I think we need to keep technologists away from our precious bodily fluids

@nanook @fluffy

@nanook

I must ask why you wouldn’t go that far. Your actual post seems to suggest you would go that far but are afraid to say so since everything they do is what you describe.

I can drink whisky without them

@fluffy @p

All good points. I'm approaching it more like an engineer than a scientist. I'd rather copy the MSRE because it's already been run once and so we know a lot about the pitfalls already (e.g. impurities in the graphite eat neutrons).

The concept is just so rich that you can afford to use expensive fuel and antiquated methodologies, and still come out on top.

@nanook @tard

> I don't believe storage + intermittent will ever be a solution.

Logistically, improvements in storage and transmission technology matter about as much as generation. We wouldn't care about lithium except that lithium ion batteries are currently the best mass-produced storage system we have, and we care about it so much that finding enough lithium in a hill can make a third-world country wealthy (provided they have the domestic infrastructure to dig it up instead of getting bent over by whatever mining company conglomerate).

If we had the cleanest and most abundant power-generation in the world but we got stuck with 1950s battery technology, we'd still be using gasoline for cars. Storage and transmission of energy.

So we have Venezuela.

@bajax @nanook @tard

> but their description of the solid, glass-based electrolyte sounded like scifi mumbo jumbo at first blush

I have now looked at their Wikipedia page and am furrowing.

@nanook @cjd @bajax @tard
so you've changed your thesis entirely now? abandoned this claim that nuclear power will drive prices down?

now your win condition is that it provides some, any, amount of power and doesn't create a mass death incident? which, as far as i can tell, even that much has been contested?

and i'll put aside your completely childish understanding of what it means to construct power facilities, you have this notion like money appears out of thin air. no concept of time discounting, capital costs, etc. you did not even give a cursory glance at the total cost of merely constructing the facility, which even without this (basic financial literacy) would have completely muted you on the topic.

i have a proposition: i will give you $1 per year, forever, all you need to do is give me $1 million now. it's a no-brainer, right? just like nuclear power. long term i lose bigly, but i am a stupid @fluffy and i am offering you this deal, take advantage now!

So you're saying that the safety issues with nuclear power are so intractable that the energy density of uranium is totally meaningless, and sending people underground to dig coal is just going to be the most efficient way to make electricity forever?

This sounds like some kind of "no combustion carriage will ever be a match for the mighty horse"...

Was a reply to fluffy, who seems to think nuclear energy just has no future, first principles be damned.

I can't imagine a future 100 years from now where nuclear energy isn't cheap and ubiquitous - unless it's some post-apocalyptic dystopia, or else some world government tyranny where everyone is forbidden from touching the magic rocks.

IMO once the US empire finally collapses and the IAEA is defanged, sketchy Alibaba reactors will start popping up all over the world - and THEN finally we'll start to see some progress on safer cheaper designs.

> I rather hope a collapse isn't necessary

Picrel doesn't continue forever. It always ends the same way, as in Athens and in Rome, the same in the US.

> armed to the teeth with hydrogen bombs

Will be like the USSR collapse, highly unlikely anything serious happens b/c oligarchs who control the bombs have families too, and they plan on living past the end of the empire. If you go Rambo on the world - you might have a lot of fun, but when you're done, you're gonna be hunted down and exterminated.

> humanity overcome scarcity

🎵 IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE, LIVING LIFE IN PEACE... 🎶

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook
Now that we are seeing how much fraud and waste is part of that debt it might improve.

Prolly not though.

@nanook @cjd @bajax @tard

everyone exposing themselves...

It'd be nice if countries didn't have a fixed lifespan, but they don't because they deteriorate.

From the time of its founding, a country only ever gets more laws, more taxes, more subsidies, more corruption, and more debt until eventually it's so stupid and broken that it cannot support it's own weight - and then it collapses.

It's always been like that, and if you can figure out how to prevent it, then you've made the greatest discovery of at least the past 2 millennia.

> China and India have both survived

In the sense of a landmass with a name, but China's current government is like 30 years old.

