still no. Highest is from coal.
Entire chernobyl deaths are expected to be about 4k per old UN estimations or much less per recent UNSCEAR reports. That's for decades span. And Chernobyl was a design that the west wouldn't even allow back then... Now check coal...
Actual Chernobyl deaths is not a measure of potential deaths. It's the same flawed argument in different clothing.
It assumes that what has happened is the worst that could happen, but it's not.
It pretty much was compared to modern plants. What happened there can't physically happen in western gen2 plants and even more so in gen3 units. Chernobyl is de facto the worst thing that could have happened unless we start using some wild imagination.
Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage/danger despite extreme tsunami and earthquakes
> Chernobyl is de facto the worst thing that could have happened unless we start using some wild imagination
A scenario where the fire continued for 4 weeks instead of 10 days takes very little imagination and would be much much worse than what actually happened.
>Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage
Fukushima would not have had a graphite fire, but we were lucky to not get a fuel rod fire which would have been very bad as well, although likely more limited geographically than Chernobyl.
As it is, Fukushima will perhaps "only" cost an estimated 500-600 billion dollars for the Japanese taxpayers over the next 100 or so years. Unless another earthquake hits and breaks the ice wall of course, which also requires very litte imagination, it being Japan.
Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?
"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free.
What else is the problem? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear?
So a scenario where humans will not do anything to stop a fire? Sorry that's not realistic. Chernobyl's fire was stopped because of human intervention, otherwise it would have taken longer. And again - such thing can't happen in western units.
Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better, even if there was fuel rod fire, due to... better plant design...
Fukushima costs are blown out because Japanes govt wanted it this way. Just like JP govt forced long term evacuation even if the doses both during and after event were not life threatening.
"Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?" - like what? Renewables firmed by gas and coal like in Germany? You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime? So Germany spent more, achieved much less in much longer time. And on top it plans further gas expansion to firm renewables. This is not a cheaper/faster/safer way. It's the exact opposite in all directions.
"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free." - electricity for synth will not be free and bess will eat into it's economics. Synth fuel infra isn't cheap either. Using H2 for firming is a pipedream pushed by fossil industry to justify expanding gas infrastructure.
It has to be nuclear + renewables. That's the difference - we already know it works good looking at Sweden and France. Others that tried to follow pipedreams ended up worse
>So a scenario where humans will not do anything to stop a fire? Sorry that's not realistic.
You seriously can't imagine people fleeing instead of sacrificing their lives?
You can't imagine an ongoing war or natural disaster making it impossible to stop a fire?
You can't imagine anyone wanting to sabotage a plant as a terrorist act?
We are very lucky then that the people actually in charge of nuclear power have better imagination!
>Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better
Only in the sense that it wouldn't have spread as far as Chernobyl's waste did. It would still have meant hundreds of thousand dead in Japan, and probably made it impossible to stop the groundwater contamination, leaving large areas of Japan uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Again, you seem to be woefully uninformed, or even misinformed, about the actual dangers involved because you only look at what has happened so far.
The gun was fired, the victim was hit in the shoulder, and the hospital patched him up - your conclusion is "guns are not dangerous". This is the wrong conclusion.
I can only reiterate that you need to look at what COULD happen, not what DID happen.
>You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime?
France is nowhere done spending money on nuclear. They got a 64 bn "forgotten bill" just 4 years ago, it has happened before and will happen again.
The truth here is that France basically pretends to have cheap electricity by hiding a large part of the electricity bill in general taxes, that is not only paid by taxpayers today but will be paid for generations to come.
As for Germany, since they closed the 3 remaining nuclear plants in 2023 they have added approx 3x as much power generation in TWh from solar than those plants produced.
So they could never have reached the same amount of power production by going for nuclear instead. No chance.
Now - one might argue that they should not have decided to close the existing plants when Russia was about to attack Ukraine, and I certainly agree with that!
Countries do have armies where ppl sacrifice their lives, Ukraine's war being a proof, so no, I can't imagine a Chernobyl situation being worse in this regard.
