We know that chess can be solved, in theory. It absolutely isn't and probably will never be in practice. The necessary time and storage space doesn't exist.
Ok, and on the 2nd the price crashes, company goes bankrupt, stock is worth zero. You were taxes on theoretical value that you can't sell at to pay that tax.
For me, a lot of these issues become immaterial if the threshold is high enough. If the threshold for a particular tax is assets over $100 million, or a billion, then the answer can just be "you are totally screwed" and I'm basically fine with that. If you don't want that risk, just don't get that rich.
In Germany I'd say you still make more with white collar, if you have a job. The problem for Gen Z though, is that they aren't hiring for junior positions.
Still if you go blue collar you have to build your own business.
This could be said of literally anywhere except a ghost town, and it's only true in a very narrow sense. The problem is not housing supply. It's zoning, which is a political decision.
Google "Messmer Plan". France built 65 reactors in 15 years as a reaction to the 70s oil crisis, and now the majority of electricity in France comes from nuclear without any significant dependency on fossil fuels. The only thing that we're lacking is political will to change things.
Yep. Once people experience true hardship like having to keep their house just above freezing in the winter due to the cost of energy - all of a sudden impossible things become quite possible.
The only potential issue here would be if the west had collectively hollowed out its manufacturing base so much as to make surging capacity and capability a generational thing vs. immediate.
Coasting on past success eventually brings stagnation and pain. Hopefully the pain isn’t too horrible for normal folks this time around.
The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.
That seems to be mostly because of oil use which is coming from transportation. Electrical generation is dominated by nuclear and renewables. Electrification of transport will help, provided they don't generate the additional electricity needed by burning gas or coal...
That's why I used the word electricity and not energy. It isn't perfect, but still much better than the majority if the world and even Europe. The fact that even the French themselves cannot replicate it anymore speaks volumes about the weakness of the current political system. As a counter example, the Chinese can and do.
In 2024, China produced 8 times more electricity from renewables that from nuclear [1], and the renewable share is growing much more quickly. Nuclear is as dead in China as it is elsewhere in the world.
China has a huge advantage over the majority of Europe: abundance of mostly empty land with a lot of sunlight, it's unrealistic in places like Norther Europe. But I'm not talking about nuclear alone, it was the best answer in the 70s and 80s, nowadays we need a healthy mix of nuclear, solar and wind. But above everything else we need a government willing to make significant changes and make them fast.
Chinese population is concentrated in the East. The Western half of the country is pretty much empty. Lots of sunny semi-desertic/desertic areas, too so they do have a lot of actually empty land well suited for solar (China is more to the South compared to Europe: Beijing is about same latitude as Madrid...) and wind.
And now Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 14 years late. Online but not commercially operational.
Their EPR2 fleet are getting an enormously large subsidy at 11 cents kWh CFD for 40 years and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor online in 2038 of everything goes to plan.
How many trillions in subsidies should we handout to new built nuclear power to ”try for real”?
Or we can just build renewables and storage which is the cheapest energy source in human history.
6-7 years. France built 40 its nuclear reactors in a decade, at 6-7 years per reactor.
Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.
--- start quote ---
Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.
Every single conventional commercial-scale reactor project in Chinese history has achieved completion in under a decade
Since the start of 2022, China has completed an additional five domestic reactor builds, with their completion times ranging from just under five years to just over 7 years. This continues the consistent completion record of Chinese projects even despite potential disruptions from the intervening COVID-19 pandemic.
China successfully constructed six nuclear reactors in Pakistan in around 5.5-6 years each
The actual lesson here is that beyond a small reserve, the case for nuclear is non existent (unless proponents are willing to stop pretending it isn’t about nuclear weapons).
The same Chinese who in addition to wind and solar are also building many nuclear energy plants of several differing designs, have nuclear already as 20% (?? or so, IIRC) of their supply capacity and intend by plan to keep it that way?
For whatever reason, the Chinese are all for hybrid nuclear / renewables - and keeping modern more efficient coal plants in the picture until they no longer needed.
The "trending flat" is by design, they want coal and nuclear as still available fallback, nuclear also has national security benefits for deterrence, the expansion plans for nuclear (not major amounts more, just steady low growth) are still on their table, just throttled back somewhat for now and ready to ramp up as they choose.
So, Wind on it's own ~ 2x Nuclear, and Solar on it's own about 1.3 x Nuclear.
Clearly I was thinking of some other pivot on energy charting in China taht had it at 20% - perhaps current growth rates .. apologies.
That aside, in the greater picture of energy consumption, Wind, solar, and nuclear in China are all close enough to be ballpark ( a little more seperated just in the context of electricity generation )
> How does nuclear, an energy source known for needing to run at a very high capacity factor (i.e at max capacity) help with energy spikes?
It's one of the fastest load-following power sources we have. I think only gas power stations are faster. And no, they don't run at full capacity at all times.
You can't ramp up or ramp down any of the renewable sources as quickly. Or you have to insanely overbuild them.
Batteries help to a point, and there are downsides and problems to batteries, too. You want to be as diverse in your power sources and power source backups as possible.
