𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

  • 2 Posts
  • 747 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Nuclear is there as a back up for when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t have enough space for renewables, or you’ve reached the capacity for building and repairing renewables (Either logistically, in lack of expertise, or lack of public support).

    Nuclear is a terrible backup. It’s far too expensive, requires a ton of highly educated personnel we don’t have and is not flexible enough to act as a quick backup if renewables fluctuate too much. On top of that there are very few moments where there is almost no wind or sunshine over a very large area all at once, making it economically unviable to an enormous degree.

    Obviously the best backup is battery storage, which is ramping up in production capacity quite quickly. And it allows far more decentralisation: a lot of homes can be fitted with a small battery pack, which combined with some solar allows them to be basically off the grid. Combined with more research showing PV cells are still up to 80% the efficiency they were designed for after 30 years (suggesting they last far longer than estimated), it seems solar is becoming an ever stronger long-term solution. It’s also becoming cheaper each year beyond even the most optimistic scenarios.

    But even something like gas is a more preferable alternative to nuclear. It’s very cheap and still viable when needing to spin up or down quickly. It also requires less educated personnel than nuclear and most countries have at least a few built already. Sure there’s more emissions, but for those 30 days of the year you really need them that’s still well over 95-98% of emissions cut when compared to the current fossil fuel mix.

    nuclear should never be a reason not to invest in renewables

    Unfortunately it is, because money is finite. And investers choose whatever is most viable, which increasingly is not nuclear.

    I’m hopeful for fusion, but as always that’s at least a decade away from commercial viability.


  • Is SMR a joke to everyone?

    Yes, because it hasn’t really been demonstrated to be particularly viable. You don’t need tons of small reactors, that’s way too much logistical and regulatory overhead for little capacity. And you need way more auxiliary infrastructure and personnel that way, driving up costs that exceed what you save by modularizing them.

    In October 2023, an academic paper published in Energy collated the basic economic data of 19 more developed SMR designs, and modeled their costs in a consistent manner. A Monte Carlo simulation showed that none were profitable or economically competitive.

    In 2024, Australian scientific research body CSIRO estimated that electricity produced in Australia by a SMR constructed from 2023 would cost roughly 2.5 times that produced by a traditional large nuclear plant, falling to about 1.6 times by 2030.



  • They’re not as complementary as you might think. Because solar and wind fluctuate during the day, any additional power source also needs to be able to spin up or down quickly. And nuclear doesn’t do that, it takes time to do so. Worse, because nuclear is so expensive the only way it gets even remotely close to becoming economically viable is if it’s running all the time. And that’s precisely what it won’t be able to do, because solar and wind are simply cheaper; nuclear will be pushed off the market.

    Energy storage is genuinely a cheaper and more viable option these days. I think I saw someone calculate recently that producing the equivalent amount of energy in solar/wind/storage as a nuclear plant would cost less than half the amount of money to build, and even less time than that.

    I think nuclear is cool and fusion is probably the future, but for now I don’t see it making any kind of financial sense.












  • It doesn’t delete them from OneDrive, because they never get uploaded. If you max out the storage on OneDrive, then have a program write to that folder, it looks like everything is fine but OneDrive then deletes it once it notices no space is left.

    It’s anecdotal, but I’ve seen it do this myself.

    Perhaps to clarify: OneDrive folders exist both locally and in the cloud. If OneDrive is full, programs can still write to the local folder (nothing OneDrive can do to prevent that) so they don’t error or anything, but once OneDrive fails to upload the file just goes poof.


  • It should stop uploading new files, and visibly notify the user that their cloud storage is full.

    It should not start silently deleting your data after you save something, especially because OneDrive likes to “replace” your Documents folder as it were.

    Imagine you work really hard on some important document, save it, and then OneDrive lovingly deletes it for you with no way to get it back because you ran out of cloud storage. Instead of, you know, just keeping it stored on your local storage and telling you it can’t upload it?

    Because that’s what it does now. Just deletes your stuff. OneDrive loses you more files than it saves. Terrible product and always the first thing I uninstall.


  • It’s how elections aren’t supposed to work, but it is how they work in the US. If you don’t vote in favour of one candidate, it works out to a half-vote for the other candidate. It’s the inevitable reality of a two-party system, which sucks ass, but it’s still there and voters are still responsible for how they choose to deal with it.

    Not voting for Harris means realising a Trump victory. It’s just how it works in the US, and no amount of principled ideas can ignore the mathematical reality of the US electoral system.

    Also, I don’t buy into the idea that voters are powerless sheeple. Organize, protest, strike, options a’ plenty. But Americans are apathetic and don’t care enough to realise actual change. And it’s clearly possible, given the track record of several leading human rights activists in the US. But it is hard, and people don’t even bother trying something if it looks hard.