frezik

Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there's enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.

The problem with LEDs isn't the bit that emits lights. It's the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.

Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It's better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.

I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.

If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn't be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.

React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.

This is critical because it means we don't have to replace a GW of fossil fuel generation with a GW of renewables. The difference between demand and supply all but disappears. You don't have that for nuclear, though, because it doesn't react that way. In fact, it's preferred if they only provide baseload that never changes.

Sure, that's what you have to do. You shouldn't have to at this point.

I tried an IPv6 AWS Lightsail instance recently. It had a private IPv4 address, but it's not behind NAT and won't route outside the network.

Which would be fine if all the software packages you need can access things over IPv6 on their servers. One that doesn't is WordPress, because of course it doesn't. That means no plugins or updates except by manual downloads.

But hey, who would ever want to run WordPress on a cheap Lightsail instance?

What is actually happening is that governments still spy, but it's on everyone behind that address.

People really need to stop pretending IPv4's flaws are good things.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Governments still spy on an IPv4 address, but because that address is shared, it's spying on everyone behind it. At least with IPv6, it'd be targeted.

Realistically it’s the only viable long-term option

No, it isn't. Solar+wind+storage will do fine.

Fusion power would be nice but doesn’t exist yet at least not outside of a lab and I don’t think even in the lab particularly efficient.

And the fact that you word things this way makes it pretty clear to me you have no idea what you're talking about and haven't actually researched anything about it.

Me too. Fuck the Greens. Joke political party in so many ways. Even if I lived under a system where First Past the Post voting wasn't the norm, I'd be looking for parties other than the Greens.

We've basically solved the storage issues through about eighty different methods that have various applicability in different situations. They just need to be scaled up at this point.

It's actually better. No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result. A wind+solar+storage solution can match demand very close. This means we don't need to replace every GWh of coal and gas with a GWh of renewable. The lack of wasted power takes off a pretty big chunk.

especially when the nuclear lobby say things like ‘they’re safe as long as they’re run properly and no one cuts corners, but please don’t regulated them properly or they won’t be cost effective’

This this this, so much this. Yes, they can be safe. That safety comes with heavy regulation. That makes them incredibly expensive, and once you get there, it's just not worthwhile anymore.

That is a horribly naive underselling of what's involved in storing nuclear waste. How do you transport it? What do you do in the event of an accident during transport? Where is it stored now? Is it somewhere we can get good transport in? How do you mark something "do not enter" for tens of thousands of years? Think of what languages existed during the Roman Empire, and then realize that we'll have to store it for orders of magnitude longer than that.

Logistics, logistics, logistics. They are not easy for even the simplest projects.

We do have the recycling technology. It's not a far off thing; been developed for decades. If there's a good reason for a nuclear renaissance, it's in using the waste we already have, and recycling it down to something that's only dangerous for centuries, not millennia.