Wth are you saying about Fukushima? It would not have been such a catastrophy- Fukushima is a direct proof that even under extreme conditions of tsunami and earthquakes a proper design leads to better results. And situation got much better after that due to adapted regulations
What kind of terrorist sabotage you think of? Don't be ridiculous. And even if it magically happened it would still not be as bad as Chernobyl
It looks more like you are spreading fear mongering trying to portray nuclear more dangerous that it is. The data is clear. We know what can happen with a twrrible design. We know what can happen under extreme conditions.
France is nowhere near being over with nuclear- but this doesn't disprove my argument. What a nonsense are you implying? What do you mean with a forgotten bill? Germany is spending 18bn/y on eeg and 6bn/y on transmission subsidies. And has still much worse emissions.
The statement about pretending to have cheap electricity is total bullshit and you know it, sorry. EDF debt to ebitda ratio is fine. Household prices are lower than Germany despite EEG. Emissions much better since 90s.
I don't care how much Germany added in renewables after phaseout. I care that Germany shut down nuclear before coal and gas and is planning gas expansion to firm renewables
Germany should not have closed nuclear in general, not because of russian war. Closing nuclear before fossils is a terrible mistake in itself
>It looks more like you are spreading fear mongering trying to portray nuclear more dangerous that it is.
Every country operating nuclear power has rules, regulations and action plans that match what I am saying about the dangers of nuclear power plants.
If I'm spreading anything it's knowledge that's agreed upon by every expert in the field.
Your arguments rest on the idea that nuclear is harmless because the harm hasn't happened yet, and that's simply not good enough.
>The statement about pretending to have cheap electricity is total bullshit and you know it
No it's not BS. I assumed you were familiar with ARENH but apparently not - in short, France decided that nuclear electricity should be sold at 42 euros per MWh, but it turned out that was not enough to sustain the plants and keep them in good shape. It ended with France having to let taxpayers cover the EDF debt and renovations.
Once the nationalization was done, the new price is 70e per MWh.
This means exactly what I said - during all of ARENH, nuclear power "pretended" to be cheaper than it actually was, but there was a hidden cost that ended up having to be paid for by taxpayers decades later.
If 70 is the true cost or just a less bad price than ARENH dictated remains to be seen, but there is one fact we know already - the price for electricity in France is often less than 70 euros. And when it is, the taxpayers in France take the loss.
A similar hidden cost is brewing in Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, the US, and it has surfaced in Japan (bigtime) and Korea.
I want you to study other sources than the ones you have studied so far, and widen your knowledge about the topic. But you are clearly annoyed with me so it's probably counterproductive to argue this further here.
I feel the same frustration but for the opposite reason. I am entirely confident you must be misinformed, not me.
I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.
Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!
A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.
Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.
- nuclear waste is not a problem
Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.
The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.
Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.
Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.
My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.
That's where we should spend time, money and effort.
Nuclear was safe even considering gen2 units which were not subject to all curent requirements. But the biggest impact is supply chain, not regulation.
"Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily." - ah yes. And a meteor can kill the entire earth. What's the possibility?
Entire US interim storage of commercial waste costs merely 0.5bn/y until a final repository is built like in Finland. That's dirt cheap.
Nuclear is statistically safe as you said, even accounting with major incidents.
Nuclear requires least mining, materials, land per kwh - can be proven too and has one of the lowest env impact per UNECE.
It's your choice to be antinuclear but the data is clear - have the world followed the french/swedish path - we'll not talk about climate change in it's current form. We also know what an antinuclear path leads to - both in Germany and even Denmark which still can't reach french emissions and started pissing off neighbors
montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd776a/norways-ruling-party-rejects-renewal-of-denmark-cables
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...
>And a meteor can kill the entire earth. What's the possibility?
Both are a possibility but we can't make choices about the meteors. ;-)
Nuclear incidents due to negligence or malice are many orders of magnitude more likely, and get more likely the more waste we make and the longer we keep making it.
Europe was a bombed wasteland less than 100 years ago. Luckily that was before nuclear power plants.
Have a look at the situation in Sellafield, or the Asse II mine. Negligence has caused problems many times already.
Chernobyl is in the news recently due to drone strikes. Had it been a solar plant it wouldn't have been.
Anyway - the point is that the expensive security efforts and precautions are needed, not optional, and the historical safety record is no guarantee for future safety.
>We also know what an antinuclear path leads to
Not yet - we can hope that it leads to solar, batteries and synthesized fuels.
