In all honesty, Grenfell was caused by bad construction choices, materials and political penny-pinching. A second stairway filled with cyanide smoke would have had very limited benefits.
You have surely never operated a website that publishes user generated content. Every available textbox and file uploader will be filled with garbage so revolting that, without moderation, will quickly kill any chance of respectability for your site.
You're missing the point. Yes, if you let randos upload publicly-visible media to your site you'll need to check it for illegal material (or, if you're a bigco, pay hundreds or thousands of other people to do it, because god knows the CEO, president, board, et c., won't subject themselves to that).
If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean "some other people'll".
If you're arguing in good faith you should probably explicitly acknowledge that you recognize that you're using hacker news to argue that a website like hacker news shouldn't exist. Do you think that no one is paid to moderate this site? Do you think that no one has tried to spam illegal content here before?
Brimble said "If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean "some other people'll".
But you could... not do that."
Hacker news and Facebook:
1. Have advertisers (and just standards)
2. Check it for horrible stuff that's "not illegal"
3. Using "some other people'll" that are paid with money.
Now, here's the thing. Facebook and Hacker news are not equivalent in quality or quantity when it comes to how much illegal or horrible content is uploaded to them. But they both have advertisers, a risk of bad content, and use at least one paid moderator to prevent bad content from existing. Brimble is saying that Facebook and other hypothetical services could "not do that", which either means that:
1. The website / service will not exist or
2. Paid moderation on that service will not exist or
3. Moderation on that service will not exist or
4. User created content on that service will not exist.
That would affect Facebook and hacker news. No, I do not believe that hacker news is exposed to as much illegal and horrible content as Facebook. However, it is exposed to some, and it seems like the remedy in both cases is for the website to not exist. I'm pretty sure that if someone asked dang whether they had ever, in their years of moderating this site, seen something that disturbed them, he'd answer yes. I'm certain of it.
When did I ever argue that something shouldn't exist? I only pointed out a false equivalence in the parent comment.
If you want to know my opinion though, I don't personally get enough value out of facebook, instagram, etc to use them at all. So if you were to ask me if the price of psychological damage to content moderation/review workers is worth it, I'd say no.
The reason that the "yet you participate in society" argument works in the original comic you're quoting is that the peasant with sticks on his back is saying "we should improve society somewhat" and the peasant isn't allowed to choose whether they participate in a society. The reason what you're saying is not convincing, and why people keep pointing it out, is that you're saying in effect "a product that I freely use should never have existed".
Let me spell it out for you.
* The peasant doesn't get to choose whether he participates in society.
* The peasant wants to improve society.
Here's you:
* You get to choose whether you use hacker news, and you have decided to use hacker news.
* You think that websites like hacker news should not exist.
Do you see why your argument isn't convincing? Your riposte of "yet you participate in society" could be used for literally anything. You're saying that hacker news shouldn't exist, but you don't actually believe that. If you argue things you don't believe, it's not really a good faith discussion.
> The reason that the "yet you participate in society" argument works in the original comic you're quoting is that the peasant with sticks on his back is saying "we should improve society somewhat" and the peasant isn't allowed to choose whether they participate in a society.
If we're gonna cite the comic, three out of the four panels of the comic do not rely on this, and are precisely about using something by choice even while saying they should be different. The last panel is even more extreme because it's funnier that way, presumably, but the core point does not rely on lack of choice.
The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have seatbelts.
> but you don't actually believe that.
Nice mind reading. Shall I baselessly speculate about your posts while accusing you of being a bad actor, too? No, no I shall not.
Sure, but you chose only the last panel as your witty rebuttal. Honestly, I don't think that the first panel is that off. If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that you're doing something that's a little hypocritical. People see the contradiction and then wonder how strong the conviction and argument is when the person making the contradiction is hidden.
You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?
Let's ask this:
1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?
2. If not, what would you change?
3. Do you use it?
4. Do you think that it should exist?
5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?
> If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that you're doing something that's a little hypocritical.
It's not, though? Else we are all constantly hypocrites in this regard. We may think the electoral system is broken and should be reformed, yet rarely vote for a candidate who supports that (because the current system provides few such candidates), et c. So calling it out seems pointless. We all deal with imperfect information and with the choices that the current system presents, but not others that might exist (or, rather, represent more-practical alternatives than they do now) instead, if the system were different. Prefacing criticism with public confessions when it's not very relevant is just a waste of space, and is stating the obvious.