> Well you better go tell the Chinese that they should slow down on wind and solar, clearly they are misinformed about how to run their grid.
Non-sequitur.
China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. They build both renewables and nuclear. They literally approve 10 new reactors a year on top of all the renewables they also build.
And while they canceled inland
plans after Fukushima, they may still reverse the decision. China is nothing if not pragmatic.
> China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. They build both renewables and nuclear. They literally approve 10 new reactors a year on top of all the renewables they also build.
Not a non-sequitor. They are building out wind solar and hydro at orders of magnitude more than nuclear.
“Look China is building so much nuclear, we should too.” Is disingenuous and self-serving by the nuclear industry since they don’t acknowledge that their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables. If we want to point to China and say we should do what they do, the obvious take away is that renewables are the way to go.
You: "Well you better go tell the Chinese that they should slow down on wind and solar, clearly they are misinformed about how to run their grid."
What do you call this? "An argument"? I was polite calling it a non sequitur.
> Is disingenuous and self-serving by the nuclear industry since they don’t acknowledge that their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables.
China: Approves 10 new nuclear reactors a year. Builds up an extremely diversified power source for their country.
You: You're disingenuous. They are not building that much nuclear.
> their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables.
Please don't use words and term whose meaning you don't understand. By source of power nuclear is 4.47% of total electricity production. Solar 8%, wind 10%, hydro 13.4%.
China is extremely lucky with their rivers and landscape. Hydro is huge in China.
> If we want to point to China and say we should do what they do
They do literally what I said: China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. It's diversifying its energy production.
You, on the other hand:
- Claim that I should go and tell China to stop building solar and wind. Something I never said or implied
- That nuclear build up in China is a rounding error compared to renewables. It's not
- That "doing what China is doing" means to somehow only focus on renewables. Whereas China focuses on all sources, and nuclear is literally one of the country's priorities, building and approving more reactors a year than the rest of the world combined (going from 9 constructions in 2000 to 36 in 2025, 42 new ones proposed, and over 140 on the roadmap, 6-7 years construction time per reactor). And they are busy building nuclear reactors around the world (so, gaining more and more expertise and technologies).
At this point I've said all I needed to say to you.
> Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.
Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon. The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.
Besides that, part of the point of switching away from oil and gas is at least some independence. Europe isnt known for its nuclear fuel supply so now you're reliant on another country again.
Yes, most solar is produced in China but its about as low maintence as it gets and there is still enough knowledge to produce in Europe.
You are right to point out the astonishing developments in Chinese nuclear reactors technology most people are totally oblivious of. It has been standardized, is seemingly safe and far more efficient due to Chinese technological advancements; however you may be overlooking that the ability, the capacity to do that, to do what France did by installing 56 nuclear reactors due to the last oil shock, takes an industrial capacity that does not seem to really exist anymore in Europe to the same degree. I won’t even get into why that is, because it would simply turn into a book, but suffice to say, it’s a euphemistic, polite “challenge”, so to say.
But people also forget that it still takes nuclear fuel to do any of that, which France/Europe has now also largely lost access to, due to the Niger situation along with cutting itself off from Russia/BRICS. That will at some point become an issue for France/Europe, which the “remilitarizing” EU may even make one of its first contrived America-style military adventures to “protect democracy” or some other manipulative, emotive, contrived lie by the lying Epstein, Mandelson, Brunel Class.
Fun fact: Germany blew up its nuclear energy capacity with voted approval by the current EU Commission President von der Leyen, while she was in the German government ruling coalition … she has described that her own action as a “strategic mistake”. That is who is basically the dictator of Europe, someone who makes self-described “strategic mistakes” of the highest order, multi-generational, rippling, echoing, de facto permanently consequential mistakes.
We do, it's not our fault that the electricity market in the EU is such that the spot price is based on the most expensive kWh produced in the zone we supply to. It sucks that we have to pay high energy prices because Germany fucked up their energy policies, or because Poland is still mostly coal-based.
Nuclear reactors are running, Forsmark, Oskarshamn, and Ringhals are still there and producing 25% of our electricity right at this moment.
So we do, and we are getting ratfucked by the common electricity market in the EU that pushes our prices much higher than what it costs to produce.
Poland plans to enter nuclear power. Three AP1000 reactors at the Choczewo site in the voivodeship of Pomerania. The European Commission granted formal approval for state aid in December 2025, including a capital injection of approximately PLN 60 billion (approximately $17 billion) and a 40‑year contract for difference.
Discussing whose fault it is does not change the fact that a statement such as "we do manage quite well to use green energy for heating during winter in Sweden" is quite questionable. The electricity prices ARE high and they would be significantly lower if we had not decommissioned half of our nuclear reactors
> The electricity prices ARE high and they would be significantly lower if we had not decommissioned half of our nuclear reactors
Where is the source for this statement?
The prices are not set by our producing costs, do you know how electricity is priced in the EU electricity market?
We do manage quite well, if you understood the pricing mechanism you'd know what I meant instead of knee-jerking into the umbrella "but more nuclear!".
