Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.

So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.

NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.

Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.

And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.

If he’s running again in 52 years, then I’ll have serious questions about what I know about the fundamental rules of life on this planet, so maybe he should be president again at that point.

That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.

The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.

There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.

I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.

For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.

So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.

As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.

It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.

Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.

I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.

Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).

But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.

Anakin Skywalker was able to build this in a desert with scraps!

They’ve got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola’s fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder’s indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They’ve had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors’ cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn’t actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They’ve gone after India’s Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn’t led to anything actually uncovered. India’s security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani’s founder is close to India’s Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn’t enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn’t really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don’t have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

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Unions are legal in all occupations.

One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.

There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.

But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).

The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn’t necessarily come from fusion. There’s all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don’t think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.

So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.

In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

She absolutely is a trash person. I agree. I’m not defending her to be clear.

People who let their dogs off leash in public are assholes and deserved to be confronted and shamed. She was a piece of shit well before their conversation started.

to the downvote brigade I highly recommend go watch the full video and decide for yourself

Yeah it’s obvious she’s weaponizing the police against a guy who she doesn’t like, by knowingly playing directly into the “police will overreact against a black guy” card, and faking panic in her voice. This is violent escalation to a non-violent situation. The faked panic is straight up sociopathic.

People who don’t leash their dogs are assholes, and his response to that was relatively tame.

I don’t see how you can watch this and respond the way you have, unless you’re also the type of asshole who feels entitled to walk dogs without leashes, or generally dislike black people, or are completely oblivious to the social context in which police in New York interact with black people.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.

Why are you sticking with a specific spectrum? You made it hard to read in service of a requirement that doesn’t make any sense.

No such thing as an NDA that allows a spouse to work in the same room, and allows the spouse to actually be on video while blurred, but draws the line at not being able to unblur the video.