> You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?
The "something" being improved would be worker protections, essentially. Publishing other people's stuff would probably require human review of it all. Given that AFAIK publishing houses aren't inundated with tsunamis of abusive content, I don't think that level of review is a problem in practice, as far as being abusive to the people doing the work—rather, it's the fact that abuse gets through with some regularity, that draws it in the first place. What's done now with review of user-posted online content clearly is hurting people, and it's the way certain businesses operate that are causing the problem.
If you asked me to draft legislation for this, I'd at least consider a carve-out for very small (low head count) operations. That's already super common in all kinds of business and, specifically, worker protection, regulations.
> 1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?
It doesn't seem to be a significant part of the problem, no, but I'd happily lose it in the name of reforming social media (=publishers with terribly lax submission and go-to-print standards) generally.
> 2. If not, what would you change?
Oh man. Nothing related to this, actually. Probably put in better poster-identity-tracking capabilities so it's easier to remember when you've already been down an unproductive garbage-thread with someone, or watched someone else do it (I do not have present company in mind here, to be clear) and over time people prone to creating those stop drawing replies at all and hopefully go away. There's a lot of inside-the-rules shitty posting that can't easily be user-policed right now, as it is on some other sites. I get the motivation behind weakening poster identity across threads, but I think it's beyond clear that it does more harm than good, now. Posters I read elsewhere today on HN, who were wondering how some subreddits can see HN as a cesspit: this is a big part of why.
The main downside is that meta-discussion about who's what kind of poster is low-value noise, but norms around here do an OK job of policing worse than that (provided the content being policed follows a clear pattern), so I think it'd work out OK. Just allowing personal tags for users, maybe with color-coding (visible only to the tagger) for posts, would go a long way. Some kind of hide-user functionality might help too, though it'd take some thought to make it work OK with HN's threading. Probably have to hide entire sub-trees they're at the root of, but I've definitely seen users for whom doing that would strictly improve my reading experience and I wouldn't miss a thing worth reading.
> 3. Do you use it?
LOL.
> 4. Do you think that it should exist?
Again, I'm not sure the entire category of thing is, fundamentally, not a crazy thing to bring into the world. It's like having an open email relay then trying to police messages passing through. Clearly insane. But, also again, most of the harm seems to kick in at scale. So, I dunno, maybe.
> 5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?
Chiefly in size. Fewer users, fewer employees, way less visual or auditory media to evaluate as a percentage of posts (I'm counting links, or it'd be zero). Arguments in favor of one and not the other are purely the practical sort—what's doing harm in practice, and how do you narrow in on that as specifically as possible—not the iron-clad-pure-reason sort; but, again, that's a pretty common approach with this kind of thing, for good reason.
> The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have seatbelts.
This is more akin to posting from an iPhone and saying phones shouldn't exist.
If someone wrote an op-ed saying they thought newspapers should be abolished, including some amount of explanation for why, sent it to the NYT, and the NYT published it, would you think that's slam-dunk proof that the author of the op ed is lying?
You may also be surprised to find out I'd prefer much more bike- and walking-friendly city planning, even to the point of making it harder to drive places, while in fact I drive almost everywhere.
Dealing with the current reality does not prevent one from advocating something else. Am I the one taking crazy pills, thinking that's super-obvious?
It's possible to make the case that you need to drive to get somewhere. Recreation is an entirely different matter. You don't need to read the New York Times. You don't need to read or post on Hacker News, either. You could go your entire life without these things at very little personal cost. In fact, it costs your attention to be doing these.
The fact that you supposedly hold such a strong position as saying 'this platform shouldn't exist' when the cost to you for not using this platform is minimal makes very little sense to me. For the example of a phone, it's not entirely incongruent for someone who's already bought an iPhone to be upset with Apple, and if they generally wish to use a phone, other companies might not be much better. But if somehow they get the notion that phones or smartphones shouldn't exist at all and continued using them, that doesn't make sense. I know people who get around fine without smartphones. If somebody really thought smartphones shouldn't exist yet continued using them, I question the strength of their convictions, and am more inclined to believe they hold their position more for the value of controversy than genuine belief.
