derriz

> It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough

It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.

And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.

> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.

I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.

Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.

- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...

- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...

I didn’t cite sources. You’re confusing me with someone else.

Could you recommend a book or reading material that reflects recent developments in PIE research? I have a few books but they’re quite old.

Is supporting a racist, science-denying, authoritarian and xenophobic party which views Germany's European neighbors and allies as threats to its prosperity going to do so? When has strident ethno-nationalism delivered more livable lives to Germans?

I'm just not convinced with this "no alternative" narrative for supporting political movements which leverage hate and conspiracies. Be honest with yourself and own your opinions and views instead of claiming victimhood and blaming the political landscape for not offering you alternatives and forcing you to passively adopt a bunch of ugly views and positions.

> have been left almost no-where else to go

I’m pretty sure that there are political alternatives to afd’s ethno-nationalism, climate change denialism and Putin-worship

Match in what way? The equivalent number for the EU is about 125 tons I believe.

Yes consumption varies by month but that's not why nuclear output fell by 30%.

There was wide scale unscheduled reduction in nuclear generation this Summer: in Hungary (Paks - reduced to 10% output), Romania (full shutdown of Cernavodă), France (5 plants fully shutdown, 2 curtailed) and Switzerland (Beznau operating at 50% then shutdown). All due to weather (lack of water for cooling).

I clearly distinguished scheduled from unscheduled downtime and am talking purely about nuclear intermittency caused by unscheduled downtime. And even if I didn't/wasn't, your original claim:

> Nuclear works 24x7 on its own.

simply does not stand up to any scrutiny.

Nuclear is also intermittent - ask Europeans.

During January this year, nuclear contributed about 62TWh of the electricity generated in the EU while in June this had fallen to 43.7TWh - about a 30% decrease. The deficit was largely filled by a surge of solar generation as well as burning more gas.

The drop was due to both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. There is no such thing as a non-intermittent source - even without unscheduled outages, a typical nuclear plant spends over 4 weeks offline a year. You need to be able to handle that also - i.e. with redundancy and backup.

Also because nuclear (like coal - the other thermal steam generation tech) requires huge scale to be profitable, it requires huge transmission investment. Contrast this with solar, for example, which is economic to scale down and can deployed in a more distributed pattern.

> Nuclear power plants are expensive, but that's because they are big. For the amount of electricity they generate, they are cheap.

Not according to the standard statistic for electricity generation cost - LCOE which amortizes capital costs.

> They are also quite cheap to run. As far as I know, there is no cheaper source of electricity than a nuclear power plant that has paid off its construction costs.

The are not cheap to run. Indian Point closed ahead of end-of-life because it couldn't support its operational costs - about $31 per MWh - about $500m per annum. Average wholesale prices at the time were around $28/MWh.

I don’t agree. The technical device we use for creating clear boundaries, useful abstractions and managing dependencies in monolithic code is the function/method/procedure call.

The history of distributed software is littered with the corpses of attempts to make the RPC look like a function/method call (I worked for a CORBA vendor decades ago). But these two techniques are so different on a fundamental level they are not substitutable except in the most trivial cases. The compute and elapsed time RPC overhead which makes perfectly good local abstractions completely impractical across a network. And then there are the differences in terms of failure modes, concurrency and synchronicity.

So even a beautifully designed and layered piece of “monolithic” software with a code base costing of coherent and clean abstractions will not be easy to port to a microservices/distributed architecture.

Examples? Maybe it’s true but I’d be surprised. Like I said from experience of living under a number of jurisdictions, none will charge a person with murder in those circumstances. Everywhere I’ve lived, if your life is directly threatened like that, you are absolutely allowed to defend yourself with violence commensurate with the threat.

They may have been confusing or deliberately conflating things with the fact that in most western jurisdictions, you are not allowed to kill, for example, a fleeing trespasser or burglar. This is viewed as an entirely different situation from one where you are being threatened directly with immediate physical violence.

> Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge.

Which jurisdictions? Is this in the US? I’ve lived in a bunch of European countries and in none would you be charged with murder in that situation.

I’ve had the same reaction. We’ve seen this play out in other language eco-systems (Java - JAXP, javax.validation, JPA, etc all ended up with a de facto single implementation) and the idea of pluggable implementations sounds appealing but rarely pays off. The price that Rust paid for this abstraction - which in fact ended up not being useful as tokio is the only reasonable choice - was high in terms of requiring ugly (to my eyes) changes to its type system.

