Yea, I don’t think things are hopeless here. What you mention might drop fuel costs by as much as 0.3c/kWh which would be a major step forward, but nuclear needs several such wins and it needs them quickly.

People aren’t going to ramp up construction until the economics change significantly and then you’re looking 6+ years out before anything comes online. Meanwhile investors are thinking what will renewables look like in 6-60 years from now? which makes such projects hard to justify without massive subsidies or at minimum locked in pricing for decades.

60 years is way beyond the prediction threshold. in https://dernocua.github.io/notes/backward-exponential.html i calculated that we can produce 16 earth-surfaces of human living space in less than 30 years, using 0.3% of the mass of the moon

60 years ago was 01962, when moore's law hadn't yet been noted, most people were farmers, there was no energy crisis, global warming was a forgotten 19th-century speculation, nuclear energy was hoped to make electricity too cheap to meter, communism was widely believed to be more efficient than capitalism (and produce higher living standards, if you discounted the gulag), mass imprisonment was a defining characteristic of russia rather than the usa, global thermonuclear war was widely considered survivable, overpopulation was driving inevitably toward widespread famine because the green revolution hadn't happened yet, and electric generation capacity in the usa was starting its last pre-energy-crisis doubling

The world doesn’t actually change that quickly. A great deal of energy infrastructure designed or even built well before 1962 is still in use. The hover dam for example was constructed between 1931 and 1936 for ~800 million in today’s money. It’s paid that off over time, but time horizons get really long. People had been evaluating that site for ~30 years before construction began and the project was authorized all the way back in 1928.

With nuclear you’re essentially betting that the plant will have an operating surplus long enough to both pay down the initial construction costs plus interest and be able to set money aside for decommissioning. If you predict the nuclear plant will be shut down 30 years after construction finishes that’s a deal killer. Further while people talk about construction timelines but projects start well before construction begins because you need to convince someone to pay for it. So you’re essentially looking out 40 years before the possibility of profit exists.

the vast majority of energy infrastructure in china was built in the last 20 years. actually that was true in the usa in 01962 and 01972 as well. the world is changing much faster now than it was in 01936, when all we had to deal with was the rise of fascism, the end of the millennia-long gold standard, history's deepest recession, communist revolutions around the world, radical overhaul of the economic system in the united states, and the rapid adoption of automobiles and electricity. you probably think i'm being sarcastic but i'm not

consider that 20 years ago photovoltaic was too expensive to be a viable alternative to nuclear and fossil fuels, youtube didn't exist (and your isp would often shut down your account if you posted a video on your web page), russia and china were friendly to the usa, friendster and orkut were the hot social networks (because you had to be at harvard to get a facebook account), javascript was too slow for most apps so demanding web apps used flash, gmail was only available inside google (so email was still really distributed), most people in the usa didn't have cellphones, cameraphones were new, the iphone hadn't come out, consequently most people who owned computers had root, orrin hatch was trying to ban the ipod, fast company demanded that you fax them a permission form before linking to their website, most people thought the nsa's worldwide dragnet surveillance was a myth, bitcoin didn't exist and was considered probably impossible, ycombinator didn't exist, neural networks were an interesting failed approach in ai history books, it was the year of desktop linux for the seventh year in a row (but there was no android), the only global pandemic in living memory was aids, the leading semiconductor fabs were in the usa and israel rather than taiwan, one laptop per child hadn't yet made it credible that internet-access computers would be cheap enough even for children in poor countries (who now mostly have one in their pockets), nasa still monopolized crewed spaceflight in the usa (if we don't count spaceshipone; carmack's x-prize competitor went 131 feet high), microphones and cameras in most people's homes reporting to secretive overseas data centers were dystopian fiction, the geforce 6800 yielded 15.6 gigaflops, and led illumination was new.

> the world is changing much faster now than it was in 01936

Hardly.

In most ways things were advancing much more quickly in 1936. Look at say medicine, cars, aircraft, physics, nuclear power, even computers and communication systems, and if anything things are currently slower right now than back then. In 1905 the fastest aircraft did 30 MPH and had troubles traveling 30 miles in bad weather, by 1965 we could fly ~1,000x as fast and that’s ignoring interplanetary probes etc. 1935 sat in the middle of that transition but fly somewhere today and there’s good odds you’ll be in a 30+ year old airplane with some new paint an arguably upgraded interior.

