Always thought this was unlikely to make much sense.

Can this really compete with mass produced Sodium batteries also used in cars?

Also, the Iranians you likely hear, are not representative. I don't think most people who depend on energy and water don't want that infrastructure destroyed.

Car costs don't have to be insane. If you are smart about buying a small second hand car. Its just a reality that almost all american insanely overspend on their cars. And even reasonably poor people refuse to use buses or public transport even in places where it is possible.

> Healthcare costs are insane. Daycare costs are insane.

A huge number of people who are both healthy and don't have kids, or don't use daycare also live paycheck to paycheck.

> "those poor people just don't know how to manage their money!"

Its simply a well document fact that people insane overspend on consumtion. There is a reason the term 'house poor' exists. US culture tells everybody you need buy a house or you are failure, and that traps a lot of people. Same for cars, the overspend on cars is insane, the amount of 'poor' people that drive F-150 is off the charts, when you could get a second hand Honda Civic for 1/3 cost.

There are 1 million+ large F-150 like trucks sold in a year in the US. And we know for a fact that many of those are sold to people who will end up having payments mich higher then the recommended monthly acccount. And we know for a fact, that most people don't need these trucks.

We also know that people who have a pattern living paycheck to paycheck very often continue to do so, even as their income increases. Partly because they life-style inflated helped by the fact that as your income grows, your ability to add debt increases as well and many people see this as an oppertunity, rather then a trap.

Changing those things doesn't turn you from poor to rich, but it would mean that instead of living on the edge paycheck to paycheck with constant use of credit cards, instead you could have no credit card, an emergency fund and a savings rate of a modest 5%. There are plenty of people you can find who do this, who are worse off in terms of income then people who live paycheck to paycheck.

Its a fair argument to make that the US make this to hard, specially for people with kids or people who are sick, but those don't account for 30%+ of the population. But to ignore all individual choice is equally silly and infantilizing. People prefering F-150 over retirment savings is just a fact of life, and its not elitist to point it out.

Yes, sometimes this is medical debt or other unavoidable things. But its also true that the consumtion rate is incredibly high and the savings rate is incredibly low, with US credit card industry making it easy to create huge debts.

So its simply a fact that a huge amount of people live in self imposed risky situations. Instead of an emergency fund, they think they can just open a new credit card.

So its of course not what is causing people to be poor, but what is does is that it makes many, many more people 'living on the edge' then there should be based on their actual incomes.

In addition, if we built proper high speed lines, would could increase the frequency so much that it doesn't actually matter anymore.

So it doesn't actually break the system, it improves it.

Join us in advocating for this vision: https://swissrailvolution.ch/#goals

I don't think rules and regulation in California are actually worse then in Switzerland.

The reality is that in most western countries even 50+ year old nuclear plants often have an 80% uptime and usually are down at times when the capacity is not needed. If a government properly cares for their reactors, up-times of 90-95% are very possible.

Switzerland has a capacity factor of 90% with some of the oldest reactors in the world.

> The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.

The fact is that is overall much less available and much less flexible on when you do the generation and when you want more or less energy.

> Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.

Nuclear is to slow is something renewable fans have been arguing since the 1970s.

The fact about cost is that on a system level its cheaper and France has been able to have cheaper energy then Germany for the last 50+ years.

Once you don't just look at generation but total cost, including all the cost of building out the grid, the cost is much higher. And if you ever want to be 100% renewable you better have weeks of battery at least, and that is a thing people barley calculate. Gas peakers plants will remain the solution for a very long time and when gas prices go up, it will cause an energy crisis.

In addition you will need to replace the wind energy far sooner.

In addition, with nuclear, a huge part of the cost is going to salaries of local highly educated people and technicians. You capture much more of the value in your own economy for the next 60+ years.

> Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.

> Just look at the proposed EPR2 fleet. A 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans. Summing up to over 20 cents per kWh for the electricity. With the first reactor coming online at the earliest in 2038.

The West has so totally and completely fucked the industry and did every possible thing wrong for the last 30 years. And now we are paying for it. This is what 30+ years of renewable orthodox has brought us, high energy prices and a complete collapse of the nuclear industry. France has dropped all its advanced reactor as well now we are building EPRs again. Its beyond sad.

What we could build are APR1400 units like in the UAE. If you do a proper build, yes it takes 10 year for the first to finish but after you start a new years 3 years later, and then another every year and then 2 each after that and later 3 each year. In 20 you can build pretty much as much capacity as you need and your learning curve is going to be amazing, likely you will finish a new build in less then 5 years at much lower cost. The problem is if you only look at 'when will the first reactor finish' instead of 'how fast can we build 20 reactors'.

Capital-recovery component for APR1400 alone works out to about 3.2–4.3 US¢/kWh at 5–7% financing, but this is for only 4 reactors built in with no background. But we should finance this with government bonds directly, so really capital alone is only 2 USc/kWh and less as build cost go down the learning curve. The fuel cost is also only 3-4 USc/kWh (hopefully we again have reliable European fuel and reduce the price further, another thing destroyed by the last 30 years). And operation and maintenance around 10USc/kWh isn't crazy for a proper fleet with centralized staff training and local industry.

As with everything in nuclear, one nation building 1 plant is going to be expensive and makes the numbers look worse then they are. And remember this was build in a country with no experience and no train workforce and only 4 reactors built, not the 10s of reactors people should build. A country like Poland could easily do a 20 year flash build program, and that would be much faster for them then Poland.

