I think the administration's energy density should be extended for all things. Lets take transportation: Can't use federal lands, waterways, airspace or highways unless the airplanes, trains, ships, trucks and cars are powered by the highest energy density (nuclear).
Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
This. Nobody is free, until everybody got a thermonuclear warhead.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
Nuclear submarines were developed at about the same time as civil nuclear power plants (and you could actually argue they were developed earlier or reached maturity earlier). Nuclear submarine power was a sort of ‘killer app’ for nuclear power, rather than a derivative of civil nuclear power stations.
Most of the things you cite, like phones, cars, airtags, can already be powered just off batteries and the electric grid, so the actual source of the energy is already abstracted away.
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
Looking forward to the DoT getting in on this. Cars have to go! Busses trains and bikes only! No other mode of transit can be funded, not dense enough!
We control nuclear proliferation by making enriched uranium (U235) very, very hard to acquire.
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
Why did you interpret your parent as is they were serious about putting nuclear power in every device?
It was extremely clear to me that it was a comment to show the stupidity of the admin insisting that energy density was the right/only heuristic for evaluating which fuel sources to use/support.
Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium. Stuff that’s producing enough thermal energy through natural decay, rather than criticality in a reactor. You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.
Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.
Authoritarian rulers favour loyalty over competence, so it makes sense. This means that you will have people in positions who are incompetent and shouldn't be there.
The tearing down what this admin dubs the "green new scam" is hugely responsible for this. De-funding & clawing back great investments towards the future, investments that would both power America and fuel our industrial base, drive huge economic growth.
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
> China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents.
My understanding is that China doesn’t care about abusing patents they don’t own. Is this incorrect? Do they value patents only when they hold them and enforce them?
Meanwhile in china they set factories on fire because they are not paying the wages. Chinas graphs are as dubious as the sovjet unions and they have used up the working population that drove these economic miracles.
Fossil fuels are more expensive than new renewables and storage. This has to do with intentional sabotage of domestic energy supply for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry by the current federal administration.
Trump literally justified his actions based on climate change being a Chinese hoax. He recently claimed that China has no wind power turbines when they install 70% of them.
It’s relevant because every single time the American green energy transition is brought up, people like you make bad-faith attempts to derail the conversation by going “it doesn’t matter what we do because China will still make tons of carbon”, and this information is demonstrating that’s not true. China is actually making considerable progress in decarbonization, and it’s us— and only us— who are the laggards.
Potentially, but in this case the administration is doing the exact opposite and making it harder to build by adding new regulation (and interpretation) that makes it harder to build new power generation.
Isn't that supposed to be the Republican position? Get rid of all these job-killing regulations?
Imposing bureaucratic offset requirements etc. for renewable generation is the opposite of that. It can't really be news that Trump is a hypocrite, but water is wet again today.
> This cabinet is one of the most impressive on paper cabinet i've ever seen
How can I be on you side since said this without any source. I had to spend 15 minutes going through each of the cabinet members profile (and the ones in previous presidencies). While there are a few people with good experience in the present cabinet, majority of the members don't seemed to have any experience for the job they where hired for
> This is only for federal lands, which correctly falls under the interior. They have a specific amount of land to give out, they want the energy projects on that land the have the highest impact. This is very Elon thinking to solve the current crisis. Helps solve the energy problem, while getting the most kwh produces per parcel of land given out.
That's clearly complete bullshit because for most places where someone wants to build a solar or wind project the alternative if the solar or wind plant is not approved is not a coal, gas, or nuclear plant. The alternative is no plant.
As far as I can tell, coal is middle of the pack in terms of energy efficiency [0] and less than half of the energy is captured as electricity, which doesn’t seem particularly incredible in relative or absolute terms.
Although comparing fossil fuel efficiency to renewable energy efficiency is a bit odd in one sense because while you’re technically wasting energy with renewables, there will always be more tomorrow, at least on human time scales.
When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
Creating and exacerbating a whole host of problems with some idea that an AI-God will then rescue us isn't "impressive" - it's mentally ill. These are the same types of people from the articles about LLM psychosis, except these people are in positions of power so we all get to suffer their delusions. Except for Trump himself who is closer to being the LLM side of the dynamic.
I mean... Us humans have done that countless times in history. Cannons, Tanks, Nukes, Space... One thing history proves is that if one side can develop a next gen weapon that you can't defend against, your civilization ceases to exist.
Every single one of those advancements caused more problems than they solved. We don't need AGI for "AI" to be more dangerous. Just some kind of super trojan would do.
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
The other thing that people forget is that dams, in almost all cases, have a finite lifespan. Both the engineering and (mostly) the silt buildup mean that every dam eventually has to come down or otherwise be involved in a massive infrastructure project rivaling the cost and complexity of building a new dam.
Maybe other people are thinking about different dams, but the ones that were in the news semi-recently for being dismantled were producing something like five wind turbines worth of energy. China has built five turbines in the time it took you to read this comment.
I can't speak to any particular dam closure but there's a lot more to maintaining dams than one might believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUOBdEUqjY (Practical Engineering - All Dams Are Temporary)
I think the administration's energy density should be extended for all things. Lets take transportation: Can't use federal lands, waterways, airspace or highways unless the airplanes, trains, ships, trucks and cars are powered by the highest energy density (nuclear).
Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
This. Nobody is free, until everybody got a thermonuclear warhead.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
Nuclear submarines were developed at about the same time as civil nuclear power plants (and you could actually argue they were developed earlier or reached maturity earlier). Nuclear submarine power was a sort of ‘killer app’ for nuclear power, rather than a derivative of civil nuclear power stations.
Most of the things you cite, like phones, cars, airtags, can already be powered just off batteries and the electric grid, so the actual source of the energy is already abstracted away.
