When people tout nuclear, I tell them that China has already ignored that idea to have only 3 plants, stamped out: they are building ALL the designs, in hopes to sell to anybody despite NIH syndrome in every nuclear regulator. So if China can make it work with their thumb on the scales, if it isn't lies about some plants coming in at $4.50/watt, then we can follow their lead.

In the meantime, my original comment springs from the MIT study that you could come "close enough" to baseload emulation with $20/kWh CAPEX for batteries...and while we watch China build reactors for 5 more years, we may watch another part of China get below $30/kWh...and the game is on.

I'm afraid my money is on the batteries, after 50 years of nuclear cheerleading.

Investors can watch the nuclear industry trying hard with SMRs and thorium and traveling wave and pebble-bed, and NOT see industry getting the construction cost down below $10/watt. One hears tell that China is kicking reactors out the door in sixty months flat, at $4.50/watt. But then, China is an unreliable narrator about the greatness of China, and may be doing awful things to local environments. Even if they lean on our governments to ease up on nuclear (Trump sure would), halving the cost to $5/watt seems - well, unlikely: RISKY. And capital is a coward.

Meanwhile, investors are watching batteries and renewables get cheaper, steadily, are monitoring announcements from pilot plants and upstream to the labs, and must feel pretty confident that prices will KEEP getting cheaper, significantly so in the five-year minimum construction time for a reactor.

Nuclear is great, I was a champion for 50 years. But I can read an accounting ledger, and nuclear has been beaten.

Sigh. Yes. Yes, I do, because for TWELVE FREAKING YEARS, I've been having to find and copy this excerpt from the NYT story on it, November 16, 2014:

"Here’s another: Remember Solyndra? It was a renewable-energy firm that borrowed money using Department of Energy guarantees, then went bust, costing the Treasury $528 million. And conservatives have pounded on that loss relentlessly, turning it into a symbol of what they claim is rampant crony capitalism and a huge waste of taxpayer money.
Defenders of the energy program tried in vain to point out that anyone who makes a lot of investments, whether it’s the government or a private venture capitalist, is going to see some of those investments go bad. For example, Warren Buffett is an investing legend, with good reason — but even he has had his share of lemons, like the $873 million loss he announced earlier this year on his investment in a Texas energy company. Yes, that’s half again as big as the federal loss on Solyndra.
The question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in fact, on track to return profits of $5 billion or more."

There can't be any bit of software in the world more documented as to the requirements of every singe function, every menu item, every bit of behaviour, than Excel.

And it's the only thing tying so many people to Microsoft. Windows and Word sure are the hell not.

"The Spoils of War" by Andrew Cockburn. Goes way back to American soldiers having to steal boots off dead Chinese soldiers in Korea to get decent boots, their feet were freezing off.

"The Pentagon Wars" by Col. James F Burton. Burton was part of the 1980s "Fighter Mafia" who got the F-16 built, against Pentagon tendencies for every new plane to be twice the weight and twice the cost of the last one. (The F-35 continues the tradition.) They were the ones who publicized the $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat.

Cockburn laments that people thought it only applied to some things, when their point was that every $1 lightbulb on the console was $25 to replace.

Burton notes that one Army logistics guy got the price of a single uranium bullet down from $80 to $4 by whipsawing two suppliers into real competition, another reduction every purchasing round, for years. That guy gave a presentation to a roomful of Stars on it, and came back to his desk to find retirement papers waiting. Or a transfer to Thule. His choice.

I posted this in a substack forum recently, using very back-of-envelope arithmetic using half-remembered price mentions. I was surprised to see nobody dunk on the estimate. If this is for reals, I think my trollish ending of "so nuclear's toast" might be true?

The money issue is the one where I'd have to tell a Big Investor, that a good $10/watt should be budgeted as the CAPEX for a new nuclear station that will provide 7x24 power (85% of the time, they need scheduled downtime).

For $10/watt, instead of a gigawatt of nuclear, I can spend $10B on:

- 5 GW of solar at 20% capacity, so 1GW on average, just intermittent. ($3B at $0.6/Watt)

- 3 GW of wind at 30% capacity, another 1GW on average, intermittent ($3B at $1/Watt)

- 72h of storage of 1GW ($3B) ...I find that last hard to believe myself, but I'm told that $40/kWh is coming from sodium-ion, which is $40M/Gwh, but you have to spend $160M for 4 hours of discharge at 1GW. But $160M/4 hours = $1B for 24 hours, so I think I get to claim 72h for $3B of sodium-ion in 2030.

And I have a billion left over to make it all work together. And I can have it built long before your nuke plant is done, the battery price will come down while the rest is being built.

This system may not really replace a 1GW nuke plant - but it will certainly put out a hell of a lot more than 1GW at times, probably not a bad thing.

The thing is, it's close-enough to dispatchable power to take the investor's money away from the nuke plants. So I don't see any getting investment money without government intervention like Ontario's.