Anyway, "be more like China" is not a goal.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook
>you're saying safety of nuclear power is intractable
caleb i am not making such an assertion. in my post, in the brief part where i did mention safety issues, that was mentioned to illustrate the straw man nanook (unknowningly?) constructed.

i wrote that the safety of nuclear power is contested, this is a very weak assertion, we need only find some nontrivial contest. but even if you ill like this, i wrote that part ("which, as far... contested?") as dramatic flair anyway, the post as written loses nothing if you omit that sentence.

ultimately the issue with nuclear power is that it several order of magnitude more expensive to construct, unless you are sitting on huge piles of cash you will be financing it, this means you will raise power costs to pay off the loan, the prices per watt hour then end up flat or higher, it is just a wealth transfer from the state to bankers.

if you have a lot of cash, you could build them and it would be a good idea, at least compared to just letting the cash sit around, but nation states are not apple or mihoyo, come to think of it didn't mihoyo build a fusion reactor? that was quite entertaining, i wonder about the details there.

@nanook @cjd @bajax @tard
>your assuming
there is no room for this to be true.
why would i make assumptions? you can read my post, i deliberately wrote out all the parts required to fulfill the definition, there is not any room for ambiguity.

it is normal and not strange to accidentally construct straw man arguments. actually, it is much more unusual to stay on topic, you are very normal,

> several order of magnitude more expensive to construct

Building nuclear plants is not that expensive, $2000 per KW is competitive with coal plants.

Also there are engineering problems which, if solved, will push the cost even lower.

As I said, there are engineering problems which, if solved, will push the cost even lower.

You can't get that much cheaper than coal without running into things like "turbines and generator heads cost money".

But India is building $1700/KW nuclear plants already, even with dumb PWR, so that's very encouraging. If China commodifies molten salt, they might get it under 1000/KW, which is really good.

But even now, nuclear fuel costs are so low that if you just built one nuclear plant per year, eventually power would <1 cent per KWh.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook
those indian numbers are certainly surprising, i will make a note to check what is going on. there certainly exists a possibility that india of all places has innovated and thrown out the paradigm. it deserves a closer look.

>Building nuclear plants is not that expensive, $2000 per KW is competitive with coal plants.
when you write 2000 per kw, this is neither the cost[1] , nor is this competitive with coal [2].

>engineering problems
indeed, i hope that things do change, it would be great for everyone to have cheap power.

1. on your own chart, ending in 1990, the most recent number is ~8000.
2. coal is ~800 per kw

@cjd @bajax @nanook @tard
i will also remark, since i made a coffee and thought about it, that the 800 is in modern dollars, that chart is in 2010 dollars, this 800 for coal should be about 500 in 2010 dollars, meanwhile the chart goes from about 1000 to 8000 in 25 years, it has been 35 years since 1990, so plotting a linear trend in the chart, we would (naively) expect the cost to be about 18000. this is about 35x coal,

of course this is just the most naive way to compare it, but i felt that it was necessary to at least make a naive comparison

@nanook @cjd @bajax @tard
>i am not sure what melted down means
just think about it before posting, then? even if you are some sort of, caveman, who has never seen this word used before, you can easily infer its definition from the behavior it is used to describe.

>[you] are irrational negative and hate humanity
see, these hysterical accusations. are they absurd hallucinations? or just emotional outbursts?

get a grip. it was bad enough when you jumped into here talking about sex with chatbots and accused me of being ai. worse was that, episode, of your pseudo-intellectual babble. when i finally dropped in to provide primary source testimony ("i saw the balance sheets and they looked like this") you just became increasingly hysterical, until we reached this point.

it is very likely that you are trying to salvage your ego by painting me as some evil guy. unfortunately, this is so far removed from reality that it is not likely to work even if you say it out loud to yourself.

Yesterday I went to ChatGPT to try to get down to the first-principles cost of a reactor, and as a result I've moderated my opinion somewhat.

My original position was that nuclear is *cheap* because getting rocks to get hot is easy, if you're permitted to buy said rocks. And the only reason it's not ubiquitous is regulation and bullshit.

GPT's claim is that there are two true first principles problems:
1. Neutron economy as cores are scaled down.
2. Moving heat away from the core as cores are scaled up.

