At that point, wouldn't it be more efficient (in "useful motive power per dollar", taking into account both the reactor side and the truck side) to use the nuclear reactor to generate electricity, then use that electricity to charge batteries?

EV batteries ... just don't die that often.

If you're citing coal as the fossil fuel that solar+batteries must compete with, you clearly do not know what the fuck you are talking about.

Coal is nowhere near the cheapest fossil fuel. Natural gas is.

We can go further than that and probably say that if the world had transitioned away from fossil fuels earlier, Putin would never have been in a position to invade Ukraine (torching hundreds of billions of dollars of value and killing a vast number of people).

Petrostates tend to be pretty shitty.

We should count all of the extra military spending in the Middle East as a subsidy for oil, too.

The only reason anyone cares about various tinpot dictators is because they have oil -- and the reason the Middle East is so prone to tinpot dictators in the first place is *because* they have oil.

I am happy to pay taxes to build low-carbon infrastructure. Earlier this year my old car was totaled; I didn't buy an expensive new fully EV, but bought a relatively cheap used plug-in hybrid after calculating that it would let me drive 70% on electrons.

The EV community is well aware of, and quite grumpy about, the proliferation of high-end EV's in the US. Many more affordable electric vehicles exist elsewhere that are not sold in the US -- Chinese ones, yes, but also smaller models that are not sold in the US because Detroit and importers perceive (wrongly, in my opinion) that American buyers only want large expensive models. But the average purchase price of a new car in the US is to my mind ludicrously high -- around $47K. This is higher than a Model 3, for instance. So the most common EV option is actually cheaper than the average purchase price of a new car.

The cost of climate mitigation will necessarily be borne by people who won't benefit as much -- wealthy people (who tend to live in cooler climates) need to stop burning fossil fuels so that poorer people (who tend to live in warmer climates nearer the Equator) don't suffer so much from global heating. It is perfectly reasonable to expect the wealthy to pay the cost to stop injuring the poor. The impact of unmitigated climate change on the global poor is going to be staggeringly bad; there is no reasonable path that doesn't involve mitigating it.

I think your last assertion may be true when comparing the American wealthy to the middle class, but not true when comparing the middle class to the working poor. The wealthiest people don't have fixed working hours while the middle class is usually doing a 9-5. But the working poor (who more often work shifts that are not M-F 9-5) have access to off-peak times; they are not "getting home at 6pm, then drawing 3kW for their stove and another 3kW for their car" as much as the 9-5ers in the middle class.

Time-of-day pricing lowers the cost of generation for everyone by better aligning supply with demand, reducing the amount of power that has to come from (expensive and inefficient) peaker plants.

The bigger issue is the availability of charging infrastructure in places where poorer people live, like apartments. I live in an apartment and have to charge my PHEV at work, paying 50% more per kWh than I would pay at home (and that's without time-of-day adjustments).

And there are, in fact, security updates -- including a very recent one:

https://knowledgebase.frame.wo...

This is expected:

1. Replace as much stuff that burns gas with stuff that runs on batteries as possible
2. Charge those batteries with low-carbon energy

The challenge isn't just step 1; it's step 2 as well. Replacing all the gas cars with electric ones means you need more electricity; just because electricity can be zero-emissions doesn't mean you don't have to build infrastructure for it. Building new electric infrastructure to replace gasoline infrastructure is a good thing. Yes, it costs money. We should happily pay it -- this is part of the point. We built a huge amount of gasoline infrastructure (filling stations, tanker trucks, refineries, etc) -- we can build power lines/wind+solar+nuclear generation to replace it.

There are a number of ways to soften the impact here. The most obvious is even mentioned in the article: "coordinated surge in demand that occurs as people get home from work and plug in". With proper time-of-day pricing, this won't be a thing; if this surge is an issue, then energy should be more expensive at 6pm than at 3am. Home charging on 220V is fast enough that you don't need all night to replenish a day's usage; home charging on 110V doesn't draw as much power.

The BIOS issues are overblown, and mostly present for an older mainboard. The new ones (Zen 4 AMD) work great -- mine runs Fedora perfectly out of the box.

Framework is not so much about upgrades as it is about repair and modularity. The idea is that a lot of laptops are written off as a total loss after minor damage (whether from component failure or accident) because they are too hard to repair.

I have next to me a perfectly serviceable laptop that had a piece of the display hinge and mounting frame break. It works, but opening and closing the screen is an ordeal and each cycle damages it further.

I got a Framework instead. A replacement display hinge for it is $cheap.

Yes, if at some point I decide that it's not fast enough, I can upgrade the mainboard. But that's not the main draw -- the main draw is that when stuff happens to it, it's cheap to fix.

The thing about wearing out tires is mostly false.

EV's are capable of wearing out tires faster because they are capable of very high acceleration -- without the driver really being aware of just how fast they're accelerating, because there's no roaring engine.

It turns out if you do this all the time, you wear out tires. If you don't, you mostly don't.

There is slightly higher wear because EV's are slightly heavier. But people don't seem to care that much about this -- look at all the giant SUV's out there that people have chosen to drive! Making a sane comparison (standard sedan vs. standard sedan), a Camry is 3350 or 3500 pounds and a Model 3 is 3850-4000 pounds (higher figures are for AWD). EV's weigh more but not that much more.

But the Model 3 will do zero to 60 in 4 seconds or something silly. If you do that all the time -- yeah, you're going to burn up tires. So don't do that.

EV batteries last a hell of a long time, especially LFP batteries. The usual rule of thumb is that an upper end is 10% degradation after 100,000 miles, but this is measured based on older Teslas. Newer batteries are likely to be even better.

Regarding downtime for charging, it doesn't need to be that much. Commercial vehicles that really do need to be in motion close to 24 hours a day (a minority, I imagine) can just be fast charged using DC chargers (the kind you see on the highway); these can restore 200 miles of range in 15-20 minutes on many cars. Others will likely be charged using plain old 240V AC while loading/idle.

It turns out gasoline is *heavily* subsidized. We subsidize its use by allowing people to burn it and create pollution without compensating the rest of us, and we further subsidize it by all of the geopolitical effort put into securing its supply (all the vast sums of money spent giving a shit about tinpot dictatorships in the Middle East).

Even with all those subsidies, EV charging is far cheaper than gasoline -- without any subsidies, since a vast majority of EV charging is done with ordinary home electricity and the power company doesn't even know. (They just know someone's drawing power; they have no idea if someone is charging a car or cooking dinner.) Rates for DC fast charging (what Tesla calls "superchargers") are higher, but most folks don't use it much.

Both of the following are true simultaneously, if you listen to the protectionists:

1. American carmakers do not make small efficient cars, particularly EV's, because Americans do not want to buy them
2. We cannot allow anyone to import small efficient cars because Americans will buy them instead of American cars

It is remarkable how much people don't understand what EV drivers do. I'm only next to the Level 2 long enough to wave my phone at it (to authenticate with Chargepoint), plug in, go to work.

Funny, since if you are using paddle shifters I imagine it's safe to assume you're burning gasoline and care about going fast.

Electrics don't burn gas and effortlessly go faster than whatever loud gas-burner you're on about.