It's still absolutly at odds with reality to say driving and cars aren't encouraged.

Firstly roads get the majority of what the government spends on transport. Secondly you're basically saying that not being gifted free use of expensive land for storage is an active discouragement! That's wild!

The "making whole neighborhood car free zones" as you say it's firstly usually not true (more vehicle access is often allowed, but not prioritised and through traffic isn't allowed). Secondly this is you complaining that having 0.01% of space given over to areas where people aren't substantially at risk of death from drivers is "discouraging driving". That's just off the wall. You're taking absolutely minute areas where non car traffic is strongly in the majority already.

"We stopped caring for our forests in a way that prevents or limits wildfires: ground clearing, controlled burns, and thinned out silviculture practices go back thousands of years"

At last some sanity. Same happened in California where I live. The Governor and the Mayor of L.A. allowed forests to become time bombs.

Of course it was 'Global Warming. (violins) ' Uh huh.

Timeline hopper here, just through the gate from funny laugh lady land. Believe it or not in that line Musk is still the richest man ever over there - richer even - but he's a woke social librul because he knows which side of his bread has butter on it.

Notably, President Harris also prefers rockets that will launch to rockets that will not for some reason.

But don't eat the fish. Just in case.

> Your response makes sense *unless* the company is able to deliver their solution
> at a price that significantly undercuts previous technologies.

As I noted in my initial post, wrong. Even if they significantly undercut previous technologies, they will still be out of the money. A 20-year PPA for PV with 4-hour firming is 4 cents right now, today, and falling. They are predicting best-case 8.4 cents in some future date. So even if they hit their numbers, no one is going to buy this for power.

And that price prediction is based on numbers that make no sense at all. For instance, they are using a $850 million CAPEX on the plant, yet Darlington just spent that much *just to develop the plot of land* for their new SMR build. And that land was *already set aside* in the 1980s for a new plant.

There is no rule of physics that says their numbers are completely pants, but I'll bet anyone here they are.

> The main reason it never was used is that this technique can be used to create nuclear bombs.

Fascinating seeing you say that after complaining...

> You are the fanatic who is not aware of technological realities

The reason we don't use reprocessing is that it is fantastically expensive. That is the only reason.

Here's a report from Los Alamos on the topic:

https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00315989.pdf

If you care to turn to page 19, you will see that the effective cost of power from reprocessed fuel breaks even with fresh uranium ore when the ore costs about $100 to $200 per pound. At the time they were writing the report, it was around 40 to 60, so it was not economically viable. However, in the 1960s the assumption was that there would be 1000 reactors in service by the early 1980s. The amount of ore and the speed of reprocessing, combined with the expected demand, suggested prices well over $200 were likely, so moving to a closed fuel cycle was required.

However, the crash of the nuclear market just prior to TMI, followed by lowered power demands, led to a total of about 200 reactors. At the same time, large new amounts of ore were developed, especially in Australia, and cheaper LEU enrichment systems were introduced. As a result, the cost of uranium dropped, instead of rising, and the entire purpose of the closed fuel cycle evaporated.

For comparison, the current price of yellowcake is around $65. Inflation adjusting that to FY79 gives $14, about 1/4 to 1/5 the spot price in 1979. So it is dramatically cheaper to simply buy new fuel than to try to extract it from waste, on the order of 10 times.

Now I know you'll object that this is not what Carter said. And that is true. But it is also true that he was being widely and continually advised that moving to a closed cycle make absolutely no sense for the reasons above. That is why the many other countries that developed such processes, like France (breeders) and Japan (PUREX) had all given up on it by the 1990s as well. In the 30 years since, the numbers have not changed. China's build-out has been matched by a similar number of older reactors going offline, ore prices remain fairly steady, and capacity factor of existing reactors improved to further erode the value of fuel.

To put this in perspective, Canada's CANDU fleet has excellent neutron economy and that allows it to run on a variety of fuels, including those with thorium and reprocessed uranium. We also have the capacity, notably pre-built in Port Hope, to run practically any fuel cycle we wish. We have done this in a real production setting (as opposed to experimental runs) precisely zero times, because it still makes absolutely no economic sense.

> Everything about nuclear energy is expensive

Precisely.

> This is the first time that an actual solution to disposing of nuclear waste, has been achieved

Reprocessing and fast breeders have been around as long as light water reactors. The reason we don't use them is that they are fantastically expensive.

There is n reason to believe this cycle will be as cheap as the company claims, so it is highly unlikely this will change anything.

> The cost may be high, but the importance is also high

We have been talking about this problem for almost a century and done nothing about it, so I don't think anyone agrees that the importance is high.