I think what's twisting people up is that I'm advocating a position that might (maybe) threaten this site if it became more popular, but I'm not advocating that position because I don't like using HN. I'm not even advocating the position because I don't like Facebook's site or functionality. The two things are hardly connected, except that the harmful part of it may be (as advocates of these services typically claim) necessary for them to operate as they currently do.
I object to the idea that we have to psychologically wreck some workers. No, Facebook (and Twitter, et c.) do, to stay in business, evidently. We don't have to. We could say they aren't allowed to do that anymore, as we have with other worker safety issues in the past. We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm operations and cases in which that kind of work really is something resembling necessary (police work, say). There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that similar worker protection regulations deal with those sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a problem any other time), I'd personally be OK losing HN over that, sure.
> I'm advocating a position that might (maybe) threaten this site
You seem to be advocating a position that content moderation, and services that rely upon it, should not exist. I'm not sure why Hacker News would somehow be an exception to this, so you seem to be advocating this site should not exist. If you're not advocating this, perhaps you should explain how this site, which consists entirely and exclusively of user-generated content, would get around without content moderation, or why that content moderation would be acceptable.
> I'm not advocating that position because I don't like using HN.
I'm not sure what that has to do with it. If I heard someone advocating that, for instance, meat should be abolished because it's murder (or something along those lines), I would be perplexed if the person advocating that continued to eat meat. It wouldn't do anything to lessen my confusion if they told me they're not advocating that because they don't enjoy eating meat; that part makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is both having that point of view, and continuing to to engage in that behaviour.
Now, if this individual instead had the position that meat should be taxed, or that people should cut back on their meat consumption because of its impact on the environment, I don't see an incongruence there. But if they hold the position that it should be banned entirely, that doesn't strike me as a deeply-held conviction if they continue to eat meat.
Likewise, for our NYT op-ed writer, if they, e.g., once read newspapers and then decided they were garbage that needed to be abolished, then perhaps there's no incongruence there. If I see him next week with the Sunday Times in hand, I would then gather that perhaps the position he advocated he wasn't serious about.
> You seem to be advocating a position that content moderation, and services that rely upon it, should not exist. I'm not sure why Hacker News would somehow be an exception to this, so you seem to be advocating this site should not exist. If you're not advocating this, perhaps you should explain how this site, which consists entirely and exclusively of user-generated content, would get around without content moderation, or why that content moderation would be acceptable.
This is covered in the post you're responding to, directly. And others in this thread. I don't think it's particularly important or helpful that HN be outlawed, but I might be willing to accept that for fixing worker abuse in social media companies generally. I doubt, however, that'd be necessary, for reasons that are, again, covered plenty well in other posts of mine here. The TL;DR is that it's totally normal to have regulations, including for worker protection, that kick in only at a certain scale (say, employee head count) and that could probably work here.
I'm not set on or advocating outlawing HN. My entire original point was that harmful social media moderation jobs do not have to be done. Facebook (among others) choose to operate in a way that makes them necessary for their bottom line. Further, we implicitly choose to allow these jobs to exist by not making jobs that are psychologically abusive illegal without an excellent justification, as we do with jobs that are physically abusive or dangerous without a great reason to be so. This is close enough to regulations we already have for worker safety, that I don't think it's wildly outside the bounds of behavior we (at least in the US) already regulate.
I doubt HN in particular is harming moderators very much, for a bunch of reasons including its size and the form it takes. Probably not a ton worse than your average customer service job. And maybe better, since no-one's yelling abuse at them on the phone.
> The TL;DR is that it's totally normal to have regulations, including for worker protection, that kick in only at a certain scale (say, employee head count) and that could probably work here.
OK, then that's at least a substantial comment on why you feel that HN is different, rather than the evasive ones you've been giving throughout the thread; you could have just led with that instead.
> We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm operations and cases in which that kind of work really is something resembling necessary (police work, say). There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that similar worker protection regulations deal with those sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a problem any other time), I'd personally be OK losing HN over that, sure.
Couple posts up. Cut the passive aggression and read.
> presumably be exposed to an action for negligence if something went wrong as a result of them employing someone with that record.
That's just the type of bullshit that makes pizza restaurants not wanting to have a person with a criminal record anywhere in the building. It's a form of vigilante punishment that continues to for the life of a felon, way past the point where their debt to society has been supposedly paid.
Employers should be banned to ask or process such information. "Is currently wanted or on parole" - legitimate question, "was ever convicted" - No, you have no right to know that, except very limited cases defined by law: working with children and the vulnerable, large sums of cash, working in the financial sector etc.