> The 10 GW HVDC links being built costs €20B. That’s equivalent to the subsidies needed for one new large scale reactor. Then you have the market price of electricity on top of that.

> Are you starting to realize the conundrum?

Try looking up total grid upgrade cost if you want to achieve 100% renewables. We are literally talking the same amount of money as all the generation combined. I heard interviews with people responsible for even only part of Germany where they admitted they will have to go to private markets to fund 100+ billion $ in investments. And these investors will want their money back. Total grid cost will be higher then to total cost of renewable installs. And of course wind turbines need to be rebuilt.

But I guess Germany is making it easier on itself by losing so much industry that they have fewer problems in the future for renewables to solve. Germany by the way since 2018 is spending 50 billion $ per year on direct energy subsidies. Yes that is partly heating but France because of its cheap electricity has far more heating converted to electric. So it is related to electricity policy.

What I want is rock solid energy that is reliable and served from a simple centralized grid, nuclear + 1-2h battery peak shaving with lithium or sodium batteries. Anything longer then that isn't great. Not some scheme where we somehow hope that the combination of Greek solar and Danish wind produce enough, and then trying produce hydrogen in Canada and ship it to Germany, or whatever other nonsense people want to come up with.

The current proto-market system has all the wrong intensives built in and we were much better of in a system where there was simply one centralized utility that made rational engineering choices about how to get cheap energy to everybody.

Not to mention that having a well functioning nuclear industry has lots of other advantages that 'buy solar panels from China' doesn't bring.

So basically, you can put some battery next to every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid.

For renewable you need a much more complex grid with much more battery.

The forced EDF to sell nuclear at very cheap prices to fossil fuel companies and then buy it back at much higher price.

The French forced EDF to give subsides to solar even when that actually hurts their economics.

The French randomly in the 2010s decided to replace nuclear in a short time-frame (completely 100% unrealistic) but it sounds good to politicians. And they decided to delay all maintenance and didn't do any of the upgrades many other nations did.

Once of the secrets of French nuclear is, that their grandfather were so good in providing them these nuclear plants, the french absolutely suck at running them. Other countries like the US and ironically Germany managed to run their reactors at higher factors.

The problem is the solar is cheap when its being produced and makes the economics of base lose worse, without actually solving base load. Solar has been cross subsidized this way for a long time. And has been more explicitly subsidized. But its a private good, it helps only private people, it is negative on a system level.

Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy doing what they did.

> Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?

If somebody privately wants to build solar/storage that's fine, but they should get no support. Also prices should be adjust to actually reflect peak demand. Historically the way the system operated is with much simpler pricing models because it was understood that everybody shares in this infrastructure. In such a situation, the majority of people wouldn't build solar and batteries.

But really, the question we should ask, what the best thing to run a modern economy on and the German solution of 'lets build a massive electricity pipeline to solar farms in Greece' isn't a great model.

All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation itself, and sometimes more.

Also, the claim that nuclear is slow to change is a limitation of current nuclear plants, more modern plants could be far better. Some designs are very much load following.

Using heat is the most efficient and if you use nuclear heat directly, and you don't have to go to the step of converting to electricity, you get huge efficiency.

> There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel

Nuclear fuel is not valuable once you have a closed cycle. Fuel cost are already only a few % of total nuclear cost and in a closed cycle would be almost nothing. As soon as you breed fuel from fertile material the cost is basically 0.

> The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable.

It requires a very large plant to do in many small batches and cost 20x what hydrogen costs from natural gas. Its not efficient and will not be for the next 20+ years at least.

And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.

And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.

I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.

That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.

SpaceX is ahead, but its only technology, and nothing in Falcon 9 or even Starship suggest that nobody else can replicated it.

SpaceX themselves realized that launch itself isn't a big enough business, so they went themselves after space based comms. For SpaceX to stay ahead they would need to be technologically ahead on every single technological advanced.

But with companies like Amazon and so on involved, SpaceX is nothing like Standard Oil that was already the biggest company. SpaceX can not defend its monopoly on launch or space comms.

Comparing them to standard oil is silly.

So yes, there is research going on, and certain program to develop components.

But that is a very long way away from an actual concrete proposal to develop a real new rocket.

The Vinci engine for example started in the 90s and only flew first time with Ariane 6. So you could have said in 2002 'Ariane 6' is in development.

The question is when do the politicians get together and actually decide, lets spend 4+ billion$ (minimum) on a new rocket. And that is years away at best. And from that point on you would expect it to take minim 6 years, more likely 10 years.

Anybody that expect anything Ariane 7 like before 2035 is hopelessly optimistic. Not unless there is a major political shift.

> Given the financial limitations ESA is actually quite capable.

No its not. Ariane 6 development has cost more then the development of Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy. And that's if you do not count development of Vinci, if you do not count most development of the static boosters and so on.

You can say 'we are so poor' and then spend 5-6 billion $ on a rocket that is not competitive with Falcon 9 as it existed in 2015 and then spend another couple billion $ on giving subsidies to all the users of Ariane 6.

Funding isn't the problem, efficiency and good choices is.

There are some research project and research, but it's not close.

As for startups, none of them have even a working small vehicle. And small launch is a horrible buissness model that basically every company runs away from as fast away as they can burn investor money. Most go bust.

Euroean startups are 10 years late and fight in a very small markets with lots of competition.