This makes enough sense to me, and I will reform my position the the following: "Nuclear should be relatively cheap, but there are engineering problems to solve, and they are not solved because of regulation and bullshit".

---

> 800 for coal

Okay I'll take your number, 2000 was GPT's estimate and it sounds like you know this for a fact.

> meanwhile the chart goes from about 1000 to 8000 in 25 years

The point is that nothing's supposed to get MORE expensive with time, so it means the US got lost in the weeds of over-regulation and loss of will.

There's another chart I can't find with reactors from different countries, and you see that China today is pushing the bottom of those 1970s numbers. Picrel is the same story.

Now if $1700 is the cost of a PWR, and China has a molten salt thorium breeder (they have an experimental one and plans to build a 100MW small production unit), then we should expect that getting rid of the whole pressure vessel and all of the crap that comes with it will at least halve the cost, if not quarter it. So there should come a time when coal becomes uncompetitive - and then at that point, economies of scale will drive the cost down probably another 50% again and coal will be very dead.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook
>The point is that nothing's supposed to get MORE expensive with time, so it means the US got lost in the weeds of over-regulation and loss of will.
i am not sure this is a true statement. plenty of things get more expensive in time. furthermore, putting that aside, this alone would not conclude over-regulation. in fact it is neither necessary nor sufficient to conclude it.

>"Nuclear should be relatively cheap, but there are engineering problems to solve, and they are not solved
certainly nobody could disagree. that was the original promise of nuclear power. cheap, ubiquitous, reliable. the basic thesis is solid, but the details are muddled. actually, long term, my hypothesis is that this sort of atomic power will dominate: we just need to innovate.
>they are not solved because of regulation and bullshit".
do you have a "smoking gun" for this?

>China today is pushing the bottom of those 1970s numbers
can you pro-rate that to us construction costs? that is, take the cost of an identical building in china and usa, and look at the ratio. whatever is easily available, airport, high rise, whatever, just the same building. i think that chinese construction in general is cheaper, but tis way we can estimate its equivalent, i am interested in this pro-rated cost.

> my hypothesis is that this sort of atomic power will dominate

My original point was that power prices will come down by an order of magnitude (i.e. 10-20 cents -> 1-2 cents), and then after this, petroleum will be more uncompetitive vs. electric transportation.

If nuclear power dominates in the future as you say, and power demand (datacenters) continues on it's current trajectory, then I don't think this is unrealistic at all.

Nuclear is really interesting because its ongoing operating cost is so low that over time, it can eventually push prices into a whole other dimension. But demand growth is key because without it, you can't build supply or else you get a glut and then you're unable to pay for any of your reactors.

> i think that chinese construction in general is cheaper

It's an interesting question. I suspect some things are reasonably competitive (e.g. a car factory in Alabama) but some things are essentially impossible to do in the US - the California high speed rail project comes to mind. But that's kind of my point: If the US can't build nuclear reactors, this doesn't mean nuclear reactors are actually that expensive.

I'm not sure that the data necessarily bears that out.

Ontario is largely nuclear, and prices are higher than in Manitoba and Quebec which are largely hydroelectric.

The problem is:
1. Retail price only loosely reflects wholesale generating cost
2. Cost of nuclear in Canada might not reflect actual cost of nuclear. If you want the actual cost, you have to look at India and China who are actually trying to do it as cheaply as possible.

Obvious example: Just because it costs California hundreds of billions of dollars to build high speed rail doesn't mean that's the cost of high speed rail...

@nanook

> So do I get vaxed or not?

All I needed to know was the liability shield. If the federal government gives an untested substance a blanket liability shield, you don't take it. Sixty-six years ago is 1960, which means you would have been about 16 in 1976, which means that you would remember this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swi… . Complete with politicians taking the vaccine on TV and everything. I don't know what this has to do with the price of fish.

> So I post about this in both Farcebook and Twatter and got banned.

I was never on Facebook; I left Twitter in 2016. I do not know what this has to do with anything, either.

