SMRs that utilize 1950's designs and require intense operational oversight and maintenance could never be economical. SMRs that use better, safer designs that can safely operate with no active operational oversight and little or no maintenance, which can function without intervention and without refueling for 20-30 years, then be inexpensively disposed-of and replaced, and which can be manufactured in large quantities to bring the unit cost down, promise to be very economical.

Will the new designs actually achieve all of those goals? On paper it looks good. Whether that theory will translate into practice is something that can only be discovered by trying.

The risks are a lot smaller than you think they are, because of new reactor design. Nearly all of the nuclear reactors in the world are still using a design that's 70 years old, that requires active cooling and doesn't fail safely. We have much better designs now, at least on paper, designs that simply can't melt down, whose failure mode is to simply stop. But no one builds these new designs on industrial scale because they're unproven, and there hasn't been much funding for doing all of the engineering and research needed to develop them into fully-functioning designs that can be.

I'm skeptical that small reactors are really the best way to actually deploy nuclear power on a large scale, because of security concerns, but starting small is the best way to validate and refine new designs. And modularity is clearly a good strategy for making deployments of varying sizes cost-effective. If you can develop a cost-effective module that can be manufactured in large numbers, you can build large plants by clustering them.

The new designs shouldn't actually need much operational oversight -- if something goes operationally wrong, they just stop functioning -- but they'll still have highly radioactive cores which, if extracted, could be pretty terrible weapons. Not to make nuclear bombs, but to greatly enhance the damage done by conventional explosives, by adding radiation hazards that linger for years. So, security will remain an important consideration, and the SMRs should only be deployed where security can be assured, which will in practice mean that most are deployed in large clusters.

This all assumes that the safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the new designs proves out, of course. The only way to find out whether that will be the case is to try.

One common way is treating municipal wastewater. This doesn't "create" water, but it does make available a water supply that wasn't previously.

I think such systems are generally dual-loop. There's the loop that directly cools all of the equipment, which is full of pure (might even be distilled) water that circulates but is not consumed, then that water goes through a heat exchanger in a much larger supply of treated wastewater. So the wastewater doesn't get close to sensitive equipment and doesn't run through tiny pipes.

There was a time when Anthropic had successfully convinced a LOT of people that they were the one and only trustworthy AI/LLM. They've pretty much blown that tentative good faith up and they should know that.

I find it odd that they're still carrying on as if they're the "good guy".

It's not as good as we want, but it's not as bad as you say.

The INTERNET has a ton of bullshit. It also is the single greatest source of fact in the history of human civilization. The challenge is separating fact from bullshit. Pre-evil Google figured out that if you rank websites' relevance according by references, the truth tends to float to the top.

Every pseudonymous/anonymous communication outlet has a ton of bullshit. What matters is the scoring structure, though, tends to float stuff to the top. That whats makes it useful. There's has been enough truth in Reddit posts and the scoring system had been sufficiently successful that after everyone learned how to game Google in search of clicks, people started adding "reddit" to their Google searches knowing that it genuinely increased their ability to solve a problem.

It just so happens that now its getting even worse.

I don't think I ever suggested that this was a Trump-only problem... indeed I specifically highlighted at the end that conservatives should worry greatly about what an unlimited liberal president will do, and I pointed out at the beginning that presidents have been pushing the boundaries since Nixon, at least.

Regarding your claims about Biden... bringing him up is kind of a non-sequiteur. As the other commenter pointed out, Biden very much followed the traditional path with respect to treating the independent federal agencies as independent. Do you have any counterexamples? As for #3, Biden did abuse the pardon power and I wish he hadn't done it, but as far as I know there is zero evidence that he did it to protect people from prosecution for illegal acts that he ordered.

Finally, on #1: Yes, the ruling happened during the Biden administration, but the ruling was entirely about Trump. I'd go so far as to say that if Biden had been the subject of the case, the conservative justices would have ruled the other way.

While Trump didn't initiate the move towards a more powerful executive, if he achieves status as king-in-all-but-name, he'll be the one that did 90% of it.

I agree that Trump has not yet achieved full control over the executive branch. The uncertainty over whether Slaughter will go his way is a remaining obstacle. We'll know soon.

Not at all.

Car batteries have to have high storage to weight ratios. A reduced-capacity battery holds less power but still weighs just as much.

But weight doesn't matter for grid storage. If the batteries only have half as much capacity, just stack up twice as many of them. And in fact it's not a case of "half capacity". I'd bet Waymo retires them when they get to 80-90% of capacity, because reduced capacity means more time spent charging and less time spent working. If the grid storage system gets a battery with 80% of its original capacity, it can likely use that battery for decades before it has to be retired and recycled.

And, of course, lithium ion batteries are highly recyclable, so there's no reason not to expect them to be recycled when they're finally taken out of service in 2060 or so.

