You're citing some blog copy that doesn't link to or correctly cite its sources that seems to be trying to sell shady psychological services.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if AI played a part in constructing this post. For example, what's up with the last paragraph about Nicholas Carr? It says "Dr Nicholas Carr", but he's a journalist who doesn't seem to have a doctorate degree and I cannot find any indication he refers himself as "Dr Nicholas Carr", did an AI hallucinate this? Also Carr has a bone to pick with the Internet, not AI, his book was written back in 2011.
The article says that "in one possible scenario included in the agency’s report to Congress, the I.R.S. could fill out tax returns with information it already has." We can only hope :)
That isn't why in the slightest. It isn't about the number of alternatives, it's entirely to do with the cost of producing electricity for the different alternatives.
When there's plenty of wind, then wind power is obviously cheap. Sometimes running into the negative, as in: we get paid to use it.
This causes _everyone_ to lose money.
When there's no wind in large areas, industry power draw (which is most of it by a wide margin), means that something else has to produce the missing energy. If too little electrical energy is produced, the entire grid breaks down, so there's a scuttle to either disconnect sub-nets or add more production.
The production that is added is more expensive. This sets the market price.
Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous.
Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow.
You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks.
But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous.
You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion.
If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think.
We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea.
Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances.
The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.
It’s not poo pooing fears to highlight that the cost is 2bn/year for decommission a weapons reprocessing plant and that in no way provides information about commercial nuclear power. It is economically viable considering it’s still cheaper despite not having any meaningful investment to reduce costs.
The fears I was talking about were around the toxicity and dangers, not the cost. While we're on costs why didn't you highlight the $7B/yr for Fukushima or the $68B to date for Chernobyl? What about the 200% cost overruns and scandals involving Virgil C. Summer & Vogtle in the US that have cost tax/ratepayers tens of billions? $2B/yr doesn't look that bad in comparison.
The point is that while all these costs may seem eye watering & renewables do indeed not have that problem directly (they can have their own set of cost and ecological problems indirectly through requiring storage), they are actually comparatively tiny & it's only because fossil fuels externalize most of their cost that we don't have an easier baseline to compare against. There's varying estimates for how much climate change is costing us but some metrics have it at ~1T/year alone (not including all the healthcare costs associated with pollution from burning fossil fuels as those are even harder to estimate).
As for why I ignore Fukushima or Chernobyl, that's because for the next phase of scaling out nuclear, we shouldn't really be building LWRs. We should be building nuclear designs that fail safe (e.g. nuclear reactors). Even still, LWR designs being built today are much much safer than the designs used for Chernobyl and Fukushima. As for cost overruns and scandals, I can't really comment on them as I don't know any details except to say that cost overruns and scandals are not unique to large scale nuclear projects. Solar has it's own share of problems where grid operators are struggling with rooftop solar (see the political battle in California) & figuring out how to handle the variability of solar plants since we still don't really have scalable storage solutions (arguably maybe we should be mandating that some solar and wind plants have onsite storage to more accurately represent the cost of adding those renewables to the grid & is an externality frequently ignored when discussing the cost of solar/wind).
Don't get me wrong - solar & wind are great. If we can do more of it then great. I just think at a fundamental technological level it can't scale as quickly to replace fossil fuel dependency in the energy grid on any timescale that matters for us addressing global warming.
The cost is not relatively tiny, it's actually quite significant. Nuclear at least allows for better accountability & management of the waste it produces. Unfortunately accountability & management has been rather poor, diminishing the potential.
I am not entirely sure what your point is about reactor design. Did you mean we shouldn't build more BWRs? Agreed. If you mean we should focus on HWR like CANDU or experimental molten salt reactors, those have their downside. Deuterium is expensive & molten salt is corrosive & not commercially proven. If you really want nuclear you go with off the shelf proven designs like AP1000, but even then there are hurdles to build these as these boondoggle projects have shown. Yes every sector has scandal, but massive rate hikes & tens of billions in overruns is atypical & undermines the promise of what nuclear was sold as to those ratepayers.
Nuclear is go big or go home, and we can't socialize losses & liability while privatizing profit. Nuclear is also unattractive to the commercial market due to long-term ROI & project/liability risks. Effectively it needs to be a massive energy independence program funded by the government. I don't see that happening though.
You can do more power optimizations with efficiency cores than the performance cores. There are power tradeoffs to get max perf. You can significantly reduce vcore if your max frequency is much lower. Cache is also power hungry & takes up space.