Nuclear in this millennium is not competing with nuclear or other tech from the 1970s - it’s competing with newer technologies (solar, wind, batteries and gas turbines) which do not require 5 to 10 year huge civil engineering works. All these alternative technologies benefit from mass production in factories. While civil engineering does not get cheaper over time - not just for nuclear plant but all large infrastructure construction.

And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.

Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.

It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.

Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind facilities. Generation tech which requires no fuel or hazardous waste handling and storage also has an obvious cost advantage. None of these factors have anything to do with “need to believe”.

Looks like there's contact between the outer diameter of the sun-gear and a surface close to the center of the planet-gear? The link arm is pulling them together and this contact keeps them apart I guess. The rotation speeds are different so you'd need a bearing? I dunno tbh - I'm not sure what the colors represent and I'm not even sure if I'm using the correct words to describe what I see.

Prices would increase making the alternatives more attractive.

Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.

The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.

Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.

Names or evidence. Either will do.

Foreign state actors?

We have government agents frequenting this website to sew anti-US sentiment? Really?

Could you identify some of them? Or at least one or two of the obvious ones?

Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?

The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.

We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.

> €400 gets you a very, very, very low-end new bike, like just one step above “unsafe to ride”

I don’t agree. After my last bike was stolen I decided to buy the cheapest Decathlon had to offer - 240 - for getting around town and there’s nothing unsafe about it. It’s heavy and has cheap components but everything works fine for light city cycling.

This is the case for me - since the age of 4 or 5. I don’t live in the US but have lived and worked in 3 different countries and the only time it was an issue was getting married. Everything else - bank accounts, drivers license, residency permits, employer background checks, etc were no problem.

What sort of C++ project requires general recursion to describe its build process? I could imagine a compile step not terminating - due to some crazy template meta-programming glitch but the build system itself? The output of a compile or link operation (or preprocess or source generation step) has a distinctly different type to that of its input - so I don’t see how a potentially infinite chain of build operations can be constructed from these build steps?

Funny I tried the same and it advised a using searing/smoking hot pan. Which is poor advice unless you enjoy the bitter acrid taste of burnt meat. The Maillard reaction doesn’t require those sorts of temperatures (under 180C is hot enough) - especially as the surface of the steak will dry from the oven phase of the reverse sear. “You were right to pull me up on that…”

Incompetence is one thing, but the aspect of the current leadership that I (as a non-American) find most shocking is the corruption. That is, the use of state power to enrich an individual and his family members and to bend state institutions into tools for conducting petty personal vendettas. Pardons are sold for “investments” into private business owned by the president. Legal “settlements” agreed with organs of state under the direct control of the executive. Granting themselves perpetual immunity for tax evasion. The use of federal regulatory bodies to force private media companies to cancel comedians who hurt the president’s feelings.

The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.

BBQ culture is different in different parts of the world - I experienced what you describe in Switzerland once (bring and grill your own food). Where I’m from, it’s bring your own booze but host is expected to provide all the food. Where my partner is from, you’re expected to bring either dessert or salad - but not booze or stuff for the grill. I think you’re reading too much into some fairly minor difference in etiquette. If you want to experience real culture-shock, try using a sauna in a German-speaking country…

> But of course, as I'm sure you recognize..

I do not. When you say, “what I mean is economic capacity is constrained by demand and raw materials” - that’s a significant deviation from your claim that economic capacity is infinite which is why I asked you about it. I’m not a mind reader.

But even this claim makes no sense with your toy factory example. Building such a factory consumes no land, no construction workers or engineers’ time, requires no energy to construct or operate, requires no human effort at all to operate and all this can be done for zero cost?

Can you point to any example of such a factory anywhere in the world? I mean if this were possible, why would places like sub-Saharan not be full of such factories?

I’m not sure I understand? Financial services and insurance make up about 8% of US economy and 5% of that in Europe. I’ve seen no signs that these sectors or the economies they’re part of are growing in an unconstrained way?

> economic capacity is effectively infinite at this point

This is a bizarre claim?

The total ability of an economy to produce goods and services is most certainly finite. For it to be infinite, we'd need infinite workers, infinite factories, infinite raw materials, infinite land, infinite infrastructure, infinite energy, etc.