Bonam

I agree that there are plenty of subsides going on for nuclear. But for all the money that the government puts into this industry to keep it going with one hand, it hobbles it at the same time with the other. I agree regulation is necessary from a safety standpoint, of course. The option of "give back the money and build without regulation" is obviously not on the table, because regulation is needed. I think the main problem with the regulations as they stand is the timeframes they impose on nuclear projects. Nuclear plants in the West routinely take decades from the initiation of planning to completion, not because it takes decades to build them but because it takes decades to get them cleared for construction. Anything that has an extra decade inserted into the timeline instantly becomes almost impossibly expensive. We need to streamline the process so that all the necessary safety reviews and approvals can be done in 1-2 years instead of 10-20, and that alone would likely cut the effective cost to build these plants in half. This is especially important for new designs, many of which have functional/research prototypes built, but will take decades to receive approval for commercial use in Western countries.

Power is cheapest where there is hydro. Hence like 3-6 cents per kWh in BC and WA, some of the lowest prices on Earth despite high labor cost high tax jurisdictions. Labor is cheaper in China but not that cheap anymore, and not for the highly skilled technicians and engineers that are needed for nuclear. I bet your estimate of $0.35 per hour for the average nuclear energy worker in China is off by at least a factor of 10. The average Chinese worker makes ~$3/hour, and workers building nuclear power plants are probably somewhat above the average. Many professional jobs in China now pay wages on par with what they make in the West. I'm just not convinced yet. While you have presented some evidence it is not conclusive. What is the total material cost to build a nuclear power plant as compared to an equivalent power output natural gas power plant? What is the total number of man-years of labor needed in the actual construction of each? How much of the increased labor cost of nuclear isn't actually construction/operating expenses but expenses that are incurred because you have teams of highly skilled engineers and managers that need to be employed for 10+ years throughout the approval/review process before construction can even start? Keep in mind that when calculating returns on investment, businesses must discount future cash flows to find their present value, so cash flows that are decades out in the future are reduced by a significant factor while the labor costs accumulate in the present.

Right, and as pointed out in that thread, almost all the new construction of nuclear plants is in Asian and Eastern European countries. China wouldn't be plunking down reactors by the dozens if it wasn't cost effective. This again suggests that the cost problems dre talks about are not inherent to nuclear energy but just to the political and economic conditions imposed on nuclear energy in Western countries.

Cite! Give me a cite! Here's a cite. ... I don't want cites!

The $24 billion cost does seem absurd (ITER will likely exceed it by the time it's done, making it only the 3rd most expensive object ever built, but your point here stands). That said, it sounds like it will still be delivering energy at a cost of 9.25 cents per kWh over its lifetime, definitely on the high side but not absurd. Other reactors presently under construction come in closer to 5 cents per kWh, which seems to compare well with other energy sources. If the cost is on order of 5 cents per kWh for a typical new nuclear reactor, that strikes me as quite reasonable and possible to make a profit from. Indeed, under the terms of the deal the builders of Hinkley struck, they are getting an exceptional ROE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Return_on_equity

But what has driven this tripling in cost? Did the materials needed to build a nuclear plant suddenly get 3 times more expensive? Is the labor now three times more expensive? Or is it that the company building it has to spend 3 times as long to get approvals, environmental assessments, permits, impact studies, community consultations, etc? Both statements can be true: the government can massively subsidize something and yet still largely stifle the ability for it to be done through regulation. Yep, I've actually built one of those before. But the problem with things like this are they are only useful for a very narrow subset of demand: individual home owners in areas with reliable sunlight. They can't provide the heating needed for commercial or industrial buildings, and not even for highrise apartments/condos since the water usage / roof area is so much higher. Therefore, the relative impact of such things on the overall energy needs of human civilization will be small. On the other hand PV just provides electricity to the grid and can be transmitted hundreds or thousands of kilometers to where it is needed.

Of course. I am no more a fan of government subsidies than you are. When solar is the obvious choice, it will be deployed very rapidly, just like when coal/oil/hydro were the obvious choice in their time they too were deployed very rapidly. Clearly there are physical limits. But I don't see any evidence to suggest we will hit such physical limits before solar energy improves another factor of 2 in terms of its EROI.

That's all true but is a much weaker assertion than some of your previous statements which claim that solar's EROI is simply too low. Of course analysis should be done to determine when and where solar makes sense to install. But, the economics and energetics of solar energy are changing faster than for any other power source and I suspect that within 20 years it will seem foolish to build anything else in any part of the world that has reliable sunlight within a few thousand kilometers.

I've skimmed through the paper. One thing worth noting for the way he calculates solar is that he assumes you need to store 10 days worth of energy. This seems like a really large amount of storage. I would think 1 day worth of storage would enable solar to be used for a much larger % of the energy contribution of the total grid than now, while requiring 10x less storage infrastructure. Additionally, the headline number he lists (4.0) is for locations in Germany with low sunlight and he explicitly mentions that in southern Europe you'd get a factor of 1.7x higher EROI, which is 6.8, very close to your threshold of 7. I suspect that with further advances in manufacturing/performance/longevity of solar cells combined with using them in areas where there is more ample sunlight and considering more reasonable storage timeframes, and you'll see the EROI well over 7 within one decade of today.

