What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
> Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from?
Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). Since it is about 1% of the energy cost, that’s pretty inexpensive.
Also, uranium comes from suppliers on 4 different continents, there is little chance that it becomes unavailable overnight.
You could do that, too, if you want. The relevant questions would be how much of the electricity cost is buying solar panels, how are they stored, and how they age when not used.
Stockpiling uranium addresses a specific risk related to sourcing in an inexpensive way, I'm not sure what problem you address by stockpiling unused solar panels, and for what cost.
Importantly, it used to be Germany which had all the expertise, until the CDU government destroyed much of the German solar industry over night. It's funny how everyone always talks about Germany stopping Nuclear energy but nobody ever talks about the fact that subsequent German governments destroyed the renewables industry twice (and they are talking about it again), largely due to lobbying from the coal, Nuclear and car industries. Definitely an interesting what if
Could you please send which lobbies worked on destroying renewables industry twice? (You probably mean destroying solar industry, wind industry is up and running).
I could only find that EU manufacturers of solar panels wanted tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels and EU builders and operators of solar power plants didn't want tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels.
There are solar panel manufacturers outside of China that have no dependence on Chinese inputs such as polysilicon, wafers, and ingots. Two that come to mind are First Solar (US) and Toyo Solar (Japan). I’m sure there are others. Europe can buy from them while scaling local manufacturing.
Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.
You can scale battery installations basically arbitrarily to the size of the grid connection you have. Put the batteries at the end user if you can. Then they get power outage protection and the grid gets much of the same flexibility.
Atomic power is in a bit of a sour spot as a technology. The large size of plants means we don’t build very many means we don’t get much cost reduction from learning curves. Wind and solar are getting much much better cost reductions over time. Batteries are in the same boat- small, modular, benefitting from learning curves.
A small number of large plants are much easier to target during war than distributed wind, solar, or batteries. It’s not that batteries are immune to grenades. It’s that you’d need to put grenades in orders of magnitude more places to get to all the batteries as compared to large nuclear plants.
Batteries do pose a fire risk, but so do petrol cars. We pump flammable gas into our homes in large parts of the west and have designed ways of keeping ourselves safe. I see no reason why batteries won’t follow the same path.
Depends. People don't understand the idea of learning curves related to nuclear. If you don't fix your problems in second build you'll still make same mistakes. On the other hand if you do proper planning you can achieve instantly N of a kind costs, like first japanese ABWR.
Ren infra has own risks too. For example concentration in best weather areas. Most ren infra in Ukraine was in the south and was either captured or destroyed by Russia. There are similar risks in for north sea/offshore projects
That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in solar panels we’d have almost enough energy to power the country. Turn the other half over to food production and you’d come out ahead on both energy and food.
It’s weird that he’s so in the numbers but then doesn’t carry through with the battery electric truck calculations. He just dismisses it out of hand.
Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.
Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.
My read is most likely some kind of strike on the cartels. There hasn’t seemed to be any significant US military buildup so it’s something they’ll be able to do with a smaller force.
The trapezoid makes me worried about a ground incision there- it extends to the border and would be a cover space for an invasion force. Absolutely bonkers that we are even having this discussion.
The TFR is most likely contingency planning for possible retaliation by cartel drones and the need to keep the airspace clear so they can see (with radar) and shoot down drones and not passenger aircraft.
Other commenters here in this thread as well as many people on reddit and other sites about this news are also saying the same thing. Our minds are not as unique as we think :)
Nuts, definitely. Bonkers to jump to that conclusion? No, especially with this US administration.
Mexico itself is concerned enough about the possibility that it's made statements to make it clear it wouldn't be acceptable. Mexico thinks it's nuts, too, but not bonkers to think the US might do it.
> You can't be a simple mayor without cartel involvement in Mexico.
I don't know what world you're living in, but this is absolutely not the case. Mexico is not a failed state, don't get all your news from places trying to scare you.
It is totally nuts. We will see I guess. If there will be a ground invasion, people will see the convoys moving into position. You can’t really hide that much stuff.
What’s also bonkers is our political whimpiness that allowed this to happen, right? If there is a drone response it’s pretty damning evidence that we are way too dovish in our policy against drug smuggling up until now
I mean the RIRA is a splinter group of the PIRA which had massive funding from overseas, especially from the United States. PIRA was not a small-time group.
I'm assuming that's a typo missing a zero (i.e. should be half a million), not a typo substituting comma for decimal (i.e. five hundred quid). Even with 24 years of inflation, that spend does not suggest a big group to me.
I'm just going to copy my comment on a previous post about this topic:
You think that Trump won't demand something in return for this?
I keep telling everyone I know that AI will be enshitified just like every other internet business. Tell me why the incentives will be different this time around. Putting yourself in hock to an aspiring authoritarian is certainly one way to supercharge that process.
What do you think OpenAI's output about Jan 6 will be one year from now if this goes through?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
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