Another one: even a lot of systems programmers have never coded assembly language and don't know how processors work. And, a lot don't need to.

Which is IMO too bad.

Another comment on "big grid."

Any time you go for very high availability, it costs. Big grid delivers that availability, an availability that is absolutely critical. Because it is geographically disbursed, it achieves more redundancy that microgrids or smaller grids. It does cost to build the power lines, but it doesn't cost much to use them unless you actually need the power that they transmit, and the fact that they do move a lot of energy suggests that they really are needed.

Small nuclear reactors are really the equivalent of building small fossil plants, minus the CO2 emissions. We already have those all over the place, and yet we still need the long transmission lines.

If we want to engineer a much smaller grid to have the same reliability, what we save in long-line costs would probably be offset by the spending for in a higher degree of required redundancy.

I agree on modular nukes.

The problem with all of this is twofold:
    -cost - electricity is the fuel of our civilization. Raise the cost and you hurt people, and hurt the economy
    -reliability ("grid stability") - we require highly reliable electricity

On wind/solar:

If you do the math, you'll see that batteries just aren't going to cut it, and I have little hope for dramatic breakthroughs - the trend has been more incremental than dramatic, and at a fairly slow rate. Batteries are just too expensive to do anything other than cushion minor load/generation shifts.

Other methods of storage don't seem to be going anywhere, and there has to be a reason other than big bad power companies (and I'm no fan of regulated power companies, *except* that their grid stability (reliability) is an incredible achievement upon which our civilization depends). One nation in Europe is building, at high costs, pumped hydro, by excavating a deep underground reservoir to put the water into. Again, if you don't mind the cost, things like that work.

There are "obvious" storage technologies: batteries, compressed air, hydrogen, pumped hydro. That they are achieving almost no success, other than for bragging, says that those technologies are just too expensive. If you are willing to spend enough money, you can make pretty much anything work
  But, if you want to not raise our power costs too high, then nothing works except, maybe, nuclear after first coasting along on CCGT natural gas.

What we see today is wind and solar starting to destabilize the grid. This happens due to a combination of their intermittency, and their low incremental cost (only when generating) that drives down the capacity factor of the more reliable power plants, causing them to be permanently shut down. It isn't that wind and solar are cheap (other than their fuel costs), it is that the true costs are being born by the grid, invisibly. As long as the penetration is low, this isn't a huge problem. But add more wind and solar and grid stability becomes a huge problem, which translates into a lot more cost.

BTW, the resource costs and impacts of wind and solar are immense. Each wind turbine is immense, and greatly impacts the area around it. If it weren't for the fad factor, no environmentalist would be for putting thousands and thousands of skyscraper sized concrete, steel and plastic wind turbines all over the landscape. I see these things when I'm storm chasing in the midwest, and they are hideous. A single wind turbine is pretty graceful. Put a line of them on a ridge ten miles away and they just look like unnatural clutter. They require special exceptions for the protected species that they kill.

You'd need to put a whole lot of stuff up there. You can't just boot up heavy, high-tech industry from a metal rich rock and some solar cells. There are lots and lots of interacting technologies that go into producing almost anything these days, and those technologies take place with a whole bunch of highly specialized equipment operated and maintained, to some extent, by humans.

The "big grid system" is a feature, not a bug. It takes advantage of economy of scale, and provides redundancy, which is critical. The vested interests - utilities regulated by the government - may indeed be a problem.

But yes, we do need to shore up (actually, increase) electric generation. The best short term solution is combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) for the US, because of its low cost and relatively low emissions. But if you are really concerned about CO2, then nuclear is the way to go. Unfortunately, regulators, unreasonably scared NIMBY's, and radical environmentalists have pretty much destroyed nuclear power advancements in the US,

Beyond that, I don't see a next generation of technology. Solar and wind are hitting their limits - to use much more of them will be extremely expensive due to their low quality power (i.e. intermittency). With intermittent power, you need either extremely expensive storage technologies, or you need to maintain the existing technology (nuclear, fossil) as backup. Batteries and other storage technologies are not getting better at any reasonable rate, which is not surprising, since they have been under intense development for over 100 years, with even more focus for the last 30 or so.

Nuclear is expensive, but less so than the equivalent solar/wind - because of intermittency. Also, beware Levelized Cost of Energy comparisons, which make intermittent power look really cheap. LCOE only covers the cost of the plant, not of transmission, and far more importantly, not the grid stability cost - i.e. the backup generation required. Throw that in, and things change a lot.

They were not "innocent bystanders" although some innocents were killed. Japan was highly militarized, and every civilian adult was expected to fight if Japan was invaded. Japan had been butchering civilians throughout it's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" - the conquered countries. They used biological warfare on Chinese, and in experiments on prisoners of war. They tortured and murdered prisoners of war. Japan was a racist society that accorded no humanity to anyone not Japanese.

The allies were planning to invade Japan, as that was the only way to end the very real threat from their vicious regime. The atomic bombs were dropped to shorten the war and lessen the number of lives killed. (although my Japanese relatives still would disagree_. While saving Japanese lives wasn't the intent - in those days, the enemy was the enemy - the effect of the bombings saved millions of Japanese lives.

Also, the atomic bombs killed fewer Japanese than a single night's firebombing of Tokyo.

So no, the US was hardly morally culpable for nuking the Japanese, and we in fact did them a favor!

Most lower cost providers still charge by the minute.

ref: B.A ... R.B.A. (obscure references, it was the mid/late 90's)

It does seem a little silly though, that it's fine we eat it. Hell, some people brush their teeth with it. But "Oh no, don't use the substitute in an emergency!".

Makes *me* feel like a youngster.

You can kind of game them on data, SMS and voice to keep your costs near zero.

Granted, certainly not for everyone but there is nothing less expensive and coverage in the States is fine.

As a long time SQA/HQA eng, this is an awesome question. I've been around a lot of blocks. New build. Broken. Here's another one. Broken. My Golden Rule? Stay until it works. I'd so much rather have a good build than something slapped together. It wastes everyone's time.

I had the (shall I say it) honor of working directly with Vint Cerf at MCI back in the early 90's, part of the triad or more that formed the earliest foundations. We had some interesting conversations.

Yet.