> So in the cost/benefit equation, it still makes sense

Perhaps to people who think "the importance is also high", but they appear to have little sway.

>[T]he oligopoly seems to be facing the first credible challenge to its capacity discipline...

What an interesting way to describe that. A disciplined way, you might say.

It shouldn't be either! University isn't meant to be vocational training, where you, say leave knowing exactly how to run the programming tool for the AMD(r) Xilinx(tm) Zync(TM) chips. You should know enough of the fundamentals that you can learn when you need for the job straight out of uni but also in 2,3 and 4 decades time.

Many good students now do see it transactionally as an opportunity to learn specific skills employers want and I don't think that's a good thing.

I've spent a good amount of my career informally providing on the job training to people with degrees.

Do we really have to reinvent the wheel every damn time?! It used to be that you just got Voight-Kampff tested, and the administrator of the test would sign your PGP key. WTF was wrong with that?!

Moltex has been pitching this concept for some time now. They moved from the UK to NB because the province was trying to figure out what to do with their CANDU replacement and put up some money for alternatives willing to move to the province. Moltex, and two others, obliged.

Moltex claims that a WATSS + SSR reactor can produce electricity for about 14.5 cents/Wh. That is twice the current going rate, let alone the rate from the paid-off CANDU6. However, they also claim that by burning the waste from other plants that the cost would come down into the 8.5 range, which is competitive with CANDU's like Pickering.

However, all of this depends on the capital cost of the WATSS being around 850 million. There is absolutely no way that will happen. Everything takes place in hot cells, the plant structure itself has to be safed, the resulting fuel has to be moved to the SSR for round-trip processing, and you HAVE to include general cost overruns one has to bake into any nuclear plant, let alone first-of-type.

20 years ago everyone was pitching their energy ideas by claiming the result would be cheaper than coal, but these days most things are cheaper than coal so when you see someone making that claim you know they're full of BS. So when I see Moltex claiming "cheaper than PUREX" I don't see "economically viable" I read it as "less unviable" and that's not inspiring. It's simply not a useful comparison in an era where 20-year PPA's on solar are 2 cents and 4 cents with 4-hour firming.

One can twist the claims a little to be more about the timelines of the waste than the electricity cost itself, but no matter the protestations one reads around these parts of the 'net, people don't *really* care about waste. It's been sitting around in casks and pools for decades and no one's doing anything, and no one's really asking them to. So while we might all think this is a great idea, finding the money for it, and the political capital, seems like the difficult part. Ultimately the pitch comes down to that, we burn your waste, and I'm not convinced this is a big enough issue for the ratepayers of NB to consider doubling the cost of their wholesale power.

Committing between suburbs is only a problem in that way if you do it by car.

I'm in suburban south London, going east/west for about 5 miles. Fortunately there's a decent bus and enough LTNs, parks, modal filters and bike lanes than I can do it on a bike without mixing it up with angry psychopaths.

I don't believe I'm concurring significantly to pollution or traffic jams, but I do see the odd gnarly one when crossing some busy roads. No wonder drivers are always so angry.

Firstly, no you don't have multitudes, don't lie.

Secondly, cities aren't loud, cars are loud. If you don't put massive stroads or motorways through the places where people are living you have way fewer problems.

Cities are only bad if you worship at the altar of the mighty automobile companies and issues cars are supreme and all else must take second place. I live in South London, edge of zone 2 if you care, just inside the south circular troll. At night it is deathly quiet.

Love in the sticks, live in as city I don't care.

Funny thing is I can't actually tell where over here is!

Motorists hate cyclists on both sides of the pond. A substantial fraction are literally psychopaths who retard cyclists as less human than themselves. And a lot of drivers are frankly fucking morons. So make will pull dangerous manuvers to overtake just to slam straight into the red light that was right in front of them.

I don't know if it's plain volume or some more subtle characteristic of the noise; but I'd suspect that there's more to it than noise alone; given how rare(and often slightly disconcerting in practice) genuinely silent environments are and would have been in evolutionary history.

Even in totally undeveloped areas where you and your little teeny band of hunter-gatherer pals are the only thing going the wind is always up to something; some combination of birds and insects will be doing their thing depending on temperature, if there's a body of water of any size or moving water you'll hear some flow or wave action.

Could be pure intensity; a lot of modern noise is quite intense close to its source; could also be something about how it is interpreted and how readily it is or isn't discarded as background vs. forcing some amount of constant active attention.

Mate you're full of shit.

Car ownership is ubiquitous in Europe, and some parts of it (like most of the UK outside of London) are completely car brained. The difference is Europe didn't have an aggressive, lethal hostility towards pedestrians like America.