If you want work in computer security, then you really shouldn't have a record of fraud. If you want to make pizzas, then you're not likely to defraud anyone but your employer; so it's her lookout. A blackmail conviction is a danger to other staff; it's the employer's responsibility to protect their employees against that risk.
This guy seems to be on probation, and under supervision of SOCA - he hasn't yet completed his sentence. Are we talking USA? He's a felon, and in most US states he will never again be allowed to vote in elections.
In this country you don't have to disclose prior convictions to anyone, beyond a certain date - I think something like ten years. I agree with that. In the same way, expired convictions can't be taken into account in sentencing deliberations. I agree with that too - I do think convictions should expire. Past acts shouldn't follow you around forever. But if you're on probation now for two serious crimes, I think it's crazy to say that a prospective employer shouldn't be allowed to ask, and to rely on your answer on pain of instant dismissal.
And FWIW I don't agree with the US practice of denying felons the vote.
> hot ass babe to pleasure me and raise nice children
Boy, are you in for a nasty surprise. But don't come crying to us, old men who warned you that what you really should want is a nice cabin near a lake with plenty of fish and an absolutely plain ass woman.
> if you give the vaccine, then the vaccine causes more cases (of type 2) than it's stopping.
> There's no solution here - either option makes things worse.
That's false and misleading. The OPV2 vaccine will stop both vaccine-derived cvdpv2 virus from spreading and the wild type 2, which has been eradicated. Since OPV2 is a live attenuated virus, it will also continue to multiply and confer protection to any person drinking contaminated water, the vaccine "spreads". It is thus highly effective at stopping polio and in no way it can be said that it "causes more cases than it's stopping".
The problem with OPV2 is that it has a relatively higher chance of reverting to an variant that causes polio. This is not a problem if the population has a high level of vaccination, since the live attenuated virus cannot propagate and mutate. It's only problematic in low coverage areas where it can multiply extensively in many hosts.
Thus, the cvdpv2 epidemic is an expression of low vaccination rates, similar in every way to a wild poliovirus resurgence. The novel OPV2 vaccine will improve the genetic stability of the attenuated virus, allowing further "viral vaccinations" in low coverage areas - but we could eradicate cvdpv2 today with the existing OPV2 vaccine, if only we could get good vaccinations rates everywhere, as it has happened in most of the world.
You are completely misinformed about this. I spent quite a long time reading about this.
What you write is what they hoped would happen. However it did NOT happen. The reason is that the more you try to vaccinate the entire population, the more cases of cvdpv2 you cause. Until you hit that magic 100% you cause more harm than you prevent.
And in the real world 100% is impossible. So yes opv2 "causes more cases than it's stopping" - there are zero cases of wild type 2, so it's stopping nothing except itself.
And in fact that people running this campaign noticed this and stopped vaccinating with opv2! (Which perhaps you did not know.)
The new version of it will hopefully help, and we can eradicate this.
But right now Polio eradication is failing, not because of Taliban, but because of cvdpv2.
I have high hopes for the new version, but it'll be years before we know.
> The reason is that the more you try to vaccinate the entire population, the more cases of cvdpv2 you cause. Until you hit that magic 100% you cause more harm than you prevent.
This makes little sense if you understand that both wpv2 and cvdpv2 were eliminated in the poorest regions of the world using OPV2. If what you claim is true, elimination would have been impossible, you would simply replace wpv2 with cvdpv2, since any attempt at eradication would seed new cvdpv2 cases.
Inactivated injectable vaccine, which does not boost herd immunity, is inefective in these countries with limited health systems.
> And in fact that people running this campaign noticed this and stopped vaccinating with opv2! (Which perhaps you did not know.)
Perhaps you refer to the global coordinated action to move from trivalent vaccine to bivalent (wpv1+ wpv3) in 2016 after the wild type 2 virus was certified as eradicated. But monovalent OPV2 was still being used recently to target specific areas where cvdpv2 is endemic. It makes little sense to use it elsewhere and seed cvdpv2.
And 8 years later the vast majority of Polio in the world is cvdpv2. (There is more cvdpv2 then wild type 1 and 3 combined.)
You are correct in your details, but are completely missing the bigger picture.
If you look at stats there is zero evidence that cvdpv2 is going away, it just shifts countries, goes up, goes down, but has no signs of ending.
