You seem to be misunderstanding friend.

I’m all for building as much wind, hydro, and solar power as possible. It is the cheapest option.

I’m not arguing against that.

People here seem to think that money spent on nuclear is money NOT spent on Wind/Solar/Hydro/Storage/etc as if there’s a fixed budget for all energy transition projects. That’s not the situation.

Insurance and financial institutions are losing big money on climate change disasters, and they are getting data from their actuaries and climate scientist, saying it’s going to get massively worse. There is rapidly growing interest from “big money” private sector investors, In any technology that might solve the climate crisis.

There’s more money investors wanting invest in wind, solar, or hydroelectric projects, than there are projects to invest it. The limiting factor isn’t money.

Believe me, no one would be happier than me to be proven wrong that we can build enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric to get off a fossil fuels by 2050.

But if you extrapolate the current data and the current trend lines, they don’t come anywhere close.

If we also invest in nuclear, we come closer.

It’s not a question of viability it a question of time.

Can we replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar power only? Absolutely.

Can we do it by 2050? Not without a miracle.

From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.

There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order and it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.

At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 months so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.

People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.

But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital with non-energy related investments and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.

Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.

Solar has been growing exponentially for the past decade or so, wind has not. Wind has run into supply chain limitations on rare earth metals such as neodymium and isn’t growing exponentially anymore.

It’s doubtful that solar will continue growing exponentially for the next 20 years but even if it does, that only gets us to the point of enough capacity to displace the ~17.9 PWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023.

To get off of fossil fuels we need to change everything else that’s burning fossil fuels too. That means every vehicle replaced with an EV, every gas furnace replaced with a heat pump. As we do that it’s going to 2-3x electricity demand.

The world burned 140 PWh worth of fossil fuels in 2023, and we only generated 1.6 PWh from solar power. That 1.6 is up from 1.3 PWh in 2022. A lot of that 140 PWh was wasted heat energy so we don’t need to get that high, but we still need to generate something in the area of 60-90 PWh of electricity annually to eliminate fossil fuels.

~4/5th of our energy still comes from fossil fuel, we have a long f’ing way to go. Even with the current exponential growth of solar we don’t get off of fossil fuels within 20 years, and that’s assuming global energy demand doesn’t increase.

Don’t take my word for it. Extrapolate the data yourself. Your rose coloured glasses aren’t helping.

We can’t manufacture and install enough solar farms and storage to get us off of fossil fuel within 20 years and more importantly available investment capital isn’t the limiting factor.

Investments in nuclear power are not taking money away from investments in solar.

We can do both, and it gets us off fossil fuels sooner.

It’s not quite as crazy as it seems. The older/larger floppy disk formats were more reliable due to their lower track density.

There was more surface area per byte of data. The old floppy disks could be written once and read for years in harsher environments. New floppy disks we more prone to failure after a few years.

Yes that’s correct.

To be more clear, nuclear waste is only a small percentage of the hazardous waste we’ve been disposing of by permanently burying it.

Yes. Nuclear waste is tiny. That’s the point.

Nuclear isn’t the only hazardous waste we dispose of burying it.

We’re disposing of tonnes of hazardous waste daily. Only a tiny percentage of that is nuclear waste.

Yet for some reason everyone loses their mind about the comparatively tiny amount of hazardous waste from nuclear and no one cares about the significantly larger about of hazardous waste from the eventual disposal of solar panels and 100s of other sources of hazardous waste.

For over a century, the standard way we’ve been disposing of hazardous materials that can’t be easily recycled is to permanently bury it. We’re doing it with thousands of tonnes of hazardous materials daily.

A nuclear power plant only generates about 3 cubic meters of hazardous nuclear waste per year.

At the typical sizes we’re currently building them, you need 50-100 solar or wind farms to match the electricity output of a single nuclear reactor.

When we eventually dispose of the solar panels from those farms we literally end up with more toxic waste in heavy metals like cadmium than the nuclear power plant produced.

No solution is perfect.

But contrary to the propaganda, nuclear is one of our cleanest options.

Google isn’t the only tech giant that needs smashing into pieces, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, all need to be broken up. The tech industry shouldn’t be dominated by a few companies.

Oh please.

The evidence for Szabo is circumstantial at best. I’ll give you he has the skills and experience and was working on digital currency at the time.

But Szabo was just one of hundreds of people working on different ideas related to digital currency around the time Bitcoin was released.

And how many hundreds of people developed their own cryptocurrency after getting the idea from the Bitcoin whitepaper? Clearly he not the only “person on earth who had both the skills and experience”.

Not to mention Szabo has repeatedly denied being Satoshi.

They’re was never any evidence of google’s wrongdoing, the accusation came from former MS edge developers:

https://www.developer-tech.com/news/edge-developer-google-youtube-chrome-browsers/

Officially Google denied it:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-intern-claims

You may be right, this could have been MS couldn’t make a better browser and pulled the plug, and the devs just blamed google.

I’m not defending Microsoft… but if we’re going to go after a tech company for leveraging their other assets to give themselves an unfair advantage can we also go after Google?

In the first releases of Edge, Microsoft tried to build a new web browser from scratch to compete with Google Chrome. By google kept changing YouTube’s code so that videos would playback janky on Edge. Microsoft eventually gave up trying to fix for YouTubes ongoing changes and now Edge is based on Chromium (the same open source web browser maintained by Google, that chrome os built on). Google leveraged YouTube to prevent completion from Edge.

And now Google is blocking ad blocking extensions so that users are forced to see more google ads in their browser.

Microsoft’s has leveraged their unfair advantage to get a little over 5% market share.

Google’s leveraged their unfair advantage to get 66% of the market.

Both companies need a hard smack down, but I want to see Google taken down too.

Just beware, sometimes the AI suggestions are scary good, some times they’re batshit crazy.

Just because AI suggests it, doesn’t mean it’s something you should use or learn from.

They call it jailbreak because this is an issue of freedom

I support your position and the right to repair, but that’s not the origin of the term jailbreak in the context of computing.

The term jailbreaking predates its modern understanding relating to smartphones, and dates back to the introduction of “protected modes” in early 80s CPU designs such as the intel 80286.

With the introduction of protected mode it became possible for programs to run in isolated memory spaces where they are unable to impact other programs running on the same CPU. These programs were said to be running “in a jail” that limited their access to the rest of the computer. A software exploit that allowed a program running inside the “jail” to gain root access / run code outside of protected mode was a “jailbreak”.

The first “jailbreak” for iOS allowed users to run software applications outside of protected modes and instead run in the kernel.

But as is common for the English language, jailbreak became to be synonymous with freedom from manufacture imposed limits and now has this additional definition.

This also leads to stupid rules like you can’t change your password more than once a day, to prevent someone from changing their password 5 times and then changing it back to what it was before.

It is, but lead based chemistries tend to wear out and need replacing a lot sooner than lithium ion.

You’re core idea is correct though, there’s a lot of battery techs that are cheaper / better when size and weight are irrelevant.

Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.

Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years

Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.

The time between each doubling of output is increasing.

It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.

It was exponential for a while but it’s slowing down in the last decade or two.

It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.

It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.

If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.

Such an incredibly misleading article.

1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.

Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.

PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.

Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.

At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.