pfdietz

Cline talks about, and dismisses, the theory that iron caused the LBA collapse. The timing doesn't work.

What iron did, or at least was associated with, was a change in military tactics and organization that made the expensive chariot-based forces of the centralized states less workable. But undoubtedly the LBA collapse had other factors, like severe prolonged droughts (which are attested in the archaeological evidence).

This proposed change in tactics happened before iron weapons became widespread, though. Iron should I think be seen as a cope for a world in which long distance trade in tin had shut down.

Making plants smaller increases the number of employees per MW. Standardized might reduce the cost of construction, but how would it reduce the number of employees needed?

Large natural gas plants have about 0.05 employees per MW. Nuclear plants have 0.5 to 1.0 employees per MW.

> I was responding to the thread, which is comparing nuclear to natural gas.

It's comparing nuclear to alternatives, one of which is natural gas. Others are renewables. One cannot make or justify a decision on nuclear without considering all the alternatives.

The page you linked doesn't count recreational horses.

The number of horses in the US is down by about a factor of 3 from the peak in 1920. They're mostly recreational now though.

> The one thing that low carbon grids around the world share is high portion of nuclear (or hydro, which you can't build unless it naturally exists).

This is an historical artifact. When that generating capacity was built, nuclear was the alternative to fossil fuels. It isn't today; renewables are now cheaper and faster to install.

Your argument can be seen as a way to ignore the cost decline of renewables without at first glance doing so.

(As you say, there are hydro-dominated grids with no nuclear, for example Costa Rica, which gets 98% of its electrical energy from renewables.)

The big question in my mind for efficiency figures is whether it's with respect to the Lower Heating Value (LHV) or Higher Heating Value (HHV) of the fuel. The latter includes the latent energy from condensing the water of combustion.

Those projected future savings are to be greeted with considerable skepticism. They are not locked in by contracts. They are the kinds of projections we've seen all too often fall apart in nuclear.

The underlying mechanic here is that cost projections are being used to sell a technology. As such, there is very strong incentive to underestimate the costs. This applies to FOAK plants and to projected experience rates.

So, it's not going to cost $5B? Better inform those building it.

What an absurd analogy. Of course it's worth spending time when deciding if billions of dollars are worth spending on something. It's worth entire individual lifetimes of effort if one can save that much money.

No factory for civil construction projects. Nor I suspect for 300 MW (1000 MW-thermal) reactors. That puppy is getting constructed on site.

One could bring in modules and link them together. But then they tried that on the AP1000 to famously disastrous effect, at least at first.

I call this the "bigger rat" argument.

The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.

The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.

One issue here is that the structures containing the "nuclear island" are just as expensive as that island. Containment buildings are civil construction and are not cheap.

This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.

Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.

It is for 300MW.

> These days, thanks to renewables the fossil fuel input into the electricity is lower.

Also, natural gas to electricity in CC plants is ~60% efficient.

Regenerative braking? Or the IC engine not being operated at its most efficient power point.

> A combustion engine converts less than half of the chemical energy in the gasoline into mechanical work that can move the car.

Much less. Your typical gasoline IC vehicle converts maybe 1/4 of the chemical energy into work.

When asking that question it's a mistake to assume no technological change/improvement. The process that would require the adaptation would drive changes in the technologies.

Didn't he also assume a significant amount of bioenergy, which ended up greatly inflating the land area needed?

This thread reminds me: I need to make a concord grape pie. It's the season for it.

Was one of them Del Monte? They made a bad bet about consumption patterns from COVID persisting, but canned fruit demand didn't stay high, if I understand correctly.

Fun fact: forensic teams locate buried bodies by looking for vegetation that grows above them. There's a lot of fertilizer there.

There have been lots of attempts to "improve" Lisp over the years (starting from the very earliest days) that assumed the primary thing holding it back was the syntax. All went nowhere, since that assumption is false. If you spend enough time to become familiar with the language (which you have to do with any new language) the syntax becomes a non-problem, and arguably something beneficial.

Lisp isn't difficult to read, so I don't understand the question.

This feels like someone who doesn't know French asking "what makes French difficult to read?"

> But luckily Germany saved the world by shutting down their power plants for good

No, the big contribution was the large renewable subsidies that kicked off the subsequent rapid descent of their costs by experience effects, experience effects that nuclear never had.

The hard on some people have for nuclear is incomprehensible. It's a shit loser technology. Get over it.

It's not economical if one ignores the negative externalities of fossil fuels. But ignoring those doesn't make them go away.

Fracked gas in the US is remarkably high in ethane, the base feedstock for polyethylene. There's so much that it's become almost free (there's a maximum concentration of ethane allowed in pipeline gas, so it has to be separated, and the surplus is almost being given away.) Liquefied ethane is shipped internationally, much like LNG, but it's still cheaper to use it locally.

Egypt and the Hittites were now concerned with the rise of Assyria.

All would suffer in the late Bronze Age (LBA) collapse, with the Hittite empire collapsing soon after a string of three drought years about half a century after the treaty. Egypt and Assyria, at least, would persist in truncated form, with the latter rising to new heights of power in the Iron Age.