I posted this in a substack forum recently, using very back-of-envelope arithmetic using half-remembered price mentions. I was surprised to see nobody dunk on the estimate. If this is for reals, I think my trollish ending of "so nuclear's toast" might be true?

The money issue is the one where I'd have to tell a Big Investor, that a good $10/watt should be budgeted as the CAPEX for a new nuclear station that will provide 7x24 power (85% of the time, they need scheduled downtime).

For $10/watt, instead of a gigawatt of nuclear, I can spend $10B on:

- 5 GW of solar at 20% capacity, so 1GW on average, just intermittent. ($3B at $0.6/Watt)

- 3 GW of wind at 30% capacity, another 1GW on average, intermittent ($3B at $1/Watt)

- 72h of storage of 1GW ($3B) ...I find that last hard to believe myself, but I'm told that $40/kWh is coming from sodium-ion, which is $40M/Gwh, but you have to spend $160M for 4 hours of discharge at 1GW. But $160M/4 hours = $1B for 24 hours, so I think I get to claim 72h for $3B of sodium-ion in 2030.

And I have a billion left over to make it all work together. And I can have it built long before your nuke plant is done, the battery price will come down while the rest is being built.

This system may not really replace a 1GW nuke plant - but it will certainly put out a hell of a lot more than 1GW at times, probably not a bad thing.

The thing is, it's close-enough to dispatchable power to take the investor's money away from the nuke plants. So I don't see any getting investment money without government intervention like Ontario's.

If you check news stories around Xmas week for both 2021 and 2023, the province of Alberta, a noted polity for disparaging wind and solar, had dunkelflautes exceeding 100 hours. Solar, rather obviously for when there's only 8 hours of sunlight, and that only 17 degrees above the horizon, and it was cloudy, was at 5%. Wind was at 10%. If they'd had a 300% overbuild of solar and 200% overbuild of wind, they'd still have needed 6GW of battery for over 100 hours to supply 12.5 GW to the grid. (Oh, yeah: it was also -35 F, so 12.5GW was without heat pumps we can expect in future).

The two Canadian prairie provinces are your very hard cases for wind and solar. The American states just south, hardly better. British Columbia would be worse (very low wind, more cloud) if we didn't have so much hydro.

I checked TFA, but it just said "314 Trillion". I'm still wondering if the actual number of digits they stopped at was 314,592,653,589,793 ...if guys like that start a little joke with "314", you'd think they'd go all the way.

...when officials filter out the AI by demanding handwritten submissions.

Few programs in the world are as exhaustively documented as Excel; there are so many doorstop books cataloguing the use and output of every object, method, and function.

So, that's perfect for reverse-engineering it, as long as you have a lot of programming time - or programming suddenly got almost-free. Just shove all those Excel manuals into your best coding LLM and tell it to clone excel with free code we can all use.

I will finally be impressed with AI-coding; and I will finally be able to leave Microsoft entirely, because the giant mountain of tools that is excel is my one reason I just can't leave; it's too useful.

Oh, clone ODBC while you're at it. Database hits are what Libre Calc particularly sucks at, and for me, database-front-ending and reporting was it's finest feature.

All over the continent, Emergency Rooms are backlogged and overworked. Doctors claim that paperwork steals a lot of their time, drags their efficiency.
And "medical paperwork" isn't about re-inventing a company, or building a new factory, or anything else that requires creativity and New Ideas: it's mostly the same 100-odd tasks over and over, the most, ah 'popular' diseases and injuries.

So doctors should be able to just do their medical treatments in an age of AI, narrate their day into a microphone as they go, and all the paperwork should just be done by itself, freeing up, what, 20-30% of all doctor time in the medical system? As if hundreds of thousands of doctors just popped into existence to clear away all the backlogs, give better treatment?

So: this is just about the easiest paperwork job to automate, and surely the most desperately-needed top priority. If AI doing white collar jobs isn't bullshit, then we should be seeing a major improvment in ER wait times, this year. Next? When? Please be specific.

In "Accidental Empires" pen-name Robert X. Cringely wrote a history of the first wave of microcomputer development - mostly Jobs and Gates and Aldus/Adobe, etc. In the first chapter, he points out that new information technologies

1) take 30 years to sink in: telephone invented 1870, changed lives after 1900; motion pictures invented 1890, big industry by 1920s; television invented 1920s, major industry by 1950s.

2) Rarely do what was envisioned at first. Bell thought phones would be used to broadcast music, and radio pioneers thought it would be used two way; both were opposite to each other. Early phonographs had record heads and they imagined spoken "letters" sent by mail...