China has shown that it is possible, which was the last hurdle IMO. Now it's just a matter of doing it.
Sellafield problems are due to weapons testing era.
Asse is an experimental facility without plans to extract the waste if experiment fails. Still, no public was or will be harmed since it's mostly LLW, 75% for medical and research sectors. It has nothing to do with proper deep geological repository like Onkalo. It costed 1bn to build and will cost 4bn to operate for a century with periodical topups. That's dirt cheap considering amount of power from nuclear in that period.
Nobody was affected by recent Chernobyl strikes. The tragedy there is of another kind- damaged outer dome which is expensive and equipment that was prepared to start corium cleanup was damaged, postponing the process.
Security efforts are not that expensive if compared to amount of power
China is still one of the worst global polluters and is expanding coal to use it to firm renewables. It also expands nuclear but nowhere near at the rate of France during Messmer or swedish BWR expansion. Synth fuel is nothing more than an expensive pipedream.
>I am not sure you have actually closely read what I have said.
I am very familiar with the arguments you link to, they are repeated often in these discussions but they don't hold up to scrutiny.
The key mistake for most of these arguments is that nuclear waste is harmless and nuclear plants are safe on their own and don't need to be kept safe at great costs.
Any argument that rests on that idea is not going to hold up.
Just to take one example - one argument presented is basically that nuclear waste only requires a few acres of land where you can place dry casks, then you're good.
Try to find actual scientific and financial support for that idea from anyone else than the author.
>Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:
Early cars were too, for many of the same reasons. Lower wages, worse quality, less safety.
>Spent fuel is mostly reusable:
How do you handle it while it is being reused? Does it become harmless after being reused or do we still need to deal with it for longer than the US has existed as a nation?
>Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:
Low-dose is not what we're talking about here. A kilo of nuclear waste in a van filled with fertilizer is not a contested harm, it's a nightmare scenario.
>And no, solar is NOT free
Building is not free of course but it has no running costs once built.
Nuclear has immense running costs, and they can't be stopped entirely. Even after it has been decommissioned and the company who made the plant has gone bankrupt it keeps costing society money.
I don't really see why you think nuclear waste is a large storage problem. If you don't like that website, and as you requested, here's another government resource so i can't be accused of being biased (the government also made the rules here):
"If we take that a step further, U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
"Spent" fuel these days is 95%+ the same as the original fuel. If fully recycled then nuclear waste volumes could therefore be reduced 20x from where they are today. So that 10 yards deep would be 2 feet deep.
Most costs are actually self imposed. There is no reason for nuclear not to be the cheapest form of energy out there. If you don't like my original website, please see this one, which talks about the "regulatory ratchet". Regulations were increased on a highly profitable (read: cheap) sector until the industry was no longer profitable (read: as expensive as it is today)
I don't see why nuclear waste would ever make it into fertilizer.
The problem with nuclear and your cars analogy is that with cars the data is pretty clear that new cars are safer than old - this is not at all clear in nuclear!
You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
Everybody knows about the upfront cost, but the size and long tail of costs after the plant has been built, or when unforeseen events occur, is largely hidden from all financial statements. So much so that people actually believe that nuclear power is cheap, when it's not.
But the truth surfaces of course - you can look at the financials of EDF in France (nationalized in 2022 with 60+ bn euros in debt), KEPCO in Korea (145 bn in debt), or incidents like Asse II in Germany, Sellafield in the UK, Rancho Seco in the US.
Billions of taxpayer money covering costs caused by the nuclear industry, and not appearing anywhere in any statement of estimates of nuclear power costs. Large, double-digit plant operators basically or literally bankrupt.
This to me is the bottom line. If nuclear power was cheap and profitable, people would be in line to build them as soon as they get approval! Instead, they want money.
The truth is that the industry sees no way to profitability here, except when they get access to current and future taxpayer money. This has always been the case for nuclear power and still is.
EDF debt is 50bn now. And it's debt/ebitda is healthier vs german eon/rwe. Germany is subsidizing transmission+eeg by 24bn/y. I.E. Germany could repay entire EDF debt in 2y... Needless to say in capitalism debt is ok if ebitda is good, unless you think Apple is a failure
Asse was an experimental facility without a plan of what to do if experiment doesnt work out. 75% of the waste there is medical+research sectors. Nobody died from Asse incident nor will.