Walk into a Walmart today and ~99% of the stuff sold had direct equivalents 10 years ago. Most of it is minor improvements on stuff available 50 years ago. That really wasn’t the case in 1935.

it is true that if transportation speed is your metric, things are advancing much more slowly; even considering 01876 to 01936 physical movement sped up enormously, and it was widely felt that speed was the defining feature of the age. and progress in aviation, as in many other fields, basically stopped 50 years ago

but i'd say that the differences in computers and nuclear power up to 01936 were all zero since neither of them existed. and i'm not sure you're right about physics and medicine either

unfortunately i can't walk into a walmart (they pulled out of my country, which is in an economic crisis worse than any it's seen since, coincidentally for this discussion, the great depression) but i have two rebuttals here:

1. walmart sells starlink, alexa (echo), airpods, impossible burgers, apple carplay, cheap solar panels, and ring cameras, none of which existed ten years ago, and i think doesn't sell divx anymore. they sold cassette tapes in 02014 and don't anymore. they decided the live lobster tanks were inhumane and took those out too. a lot of locations also stopped selling cigarettes. and they no longer sell fish. or ar-15 and similar rifles. also 02014 was the last year you could buy polaroid film anywhere (though maybe not in walmart)

also, there are lots of products which were hobbyist or luxury niches 10 years ago and are now on sale at walmart. 3-d printers and google chromecast come to mind. oled tvs might be another example. you could argue that ring cameras are really just a webcam, but webcams you bought ten years ago weren't remotely controlled by a surveillance company

2. if you walked into a woolworths in 01936, 99% of the stuff sold there had direct equivalents in 01926. i don't have a woolworths catalog from 01936; the closest thing to hand is https://archive.org/details/1937-sears-christmas-wishbook-ca.... selecting 5 random pages (12, 44, 52, 83, 101, all counted from the beginning of the pdf) and 3 random items from each page we get:

- a 13½-inch doll with jointed arms

- the 17-inch version of the doll

- a 13-inch doll with closing eyes and rayon socks that says 'momma'

- a 10¾-inch-wide chalkboard with interchangeable educational chart cards with a whiteboard side for erasable crayons

- 10 coloring-book-like picture cards that come with a glue stick and colored sand to color them with

- 12 picture cards that come with six colors of sand instead of three

- a radio-controlled model train controlled by voice recognition (though i suspect the radio part may have been just as fake as the voice recognition part, because it says 'transformer included' but doesn't say it requires batteries, and also because it would have required several vacuum tubes to actually use radio control, and it cost less than the vacuum tubes)

- another 'remote-controlled' model train which is fairly clear that there's no radio

- a wind-up train

- a wooden men's suitcase covered in top-grain cowhide leather with a tray inside for toiletries such as a toothbrush and a mirror

- a similar suitcase for women

- another men's suitcase with split cowhide leather on a metal frame

- a 1-pound bag of extra fancy fresh mixed nuts (walnuts, pecans, brazil nuts, almonds, and filberts)

- a 1-pound bag of filberts

- a 5-pound bag of brazil nuts

this obviously isn't enough to conclude that 99% of the stuff in the catalog had direct equivalents in 01927, but i think literally every item in this list (generated by python's systemrandom object) did, which i think justifies the claim that probably at least 94% of it did. even electric model trains date from 1897, and hornby was selling toy versions from 01925

> differences in computers and nuclear power up to 01936 were all zero since neither of them existed.

Computers existed in 1936, they were mostly analog but still surprisingly capable. Unlike today where we’ve basically standardized on only using transistors things where rapidly evolving in serval directions at the same time including the use of vacuum tubes and electromechanical relays etc. Look at the evolution of say 3D graphics card pipelines and sure things are getting faster but we’re well past the peak period of innovation when dramatically different architectures where showing up regularly rather than just more processing power.

Nuclear power isn’t limited to electricity, we used to do things like paint watch dials with phosphors that lit up at night. Radioactive quackery had largely died down by 1936, but that in itself was a significant change as was the understanding of worker safety issues.

> starlink, alexa (echo), airpods, impossible burgers, apple carplay, cheap solar panels, and ring cameras, none of which existed ten years ago

Alexa was released in 2014, and it’s arguable how distinct it is from Siri (2011) etc. You’re basically defining new in terms of brands on that list.

Satellite internet, bluetooth earpiece, vegan burgers, cheap solar panels, internet security cameras were all available 10 years ago. Solar panels have gotten cheaper per watt, but in 2014 you could get a 10kW system for ~30k vs 26k today. Adjusting for inflation it’s a bigger price drop but breakeven times aren’t that different.