My copy of Petr Beckmann's "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" is at least that old, and dog-eared. For decades, I arm-waved about the possibilities of nuclear, the incredible costs of coal and carbon. That goes back before CO2 was a villain. Ash and particulates were bad enough.

But. I just don't see the money, any more. For a long time, I thought "If only they'd build them right, stamp them out like cookies, only a few designs" or "The next generation will be completely walk-away safe, that'll do it", were going to make it work.

But, I'm an engineer. My job was always to get 'er done, cheaply as possible with every quality and standard met, and now I see that coming with just renewables and storage...cheaper.

If I'm wrong, China is going to prove it before Bill Gates does. They apparently have something like 20 nuke projects a-building, with just about every magic solution being tried. Pebble beds, thorium salts, the works. And China will be the one that can measure them up against renewables costs, too.

In 5 years, we'll know. But I am not hopeful that nuclear has a prayer, not since the sodium batteries cut the price of storage yet again.

...sounds like the Exercise #1 in the first tutorial of my Operating Systems class in 1982.

I think I still have the notes in a 3-ring if Amazon needs them.

All the replies are making the assumption that the AI-independent person NEVER uses AI at work or wherever, that "using AI" is a binary choice. But my comparison is to "screen time" - it's like saying screentime-restricted kids won't know how to use computer. You can use AI all you want, as long as you skip it often enough to keep up your mental skills.

Secondly, the replies miss the point that if you don't keep up your critical thinking and analysis skills, then you won't know how to use the AI as well as somebody who does.

Drugs challenged society with addiction. Those who could avoid, or fight off, addiction continued, many were lost. Societal rules changed, as societies, not just species, evolve to resist challenge and continue to succeed.

Those who do NOT use AI heavily and keep up their own ability to solve problems will succeed over those who do not, in the long run. Parents will learn to restrict AI they way they fight "screen time" now, as they've always had to teach kids not to be lazy - a very default human choice, laziness!

Societal rules can change. It isn't "winning" a race to use a motorcycle. "Winning" at academics by using a writing motorcycle will have to acquire the same meaninglessness.

I have no fears for the species or even the society. Just for those who don't see the challenge and respond to it.

Don't talk about productivity or innovation, talk about the general, widespread, median prosperity? Can Germany afford good schools, are kids going hungry in France? These are the measures I care about.

You're talking about measures that INVESTORS care about, and I'm not one.

I just read a dissertation by Terry Chu, a doctoral candidate in Toronto; it was about how different the COVID infection rates were in districts that read mainly Chinese media, and our media. Far worse for us. It turns out the Chinese media mainly wrote about COVID as a public health problem, a risk to life. The main Toronto papers mostly wrote about the *economic* problem, the risk to money-making.

This is another case of writing about "risks to money", not "risks to the population".

You can ask Iraq about that. The ultimate UN Treaty is the Charter itself, whose main provision is "no war", i.e. Article II.4, no use of force against fellow members.

This would all be a bit overwrought and off-topic, except Trump has broadened the exception from international law from "if I have a story about a nuclear threat", to "If I feel that we signed a bad trade deal and I want to throw it in the garbage on a whim"...even for trade deals HE signed a few years ago.

"International Law" now means just about nothing. What's Canada going to do with that lawbreaking? Take it to a US court?
Iraq could theoretically have done that over the Iraq War, too ... hah. Americans are just finding out now how that feels, to have no appeal to justice.

Never mind "jet lag"; this is proof positive that moving your body a single time zone is bad for your health.

I remember the fanciful suggestion, months back, where AI was going to scan millions of CCTV images just looking for crime in the real world.

But, very obviously, that's hard, and scanning the cyber world of bank and corporate transactions, and numbered corporations and real-estate flips, is much, much easier: it's just scanning a flow of bits for patterns found to be related to frauds and other white-collar crimes, in the past. Could AI scanning of all bank loans and Credit Default Swaps, and leveraging, have spotted the Global Financial Crash before it happened?

Oddly enough, the Masters of the AI Universe have never suggested watching their own economic class for crime, to my knowledge.

If a Canadian engineering firm designs something to be built in America, nothing crosses the border but information. Specifications one way, blueprints flow the other. The work is taxed in the country of sale, where the customers are. It's always been that way, on both sides.