Most of sellafield costs are from weapons testing era
Vatenfall in Sweden said this because Sweden has already cheap electricity prices due to existing hydro+nuclear. More nuclear without proper demand means losses. Still, Sweden will have new nulcear https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/swedish-new-nucl...
The bottom line is France with nuclear has far lower household prices vs Germany without it, far better emissions, decarbonized far earlier, spent on entire fleet half of what Germany spent on EEG, the gap getting wider each year
you are acting like there's some race that needs to prove things. But the race already ended. A combo of ren+nuclear gives far better results. It was proven in Sweden. It was proven in France
This argument cherrypicks legacy cleanup sites and distressed utility balance sheets, then treats them as proof that nuclear electricity is inherently uneconomic.
The real issue is narrower: new nuclear is capital intensive and hard to finance without long term revenue guarantees, while old waste sites can impose large public cleanup costs.
Decommissioning and waste are included in serious cost models and regulatory funding requirements, existing nuclear life extensions can be among the cheapest firm low carbon power sources, and KEPCO/EDF’s debts reflect tariff policy, fuel shocks, outages, state interventions, and investment cycles. Not simply “nuclear power is unprofitable.”
The honest conclusion is that nuclear needs strong regulation and disciplined project delivery, not that nuclear is categorically fake-cheap.
Aka what I said earlier: you need the ability for strategic long term thinking and planning and execution.
There's no false information there. Nuclear is complex and so expensive that despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel. It's also slow, with building times up to more than a decade.
France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.
It always amuses me when nuclear power is the one area where the left becomes Very Concerned about excessive government spending.
despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel
Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?
Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives
€50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
I'm not actually that concerned about excessive government spending. I just don't like wasteful spending, and that's what nuclear is.
Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity.
There is just no reason to build nuclear.
> €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all.
So you are concerned about EDF having 50bn debt and France spending 120bn to build it's entire fleet but you are fine with Germany spending almost 400bn on EEG alone till now to have far worse emissions and still drive coal? This is your concern?
"No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all." - french households have lower prices vs german ones per Eurostat too
No, my concern is that France will have to spend around €150-200 billion in the next ten years just to keep their current capacity.
I guess that's the reason that they went for renewables for capacity expansion - it's much cheaper to build and operate renewables rather than nuclear.
Those are part of EDF financials. Again, EDF already did Great Carenage for over half of reactors. And it didn't have CFD's for that - only own budget. And it was despite stupid ARENH law that got replaced this year.
Germany is about to spend over 600bn for grid expansion till 2045 and EEG subsidies for the next 10 years will too, be about 200bn (if not cancelled by govt which is unlikely unless AFD is elected)
France downscaled ren deployment plans while pushing for 6 new EPR2's + another 8 if there aren't major delays.
So not only France needs to spend/subsidize less in this period - it'll also still have cleaner grid and lower household prices than Germany in parallel
Now you are just throwing everything at the wall and hope it sticks. You're essentially shifting to a "sure, reactors are expensive, but the whole-system price is lower" argument.
Well, we'll see, I guess.
Yes, Germany is going to spend about €600 billion in infrastructure. That has more to do with electrification than renewables - France too need another €250 billion for grid upgrades until 2045.
As for the "6+8" program - EDF still hasn't produced an official cost estimation for the for the full fleet and the original estimate for the first six (€52 billion) is has already been pushed upward to €72.8 billion.
Electricity prices in France have for a long time been a political matter, not market decision. That's a different approach than that of Germany, so the two really cannot be compared.
I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?
nobody gets a free pass but the amount of damage is incomparable. Most evacuation zones in Fukushima are lifted. Nobody died from radiation due to low dose. Chernobyl became equivalent of a protected national park where animals thrive https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260424-chernobyl-wildli...
Nuclear helped France decarbonize in 90's while Germany still has coal.
EDF profits are closer to 10bn, the 3bn nr is nonsense.
50bn debt with EDF ebitda means it's a healthy debt. The amount is what Germany is subsidizing EEG+transmission each 2 y.
More than half of the fleet already went through Great Carenage upgrades.
