Nuclear is really just metal in a big water tank. The cost comes from trying to maximize safety. It can be cheap if we mass produce it. People are pretty much engaging in special pleading every time they declare nuclear to be uneconomical.
If you really believe that, then you’d support nuclear power. It is extremely safe these days and is a much better option than to deal with more climate change. You want more options, not less options, in this fight.
A lot of this dives deep into wishful thinking territory. We will need to spend trillions of dollars to make a pure renewable energy solution viable. People will find out that nuclear is not magically guaranteed to be more expensive. If it wasn’t the case, why are new nuclear reactors still being built and more are being planned?
Germany is definitely rethinking it’s anti-nuclear position. Ignore the viewpoints of the current political group in charge. They are deeply unpopular. Politicians outside of that group are advocating for a return to nuclear.
France is keeping and building more reactors. This is not a “more complicated story.” It is simple proof that nuclear is viable.
Just so we’re clear, it is cheap fossil fuels that made nuclear uneconomical. Solar and wind provide a very different type of power in comparison, and do not really compete against each other. There’s a reason why countries that abandoned nuclear are suddenly thinking about restarting nuclear again (see Germany). Meanwhile, countries that fully adopted nuclear (see France) are seeing no pressure to abandon it.
GM had record sales figures, just before they filed for bankruptcy. The problem with the car industry is that if you’re willing to sell at a loss, any level of sales can be achieved. But that is not a viable business. In reality, too many car companies are selling BEVs at a loss. This will have consequences soon.
Tesla is a massive stock pumping Ponzi scheme that just happens to have a poorly ran car company attached to it. People need to realize what the goal of Tesla marketing is really about. It will be remembered as one of the great investment scams of our time.
In the end, the solution will be to just ban most firearms and make it nearly impossible to get one outside of specific circumstances. It’s the same way gun violence was stopped in every country, and the rhetoric against that is the same broken record for 30+ years.
Eventually, the concept of a “right to mass-murder/terrorism” will self-destruct, no matter how deeply embedded it is in legal the system. Even the constitution will eventually self-destruct if it gets too far away from meeting the necessities of modern life, something it is well on the path to doing so. So it’s time to stop pretending there is a trick solution to the problem, and start recognizing the problem exactly as it is.
People need to realize that the modern church is functionally a cult. It primarily exists to trick millions of people into giving them money. The church itself gets fabulously wealthy while nearly all of its followers get nothing.
Think about it: how else are they affording Super Bowl ads? And more importantly, how is it that they think of buying ads instead of giving to the poor directly? It’s basically the same idea as Scientology, except it is old enough that we accept it as normal.
The solution is to eliminate self-driving cars and instead invest more in mass transit and walkable neighborhoods.
Then you’ll have to deal with Lunar gravity, which may be unacceptable for long durations. Humans may have to live in giant space stations if we want to live in space. And since they can be truly massive, it may be more desirable than what some might think.
It could mirror the economic stagnation of Japan that begun in the 1990s. Very similar set of circumstances.
Yes, that’s the point. It’s far beyond the actual city of Tokyo in terms of construction difficulty and scale. But it doesn’t need any new technologies to be invented to be doable. Just the ability to build on that scale.
This is sci-fi stuff. No one is seriously saying we could build this anytime soon. It will require a radical advancement in space travel capability. But the interesting part of this is that it doesn’t any new technology. It needs only the technology that we currently have, just scaled up massively.
As it is an O’Neill cylinder, the raw material needs will be truly huge. We’re literally building a city on the scale of Tokyo but in space. So we are just assuming that someday, we can move around that amount of stuff in space.
The cheapest materials would be what can be acquired in space without having to launch from Earth. As a result, you’re going to want to build your O’Neill cylinder out of some combination of iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon dioxide.
The last of which might be particularly useful, as it is the main ingredient of fiberglass while also being the most common substance on Moon and asteroids. As a result, you probably want to build your cylinder primarily out of fiberglass. You can get pretty decently sized cylinders, as fiberglass has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. Apparently, 24km diameter is a viable figure. Scale up length the same way, and you’ll get 96km. So a 24km x 96km O’Neill cylinder made out of fiberglass.
That would be about 7238 km^2 of usable surface area. Half that to 3619 km^2 to make room for windows (as originally envisioned by O’Neill), and assuming a density comparable to New York City (about 11,300 people/km^2), you’ll get around 40 million people. Or about the population of Tokyo.
That’s seems plenty for any sensible space colonization strategy we might adopt in the future. And what’s best is that you don’t really need any fancy technology. Just use solar power to power mass drivers and deliver raw materials from the moon or asteroid via electricity. And it won’t be any special materials either. Raw regolith can be made into fiberglass, so cost can be kept surprisingly low. The only question is scaling it all up, which may unfortunately be too expensive or will take a very long time to happen. Ultimately, this is still sci-fi, albeit on the hard side of it, since no fancy new technology is require.
You’re better off spending it on stuff like mass transit and the like. It won’t just all disappear at some point in the future.
You won’t be saying that once the market crashes. You’ll realize that there are much better ways of spending that money. Like far more practical emissions reducing solutions.
Not really. It’s mainly about gaining market dominance on a technology they think is the future. They’ll build them right next to the massive coal plant alongside a million other things they’re subsidizing.
It’s the result of massive subsidies. When they stop, this market will crash like a house of cards.
IOW, this is right-wing propaganda. And given her skin-color, you can add racism to that mix too.
Musk has swatted people he disagreed with. He is the antithesis of a free speech absolutist.