If not for the new vaccine (and I hope it works), cvdpv2 indicates the failure to eradicate Polio. The new vaccine may change the picture, we shall see in about 2 years.
Right now the Taliban is not the biggest obstacle to Polio eradication, cvdpv2 is. And if you check my comments this has been my claim from the start, so I'm not sure what you are arguing against.
Just because vaccines are great, doesn't mean they are perfect, it's not necessary to reflexively defend them.
There have been dozens of cVDPV outbreaks that have been successfully contained in countries around the world. We know how to do it even with our existing vaccines. These outbreaks don’t just come and go at random, they happen in places with inadequate vaccination and are eliminated using a proven playbook.
New vaccines will make the process smoother and faster, but we’re certainly not at a dead end without them.
I feel like you keep missing the point. Why are there still outbreaks 6 years later? (Answer: Because we keep causing the outbreaks.)
Is the plan to just keep vaccinating forever? Doesn't that mean that eradication failed? Wild type 2 is extinct, so why are we still fighting it? (Answer: Because we are fighting our own actions.)
> We know how to do it even with our existing vaccines.
You sure? Because it sure doesn't look like success from here.
> they happen in places with inadequate vaccination
If that were true why the switch to bivalent? How can you have "adequate" vaccination when we are not even vaccinating in the first place?
> and are eliminated using a proven playbook.
That's exactly the problem - they do not get eliminated. All we are doing is keeping outbreaks from getting huge, by creating small outbreaks.
This new vaccine is a complete game changer, not the incremental step you think it is.
Where did you get these outlandish expectations of how much progress would have been made by now? The plan, above all else, was and is to eliminate wild polio virus. Even in the best case scenario, we’re still 5-10 years away from being able to declare it extinct, so you should expect the OPV is still going to be in use until then, and the risks of vaccine-derived polio will still have to be managed for a long time to come. Unfortunately not every country have done a perfect job of that, but it certainly is possible, as demonstrated by the majority of the world having zero cases.
I think 'ars' is leading you into a rhetorical trap. The objective was never eliminating the wild virus, the objective was curing polio. The OPV vaccine is a bit like fighting fire with fire: you burn down the forest (immunize susceptible hosts) in a controlled fashion, so that the forest fire cannot reach homes (paralyze children). But when your house burns down, it's irrelevant if it was the "wild" fire or a fire set by the firefighters, i.e a attenuated virus that mutated.
What 'ars' seems to be missing is that this particular "forest" is very rapidly growing back, in some countries you have in excess of 5% of the population as infants each year. Those are new hosts that were never vaccinated, and due to the extreme contagiousness of the disease a few years of lack of coverage can reignite the fire. What happened after OPV2 withdrawal was that a whole new generation inoculated with only bivalent (type 1+3) vaccine became susceptible to cvdpv2 that was still circulating in small pockets.
Essentially, the campaign failed the end-game strategy, they proved they can reduce the infection to arbitrarily low levels using trivalent OPV, but once you take OPV away, as they attempted for a single strain, the epidemic reignites. It's irrelevant if it's a wpv or cvdpv strain. The end-game was always considered a challenge by experts, but a variety of reasons, Covid, political issues etc. conspired to make it very difficult.
This whole thread leaves me very pessimistic about the prospects of eradication. If a relatively inteligent and educated internet-person that has proper sanitation cannot understand these epidemiological dynamics and claims that "OPV causes more infections than it cures", what's the chance you can explain it to rural farmers, especially after the global rise of the antivax movement after Covid?
OPV2 (specifically 2) cures zero infections because type 2 is extinct in the wild. If causes some infections.
So explain how my sentence isn't true?
A decade ago when type 2 was in the wild, OPV2 was very valuable. Today though it's the greatest obstacle to eradication (and not because people are doing something bad, it's just unfortunate circumstance).
> OPV2 (specifically 2) cures zero infections because type 2 is extinct in the wild. So explain how my sentence isn't true?
OPV2 prevents cvdpv2 infections. This is a virus similar in all respects to wpv2, except its lower rate of paralysis onset. It's effectively the same disease, just like in my forest fire analogy.
Before the advent of nOPV2, OPV2 was much more effective at this than any other option. So you could not simply cease OPV2 production, post 2016 it was targeted to cvdpv2 hotspots only.
