I see an overwhelming interest in Nuclear power in our media and in online articles posted to reddit and HN. In many discussions I have had online and in person most people are significantly misinformed in that they think that Nuclear power is playing a larger role than it is currently or that we can not scale EVs/heat pumps/AI Datacenters without building a lot more Nuclear power plants. Most people scoff at the idea that wind power, solar power and hydro power with batteries could ever totally meet our needs.
Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.
In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:
* Very inflexible.
* Very expensive to build.
* Very time consuming to build.
* Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.
I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?
Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...
So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?
I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.
Win8 was a disaster. Hard to understand what Steven is even saying or his point about the Macbook Neo.
The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.
Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).
Robert has a whole set of youtube channels on electric vehicles and other renewable technology. It’s quite impressive what he does now but I always see Kryten in him, strange.
https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...