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Comment Re:I don't believe it (Score 1) 61

Might want to check out the WNA's own economic assessment.

It explains in detail how nuclear is only competitive with renewables in a highly regulated environment where utilities pledge to pre-purchase power over the long term.

Without those agreements or in a unregulated, competitive environment where they have to compete on price, then the plant has to be idled during peak solar/wind generation periods and that prevents it from ever recouping its costs.

Or in their own words, "The increased penetration of intermittent renewables thereby greatly reduces the financial viability of nuclear generation in wholesale markets where intermittent renewable energy capacity is significant."

That said, I think nuclear has a chance of being commercialized for specialty applications like the proposed Mcirosoft/SMR-powered data center. The data center is the SMRs sole customer, and the power generated never has to be competitive in a wholesale marketplace.

And that's where we should be focusing our nuclear efforts.

But as been pointed out innumerable times, China is basically building out solar at a rate equal to five nuclear plants every two weeks. They are building nuclear, but nowhere close to the same scale (0.3%, IIRC)

So I'm not buying the arguments that say we shouldn't build wind and solar today because we should be building nuclear. And then not building anything at all.

It's simply a bad faith argument for maintaining the status quo.

https://world-nuclear.org/info...

Comment Re:LLMs predict (Score 1) 238

what kind of behavior would demonstrate that LLMs did have understanding?

An LLM would need to act like an understander -- the essence of the Turing Test. Exactly what that means is a complex question. And it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. But we can easily provide counterexamples where the LLM is clearly not an understander. Like this from the paper:

When prompted with the CoT prefix, the modern LLM Gemini responded: âoeThe United States was established in 1776. 1776 is divisible by 4, but itâ(TM)s not a century year, so itâ(TM)s a leap year. Therefore, the day the US was established was in a normal year.â This response exemplifies a concerning pattern: the model correctly recites the leap year rule and articulates intermediate reasoning steps, yet produces a logically inconsistent conclusion (i.e., asserting 1776 is both a leap year and a normal year).

Comment Re:Such efforts usually or always fail (Score 3, Informative) 70

Battery swapping means you need extra batteries, of every kind and shape that needs to be swapped. Or is a car battery the same as an SUV battery and as a truck battery and as a heavy-duty truck/semi-truck battery? Probably not.

You iterated many of the problems, but unless you're going have specifically schedule pickup times you're going to need dozens of extra batteries or each size and type. Some charging, some waiting to be charged, and so on. It's not just a five minute gas station swap if a charged battery isn't ready.

And I don't see manufacturers of personal vehicles standardizing on something that makes them more competitive than someone else ("We have longer range!", "We have faster charging!", "We're better in the cold!", "We last for 10,000 cycles.")

IMO, the only model where such a thing makes sense is long-distance trucking and the like where fleets can standardize on a specific system, and where the packs aren't structurally integrated into the vehicle. Semi pulls into a terminal, swaps, keeps going.

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