Predicting WHAT the LLMs will actually do at this point is asking to be a comedy meme in a few years. People will just have to muck around with the tools for a while before they find out what they will really do for us.

Ironically, Cringely's point in that chapter is that the microcomputer revolution had to be invented by amateurs mucking around, because it takes too long for a new technology to settle in, to be worth the investment. He also notes that aviation was much-invented by the leftover planes and leftover pilots from WW1 just barnstorming and tinkering.

This time, the investors think they CAN stick around until payday comes...but if this one is also still 25 years away (I think we're at year 5 now?), then I don't see the money lasting that long.

Over-the-air HDTV is still putting out up to 18Mb/s per channel. It's some of the highest-quality streaming that there is, and it's free!

I've been recording it with entirely legal equipment for about five years now, use FFMPEG to crush the huge files down to H265 or H264 for action shows where movement shows some artifacts at H265. But mostly we just watch the shows within a few weeks, lots of room on the SSD of the ultrabook that controls the TV.

http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-...

David Roberts of the Volts podcast asked full-time, full-career China expert Lauri Myllyvirta in April 2024, this exact question and got a clear answer: they're building them because they are forced. To get local permission for other projects, from the local regional boss (think "Duke") whom Xi needs to keep power. They can defy the national direction to some extent.

To build your solar/wind farm in China, you often have to build a coal plant, and buy coal, since the local Duke sells the stuff and hates the whole solar thing. So you get a lot of coal plants. What you don't get is more coal sales than they can get away from. The plants are often at very low capacity factor, sometimes under 20%.

Volts.wtf is strongly recommended for anybody wanting to keep up on the transition, the bad news as well as the good.

This might provide additional evidence for/against the thesis of the famous Rolling Stone article ("Criminal Element") by the late, great Kevin Drum, connecting crime to lead.

All that Drum had was the decline in crime after lead was removed; thing was, the lead levels and crime rates showed correlations down to state, county, and neighbourhood stats.

If we could also correlate with lead levels right in the residents, it would support the thesis, which still strikes many as too simplistic, crime being complicated, and lead levels, not.
https://lead.org.au/lanv13n2/l...

>Amazon doesn't pay bribes, ever.
Just $40M for the IP rights to "Melania"?

I was just adding up how far back GOP hostility goes. The Colbert quote is TWENTY YEARS OLD THIS YEAR.
It followed his previous sally "Truthiness", which was the word of the year for 2004.
Newt Gingrich killed off the Office of Technology Assessment back in 1995, it produced too much science for Congress.

Not to forget that in 1992, GHW Bush believed in Global Warming and wanted America off oil. I suspect the serious anti-science, anti-truth fight, against the Inconvenient Truth, dates to about 1993.

It's clear nobody clicked through to the MIT study. It actually is about running renewables 95% of the time, not 100%.
I should have not used the word "batteries", when I meant "storage".

Battery has always been a somewhat generic term for "storage", but is kind of triggering around slashdot. Still, it will be interesting to see what % of service can be provided in the global south is Form Energy's iron-air batteries work as advertised...with 120 hours of reaction time. That's as long as the longest dunkelflaute in Alberta so far. In southern Mexico, with solar on the west side and high Gulf wind on the east joined up, I'm not sure you would need more.

As Nancy Pelosi said, "we're capitalists"...we all still gravitate to the cheapest solution that meets standards, and were long-willing to put up with the health effects of coal, ignore the whole climate-thing, to get it cheaper.
David Roberts in Vox, in 2019, covered the MIT study that worked out just how very cheap batteries must get to make intermittent a baseload-replacement:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and... ...turned out to be $20/kWh for CAPEX, back in 2019. So that's $25/kWh in 2026.

Sodium-ion batteries are widely predicted to reach down to that price in a few years, less time than it takes to build a reactor. That's if Form Energy, now selling in test batches, doesn't get there first with their with "iron air" batteries.

If the batteries can be produced, and work in the field (they are so far, batteries are the hot new grid purchase for 2026), then both fossil and nuclear projects will fail to find investors. That's capitalism for you.

The only dodge around it is to appeal for government subsidy on some ideological grounds. That's what renewable champions had to do until their solution became cheaper; and it was a hard sell, let me tell you.

Bingo.
I asked a friend who started enthusiastically using AI for coding, used it happily for various business bits of writing, summaries, etc.

So I asked him if he had to give up one tool: "AI" (all of them) or "The spreadsheet", he thought for about 10 seconds and said, "AI" for sure: you're in and out of Excel all day long.