Storage tech is not here because it hasn't really been needed yet. It was always the high price that stopped nuclear, not Greenpeace. Almost nobody listens to environmentalists.

The problem is not a temporary population decline. But if the decline does not stop, the human species will die out - that's just a simple fact.

So far, it looks like the decline is accelerating. With the numbers from South Korea, we'd be down to around 1 million people on the whole earth in 300 years.

But this is a cultural problem - with reference to the survival of fittest, I think you'd predict a baby-happy subculture to end up dominating.

I looked up this dude on Linkedin. As far as I can tell, he's never participated in designing a commercial nuclear plant. He did work for Westinghouse, but as a risk manager.

I think there's a certain hubris in claiming that all commercial nuclear plants designers today and in the past decades are wrong about costs. Because the trend in reactor size has been going up, not down, for a reason.

Now, perhaps they are wrong. But as of yet, commercial SMR is unproven tech. And if you look at the current and forecasted costs of renewables, there's not much room left in the market now, and what's there is shrinking.

I don't know anything about the Google offering, but Aurora is not Postgres.

It probably shares a lot of code, but you need to think of it is a database with a Postgres compatibility layer.

For instance, a complex query that makes the query executioner write out a temporary join table will work fine if you install Postgres on your local box, but can cause an Aurora instance to thrash and eventually crash because Amazon forgot to come up with a solution for temporary table space.

I enjoy most of your commentary, but you have a blind spot with Elon Musk. Not that he's perfect, but:

The Boring Company is expanding. Their stuff is getting bought. They recently raised a significant chunk of money to be able to scale up faster.

(And you're also behind - they announced they're going to see if they can make a Hyperloop work.)

Solar City pivoted, and then essentially stood still while they were trying to figure out the tech. It looks like they still have some way to go but declaring them dead is premature.

As someone with an old iPad 3 (long story, I didn't pay for it) which is still working fine, the lack of browser upgrades is bricking it. Yesterday, Youtube stopped working if you were logged in.

Where did you get the free capital from? I think a loan for this kind of thing is probably 10%. Let's say 7% and 30 years of repayment, then the cost of capital alone is £38B.

So assuming your 2% of cost of operation and that these first of a kind reactors will actually last 60 years, then around £57B total.

So £57B / (1 mio. homes * 10 kWh/day/home * 365 days/year * 60 years) = 0.26 £/kWh. For baseload power.

I'll admit that electricity in Europe has been expensive for the past half a year, but still.

Now, you could argue that you need to subtract one doubling to account for economics of scale, but the problem with economics of scale is that they only set in when you actually produce stuff. So if you can't sell the first many batches of 0.26 £/kWh new reactors, then economics of scale are never going to set in.

Regarding automation: I'm not an automation expert, but to my knowledge you need thousands of units to be produced to be able to get a ROI on considerable levels of automation. A couple of years ago I watched a video of a standard passenger train coach being built. It was built by hand.

This must be an integrated part of making a password-less service.

Password-based services need a forgotten password feature, and password-less services need to make people make backup keys.

If you go to the developer page, you can see that it was uploaded to the security repository.

The security repository is enabled when you install stable. Why the packages are not just merged directly into stable, I have no idea. Perhaps it has to do with mirroring?

He denounced the Linux and GNOME community some time ago, after having switched to MacOS. I think in reality he was perhaps more interested in the Network Object Model part of GNOME than the GNU and desktop Environment part. And the whole CORBA thing turned out to be a big mistake that others had to clean up.

When he decided to start Mono, you could really feel the clash inside the community - GNOME was a C project, Windows was the main competitor, and a pretty hostile one, and he was like, hey, I just discovered this new Microsoft language/tech, let's implement it and all switch to that!

But I think his energy help bring the early project to life. Having brought two widely used software stacks to life is pretty impressive.

Fractions are actually a horrible, non-intuitive invention. I don't get why the primary school system spends so much time on it. With decimals, she wouldn't have made that mistake.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the concepts or anything - the notation is just really confusing. Trying to make people wrap their head around a confusing notation is a waste of time.

I think spending more time with decimals, and teaching people about numerical errors is a much better use of time.

... but is is enough to replace their aging nuclear power plant fleet?

They also have plans for a huge build out of PV and wind turbines.

The cost of storage is going down, but so is the cost of the generating capacity. So still you would want to overbuild to reduce the amount of storage needed. It's a balance. You can find studies addressing this if you look for it. They typically underestimate the cost reductions over time, however, so beware of using older studies.

While very true indeed, you also need to remember that the Nordic countries have (more or less) realistic unemployment benefits provided by the state, and also free health care. So losing a job isn't necessarily as tough.

Also at least in Denmark there's a specific law regulating office workers. Why it is only about office workers, I have no idea, but it sets forth base rules for termination, vacation, sick days, etc. No mention of salary, though. It's a relatively sensible short law. People might negotiate some extra vacation, or rather the unions may, but most contracts mostly follow this law I think, also outside office work. There's value in having a well-understood base.

This sounds like a scheduler issue? Have you looked into the real-time support stuff?