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
Looking forward to the DoT getting in on this. Cars have to go! Busses trains and bikes only! No other mode of transit can be funded, not dense enough!
Careful what you wish for, Ford has played with the idea at least once before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
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We control nuclear proliferation by making enriched uranium (U235) very, very hard to acquire.
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
Why did you interpret your parent as is they were serious about putting nuclear power in every device?
It was extremely clear to me that it was a comment to show the stupidity of the admin insisting that energy density was the right/only heuristic for evaluating which fuel sources to use/support.
Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium. Stuff that’s producing enough thermal energy through natural decay, rather than criticality in a reactor. You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.
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Non-weapon fissile material Thorium is an option.
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I don’t relish the idea of a distracted driver sending text messages while driving a nuclear car.
I bet the crew on the submarines is much more focused on what they are doing…
Authoritarian rulers favour loyalty over competence, so it makes sense. This means that you will have people in positions who are incompetent and shouldn't be there.
Very sad. The Trump's party should not be called MAGA but MALR, Make America Like Russia. They are doing mighty good progress in that direction.
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The tearing down what this admin dubs the "green new scam" is hugely responsible for this. De-funding & clawing back great investments towards the future, investments that would both power America and fuel our industrial base, drive huge economic growth.
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
> China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents.
My understanding is that China doesn’t care about abusing patents they don’t own. Is this incorrect? Do they value patents only when they hold them and enforce them?
Asking sincerely.
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Meanwhile in china they set factories on fire because they are not paying the wages. Chinas graphs are as dubious as the sovjet unions and they have used up the working population that drove these economic miracles.
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Other nations comparable in wealth and power to the US have figured out how to build out green energy at scale.
The US wants to pretend that is completely impossible and we should keep burning fossil fuels instead.
Please learn some critical reading skills.
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Fossil fuels are more expensive than new renewables and storage. This has to do with intentional sabotage of domestic energy supply for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry by the current federal administration.
Trump literally justified his actions based on climate change being a Chinese hoax. He recently claimed that China has no wind power turbines when they install 70% of them.
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It’s relevant because every single time the American green energy transition is brought up, people like you make bad-faith attempts to derail the conversation by going “it doesn’t matter what we do because China will still make tons of carbon”, and this information is demonstrating that’s not true. China is actually making considerable progress in decarbonization, and it’s us— and only us— who are the laggards.
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If you want to remove all regulations, you too can have impressive growth.
I've heard many things about China. "No rules" isn't one of them.
Potentially, but in this case the administration is doing the exact opposite and making it harder to build by adding new regulation (and interpretation) that makes it harder to build new power generation.
If you remove bad regulations and enhance the good regulations, then yes.
Isn't that supposed to be the Republican position? Get rid of all these job-killing regulations?
Imposing bureaucratic offset requirements etc. for renewable generation is the opposite of that. It can't really be news that Trump is a hypocrite, but water is wet again today.
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> This cabinet is one of the most impressive on paper cabinet i've ever seen
How can I be on you side since said this without any source. I had to spend 15 minutes going through each of the cabinet members profile (and the ones in previous presidencies). While there are a few people with good experience in the present cabinet, majority of the members don't seemed to have any experience for the job they where hired for
> This is only for federal lands, which correctly falls under the interior. They have a specific amount of land to give out, they want the energy projects on that land the have the highest impact. This is very Elon thinking to solve the current crisis. Helps solve the energy problem, while getting the most kwh produces per parcel of land given out.
That's clearly complete bullshit because for most places where someone wants to build a solar or wind project the alternative if the solar or wind plant is not approved is not a coal, gas, or nuclear plant. The alternative is no plant.
As far as I can tell, coal is middle of the pack in terms of energy efficiency [0] and less than half of the energy is captured as electricity, which doesn’t seem particularly incredible in relative or absolute terms.
Although comparing fossil fuel efficiency to renewable energy efficiency is a bit odd in one sense because while you’re technically wasting energy with renewables, there will always be more tomorrow, at least on human time scales.
[0]: https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...
When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
Creating and exacerbating a whole host of problems with some idea that an AI-God will then rescue us isn't "impressive" - it's mentally ill. These are the same types of people from the articles about LLM psychosis, except these people are in positions of power so we all get to suffer their delusions. Except for Trump himself who is closer to being the LLM side of the dynamic.
I mean... Us humans have done that countless times in history. Cannons, Tanks, Nukes, Space... One thing history proves is that if one side can develop a next gen weapon that you can't defend against, your civilization ceases to exist.
Every single one of those advancements caused more problems than they solved. We don't need AGI for "AI" to be more dangerous. Just some kind of super trojan would do.
1 reply →
Meanwhile California is shutting down dams and nuclear plants.
The last shutdown of a reactor in CA was 2013 -- https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/reactors/shutdown/ Diablo Canyon got a reprieve and has 5 more years to go.
Dam removals have multiple factors behind them, from pure economics (cheaper to remove than repair) to environmental -- restoring fisheries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_Califo...
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
The other thing that people forget is that dams, in almost all cases, have a finite lifespan. Both the engineering and (mostly) the silt buildup mean that every dam eventually has to come down or otherwise be involved in a massive infrastructure project rivaling the cost and complexity of building a new dam.
2 replies →
> it's a shame to remove existing power sources
Maybe other people are thinking about different dams, but the ones that were in the news semi-recently for being dismantled were producing something like five wind turbines worth of energy. China has built five turbines in the time it took you to read this comment.
1 reply →
I can't speak to any particular dam closure but there's a lot more to maintaining dams than one might believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUOBdEUqjY (Practical Engineering - All Dams Are Temporary)