More to the point, they're *guaranteed* bucks.

People don't understand the significance of risk to profitability. By underwriting 80 billion dollars of risk for banks, it's essentially guaranteeing them profits. When it's politically infeasible to spend money on something, the government guarantees loans. That's politically popular across the board because it's spending *later* money and it puts money in bankers' pockets.

To be clear, I think nuclear can and should play a key role in our response to anthropogenic global warming. I just think we shouldn't (a) talk about it like it is *the* answer in and of itself and (b) misunderstand the full breadths of risks and challenges, the most difficult of which are likely to be economic rather than political objections by environmentalists.

Ss you point out, climate change is in effect an economic externality that fossil fuels get a free ride on. This is a key reason for nuclear power's economic non-competitiveness -- in effect fossil fuel use is subsidized by future generations. If you made fossil fuel users pay the true cost of their energy use, nuclear would *instantly* become competitive. But politically that's not going to happen. The only politically possible way around that is to subsidize other energy sources as well.

If you haven't seen any nuclear advocates claim that we should stop investing in renewables, you haven't been paying attention. Usually they come out in response to some article on climate change or perhaps renewables and they will trot out the bogus argument that environmentalists killed nuclear, which is (they say) the only solution to climate change.

The argument that a particular technology is a panacaea isn't confined to nuclear advocates; I think renewable advocates oversell what's possible in the near future, just as anti-renewable people -- and yes, they exist if you're paying attention -- exaggerate renewables' limitations. Really any all-eggs-in-one-basket approach is unnecessarily risky and likely more costly than having several approachs that can work together and compete economically. Key to making that happen will be improvements in grid infrastructure, which will increase the size and therefore the efficiency of the energy market, allowing multiple sources of power to compete.

As for thorium, that's something we'll have to turn to if fission remains a long-term part of our energy supply, but it's not really a help in the time frame we have to respond to climate change. I think the most promising developments are in the development of fail safe reactor technologies and small modular reactors. There are such things as both economies of scale and *dis*-economies of scale, and SMRs are a different way of scaling production than the traditional and every expensive nuclear power plant.

It was never the case that the public being scared caused nuclear to be outlawed, or even *discouraged*. The problem is that investors are scared by the high capital costs, long construction times, and uncertainties about future electricity prices.

This is why nuclear requires government subsidies, either in straight grants, loan guarantees or price guarantees. It's no coincidence that the only country in the world that did a serious nuclear crash program was France, where the electric system was *nationalized*. They didn't go in big for nuclear to make a profit, for them it was a national security issue in result of the OPEC oil embargos. As soon as France privatized its electric system, nuclear construction stalled, just like it did in every other privatized system.

In any case, even if we *were* to underwrite a crash nuclear program, it's neither necessary nor desirable to put *all* our eggs in the nuclear basket. One place we can put investment in is a modernized grid. This will not only help renewable sources like wind and solar, it will be a huge boon to nuclear plants, eliminating questionable siting choices that were driven by the need to locate the plant within 50 miles of customers.

The norm thirty years ago for a hardware store battery was zinc-carbon, with premium batteries being alkaline. The norm today is alkaline, with fancy batteries having a lithium chemistry. So it's absolutely true that the "regular AA" battery you put in your flashlight back then had something like an 800 mah capacity; there is nothing on the market today that is that weak.

In any case that's primary cells, which have zero relevance to this topic. We're mainly interested in secondary cells, and there the improvements in the common rechargeable battery has been dramatic and continual. Thirty years ago the standard hardware store rechargeable was Ni-Cad; a AA probably had about 700 mah capacity. A modern alkaline AA has a capacity of 2000 mah or so roughly 3x as much. This understates the case because modern rechargeable alkalines can typically be recharged easily twice as much as a 1990s NiCad. And *rechargeable* alkalines are getting significantly better almost year to year.

Of course the hardware store battery only has minimal relevance to what we're talking about. What we really care about is Li-ion, and capacity, lifespan and cost for *those* are improving faster than any other battery technology ever has.

You're not going to Gish Gallop your way out of this one. You're the one who brought up your personal experience with the price of batteries at the *hardware store* as proof that batteries have not gotten cheaper. I'm actually being charitable in assuming you're talking about shopping for primary cells; if we're talking *rechargeable* cells the argument is even stronger because they are recharged over and over again which means the steady increase of capacity and lifespan in secondary cells over the decades dramatically lowers your lifetime costs.

As documented in my links above, the cost per energy stored of secondary storage has gone done dramatically in the past twenty years, over 90% since 2000. As for why the Tesla Powerwall isn't dirt cheap yet, customers report waiting months from order to delivery; Tesla already has more customers for this product than it can handle at the current price, why would they drop it? This is Tesla milking the early adopter market segment for a product that they can't produce in high enough volume to sell to the pragmatist market segment.

In any case we're not talking about home storage, we're talking *utility* scale grid storatge with is three orders of magnitude larger. There have been economically successful grid storage projects for years now. Hornsdale in Australia earned back its construction costs in just two years [source]. That's probably close to an ideal econmic situation for grid storage, but as costs continue to drop more and more projects that wouldn't quite clear the normal profit bar will become economically feasible.

It's true you're paying about the same for a AA battery in the hardware store than you were 30 years ago, if you account for inflation. However a 1990s AA battery would have a capacity of around 800 mAH whereas a modern AA battery offers 2000 mAH or more for the same (adjusted for inflastion) price. So while it *looks* like you're paying more for batteries, you're not if you account for inflation. If you actually look at the number of batteries you to buy over the course of time to power some device, you're actually paying less than 1/3 the price *for the stored energy you get*.

In any case we're not talking about the primary (non-rechargeable batteries) you are buying in the hardware store. We're talking secondary (rechargeable) batteries. In secondary cells the price/per capacity deflation is dramatic. The cost of kWH of lithium ion battery went down by 92% since 2000 [source]. Projections are grid storage costs will continue to drop at dramatic, albeit at somewhat lower rates, so we'll see a cost reduction of about one half in the next seven years [source].

Note this is a conservative projection of of lithium ion technology's evolution. There are multiple promising technologies in the pipeline that could significantly beat this projection. Some of these technologies (e.g. molten metal batteries) promise to be an order of magnitude cheaper if the bugs can get ironed out.

War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?

If it works for them, are they wrong?

Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.

73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.

Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.

Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?

When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.

Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

It works out to $638/per registered car.