That's not really correct, though. The batteries aren't worn out or unusable after 15-20 years... they just have maybe 15-20% less capacity than when they were new. So a battery that provided 400 miles of range, now only provides maybe 320 miles. So it becomes a question of how much range reduction the owner is willing to tolerate.

I bought a Nissan Leaf in 2011. The early model Leafs were something of an outlier because they lacked a thermal management system for their batteries and they had a very small battery, both of which caused them to suffer much more severe degradation than basically all other EV models. My 2011 now has about 70% of its original range, and that original range was only about 80 miles with a good tailwind. So now it can only go about 50 miles on a full charge. In the winter, that drops to about 40 miles... less if you use the heater.

Is the Leaf's battery so degraded as to be useless? Depends on your use case. For many use cases the Leaf's battery was too short-ranged to be useful when it was brand new. For a typical commuter, though... it was fine when it was new, and now it's marginal to insufficient unless you can charge at work.

As it happens, my son -- a college student -- still drives it daily to and from school and work. In the summer it can get him to school and work and home, without charging (he charges it from a wall outlet at his apartment). In the winter, he has to charge either at school or at work. Both have chargers (proper L2 charger at school; wall outlet at work -- but it's enough).

I wouldn't put up with that at my stage in life, but there are plenty of people who would. Heck, in college I drove a car with an unreliable starter; I always parked on an incline so I could start it by rolling and popping the clutch. This is even more true of vehicles that start with a larger range, say 300 miles, and more reasonable degradation. Your 300 mile-range car may become a 250 mile-range car over the course of 20 years of use. More likely, if you're the sort who buys a new car, you'll keep it for a few years and then sell it or pass it to someone else when it has lost only a few miles of range, but there's no reason not to expect it will stay in service for 20, even 30 years... mostly likely until it's in an accident or has other issues unrelated to the battery that aren't worth fixing.

You should look up the actual data on the effects of the emissions controls, rather than relying on anecdotal experience. They're a really, really good idea, and I don't think they're actually going to get rolled back, and if they do, they'll get reinstated.

I don't think an ICE version would be legal. You can't really hit the emissions targets without electronic engine controls.

As for charging, your house is the charging station. You might have to run an outlet and plug in an EV charger. If you've got a welder you've almost certainly already got a NEMA 14-50 or similar that will work. And if you don't have a welder, you should fix that ASAP! Everyone who lives in the sticks should have a welder and know how to use it.

They try, and often they succeed for a while, but they eventually get disrupted by market changes. The most important thing is to be vigilant for regulatory capture. It's when businesses can enlist the power of the state in maintaining their moats that they can stay on top indefinitely.

And for your knowledge.

This is the enormous oversight in the Labor Theory of Value. Knowledge is actually more significant than labor. Without the requisite knowledge, labor and capital produces nothing useful. With it, the labor and capital generate something people want. With more of it, less labor and less capital produce more output, or better output.

It's understandable that Marx didn't notice the value of knowledge. He was mostly thinking about agricultural production, implemented with practices that hadn't changed significantly in generations, maybe centuries. The knowledge was already so well-dispersed among the relevant population that it was easy to just assume it as background knowledge, like knowing how to walk and talk. And it changed so slowly it was easy to miss that increases in knowledge enabled increases in production.

But ignoring the contribution of knowledge leads to failing to recognize the power of innovation. That leads to all sorts of foolishness, including a failure to recognize the power of competition and other forces that motivate innovation. The history of countries who tried to follow Marx's ideas are replete with examples of incredibly-foolish decisions by central planners who failed to understand the value of knowledge, both direct and embodied.

Another sort of knowledge people tend to ignore is managerial knowledge, at all levels of the chain and most especially in the allocation of capital (the labor involved in capital allocation is also often ignored). All those irritating financiers who seem like pure parasites are in fact doing critically-important knowledge work (and it is work) by making capital available to the enterprises who can make effective use of it, and withdrawing it from less effective enterprises.

Perhaps the biggest form of knowledge that is ignored is the knowledge encapsulated in prices, which is collectively generated and refined by countless people in every supply chain. Encoded in prices is deep knowledge of every stage of the supply chain and the value that it represents for one usage as compared to another. This is the single biggest source of foolish behavior by central planners. There is simply no way for them to discover the deep, detailed knowledge encoded into prices, and as a result they make terrible choices about how to allocate capital, labor and human knowledge. Markets also don't do it perfectly (we're human), but they do it far, far better. This is the single most important reason why capitalist economies massively outperform centrally-planned ones, though the other reasons also contribute.

I think that's impossible for internal combustion engines. They can't meet the emission control standards without intricate computer engine controls.

However... it should be very possible for EVs. You'll still need a little computerized control of the charging subsystem, but that's it -- and that could be an easily-replaceable module. The rest could be incredibly simple. No more complicated than an electric golf cart, just scaled up.