𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Except people will just purchase their own solar, because it’s cheaper than getting nuclear power from a battery. They won’t wait for demand to catch up, they’ll make sure their own demand is fulfilled so they won’t have to purchase power anymore.

    It’s a simple economic rule, if there’s a cheaper option people wi shift towards it. You can’t force people to purchase your power. You can’t stop it unless you ban buying solar, which won’t be received well.

    Nuclear fills a rapidly shrinking niche in the power mix of tomorrow, and it’s economics that’s squeezing it out. There’s no point in fighting that unless you want to pay more for power than is necessary (which nobody does).







  • The problem with using nuclear as baseload is that people have the wrong idea of what is required from a baseload power source.

    A baseload power source’s most important quality isn’t constant output, it’s rapidly adaptable output.

    When it comes to cost, nothing beats solar. It’s cheap, it’s individually owned and especially with a battery the self-sufficiency basically means not paying for power anymore. So, people will adopt solar at greater numbers as the cost of solar panels is still dropping.

    Solar and wind at peak times in several countries already exceed the demand. Nuclear, which is more expensive to run, now has a problem, because nobody wants to buy that energy. They’d rather get the cheaper abundant renewable power.

    So, the nuclear reactor has to turn off or at least scale to a minimal power output during peak renewable hours. This historically is something nuclear reactors are just not good at. But even worse, it’s a terrible economic prospect: nuclear is barely profitable as-is, having to turn it off for half the day kills the economic viability completely. Ergo, government subsidies are required to keep it operational.

    Flexibility is king in the power network of the future. That means batteries or natural gas plants at the moment. Nuclear can be useful for nations without those and with a lagging renewable adoption, but it will be more expensive in the long run. It will also become more important to do heavy industrial tasks during peak renewable hours, so that the demand better matches the output.











  • I think you’d be surprised how poor the general state of education is… I think it’s also in part why left-wing politicians lately are failing to get traction with the lower-educated. They speak in a way that doesn’t resonate, and that’s in part because they’re working with different assumptions and definitions.

    It’s what people like Trump do understand very well, he speaks like they speak to each other. As a result, even if they don’t fully follow along, it makes more sense to them.


  • I don’t survey people on the street, but they likely would be closer to the definition accepted in academia than the mere buying and selling of goods.

    I think that’s optimistic. The average persons understanding of these concepts is very limited. They’d most likely call ancient Rome “capitalist”, because “they’re not communist”.

    That’s the average persons understanding. There’s capitalism and there’s communism, and communism is when you own nothing and everyone is poor and capitalism is everything not-communism. It’s deeply disappointing but that’s what you’re up against.

    So when an intellectual person says “capitalism is human nature”, it means something completely different from when an average person says it. To both the 400-years argument won’t make sense.

    An intellectual will argue that it naturally came about, so it must be human nature for it to arise so prominently. An average person will laugh in your face “because Rome wasn’t communist”. Neither is correct in their own way, but they’re also not going to be convinced by the 400 years argument. One doesn’t believe you, the other doesn’t care.

    Historical examples of proto-socialism or communal living would be a stronger counterpoint imo. Not because it’s more correct in a theoretical sense, but because it more directly challenges the core of the opposing sides argument.