Hacker News: jakebol

New comment by jakebol in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

jakebol — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:54:12 +0000

I'm not a hard core nuclear fan but this Fervo project is coming in at about FOAK nuclear projects in terms of project costs per power output. It hasn't had to go to the public either for the cost of its power given the commercial off takers. I think people seem to think that enhanced geothermal is going to be cheaper than nuclear but many geothermal projects are signing contracts for $100+ MW/h power costs. EGS has the potential to be a considerable water consumer (non-potable) if field leak off rates are high and that sets up for potential public pushback given the arid farming/ranching environments these plants will be situated in the great basin. Like any technology there are advantages and tradeoffs, I see both technologies struggling without additional policy support.

New comment by jakebol in "World's First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

jakebol — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:19:30 +0000

A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.

New comment by jakebol in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

jakebol — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:10:35 +0000

I don't see why necessarily, they are in the same ballpark LCOE cost wise. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is that you can potentially build it relatively quickly but that is more a policy choice.

New comment by jakebol in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

jakebol — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:59:08 +0000

Enhanced geothermal are engineered geothermal systems in naturally hot dry rock where natural fluid convection and permeability are not found. The term comes from the fact that conventional geothermal power plants are often tapping into natural near surface convective systems with high water permeability. Bringing that heat to the near surface also heats the surrounding rock over hundreds of thousands of years so one way to "enhance" the output of traditional geothermal power plants was to theoretically engineer permeability into these surrounding rock formations. Fervo's facility is built next to an existing conventional geothermal power plant.

New comment by jakebol in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

jakebol — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:45:40 +0000

Not really, it is more the limiting physics of extracting heat through conductive transfer in the rock. The rate of heat extraction through fluid convection has to be less than the rate of conductive replenishment though the basement rock to not get thermal drawdown and these rates are often not economical.

New comment by jakebol in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

jakebol — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:27:50 +0000

Fervo engineers for thermal drawdown up front, it is well known that for EGS to maintain constant power output you need to periodically re-stimulate the field after a period of some number of years. What matters for the economics is the rate of eventual drawdown. The nameplate 100MW is also a bit misleading as it represents gross power output without taking into account the parasitic load of pumping which for an EGS plant is quite high. There was a ~60% parasitic load for their test facility and IIRC Fervo is eventually targeting 30-40% for the commercial power plant.

New comment by jakebol in "Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat"

jakebol — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:40:48 +0000

That is one part, the other part is that you would get more persistent high pressure blocking patterns over Europe due to reordered atmosphere circulation which will lead to more intense droughts. That is what happened this summer.

New comment by jakebol in "Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat"

jakebol — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:30:03 +0000

Current research is that it would get a lot drier than it is currently. Also the AMOC collapse process would play out over many decades (~50-100 years) it will not be a sudden event.

New comment by jakebol in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

jakebol — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:07:27 +0000

SSRIs have much more clinical evidence of efficacy for addressing anxiety disorders vs a placebo than depression. The effect size is ~0.7 vs 0.2 in meta studies.

New comment by jakebol in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

jakebol — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:54:41 +0000

A good book on this is Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. Describing the history of how many of these classes of drugs came about is pretty eye opening, I would say the book is pretty nuanced in its conclusions.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40180010-mind-fixers

The title is a play on the Pulitzer prize winning article from the 80's.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041125092022/http://www.byline...

New comment by jakebol in "Openrouter is joining Stripe"

jakebol — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:50:39 +0000

We are certainly seeing higher monetary velocity in certain sectors. That usually follows from real economic expansion but could also be due in part to inflation.

New comment by jakebol in "The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source"

jakebol — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:50:51 +0000

Extensible trait support seems like another big one if the ecosystem is going to significantly grow. Not having clearly defined traits in the language made larger projects composing many libraries in Julia difficult.

New comment by jakebol in "When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs"

jakebol — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:50:14 +0000

You forgot to add that he was in a relationship and later engaged to the chief of staff at Anthropic while raising and running his fund, but I’m sure he had no access to material non-public information.

New comment by jakebol in "Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution"

jakebol — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:38:01 +0000

I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.

New comment by jakebol in "Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution"

jakebol — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:31:30 +0000

It acts as a negative feedback signal for producers because there is limited physical pipeline capacity. I think there are some financial incentives to reduce flaring for the LNG export market, but only a small amount of gas was flared in that region (less than 5%).

New comment by jakebol in "Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution"

jakebol — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:57:37 +0000

What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good. It feels similar to the Tea Party movement after 2008.

New comment by jakebol in "Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution"

jakebol — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:29:39 +0000

Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-wary-ai-driven-da...

New comment by jakebol in "Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution"

jakebol — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:12:26 +0000

It’s largely associated methane co-produced from oil production in the Permian. The economics of co-production means that the gas is often the cheapest in the nation and can have negative prices during large oil production swings. I believe it went nearly -$10 MMBtu this year at one point.

New comment by jakebol in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

jakebol — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:41:16 +0000

Advancement of normal technologies can bring about profound conflict, I feel that is one of the main takeaways from the history of the Industrial Revolution.

New comment by jakebol in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

jakebol — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:43:35 +0000

Many polls were done post election about preferences among non voters.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...