The thing is that we really, really want to be able to stop giving the OPV vaccine because - aside from the fact that it requires a bunch of resources and there's always the risk of disruptions to vaccination from civil wars, other pandemics, etc - the original unmutated vaccine itself paralyzes and even kills a small fraction of the people it's given to, and at low levels of disease those cases can easily become more common than actual polio-related paralysis. That's why it's not used in the developed world anymore.
> Proof of work mining uniquely only draws electricity when prices are economically viable, only buying electricity when there is excess supply
The numbers don't make sense to do that.
The average time a piece of hardware lives on the Bitcoin network is just 16 months, after which it becomes e-waste, too underpowered to matter.
So assuming the CAPEX is $1000 for a piece of hardware that draws 1kW, the most it can consume is 11 MWh during its lifetime - about $1500 at residential prices (Texas) or $500 at wholesale prices.
So just how deep can you throttle down the rig to take advantage of the low energy prices? The numbers seem to show that anything below 70-80% active ratio will start to cost you more in capital than you save in electricity.
So you can avoid the peaks but certainly cannot wait for the relatively rare excess renewables events.
The amount of time a miner is economically viable for should be increasing as "Moore's Law" for ASICs slows down. Just the same laptops are usable for more years nowadays than they were in the early 2000's.
Also - if you have free electricity, which is a thing in certain settings, where prices can and do go negative, mining hardware will be viable for "a long time".
Yup, a major breakthrough in this glacial field is doubling the energy output in 25 yeas.
So by the time captain Picard is born, we might have a very expensive and massive fusion reactor that will generate the same kind of energy we can generate today with very expensive and massive fission reactors.
Really now, this is pure garbage and does not solve the major problems in the field nor do most of the myriad startups trying to cash in on speculative seed funds.
Mileage figures have little to do w/ max power. That mileage figure is roughly using the same actual power, which is a relative sip of fuel.
The main difference would be in testing EPA methodology which which would be a bit more stringent/realistic to world use. On top of that, there likely is more rolling resistance at lower speed due to larger tires and heavier weight, offset somewhat by lower C/D at speed.
Basically it's hard to extrapolate ICE efficiency gains... they're there are sure, but probably in the single or low double digits.
I don't understand why they can't just build a basic pickup truck any more.
We had an old pre-fuel injected pickup. It had a bigger bed than the current truck, and seated six instead of five. It got 33% more miles to the gallon. The new one's transmission likes to overheat, even when not towing.
I have a 2015 Colorado with a 6 speed manual, long bed, 4.10 read end, and the 2.5L 200Hp four cylinder. Probably as basic as you can get, and nobody buys them, because for like 2k more you can get a v6 and fancy electronics.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we put the massive amounts of money we have put into nuclear fusion and fission into bone simple solar panel purchases. I wonder if anyone has done the math.
There’s a fully functioning fusion reactor 91 million miles from us that sends a lot of energy our way.
The levelized cost of large scale solar power is about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
ITER alone will cost $21B minimum and won’t make power. DEMO will conservatively cost about the same, but let’s be generous and round up the total “fusion research cost” to just $30B.
That would buy about 1.5e18 joules, or around the same amount of energy as the electrical generation of the United States… for a month.
So, a drop in the bucket compared to what we use globally…
Even if you use much bigger numbers for fusion research and assume further solar power cost improvements, fusion might still be worth it.
However, it’ll only be worthwhile if the total cost the production fusion plants is not too high. If they end up costing $10B each then the whole thing will be a dead end economically.
Nothing about the current tokamak based designs suggests they will be any cheaper to build for a given power rating than existing fission designs:
- They need large, highly advanced cryocooled superconducting magnets in very close proximity to a hundred million degree plasma. This only makes economic sense in massive, and expensive plants.
- They are a very strong source of fast neutrons useful to transmute cheap depleted uranium into plutonium, so carry massive proliferation risks, need close regulatory scrutiny and will require mounts of paperwork to operate, thus exceptionally inflexible to improvements and rapid iteration. Just like the current fission crop.
- Aneutronic fusion is a currently a purely theoretical concept, in the last 70 years nobody has been able to contain even the much cooler D-T plasma for economically viable durations and temperatures.
- The structure of the reactor becomes radiologically active and cleanup operations must be considered. Highly penetrating neutron radiation means some radiation will escape regardless of containment, requiring a radiological exclusion zone. No Mr. Fusion in your car, sorry.