It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.
Energy security is something I expect the government to invest my tax dollars in especially energy generation that is resilient to international politics and reduced carbon emissions.
Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
> Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.
> The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.
Not saying they're right, just that this is a bad counter argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.
If you don't know that nuclear plants are routinely shut down in the heat of summer because the cooling water is too hot, you should learn more before opining on the topic.
Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot:
> It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.
No, it isn't a made-up number. We know pretty well when do fishes die en masse, as we have seen it in periods of extreme heat before. The research has been done and is how the limits have been defined.
The impact is 0.2% of annual power in France in units without cooling towers during a period of overcapacity. The statement is pure inflamatory nonsense
nuclear requires least amount of materials and hence imports per kwh. It in fact is one of the best option.
"Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes." - what an inflamatory nonsense. Plants without cooling towers are modulated. Plants with cooling towers have marginal impact of less than +0.2dg if we look at french Garone with 4 units.
It's not like Germany is not subsidizing renewables and building gas plants in parallel to firm them... Entire EEG is already double the price of entire french nuclear fleet...
The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?
For solar I believe it's profitable without subsidies in most parts of the world by now. It's the fastest growing power source by far worldwide and it wouldn't be if it had to be financed by subsidies.
I don't know enough about wind to say either way about that.
But both wind and solar have the benefit of being able to just abandon the plants if they turn out to lose money. Which you of course cannot do with a nuclear plant.
Rancho Seco in the US has had a taxpayer financed security crew for 36 years without producing any electricity. That costs eats away at the profits (if any) generated by the plant when it was operational, but nobody keeps track of that.
The costs are not relevant to the nuclear operator and are not retroactively counted as costs for the electricity, since the government pays.
But they pay with our money. And our children's money. And their children's money.
Well, wind and solar were absolutely subsidy-driven. The difference is that after subsidies, they became cheap and modular, and I hope nuclear becoming modular and cheaper as well.
Rancho Seco.... what an insane story. Didn't know about that. So if your have a bad nuclear project, people are basically stuck with it, unlike replacing solar panels or wind turbines.
I think it's possible that the actual construction of nuclear power plants could become cheap if they were mass produced, but I don't think that's the real problem.
The inherent long-lasting dangers of the fuel and waste are the real cost, and we are still in the first few percent of years where we have to pay for those. In 100 years, the french might be on synthesized fuels from solar and there will be a multibillion budget post dealing with the old nuclear plants that haven't generated anything for years.
Many plants are in the "downpayment of the construction costs" phase and current calculations are made on the idea that once paid for, nuclear is cheap. But that's not true.
There are costs for every nuclear plant that will come due 50-70-100+ years down the line and they are very rarely considered.
The "stuck with it" aspect is what bugs me the most. Once a few politicians today decide to get rich from building nuclear, many, many generations of people are robbed from the ability to make any decision on the matter afterwards. They get stuck with it.
Not opposed to defence in principle. But Switzerland's army has proven, repeatedly these last few years, that they are incompetent. From understanding a multi-billions contract before signing it to selecting relevant technology (drones that fundamentally cannot fly in a civilian airspace, etc).
Not only incompetent: the way the F35 was handled really looks like corruption from the outside. And for some reason the head of the defence ministry AND the head of the army left not so long after that...
I am happy with subsidies that are paid now so that the future can benefit from it. That's what states should be doing.
I am not happy with subsidies that lets people consume things cheaply now by leaving the bill to the future. That's not what states should be doing.
Subsidizing solar until the production got cheap enough not to need any more subsidies is a good example of the former, building nuclear plants is a good example of the latter.
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
I don't know if it's too late to stop the worst case scenarios of global warming yet or if there's still time, but it doesn't seem to be happening anyway. The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts.
However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own.
Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on.
Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
> The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts
Historically, that's not correct. The Montreal Protocol to reduce CFCs in response to the hole in the ozone layer is a perfect example of us doing this.
I realize the world has changed and maybe it's not possible in our current political climate, but we have worked together as a planet to solve these type of global problems before.
>The Montreal Protocol to reduce CFCs in response to the hole in the ozone layer is a perfect example of us doing this.
