Elmo really has ruined it.

It's good that people are catching up to this.

The reason the middle-east is at constant war is because colonialist machinations. Same goes for south-Saharan Africa. And the US is a big colonialist player, just ask Vietnam, South-America, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. They all have been attacked by the US because of US colonial interests. If anything, one could make the argument that the PRC is treading much more lightly than the US.

That said - I'm not defending the PRC by any way; it's a state-capitalist hell hole that's suppressing workers by denying them any ability to organize and whose political class is purely focused on furthering their own interests and that of the moneyed elite, the common person be damned.

The thing is - so is the US.

I'd prefer it if they'd just stayed a open source tech nonprofit developing a state-of the-art web browser and surrounding technologies.

I don't need Mozilla to be an AI startup.

Well, we'll see, I guess.

Yes, Germany is going to spend about €600 billion in infrastructure. That has more to do with electrification than renewables - France too need another €250 billion for grid upgrades until 2045.

As for the "6+8" program - EDF still hasn't produced an official cost estimation for the for the full fleet and the original estimate for the first six (€52 billion) is has already been pushed upward to €72.8 billion.

Electricity prices in France have for a long time been a political matter, not market decision. That's a different approach than that of Germany, so the two really cannot be compared.

I guess that's the reason that they went for renewables for capacity expansion - it's much cheaper to build and operate renewables rather than nuclear.

Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20.

That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power.

The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)

After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.

That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.

I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.

Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity.

There is just no reason to build nuclear.

> €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.

No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all.

We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.

It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".

[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.

(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)

Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.

France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.

[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.

Nuclear is just not worth the hassle.

Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone.

At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...

If scientific investigation shows that there are many causes that have a relevant impact on "A", then saying that "A has multiple relevant and possible causes" is not hand-waving. It's stating the fact.

Hand-waving is to pearl clutchlingly throw out vague terms like "affirmative action" and "diversity statements" without properly stating what the mechanism is supposed to be and without providing any evidence that it is relevant in the last.

You know, polemic tribal whistle-blowing like you are doing. That's hand-waving.

Secondly there's no strong argument that links larger population groups genetic makeup to intelligence - that's what Watson claimed and what's so infuriating; it's plain racism. There's an inherited component in intelligence - that much is right. But population groups have enough diversity that this does not have a statistically relevant impact on these groups as a whole.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/james-watson-s...

What you show is that there are not many conservatives in academia. The reason for that is manifold. It could be that they are forced out. It could be that their views are changed with higher learning and turn progressive. It could be that conservatives self-select to not go into academia.

Pointing that out is not hand-waving.

That the US military is run by a clown is a feature, not a bug. That an incompetent buffoon like Trump is at the steering wheel is not an accident.

Trump is doing exactly what the moneyed interests behind him have put him in power for - dismantling the system of checks and balances, of regulations and restrictions that prevent the oligarchs from thoroughly screwing the population.

Good luck trying to restore any of your civil institutions after Trump and his ilk - and I don't expect that to be after 2028.

Within 20 years Europe has shifted to almost 50% renewables in their electricity production, the US is at 25% and China at 30% (and rapidly growing). Demand has been cut massively through energy efficiency laws. CO2 emissions have been reduced enough that the IPC now sees the RCP8.5 scenario as unrealistic.

We've already changed quite a lot. And this despite you not cutting back on meat or on driving. Think about it.

> There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.

You don't do "it" to please some leftist eco-warrior, but because "it" is a unsustainable lifestyle. Whatever shape "it" actually takes.