Early indications are that Zen 4c actually requires significantly higher voltage for the same clock speed as plain Zen 4 cores (though still a lower voltage than Zen 4 at speeds far beyond the reach of Zen 4c). All the savings AMD gets by targeting ~3.5GHz peak rather than 5+ GHz has been put into shrinking the core area: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/653961282
5c should be the same as 5 but with a smaller cache (unlike Core vs Atom distinction in Intel CPUs). I'd rather have a CPU full of 5c than a mix of 5 and 5c.
How? Jobs did have some original ideas, but it's not like NeXT was a resounding success on its own that toppled Apple & Microsoft. Being the ideas guy is different than the implementation guy, and in some cases he was neither.
Why couldn't he just turn NeXT into the wealthiest company in the world? Perhaps you could say that's what he did by getting bought out by Apple, but Ives was an Amelio hire, and hard to say Ives wasn't as pivotal to Apple's future success as Jobs.
Jobs takes a lot of the credit, and some of it is due, but there were many other people involved in bringing him back on board & the transition back to profitability/dominance.
Well, that's not entirely fair, Jobs was credited for making a huge partnership with Microsoft that saved Apple. That deal would never have happened if any other person in the world tried to make it happen.
It literally had to be Jobs and Gates making that deal, and it worked. Apple got enough money to launch its iMac which made it enough money to then launch its store, which gave it enough money to finally turn real profits.
I know a lot of people were involved in that happening, but Steve Jobs was literally the only person in the world who had the cult following to execute on his vision. Any other leader would have been met with resistance and skepticism every step of the way.
Am I suggesting that SJ should make $200mil for that effort, no, but I am suggesting that if you're making an argument against CEO impact, SJ is probably the worst example as I'm 100% sure that man was the only one who could have turned Apple around.
Some of the Microsoft deal was due to the antitrust pressures MSFT was under in the late 90's, seeing Apple go under would've removed any deniability and put them under the microscope.
That said it's hard to argue that Jobs didn't have vision, or wasn't at least able to find people who had vision & talent, even if he was a polarizing figure.
> Why couldn't he just turn NeXT into the wealthiest company in the world?
That is a great question. The answer is complicated, but the primary reason is he screwed up. The machine was way too costly for its target market. By then, he'd run out of money. But he'd learned a great deal. He then bought control of Pixar, and turned that from failure into a massive powerhouse. Then he went back to Apple.
There's a book about it, "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs".
Jobs made three fortunes: Apple II, Pixar, and then Apple again. Just one of those would be a spectacular achievement, but he did it 3 times.
Would Apple have become one if not the most successful companies of all time if they had all the other people who helped Jobs accomplish this but not him?
None of that is really his call to make alone, upper management & the board also has influence & burdens much of the load. This idea that he's the only man in the room or on the planet that could do this position seems pretty absurd.
Some things are spelled out, claimed or alluded to, then later contradicted. It would be interesting for an AI to analyze the claims and the actions, then see if those attributes hold true, or if God is a contradictory character, one that is still hard to define with absolutes.
I think God makes sense as a character, but only if you see him as a "person" with desires, flaws and some character development. If you treat him like some omnipotent, omniscient, unchanging, immutably good being (as some religious people like to do) you get into lots of contradictions
I'd be curious to hear about some of these contradictions. I've seen giant lists floating around, but after checking into some of them they seem spurious at best. I'm curious to know if you have something concrete?
It's hard to know what you find spurious. Much of religious apologetics involves dismissing every criticism as spurious. Given that multiple authors over long periods of time wrote these religious texts, contradictions do arise, or at least conflicting themes.
I can think of counter examples to the attributes you gave earlier, but if you've read the texts and have not found them yourself, it is unlikely any logical or philosophical analysis would be persuasive.
You don't need any giant lists - earlier someone mentioned the love for widows and children, and yet this didn't seem to apply to random peoples who at a given time were the enemies of Israelites and were ordered to be murdered, including all women and children, no exceptions.
Let's say a treatment kills 9 out of 10 people. Maybe those 9 were terminally ill & that's why they died, but maybe the company was just lying and their treatment was doing nothing or killing people more quickly. How do you determine that? When would you shutdown a "death factory"? Would you require mandatory disclosures of the death rate & risks, or could a company hide those facts from prospective patients, only talking about the patients who survived? If they can't show efficacy, should they still be allowed to sell to patients?
I think the ideal of regulation is to try to remove the guesswork & expertise required for the end user to do due diligence. It's not perfect, but at least some minimum level of regulation, such as mandatory efficacy disclosures, would be needed.
