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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • So you agree that solar + battery resolves 90-99% of power needs now at a drastically reduced cost and build time than nuclear today?

    I expect that 10% will get much closer to 1% in the next decade with all the versatile battery/solar tech coming onboard, but to compensate for solar fluctuations, you use wind, you use hydro, and you use the new “dig anywhere” steady state geothermal that is also being brought online today. We can run more HVDC lines to connect various parts of the country also. We are working on some now, but not enough. With a robust transmission system, solar gets 3hrs of “free” storage across our time zones. With better national connections, power flows from excess to where its needed, instead of being forced to be regional.

    Worst case? You burn green hydrogen you made with your excess solar capacity in retrofitted natgas plants.

    There are lots of answers to steady-state that are green and won’t take 15-20 years to come online like the next nuclear plant. We should keep going with them, because they can help us now and in the future.


  • If you want more exact details about the batteries that array used, click on the link in my comment.

    The array has a 380 MW battery and 1.4Gwh of output with 690Mw of solar production for 1.9 billion dollars. Splitting that evenly to 1 billion for the solar and 1 billion for the battery, we get 2.1Gw solar for 3 billion, and 12.6Gwh for 9 billion.

    So actually, the solar array can match the nuclear output for 12 billion, assuming 12 hours of sun.

    For 17 billion, we can get a 3.3Gw generation, and 15.6Gwh of battery. That means the battery array would charge in 7-8hrs of sun, and provide nearly 16hrs of output at 1Gwh, putting us at a viable array for just 8hrs of sun.

    Can solar + battery tech do what nuclear does today, but much faster, likely cheaper and with mostly no downsides? That is a clear yes. Is battery and solar tech advancing at an exponential rate while nuclear tech is not? Also a clear yes.

    Nuclear was the right answer 30 years ago. Solar + battery is the right answer now.


  • My math assumes the sun shines for 12 hours/day, so you don’t need 24 hours storage since you produce power for 12 of it.

    My math is drastically off though. I ignored the 12 hrs time line when talking about generation.

    Assuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw solar production and 12Gw of battery to supply 1Gw during the day of solar, and 1Gw during the night of solar, to match a 1Gw nuclear plants output and “storage.”

    Seeing as those recent projects put that nuclear output at 17 bil dollars and a 14 year build timeline, and they put the solar equivalent at roughly 14 billion(2 billion for solar and 12 billion for storage) with a 2 - 6 year build timeline, nuclear cannot complete with current solar/battery tech, much less advancing solar/battery tech.


  • Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.

    So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.

    Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.

    So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.

    This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.

    The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.

    For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.

    So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.

    For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.

    So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.

    The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.

    So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.







  • Email was invented in 1983.

    It was revolutionary, the utter example of a “killer app” that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.

    Now there are 6,000,000,000 “killer” apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit “install” and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.

    Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an “all in one” solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn’t want things easy.

    Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.



  • Yes, they are protected by “qualified immunity,” a supreme court invention that says that cops cannot be individually prosectuted when engaged in reasonable, legal acts. It also has a fun carve out that says that cops can do brutally, blatently wrong things as long as they don’t “clearly” know they were wrong, I.e no one had been sued or arrested for doing that literal, specific thing.

    Its a shit ruling, and why cops in the US are so brutal. Literally no personal consequences for their actions.

    This cop was clearly agitated and took a simple, non threatening “shush” gesture as a reason to brutalize a 71 old, non violent man. He will not likely not be fired, but also won’t face a lick of jail time for assualt. The likely soon to be dead mans family, who will lose their relative specically because of his actions, will make some number of millions in a few years from a lawsuit from the city that will admit no fault. The cop will go on brutalizing and murdering others needlessly.

    Thats the norm for this, and Trump has promises to let cops get away with it more often.





  • “Free and open source software.” It’s an ethos that says that code should be free and open for people to use and improve as they see fit. The core of it is that if you modify any software that is FOSS, your software must also be FOSS. So overtime the software and what its used for improve, change, widen. Lucky for us, the movement has been ongoing for 50+ years, so it’s a mature ethos whose benefits are everywhere. Most of the internet runs on FOSS. Lemmy itself is FOSS.

    It doesn’t necessarily mean an app is more private, but it does mean you can generally self host, as the commentor said. There isn’t a profit motive with most FOSS, at least not at its core, so there is little desire to data harvest generally. There is also a heavy overlap between FOSS advocates and privacy advocates, so they tend to be more privacy conscious via local data storage or encryption.