At one point I looked into helium extraction as a byproduct of liquid oxygen/nitrogen plants, which are pretty common globally (neon, argon, krypton and xenon are already produced as a byproduct of them;. By volume, He is ~4x as common as Kr and ~58x as common as Xe, and is easy to separate from the other noble gases (though by mass, He is only 20% as common as Kr, 1,8x as common as Xe). But it's historically been much more expensive way to produce helium than from fossil sources, where it accumulates to normally 20-200x as concentrated as in the atmosphere, ~1000x in economical deposits (helium can also accumulate in e.g. geothermal gases)

Helium prices start at ~$100/kg / ~$20/l and go up from there. Krypton prices start at ~$400/kg / ~$1500/l and go up from there. Xenon starts at ~$2100/kg / ~$12000/l and goes up from there (in all cases, things like purity greatly affect the costs). So to compute ($/kg) / relative gravimetric abundance and ($/l) / relative volumetric abundance:

He: ~100, ~20
Kr: ~2000, ~400
Xe: ~1100, ~213

So some naive trend extrapolation would suggest that producing helium from air this way would cost about an order of magnitude more than it does from fossil resources (though the actual number would be a lot more complex to determine than that... helium is easy to separate from other noble gases, to its advantage, but also price isn't going to be a linear relation to abundance, and also, if you don't have as much demand for the other gases being recovered, then their prices will drop and helium's will rise)

TL/DR: natural gas does us a lot of favours in terms of keeping helium prices down :)

And how long did it take to fix the power outages? Hours? Days? Weeks at worst?

Now how long do you think it takes, start to finish, to build a wind or solar farm?

Gas is not nearly as fungible of a commodity as oil is. If you shut down Russian gas pipelines to Europe, it really does lower Russian gas production. LNG terminals are few and far between, and the cost of exporting LNG is far higher than pipeline gas.

Also, you're confusing base prices with marginal prices. When supply is tight, even adding a quite small percentage to the supply of even a fungible commodity, such as oil - let alone a non-fungible one such as gas - can have a massively oversized impact on market prices. TL/DR, consumers have an amount that they want to consume, and when the supply can't meet that amount - even just a several percentage shortfall - you have in effect a bidding war for said fixed supply, with nobody wanting to reduce their consumption (who wants to not heat their home? Who wants to shut down their factory? Who wants to not generate or be supplied with electricity?), so prices skyrocket until some party is forced to grudgingly curtail because they have literally no other option. Even a small amount of extra supply crushes that bidding war.

I should add here that I'm being a bit unfair in what I call "fungible" vs. "non-fungible". Gas is fungible within a market, but not between markets (all natural gas is basically the same and can be used for basically all applications - it's getting it to where you need it that's the challenge). Crude is fungible between markets but not between types. Unlike gas, you can't just drill up any random crude and run it through any random refinery, or at least not economically-efficiently. They're vastly different in terms of properties (sulfur, aromatics fractions, molecular weight, viscosity, etc).

Reality: neither.

Inference costs for a given capability level have been declining exponentially with a mean halving time of 7,5 months over the past 3 1/2 years - and show no signs of stopping.

From *independent small-scale inference hosts*, API pricing - e.g. guaranteed to not be subsidizing inference - frontier-scale open models are commonly served for less than $1/Mtok input-output averaged (the main cost is in output). This is an order of magnitude less than the closed models charge, because the closed model providers profit hand-over-fist on their inference, and use that to subsidize the general (non-paying) public. But the real cost is low. DeepSeek is believed to be providing inference on their platform (for a 671B-param model) at-cost, and they charge $0.028/Mtok-in (cache hit) / $0.28/Mtok-in (cache miss) / $0,42/Mtok-out. Independent providers are somewhat - but not dramatically - more expensive serving the same model due to the need to earn a sustainable profit margin.

A question like "What is the capital of Madagascar?" might involve under 100 tokens. "Write the entire next chapter of my novel" might be tens of thousands. It's hard to give a specific number, but if we say 1000 tokens, If we go pessimistic and choose $1/Mtok, then serving a flagship model (with many hundreds of billions of parameters) costs about a tenth of a penny per query. But models can still be useful for general chatbot uses all the way down to a few billion parameters (a hundredth of a penny per query), and for less general uses (for example, summarization) down well below that.