I can't agree with this, the efforts are several orders of magnitude different. Sure humans worldwide can cooperate on small things and do so regularly. The olympic games spring to mind. Or the ISS.
The Montreal protocol was great, don't get me wrong, but it basically boils down to "Hey you couple of hundred thousand people in a small part of industry, please use chemical Y instead of chemical X. Otherwise carry on."
The effort required to stop global warming is entirely different. It will affect billions of people, entire industries will be terminated permanently, millions will be unemployed, rich countries will suddenly be poor, global trade will grind to a halt.
And we can't even be sure that effort will actually work.
Instead of trying to push with a string (coming up with new non fossil energy sources) we need to ramp down fossils production using regulation, international agreements, emissions trading etc. Otherwise we'll just keep using both fossil and new energy sources.
That's a negative framing and while I'm not going to call it /wrong/, but world population is increasing so of course our energy usage is going to increase too.
If you scroll a little further down on your linked page, you will encounter another[1] graph, with renewable fraction of primary energy production and its steadily falling everywhere but the gulf states.
We're probably doing too little, too late, but my read is actually that we're moving in the right direction even if there is significant inertia to overcome before emissions actually start decreasing.
The US reversed course with the current administration and until things change with regards to that, there will be active resistance to renewable power projects. Because we need all the energy we can get and there's money to be made building out those projects there will still be progress, but it will be done in opposition to federal goals.
That "worst case scenario" (RCP85) was projecting a 5°C increase by 2100; the current trajectory still puts us at a 3.5°C increase by 2100, whoop-dee-doo. The "avoid climate change scenario" (< 1.5°C by 2100) is also rapidly becoming unattainable.
> We've already stopped the "Worst case scenarios"
maybe the _very worst_ ones, but there are still plenty of devastating worst case scenarios that are highly plausible and even more so now that Trumpistan dgaf about global warming or reducing fossil fuel emissions
Since covid I’ve actually become less convinced of this. Yes there were national interests at play and there was a lot of general chaos.
But. The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected. Of course this feeling depends on what your own baseline expectations are.
My takeaway was that if the conditions arise that we all decide to do something about climate change (because of political conditions or because of actual effects) we (humanity) are willing to make big sudden changes
I agree, the world is able to deal with some things. Another good example is perhaps the ozone layer.
Global warming is much trickier though. Covid had hundreds dying daily, it was very direct and undeniable, and the cure was cheap and efficient once it was developed.
Global warming has no clear signal (oh look, another heatwave) and no clear cure at all, let alone a cheap and efficient one.
Both things can be true. If you're truly pessimistic this is the only thing you would expect, and not the other stuff that happened- a globally coordinated vaccine rollout to every country on earth.
Millions of people died when a possible solution of "hey, everyone, let's stay inside for a couple weeks" could've possibly effectively eradicated the virus does not seem like a great example of humanity's ability to cope with imminent global existential threats. The potential solution(s) to the massive brick wall we're speeding towards are far more inconvenient than "everyone just hang out for a minute." It's radical change to everything in society.
The comparison with Covid is also striking because the only reason a global "don't travel too much" solution couldn't work is due to the nature of capitalism. It's not like we couldn't feed everyone. It's just that some people with too much wouldn't gain as much for a little bit. Which is the same root cause of why solving climate change is impossible without radical change.
Unfortunately, I don't know the answer. I'm quite certain it's not to maintain the status quo, though.
>The Ozone layer problem was exactly this: coordinated global concentrated effort.
It was so much smaller though, and nobody really had to pay for it - not with money, not with suffering. The kind of sacrifices made for the Montreal protocol can be done a thousand times without moving the needle on global warming.
From actual use I've not had a "oh shit" panicked moment yet. More like a bunch of "Holy shit" euphoric moments.
So far I feel like I as a developer have gained actual superpowers, and can deliver results that make my stakeholders slackjawed with awe. I love it.
It will last perhaps a few months more, then they'll expect it. Delivering more features faster will be the new normal. But I think system developers, as in people who actually like to deliver new features and systems, will still be the ones doing it.
Fundamentally I think LLM's just change how to make information systems, they don't change who has the inclination to make them.
MBA's making excel sheets that do more than excel was ever intended to do has given programmers lots of work over the years. Such solutions identify a need for a properly designed system and frees up the budget to hire programmers.