- They operate and must breed sensitive nuclear materials - Tritium, a well known component of boosted thermonuclear weapons. The limited efficiency of tritium production from lithium-6 might require obtaining some from fission reactors to top up the fuel cycle and keep fusion reactors operating.
So when you draw the line, a life time of magnetic containment research has produced a speculative design that even if it were to work, which it doesn't, would be, in the best case scenario, comparable to existing fission designs that are being phased out for cost and risk issues.
A PhD money pit with zero chance of ever building anything useful.
Rooftop solar was always form of green subsidy: you get the same flat price for energy you dump into the network as the price the utility charges you. But what you put in at random times of your own choosing is much, much less valuable than a guaranteed power feed at any hour or season. At times it might have negative value, the power you put in costs the utility money. That simply cannot scale.
The only way I can see the two prices equal is if you provide power in the network on request from the utility, at specific time intervals from your own storage. But then you wouldn't need a power utility.
Nuclear had roughly 60 years to deliver clean, cheap and reliable energy. If it did all that, no amount of green lobby could have derailed it. Unfortunately, and I feel that deeply as an engineer, it did not achieve those goals.
What we have currently have are slightly evolved designs over those of the 60s, which are fantastically expensive, take up to a decade to build and three more decades to recover investment, and present a large economic failure risk - see the Nukegate fiasco. No sane financial investor wants to approach nuclear, no one wants to insure it, so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states.
Yes, we had a window in the last 20 years to reinvent fission, have new, secure and cheap reactors which cannot proliferate, are passively safe and fast to deploy. The industry and regulators remained paralyzed, structurally risk averse. That window has now closed.
Renewables are cheaper then nuclear, fast to come online and have very low risk. Storage is quickly dropping in price. Together, storage and renewables, coupled with a smart grid, will be able to cover more and more of the demand and require fossils to be fired less and less. It does not matter if you go fosil for a whole week in a year where there is no sun, wind or rain, that's still only 2% of the production and you can use very expensive mitigations like CCS, as long as you have cheap renewables in the rest of the time.
And the most striking example of that is how terrifying the rise of cost of electricty is coming ahead for consumers and enterprises, mainly because of other energy sources, rather than because of nuclear itself.
Renewables are all nice and thanks (and definitely to grow and improve), but they cannot, from a long way, deliver the sheer and stable massive amount of base energy that nuclear can.
Without monstruously large storage capacities that we don't have today, cutting ourselves from nuclear is a civilisational collapse guarantee.
> In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[47][48][49]
> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[50] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[51]
> Nuclear thus remains the dispatchable low-carbon technology with the lowest expected costs in 2025. Only large hydro reservoirs can provide a similar contribution at comparable costs but remain highly dependent on the natural endowments of individual countries. Compared to fossil fuel-based generation, nuclear plants are expected to be more affordable than coal-fired plants. While gas-based combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) are competitive in some regions, their LCOE very much depend on the prices for natural gas and carbon emissions in individual regions. Electricity produced from nuclear long-term operation (LTO) by lifetime extension is highly competitive and remains not only the least cost option for low-carbon generation - when compared to building new power plants - but for all power generation across the board.
As for the "government subsidized", I don't see that a particular problematic issue, but that may be just me (a quite a few fellow French people) - that's my taxes at work.
Sure, when you disregard the initial investment cost and only look at the marginal nuclear is among the cheapest. Although still being undercut by new investments in renewables nowadays.
That is the issue at hand, building new nuclear is not only marginal cost, it is mostly fixed costs and a unfathomable initial investment.
The question is rather: how do you expect to get rid of nuclear energy production in the coming century AND reduce CO2 emissions AND not get energy blackouts and prices soaring to unimaginable levels?
"so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states."
Sure, if you can cook the accounting books to pay for a military nuclear industry, and also get a civil sector that has no need to pay for capital, insurance and cleanup. I doubt it's a scalable model, and France had its own share of fuckups and close calls.
In the UK, every single time there's been a proposal for a reactor, there are local protests, and CND/Greenpeace turn up en masse. There's been no opportunity to deliver 'cheap' energy in terms of up-front cost, because there are so many artificial hoops to jump through - legislation, planning, and so on.
As for clean and reliable. No CO2 right? And the nuclear power stations in the UK pretty much have run continuously since they were switched on, so I'm not sure what 'reliable' means here.