Green energy is super useful for heating in winter. At this point heat pumps are better than gas in almost every way unless the temperature is well below freezing. So it's just a matter of electricity which Italy and Belgium can get from the current mix of green energy (wind and even solar) and other forms (nuclear, coal, etc...)
Because the continued survival of civilization depends on leaving fossil fuel in the ground. If the transition isn't fast enough then we will have horrible, lethal shortages, but that's still better than the worst climate scenarios.
Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.
The decision to stop using fossil fuels is not tied to the decision to stop one of the sources of fossil fuels. They're divorced.
Stopping fossil fuels requires investments in alternatives, and price mechanisms that disfavour fossils. Absent those mechanisms, closing one source of fossil just shifts demand to another source of fossil, which is exactly what happened.
Meanwhile closing the gas source cost the NL a few hundred billion euros, the amount of money it needs to transition to renewables. Instead it is spending that on US LNG and Norwegian gas.
The field shouldn't have been closed in 2023, it should've remained open until e.g. 2030 and all proceeds earmarked for massive energy transition subsidies. Instead we're just importing expensive fossil now and have insufficient money to meet our green ambitions.
That may or may not be true. But it won't stay in the ground as long as there is money to be made by extracting and consuming it.
Right now all that's happening is the US is extracting that natural gas, and the middle east extracting that oil, and Europe is importing it. Which pollutes more and costs more. Just develop your domestic supplies.
The only direct thing we (the Netherlands) can do to prevent carastrophic climate change is to leave fossil fuels on our territory in the ground. Everything else is indirect.
I know this is an unfathomable concept, but to actually "leave fossil fuels [...] in the ground" you have to stop using fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels someone else refused to leave in the ground means--surprisingly--that fossil fuels weren't left in the ground after all.
And it turns out that we actually live on a shared planet with a common atmosphere; sourcing your fuels from abroad does nothing to prevent climate change. But it does mean that you are unable to secure some of the most fundamental inputs to your economy.
Plus you have no control over the standards for extractions (e.g. methane leaks), and shipping it causes more pollution.
They're actually worse off, and they pay more for it instead of creating jobs and keeping the money in their own economy. Meaning less money for e.g. green programs to move away from fossil fuels.
> That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.
I don’t understand why you wrote this in response to the comment you replied to.
No matter which way you slice it, the UK and Europe using the oil from wells physically closer to them has to be less energy intensive that shipping oil / gas from far away.
What bearing does externalising anything have on that fact.
Economics 101: if Europe taps new wells, global supply increases. Higher supply drives down prices. Lower prices induce more consumption.
We wouldn't just be cleanly swapping imported fuel for domestic fuel 1:1; we'd be making it cheaper to burn more fossil fuels globally. The marginal emissions saved on shipping are completely wiped out by the net increase in total carbon burned.
The only reason expanding that supply looks like a "win" on a balance sheet today is exactly because the long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.
> long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.
That’s not science.
That’s wishful thinking.
We can’t actually know the long term climate-costs of burning fossil fuels.
It’s unfalsifiable.
We don’t have a second identical Earth we can use as a control.
Expending the fossil fuel supply today (months) reduces the impact of global oil / gas shocks to people suffering high prices today.
Waiting for your team to invent new battery and storage technology, and littering the countryside with wind turbines and replacing the entire existing vehicle fleet does nothing to help people now.
You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.
That’s not since.
That’s brainwashing, and it’s not even good brainwashing.
> You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.
What exactly do you mean with "unfalsifiable"? We actually measure atmospheric CO2, sea level and temperature; that's plenty falsifiability to me. And the greenhouse effect itself is not even in question.
Fossil emissions are sacrificing people not just from climate change in the future, but right now from air pollution, too (about 5M deaths per year actually, according to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38030155/).
Climate science wants us to ignore the geological record and ignore geological processes.
A cubic kilometre of lava at 1200 degrees C is enough energy for thirty (30!) hurricanes.
It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.
If you think that the greenhouse effect is real (CO2 contributes to warming), why would human emissions not have any effect? we currently emits tons of it per year and person for a substance only in the 400ppm range-- even if you split a single humans emissions over a whole cubic kilometer it makes a substantial concentration difference already.
> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
No, this is not remotely plausible, because we have a pretty solid understanding of how much heat is transferred from the earths interior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget), and this is completely negligible (and off by many orders of magnitude) compared to the oceanic warming that we already observe (for a 0.5K increase in oceanic surface temperature you'd need thousands of times the total heat that we get from the planet itself).
> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
You're mistaking possible for probable. There's no evidence to suggest that's the case, and lot's of evidence that it's from climate change. In science you follow the evidence, not your pet theory.
> But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.
I don't think you understand either science or ice ages.
What exactly is your argument here? That organic chemistry is all wrong and oxidization is unfalsifiable, or that the fossil industry itself is fudging the numbers to make it look life we're oxidizing less organic matter than we think?
Careers could be very very long. My relative was kicked out of academia after finishing his postdoc and has to work manual jobs till the end of comunism in my country. His career actually started after 60 and he died just a few weeks before his announced retirement at the age of 96, teaching 5 to 6 classes a year in CS department.
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