There are plenty of conceptual/prototype/researchy reactors that are small like what you are talking about. The same issue that prevents larger scale nuclear from being developed is what is keeping these from being commercialized: cost. The cost is not inherent to nuclear technology but is to a large extent result of the regulatory regimes and politics around nuclear technology. If you look at the deployment rate of solar technology, it has been following an exponential for ~20 years. It's literally the only energy technology that has followed the same pattern as Moore's Law, because it's the only energy technology that is based on printing semiconductors: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/PV_cume_semi_log_chart_2014_estimate.svg I think solar will become the predominant energy source faster than most people suspect. Electric grids span large enough distances in the developed world that pumped storage is applicable just about everywhere in developed countries. And in developing countries which are still undergoing electrification, having electricity some of the time (when the Sun is shining) is such a major advantage over not having electricity at all, that it will still be deployed there too. And, it's much easier in these countries for individuals and businesses to deploy their own small scale solar power to meet their needs than to rely on corrupt and remote and ineffectual governments to try to coordinate large centralized power plants. That linked graph shows deployed solar capacity increasing by a factor of ~10 every ~7 years. World energy use is ~12 TW while the solar currently deployed can provide about 120 GW (1%). A factor of 100 increase to meet the majority of the world's needs should only take 14 years if the present trend continues.

The third map is more or less accurate, but the fourth is not. Israel makes no permanent claims to most of that area, barring some disputes in/near east Jerusalem and some other pieces of territory too small to even be seen on that map. If/when Israel and the Palestinians come to a final peace agreement, the Palestinian state will look a lot closer to what is shown on the 1967 map than on the incorrect 2012 map. Pretty sure Israel understands this and has no interest at all in absorbing the West Bank for this reason.

From what I remember of 2008, Obama's race was talked about non-stop throughout the election cycle, both the primary and the general. Plenty of people accused him / his campaign of using the "race card". Plenty of people to this day call him the "affirmative action president". His race was just as much a topic in 2008 as Hillary's gender is now, if not even more so (America is a country completely obsessed with race, probably more so than any other country on Earth).

Yes, those would be some of his options. What's your point though? I think pretty much everyone understands that PR increases the occurrence of minority governments/coalitions. I think this is actually one of the strengths of FPTP, you get periodic actual significant changes in government, whereas with PR you just get an endlessly shifting coalition which mostly consists of the same entrenched individuals forever.

Other way around, the Sun is a star. Other stars are not Suns (the definition of "Sun" is the star around which the Earth orbits). Anyway, irrelevant to the topic at hand here. All energy is stellar energy Except fusion... most of the hydrogen that exists in the universe was created in the big bang, not in stars.

Except nuclear. The fissile isotopes found in the Earth's crust did not come from the Sun, though they did come from other stars.

That may be so but I don't think it was really possible, any more than it was possible for Obama to not run as the "first black president". Whether she drew attention to it herself or not, it was gonna be constantly talked about in connection with her run for president.

I'm not sure about the roadblocks to increasing traditional generating capacity. Brownouts due to not enough power basically don't happen in prosperous areas, meaning that the needed generating capacity exists, and has kept up with demand over the preceding decades to the present day. If demand exceeded generating capacity and we had power rationing and brownouts start to happen in major cities in North America, I think we can be fairly sure that the demand for additional power would be louder than environmental complaints.

In fact, thinking about the numbers associated with this... US energy consumption is 5 billion MWh/yr. That's 15 billion kWh/day. A general purpose electric car will have a ~100 kWh battery. If all cars in the US (250 million) were electric cars, that's an energy storage capacity of 25 billion kWh. So if all cars were electric, you'd have 1-2 days worth of energy storage connected to the grid (cars are only driven 4% of the time on average and are parked the rest of the time, during which time they could be connected to the grid). This would allow the day/night cycle of solar to be smoothed over, for example, enabling renewables to contribute much more than the 10-20% of grid capacity that is otherwise feasible.

Modern combined cycle power plants can reach up to 60% efficiency while ICEs are typically about 20% efficient. Battery charging and discharging, power distribution, and electric motors are all very efficient steps, percentage wise. So by using electric vehicles, you still consume about half the fossil fuels, even if all the electricity needed to power them is from fossil fuel power plants. But the other thing to consider is that electric vehicles are precisely the thing the grid needs in order to allow more renewables: with large adoption, they would represent a considerable amount of distributed grid energy storage.

Hmm, I don't think that's it at all. Prior to the primary campaigns starting, everyone's assumption was that it would simply be a coronation of Hillary on the Democrat's side. Bernie's candidacy was a surprise, and the main reason he posed as strong a challenge as he did was that he appealed to the more progressive wing of the party while Hillary was and remains very much a status quo candidate. I doubt the gender of either candidate played that much of a role. If anything, the main thing that led to Hillary's victory was her ability to rack up a lot of southern primaries early based on her (inexplicable) much higher appeal to black voters.

There is definitely some truth to some people perceiving the same personality traits in a different light when present in a male vs a female.

It's more fantasy than sci fi.

Well, a little more broadly, the correct question would be "since we've seen so many people lying, killing, robbing and raping we should not trust people"? And the answer is yes, you should not trust people until they individually have demonstrated their trustworthiness.

What amounts of these compounds are released into the atmosphere per kW of solar cells manufactured?

Given that the aircraft in question was able to carry a pilot around at a speed of up to 80 km/h, it could have applications for personal air travel / recreation.