction right now to pull that off. That last 5% is harder, but even getting to 95% in industrialized nation states would be a big fucking deal.

Add in HVDC lines to this, and you’ve really got something. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and is 1300 miles long. That kind of distance in the US would mean solar panels in Arizona could power Chicago, and wind in Nebraska could power New York. At that point, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and sun is always shining somewhere else. You can also take advantage of existing hydro pumped storage anywhere you like–there may be enough of it right now that we wouldn’t need to build any other storage.

Nuclear should only be done by the state. Any commercial company doing nuclear HAS TO CARE FOR THE WASTE. It has to be in the calculation, but no on ecan guarantee 10000 years of anything. Same with fossils… execute the fossil fuel industry. They destroyed so much, they don’t deserve to earn a single cent.

That funky startup is producing waste. Imagine a startup selling Asbestos as the new hot shit in 2024.

We’re talking 11 years for 7 “small” reactors. The first decade just to establish a business, but no real difference in the overall picture. How many years, decades after that to make a noticeable difference?

Meanwhile we’re building out more power generation in renewables every year. Renewables are already well developed, can be deployed quickly, and are already scaling up, renewables make a difference NOW.

Wind and solar are both cheaper forms of electricity than nuclear. It’s not like this is a two-way race between nuclear and fossil fuels. Nuclear is a losing tech, right next to fossil fuels.

As it exists now, no. The models are reaching their limit, and they aren’t good enough. They can’t absorb any more information than they have, and more training iterations aren’t making them better. They’ll do some useful things; a recent find of the longest black hole jet ever found was done in part from AI classification of astronomy data. It’s going to get implemented into existing tools and that’s about it. It won’t be enough to justify the money that’s already been dumped in.

Historically, the field has been very bursty. Lots of money gets dumped into it, it makes some big improvements, and then hits a wall. Funding dries up because it’s not meeting goals anymore, and the whole thing goes into slumber for a decade or two. A new breakthrough eventually comes, and then money gets dumped in again. We’ve about maxed out what the last breakthrough can give us. I expect we’ll need at least one more cycle of this before AGI works out.

I’m glad you don’t make the decisions because I don’t want my taxes, that I work hard for and pay money into, to be spent by the government on highly-likely dogshit experimental brand new nuke tech that may eventually cost more money later on to maintain, and I prefer they spend it renovating existing infrastructure or building tried/true legacy nuke plant designs.

Nuclear plants cost a lot to produce but electricity from a nuclear plant sells for the same as electricity from anything else. Since many other options are cheaper to produce and maintain, nuclear is less cost efficient, not highly cost efficient as you claim. That’s why it’s not successful.

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.

I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.

For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.

So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.

As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.

It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.

Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.

Still plenty of nature to kill before humanity cannot survive

I think there may be debate on this point. Climate change may be self perpetuating soon (if it isn’t already) due to thawing meant reserves, etc.

I’m not sure if anyone in the scientific mainstream thinks that’ll push the climate to a point where we can’t survive, but that probably depends on our behaviour over the next few decades.

I think by the end of this century we might hit a point of no return because the oil and gas have enough money to keep themselves from going under due to climate change.

Elon Musk is working on the cars though. They look like they’ll handle like the 2077 cars as well.

Let me preface this that I’m not a huge fan of nuclear, but I do like factual information.

Could NOT get the nuclear power plant in Georgia off the ground for how long?

If you’re talking about Vogtle, it took about 13 years and 14 years. (two reactors)

Did it ever get finished?

Yes. If you want to be specific the original two reactors were finished in 2008. The new work was for the other two reactors. That’s what took 14 years. Of the two new reactors, one started providing commercial power for the first time in June of 2023. The second new reactor only started providing commercial power in Feb of 2024.

But when corporate wants it just fucking happens 🤡

Different type of power plants between what is being discussed for Google and what was put in at Vogtle in Georgia.

Vogtle was completing construction of an existing older design. Think of this like a bespoke tailored suit. It is crazy expensive, and only fits you.

What most of these tech companies are going for is called Small Modular Reactors (SMR). Think of this as like buying a ready-to-wear suit off the rack. Its not nearly as fancy or as impressive (usually much smaller power generation), but its not custom made so its much cheaper.

Corporations > people

Man imagine a world where that could have been what we were voting on next month.

Governments aren’t going to solve these problems either because they’re 100% for sale. Only we can solve them, through direct action.

Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.

Are you implying there is a form of energy that doesn’t?

The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.

I forgot what I was trying to say there.
I think it’s along the lines of “I’d rather we didn’t need a ridiculous amount of new power, but at least it’s being covered by non-carbon sources”.