This is just a computer doing some work in America (and we all know the actual computer may be in Sweden), work that is sold as a service by Americans, to Canadians. It's no different than the specs and blueprints. A query is sent to America, services are performed, results are sent back to the customer in Canada.

And it's a friggin' THREE PERCENT TAX. God, quit whining. You got away with no-tax for years, and never should have.

The best intel I got was from David Roberts "Volts" podcast, where he had on a genuine "China Expert" who has reported full-time on their business news for a long time. That guy pointed out that you can't get anything done in most provinces without appeasing the 'boss' of that province, generally the actual political head.

And a lot of those guys own coal mines, so you can't get your solar project approved without also putting in a coal plant. A lot of the power plants are solar with coal "backup", and a lot of those are barely turned on - just a few months of winter, say.

So, yes, they "build a coal plant every week" but at low capacity factors, so the coal usage can actually go down.

The metallurgical use is expected to decline sharply in the 2030s, even if no better process is found, simply because their building boom is over and a lot of it was for rebar.

I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.

Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually tossing of Macros that do database hits or invert pivot tables is just easier in Excel.

Thing is: IT Dept. HATED ALL THAT.

IT totally hated user programs of any kind, even when they were far more stable and reliable than their solutions. Even small ones that did one thing.

My solutions were always up for being replaced by some more-difficult usage of their Big Solutions, like PeopleSoft or the Formark Document Management system. Only the fact that they were so slow to deliver - by the time they'd started the project in earnest, the business needs would have changed; I'd adapt my Excel macro solution in a few days, and they'd be back to square one on a year-long process - kept my solutions going for years.

So, the bad news is that you won't be able to do some of the cool power-user solutions with Calc that you could with Excel; the good news is that your IT department will be happy about that.

If Britain pulling out of EU trade was Brexit, this is AMexit - America leaving the whole world.

All through my career, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw amazing numbers of white-collar jobs just created. My office seemed to need new facilitators and re-organization specialists, and levels of supervisors, and especially people doing "communications". We aquired a whole communications department that we had to work through instead of just informing the public ourselves, handling incoming calls ourselves.

I was never clear on the need for all of them, they didn't seem that productive, day-by-day, and often seemed to be doing jobs that came to nothing later on - reports on shelves.

This may be just a correction.

I've re-checked a few times now, and it's 3500 cf per MWh of heat, which means 7000 cf per MWh of *electricity* from a combined-cycle gas turbine that's 50% efficient.

But, of course, the 200T mass of the wind turbine is silly. It forgets the heavy concrete foundation, but I'm good with that as I bet the foundations last a century, like most concrete foundations, and you can wear out 5+ turbines planted in it. (I think that's why nobody mentions the concrete.)
Most of the mass is steel, and that's 95% recyclable by an existing waste stream we can assume. I think the generator parts are the same.

It's just the blades, and those seem to run about a ton per four metres, as they get big. I think the wind turbines of the future are going to be more like 10 MW, which is a 75m blade, so I'll go with 75/4 = 19T per blade, or 57 T/turbine (10MW)

But wait! I screwed up something else. Wind turbines on land are only at a 30% capacity factor, so over time, a 10MW turbine would be more like a 3MW generator, on average.

So the final numbers are 7000 cf/hour/MW X 3 MW X 0.0052 lbs/cf / 2.2 lbs/kg = 50 kg/hour (average of many hours).

So it would take 57000kg/50kg/hr = 1140 calendar hours. Or 48 days.

Summing up: in 48 days, a 3MW gas plant running 7x24, would produce about the same energy as a 10MW wind turbine running 48 days.

The 3MW gas plant would have burned 57 tonnes of methane to do that.
The 10MW wind turbine would have a coming debt of 57 tonnes of icky composite-material blades to get rid of somehow. 19.7 years later.

Still, it would be possible, surely, to simply put the wind turbine in a furnace that vaporized it at thousands of degrees C and just put the whole thing into the air as gas.

Because that's what the competition does, every day, with their fuel. So that's really a fair comparison.

It took some time to find the numbers and do conversions. At 7000 cf/MWh, a gas plant burns through 165 kg of methane for each MWh, so 827 kg/hour to displace a 5 MW wind turbine. About 20 tonnes of natural gas per day.

Every ten days, the natural gas plant burns the weight of that wind turbine and tosses the waste into the atmosphere.

I've been over the numbers twice, and I'm still shocked. Can this be right?