If the same MBAs start vibe coding, I predict we will get even more to do, for similar reasons.
I may be horribly wrong, and if the day comes that I realize that it will be the "oh shit" panicked moment. So far so good!
I do genuinely wonder if you’re correct that other people will begin to expect it. I feel I was suddenly able to do stunning stuff about a year ago, and I recall thinking this is nice but everyone will catch on to my secret soon and I won’t be exceptional any more. But 12 months have passed and I don’t think this has really panned out yet. Weaker engineers just don’t seem to understand that they can just ask AI things. Eg the other day another engineer spent like 3 hours trying to hunt down a particular line of code so I asked AI and it found it in like 5 minutes. I showed that to him, but then he immediately got stuck trying to find something else for a few more hours, so again I asked AI etc. It’s very baffling.
There is definitely a learning threshold and it's still early days. Not every developer has found out how to make efficient use of these tools yet. But I think most will, soon enough.
But I think my own clients will soon start to question why some feature takes ME a week, when I was able to deliver another feature in a day or two.
That they are features that used to take months, and even delivering them in a week is a goddamn miracle by 2025 standards, will not be relevant. They won't expect such features to take months any longer, based on what I've delivered earlier this year.
So I think that the past few and maybe next few months, maybe a year, will be remembered as a "happy hour" for this tech as a developer. These are the days that we'll talk about saying "those were the days". :)
I am still optimistic that "the normal" in a few years will be pretty much like it has been before - I'll be delivering features at work and tinkering with hobby projects at home, and the major difference will be a much larger scope and ambition for both.
Direct use of AI is going to be a filter on a lot of people - some permanently I suspect (especially say older people). But perhaps this will be short lived as the interfaces to AI are improved enough that everyone will benefit.
>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
Some agent-written tools and modules are easily the best codebases I've worked with. Documented correctly to the T with various charts and explanations for everything, "start here" guides, concepts defined clearly, and very good Git commit messages.
Naturally you can also have a LLM one-shot a 14000 line PHP monstrosity - it's up to you still, LLM or not.
The main problem is that it'll probably be a waste of time to code anything yourself if Claude is back online in 8 hrs. It's like walking to the next bus stop when you missed your bus - it won't make you get home any sooner.
8 hrs will probably be better spent reading specs or checking things with stakeholders so the next features you let Claude implement are the ones the business actually wants.
Having tried both Omakub and Omarchy I think Omakub is the more interesting approach, and it certainly matches the OP's description - just a set of scripts and defaults applied to a standard Ubuntu.
I'd love to see a bunch of similar projects based on slackware, debian, suse or whatever.
I think most current distros/DE's dump "everything and the kitchen sink" at the user leaving him or her to finish the setup themselves. They stop short of actually presenting a good, unified experience. That's how it has been for ages of course, and Omakub is basically a "distro skin" that IMO has been lacking from distros all this time.
Picking a set of sensible default apps and making them 100% integrated and well documented is just nice. Ubuntu with Omakub just feels more like a finished OS than Ubuntu itself does.
Omarchy on the other hand is as much a distribution as most other popular distributions. Sure, based on arch, but if that disqualifies it then most distros are "not distros" all of a sudden. So I call Omarchy a distro.
I get why it exists and I use it for convenience since I like Arch anyway - but I would actually have preferred a few more variants on omakub, personally.
It's not so much that things are missing (although that too) it's that some choices are poor, some are duplicated, and there's no consistency and obvious "right way".
Do you use gnome-photos or shotwell, and does the system tell you how to use either? Do you use rythmbox or gnome-music - or for that matter, do you use KDE, xkcd, budgie, cinnamon or MATE?
Does the software installation show you how to install HAM-radio tools in the same UI as where you install Spotify or Chrome? Does changing the theme also change the terminal theme? Browser theme? Are useful tools like localsend included by default?
I haven't used Ubuntu "proper" in years, so all of my questions may be outdated, but Omakub certainly felt like a breath of fresh air when I tried it. It really felt like a big step forward for attention to detail compared to any other linux distro I have tried.
Not perfect by any means, but still, I think the "proper" distros should take some inspiration from it.
One should also keep in mind that it has the highest potential deaths per TWh.
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