My understanding is that particles and anti-particles pop into existence randomly, but quickly cancel each other out. Normally this doesn't affect anything, but if they happen to pop into existance right on the border of the event horizon, one will fall in and one will fall away. Thus matter is very very very slowly "leaving" the black hole. But not because matter inside is making it out, but rather because of some interesting quantum features of the fabric of spacetime.
And even if an EV is powered by a coal plant, the air pollution is in industrial areas not the residential areas where people live, so there are health benefits regardless of the climate impact.
An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE.
Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels.
We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).
Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...
TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.
The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.
Right now everything looks set for continued exponentially-shaped curves on renewables deployment, which will drive coal and eventually the majority of fossil generation out of the grid. None of that is happening in nuclear, unfortunately.
UK is a misleading example since they’re also using 20% less electricity since the 1960s (https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom), probably due to their struggling economy. By comparison the US has increased its consumption by 1.6x. And even UKs data will turn out to be worse if they actually switch to EVs because that’s going to increase demand on the grid.
Yes, solar can supply a lot of daytime power as China has demonstrated. But all that daytime power generation is wasted for nighttime power needs. So overbuilding solar in that way will mean super cheap clean energy during the day and super expensive dirty energy at night (because that dirty energy will no longer have daytime demands). And the dirty power will be dirtier since it’s going to be plants that can spin up quickly instead of the baseload ones that are always on. Think about it logically - if solar was solving all their needs, why is China investing in turbocharging their nuclear industry? Answer: because baseload and a reliable backstop to the grid is super important and valuable and batteries won’t cut it to completely decarbonize the grid.
Renewables are popular because fossil fuel companies don’t find them objectionable - it’s a much gradual off ramp from fossil fuel dependence in the grid than with nuclear. And unlike nuclear, fossil fuels remain in use to handle low energy cases from renewables until batteries magically get good enough for the grid.
Then why are you here? If nuclear doesn't need subsidies, why aren't you just investing in the next great nuclear project and proving me wrong that way?
Because regulatory burdens have killed the US nuclear industry. That’s why China is 15 years ahead of us and pumping out fission stations at half the time.
Nuclear power needs a serious overhaul of the regulatory framework in the US and that starts with a broader swelling of support to overcome all the misinformed propaganda.
China installed more solar PV and wind generation in the first 9 months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear power stations under construction will provide (already adjusted for capacity factor.)
It's true that China is beating the rest of the world on nuclear construction. It is also unfortunately true that current-gen (non SMR) nuclear doesn't scale the way factory-built solar PV and wind tech does. Again reposting this very illustrative chart: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...
Starting in the late 2000s China began investing in nuclear, renewables and storage all at the same time. The original (optimistic) plan called for nuclear to peak at 18% of their electricity generation by 2060. But that was before the recent breakout expansion of renewables and cost decreases in battery storage. Since then China seems to have pulled back a lot on nuclear [1], coinciding with huge price decreases and deployment surges in solar PV and wind. Even adjusted for capacity factor, new wind+solar are seeing about 60x the installed capacity of nuclear (as of 2023) and that number has been on an upward trend.
[1] "It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW between a new GW scale reactor and a 200 MW small modular nuclear reactor." https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
> However, teething troubles mean that power grids are still struggling to absorb the huge capacity expansions and it will be a while before the new plants meet viable levels of actual power generation
> China's renewable capacity growth is yet to reflect in electricity supply, with coal still occupying nearly 60% of the country's generation mix
So basically China built a bunch of solar power plants that aren't connected to anything. Given how little transparency there is in China, it's entirely possible the plants were built because the country was generating way more solar panels than was useful globally & thus had to purchase it to prevent an absolute cratering in solar PV price.
> The country's solar power expansion is slowing due to tighter curbs on supplying excess power from rooftop solar into the grid and changes in electricity pricing that are denting the economics of new solar projects.
It's really starting to look like 2023 was a fluke and solar projects are running into the headwinds everyone's been saying they will - no grid is set up to switch to solar and the more solar you install the more you destabilize the grid. And since panel prices have dropped so low because of global subsidies to rooftop solar, existing policies around rooftop solar turn into another headwind which slows down growth of grid solar & should see panel prices start to rise back up as people stop installing rooftop solar, pushing solar projects back out of profitability at either end.