> Initially I ran it on an i8-6850k machine, this is a 6-core 12-thread machine with 128mb and clocked at 4Ghz. Performance was inadequate

Interesting walk down memory lane.

FSE started on a bottom-tier Frantech instance (512MB RAM, single core, something like that) in September 2018. Handled FSE up to a couple dozen users, we kept upgrading, eventually we maxed out the capacity on two Frantech boxes and got this giant Dell R820, 384GB RAM, NVMe for Postgres, RAIDed SAS, etc.; hardware issues killed the thing ( blog.freespeechextremist.com/b… ), it was a refurb. FSE now runs on a much smaller RK3588 SOM. Pleroma (sensibly) is I/O-bound rather than CPU-bound (at least once you disable the undesirable features like fucking with people's uploads), and uses Postgres heavily; I don't recommend InnoDB, MySQL/MariaDB are not generally suitable. Revolver now handles a significant portion of the traffic. (Revolver took FSE from throwing 5xx-errors at 200reqs/s to saturating the pipe with no errors at 900+rps). The RK3588 handles FSE fine. (Although due to disk provisioning issues, I'm likely to split the database onto another machine again shortly.)

FSE has dealt with Gab's bot flood, multiple DDoS's (some originating from DDoS companies), the FBI ( blog.freespeechextremist.com/b… ), scrapers, covert activity from NSF-funded "hate speech" "researchers", false reports of CP to the datacenter ( media.freespeechextremist.com/… ), bugs in Pleroma (as, until Poast arrived, FSE was the highest-traffic Pleroma instance and most of the devs run small instances or single-user instances, so we would regularly hit bugs that nobody else had encountered, some of them are linked to in blog.freespeechextremist.com/b… ).

fedilist.com (and media.fse) now operates on its own dedi provided by graf and CrunchBits. That box is now dealing with a flood of residential proxies (1.4m IPs so far) delivering an effective DDoS as some extremely aggressive scraper is saturating the pipe. I forget the specs on it, because it's a very big box and the actual limiter is network I/O.

On the other hand, I don't know what any of that has to do with challenges that China might encounter when trying to move from prototype to production.

> So the fact that something isn't done yet doesn't mean that it can't be

I have not once said that it can't be. I said that it was plausible that it *does* get done. The fact that it's not done yet *does* mean that it's not done yet and this means you can run into unexpected difficulties. Shit, the uranium centrifuges have existed for eighty years and Iran still doesn't have working ones because they got Stuxnetted and bombed and whatnot and ICBMs are even simpler to construct but I can guarantee that Iran does not get an ICBM. (They do have IRBMs, of course, because those can be launched from a truck.) A lot of things can happen even with *proven* technology.

I spoke very precisely: I said it is not done yet and I will believe it when I see it. I will not believe it until I do. If I say "possible", "plausible", "likely", you can assign probabilities. Say 70-90% chance it happens within the next five years, 10-30% chance it doesn't. You wanna argue that the 10-30% is fictitious, and if you've been running an ISP since the 90s, you ought to know the very basic engineering principle that it's not done until it's done. Unforeseen difficulties crop up in anything that's never been done and a nuclear reactor is a complicated enough machine that you can nearly *rely* on some critical problems to solve as you turn a prototype into an assembly line.

Even after it's done and it's all up and running, you have more data that comes in, you run something in production five years, ten years, and if you don't learn something new, you are not looking.
02--dead_kennedys--government_flu.mp3

@Leyonhjelm @nanook

> is there some way to mute a particular 'branch' of a thread tree?

No, and dude keeps doing replies to the top-level post.

I don't think carbon capture will *ever* be efficient.

Agriculture and trucking are actually not the worst application for batteries, because nobody cares how heavy their tractor gets, it's just the cost.

AFAIK a big combine holds about 1000 liters of fuel and that lasts a day (unless it's a long day). 10Kw/liter, 30% accessible, so basically you need 3MWh of storage. So storage cost needs to get to like $10/Kwh to be realistic.

IMO it's possible we get there, possible we don't.

Bigger issue is aviation because in the sky, you need the energy storage to be lightweight too.

But oil isn't going away, it's just not going to be competitive for a ton of applications.