If you check news stories around Xmas week for both 2021 and 2023, the province of Alberta, a noted polity for disparaging wind and solar, had dunkelflautes exceeding 100 hours. Solar, rather obviously for when there's only 8 hours of sunlight, and that only 17 degrees above the horizon, and it was cloudy, was at 5%. Wind was at 10%. If they'd had a 300% overbuild of solar and 200% overbuild of wind, they'd still have needed 6GW of battery for over 100 hours to supply 12.5 GW to the grid. (Oh, yeah: it was also -35 F, so 12.5GW was without heat pumps we can expect in future).

The two Canadian prairie provinces are your very hard cases for wind and solar. The American states just south, hardly better. British Columbia would be worse (very low wind, more cloud) if we didn't have so much hydro.

I checked TFA, but it just said "314 Trillion". I'm still wondering if the actual number of digits they stopped at was 314,592,653,589,793 ...if guys like that start a little joke with "314", you'd think they'd go all the way.

...and that's exactly why sane people may want to avoid the US at the moment.

...when officials filter out the AI by demanding handwritten submissions.

Few programs in the world are as exhaustively documented as Excel; there are so many doorstop books cataloguing the use and output of every object, method, and function.

So, that's perfect for reverse-engineering it, as long as you have a lot of programming time - or programming suddenly got almost-free. Just shove all those Excel manuals into your best coding LLM and tell it to clone excel with free code we can all use.

I will finally be impressed with AI-coding; and I will finally be able to leave Microsoft entirely, because the giant mountain of tools that is excel is my one reason I just can't leave; it's too useful.

Oh, clone ODBC while you're at it. Database hits are what Libre Calc particularly sucks at, and for me, database-front-ending and reporting was it's finest feature.

All over the continent, Emergency Rooms are backlogged and overworked. Doctors claim that paperwork steals a lot of their time, drags their efficiency.
And "medical paperwork" isn't about re-inventing a company, or building a new factory, or anything else that requires creativity and New Ideas: it's mostly the same 100-odd tasks over and over, the most, ah 'popular' diseases and injuries.

So doctors should be able to just do their medical treatments in an age of AI, narrate their day into a microphone as they go, and all the paperwork should just be done by itself, freeing up, what, 20-30% of all doctor time in the medical system? As if hundreds of thousands of doctors just popped into existence to clear away all the backlogs, give better treatment?

So: this is just about the easiest paperwork job to automate, and surely the most desperately-needed top priority. If AI doing white collar jobs isn't bullshit, then we should be seeing a major improvment in ER wait times, this year. Next? When? Please be specific.

In "Accidental Empires" pen-name Robert X. Cringely wrote a history of the first wave of microcomputer development - mostly Jobs and Gates and Aldus/Adobe, etc. In the first chapter, he points out that new information technologies

1) take 30 years to sink in: telephone invented 1870, changed lives after 1900; motion pictures invented 1890, big industry by 1920s; television invented 1920s, major industry by 1950s.

2) Rarely do what was envisioned at first. Bell thought phones would be used to broadcast music, and radio pioneers thought it would be used two way; both were opposite to each other. Early phonographs had record heads and they imagined spoken "letters" sent by mail...

Predicting WHAT the LLMs will actually do at this point is asking to be a comedy meme in a few years. People will just have to muck around with the tools for a while before they find out what they will really do for us.

Ironically, Cringely's point in that chapter is that the microcomputer revolution had to be invented by amateurs mucking around, because it takes too long for a new technology to settle in, to be worth the investment. He also notes that aviation was much-invented by the leftover planes and leftover pilots from WW1 just barnstorming and tinkering.

This time, the investors think they CAN stick around until payday comes...but if this one is also still 25 years away (I think we're at year 5 now?), then I don't see the money lasting that long.

Over-the-air HDTV is still putting out up to 18Mb/s per channel. It's some of the highest-quality streaming that there is, and it's free!

I've been recording it with entirely legal equipment for about five years now, use FFMPEG to crush the huge files down to H265 or H264 for action shows where movement shows some artifacts at H265. But mostly we just watch the shows within a few weeks, lots of room on the SSD of the ultrabook that controls the TV.

http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-...

David Roberts of the Volts podcast asked full-time, full-career China expert Lauri Myllyvirta in April 2024, this exact question and got a clear answer: they're building them because they are forced. To get local permission for other projects, from the local regional boss (think "Duke") whom Xi needs to keep power. They can defy the national direction to some extent.

To build your solar/wind farm in China, you often have to build a coal plant, and buy coal, since the local Duke sells the stuff and hates the whole solar thing. So you get a lot of coal plants. What you don't get is more coal sales than they can get away from. The plants are often at very low capacity factor, sometimes under 20%.

Volts.wtf is strongly recommended for anybody wanting to keep up on the transition, the bad news as well as the good.