In other words, we've kind of hit "peak solar" in the near term and the outlook for grid solar displacing fossil fuels is very cloudy.
Except that China is on pace to exceed 2023 deployment in 2024. They've already installed 45.7GW in the first quarter. You're drawing a lot of inferences from a phrase in one article. They're also installing massive amounts of grid-stabilizing storage: 35.3GW in just Q1 of this year, which exceeds the 22.7GW they installed in all of 2023.
You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are. It's a strange thing to be comforted by; in any case, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to become attached to.
> You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are
No, I'm concerned that for all the amount of renewables they're deploying, almost none of it is getting connected to the grid and the amount of fossil fuel usage is unaffected by all this solar capacity they've installed. I'd love it if solar actually helped us get the grid to net 0 by 2050. The problem is that right now we're way off track to achieve that goal.
> Growth in China's battery storage capacity could slow down in 2024, according to an industry association, as energy storage struggles with low profitability.
Confusingly other sources claim that they installed 10 GW in 2023 so it seems like for all of this concrete reliable numbers may be hard to obtain. Anyway, the point still stands - battery + renewables remains a pricing challenge vs fission and renewables alone cannot supplant the equivalent amount of fossil fuels in the grid due to how complex the grid is & gris are fundamentally not designed for intermittent sources like renewables & the more you install the more unstable & expensive it gets trying to stabilize it.
Thus my concern remains that solar has failed to demonstrate a power to actually displace fossil fuels within the grid reliably at scale whereas nuclear has a demonstrated track record of doing so consistently. I worry that deinvesting in nuclear in favor of renewables is going to continue to pour good money after bad and thus result in a prolonged decarbonization plan. It'll be the irony of ironies when we'll end up buying Chinese nuclear reactors so that we can actually decarbonize our grid.
The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.
Not necessarily, synthetic fuel is being developed for air transport and could also be used in internal combustion car engines. Not sure anyone is seriously working on it, and I don't know how the economics compare. One advantage would be that we already have the distribution infrastructure in place for liquid motor vehicle fuel. Our electrical infrastructure is going to need significant upgrading at least in places to handle charging if all vehicles are EVs.
If the local spray pilots aren't filing their paperwork and presumably not getting in trouble, isn't it reasonable that no one would care if you did the same?
It sounds like no one is enforcing those rules/laws.
NOTAMs are largely optional especially for things like making cropdusting passes in uncontrolled areas.
In this context the local pilots aren't out of compliance with any rules. The regulatory issue is that for almost all purposes human piloted craft have priority over remotely piloted craft, and there isn't a good way, currently, to communicate with pilots in the area.
Believe it or not, there are parts of the US, rural areas especially, where it is perfectly legal to fly an airplane without a radio or any other electronics.
All of these ag planes are operating under VFR, they can see each-other, largely they don't need to talk to each other, and don't need to know what exactly every plane in the vicinity is doing. It doesn't seem like it should work, but midair collisions between planes just aren't very common.
For planes, not filing an optional NOTAM for routine work is about as risky as not getting a police escort vehicle to go buy groceries. If we start allowing RC/autonomous cars on the roadway that place other drivers at risk, we might start wanting to file our grocery buying plans so we don't die. Or we would just say that you can't drive your RC car on the road when other road users are present.
I have a friend who bought an X for $120k when it came out and recently sold it for $35k. So much for Elon’s promises of the cars increasing in value because “robotaxi”.
Yea the cult of personality (crumbled now but was more a thing 5-10 years back) resulted in a lot of people falling for marking FUD which sucks.
I've been in software dev way too long to buy that nonsense. As far as my expectations have been it's actually ahead of schedule. That kind of pessimism keeps me constantly happy with the rate of improvement. Lovely psychological trick I've played on myself.
It appears to me that they did something clever and the wings and tail section look like they are shaped to generate lift if the vehicle is moving forward fast enough. There are two rotors at the back that blow backward rather than downward.
So possible a vertical take off multi-rotor that can then transition to more efficient (and quieter) plane like operation once up to speed.
My understanding is that particles and anti-particles pop into existence randomly, but quickly cancel each other out. Normally this doesn't affect anything, but if they happen to pop into existance right on the border of the event horizon, one will fall in and one will fall away. Thus matter is very very very slowly "leaving" the black hole. But not because matter inside is making it out, but rather because of some interesting quantum features of the fabric of spacetime.