These are not some sort of gigantic cost. And remember: the cost for a given quality level has a trend of halving every 7,5 months.

The notion that you're going to get AI to go away by being "no longer economical" is, quite simply, fantasy. The flagship model producers make money on inference. They're actually quite profitable business lines. They lose money as a company because they're sinking such vast sums into R&D and scaleup.

In principle, it could be hundreds or even thousands of years before the supply of uranium is a problem, if we used the uranium efficiently, but with today's reactors, with no fuel reprocessing and no breeder reactors, if we used nuclear for all the electrical generation in the world, we would run out in a few decades.

You forgot to add "and did not do any more exploration and any more qualifying of existing reserves, let alone entirely new types of uranium sources"

Your statement requires far too many caveats to be meaningful for anything. Under even the most optimal scenario nuclear won't replace for example existing solar, wind, hydro, etc (and as if the production infrastructure for building more will just go away). Breeder reactors *do exist* and *can be built* if there were any reason to, and then you're burning the 99,3% of 238U instead of the 0,7% of 235U (plus preexisting nuclear waste and depleted uranium). Reserves of uranium are limited by the fact that there's little incentive to explore for more or even quantify more of known deposits. And techs to put many orders of magnitude more uranium on the market at prices still eminently affordable for power generation, like seawater extraction, do exist.

The world is not going to run out of nuclear fuel, period.

That's not the problem. The problem with nuclear is capital costs. And most attempts to try to lower them are a mix of either wishful thinking or a safety risk.

There is one thing I'm optimistic about for improving nuclear's economics, but it has nothing to do with the plants themselves - it's energy storage. Whether you're talking advancing grid batteries, or new tech like storing nuclear heat, if you can timeshift generation to better match demand then you can significantly increase your mean sale price, and thus your economics. Still, its main competition - solar and wind - continue their price declines, so it's a moving target.

Another interesting possibility is what Steady Energy in Finland is doing (a friend of mine works for them): nuclear heating-only plants. On one hand, that sounds stupid - electricity is far more valuable per joule than heat, and you're throwing that away. But in exchange, your plant can be lower temperature and far lower pressure, and is in general way easier to build, and build safely (sort of halfway between the complexity of building a fission power plant and merely having fresh nuclear waste heating up a cooling pond).

EU BEV+PHEV sales are 1/4 of total vehicle sales at present. Should be the lion's share within a couple years. That doesn't make the preexisting fleet go away, but it does throw fuel demand growth into reverse, which makes it ever-easier to supply from friendly (if not outright domestic) sources.

(Unless of course you kneecap the transmission line faerie with a baseball bat)

The transmission line faerie builds much faster than the solar farm and wind turbine faeries.

Well, "a" mistake. Prematurely closing nuclear was also a mistake. There have been lots of mistakes. NIMBYism with gas extraction Groningen was another. Polls showed that a majority if the local population supported more gas extraction after the Russian invasion of Ukraine even without a renegotiated settlement that would give them more royalties. Instead, Europe kept buying Russian gas.

It's always easier to continue consuming products that have externalities so long as it's someone else that has to suffer from those externalities, isn't it? (and cue the game where one points out that everything has externaltiies (true) so all externalities should be treated as equally bad (not even remotely true) ).

Thanks, Obama. :P

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Yes, building new nuclear power plants has dubious economics. But the cost of a nuclear power plant is overwhelmingly a capital cost. Prematurely retiring an existing nuclear power plant is economical nonsense.

With nuclear power, trying to built plants quickly is not a good idea.

On some things, safety is paramount. Nuclear power is at the top of that list.

Nuclear is just one of many ways to avoid that strategic mistake.

Except Europe became dependent on Russia for nuclear fuel. Arguably we're having more trouble quitting Russian (and CIS) nuclear fuel than we are their oil and gas.

It's not about nobody seeing it, it's about certain parties taking control in certain countries with some dumb policy ideas.

To be clear, I'm not at all supportive of some mass rollout of new nuclear (beyond it being far too expensive of a source of energy, it's worth mentioning that Europe also imports nuclear fuel from Russia). Solar + wind + batteries is much cheaper (not to mention harder to target in a conflict). But phasing out existing nuclear plants, that you've already paid for, which still have plenty of life left in them, is beyond stupid. And not changing direction after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even moreso.

Please tell us more about the illegal things you're storing on your computer that you would not want your closest family members to know about.