It surprising that people still get this completely wrong even though it is not terribly difficult to understand. Base load is the level of power you always need even when demand is low, and base plants are plants that can provide this base load of power cheaply when they are always running with constant output. So in the past this could be plants that are very expensive to build but cheap to operate such as nuclear. But once you have more variation on the grid from sources that are also very cheap such as solar or wind, they will cover some of the base load when production is high so that the left-over demand becomes smaller that traditional base load. In consequence, you need more dispatchable power sources such as gas peakers or storage instead of base load plants. So the need for base load plants becomes less and they become less economical. This is terrible for nuclear.

Indeed, this is the most hilarious part of the story, that they think you could ask an AI why it did something and get an actual explanation.

Economical consideration are still important. I disagree that the choices are nuclear or coal. The choice is nuclear and renewables, or only renewables. I am would bet that the later is cheaper.

All this is actually evidence that science is progressing from less knowledge to having better understanding of the world, not that all theories are always wrong which is the claim you made above.

According to the link I posted, the contracts were signed in 2013, so this was more than just a declaration of intent.

Why did with gave the scientific illiterate access to computers? There should be basic physics questionnaire or something before being allowed to use any modern technology, so that we do not have to read politically motivated anti-science comments from uneducated people such as "These guys in 1958 are vastly more convincing than modern climatologists". I mean, even completely ignoring future issues, this nonsense hurts my brain.

This is not how it was. Microsoft announced the move in 2013 and LiMux was cancelled in 2017, but politically attacked already the years before including by the mayor Dieter Majer who as mayor from 2014 until 2026 and involved already with the Microsoft move in 2013 as head of economic affairs: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/mu...

I find it rather absurd to even consider anything orbital or flying as a solution. This seems based on a grotesque misjudgement of scale and economics. What needs to be done is known very well: Massive and quick rollout of renewables in combination with more efficient and smarter use of energy.

Luckily, we know that growth can be decoupled from CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions from Germany and the EU are decreasing since 90s and of the US and high-income countries overall since the last 20 years (per capita emissions in the US are still relatively high in the US due to wasteful lifestyle and processes). China also seemed to have peaked now due to rollout of renewables. Unfortunately, CO2 emissions are coupled to stupidity and I see no end here.

As a scientist, I somehow doubt you know much about science or the scientific method.

The main fallacy here is to assume there was a lot of effort spend making old C code safe. Maybe they did some fuzzing, etc. and this is great. But if I were takes to make legacy C code safe, I would go over and replace every open-coded string or buffer manipulation by a safe string or buffer abstraction. Yes, nobody want to do this, because playing with AI or new languages is so much more fun.

Even the fact that an issue was fixed in one caller of the function, but nobody considered the other callers before, tells you that the least possible maintenance effort was spend on these issues before.

I like to add that there heavily regulated industries that successfully brought down cost - such as aviation. The reason nuclear industry is not able t bring down cost in general is because building plants is slow and there is also no scale in numbers, so you can not iterate and optimize. Bringing down cost also did not work under favorable political circumstances. SMR try to address exactly this, but the problem is that there are also many fixed costs so building larger plants is more efficient. The gains from building many small reactors must be large to overcome this. I would not bet my money on this.

I think the idea that "evil people killed nuclear by adding pointless regulations" is a bit of a fairy tale nuclear proponents tell to rationale the economic failure of nuclear. The fact that there is indeed some element of truth to this may be very misleading.

I think it is your comment which is misleading. First, there is capital cost in addition to operational cost. (Ironically, directly in a sentence mentioning "lie by omission".) Then, the idea that it is expensive only because of paper work is clearly wrong. Regulations certainly add cost, but this is certainly not the only reason building a nuclear power plant is expensive. Then it is also clear that "no regularization" is not an option, so it remains unclear how to fix this, as some regularization is necessary. The statement "If this happens, then most of the expense to build a nuclear power plant will vanish, leaving only the significantly cheaper operational costs." implies that all capital cost would disappear without regulations, which would mean you could magically create nuclear plants over night without cost, which is clearly a ridiculous statement.

GP said: "frankly the thought of having to roll my own dynamic array, linked list (for the 10^6th time)" and this is wrong. You need to do it once, or just pick a library once. I agree that there are advantages of having some common data structures in the standard library.

And yet, many of the applications I use daily and actually prefer to use turn out to be written in C. I think more people should write applications in C.