Trump Derangement Syndrome???

Might want to check out the WNA's own economic assessment.

It explains in detail how nuclear is only competitive with renewables in a highly regulated environment where utilities pledge to pre-purchase power over the long term.

Without those agreements or in a unregulated, competitive environment where they have to compete on price, then the plant has to be idled during peak solar/wind generation periods and that prevents it from ever recouping its costs.

Or in their own words, "The increased penetration of intermittent renewables thereby greatly reduces the financial viability of nuclear generation in wholesale markets where intermittent renewable energy capacity is significant."

That said, I think nuclear has a chance of being commercialized for specialty applications like the proposed Mcirosoft/SMR-powered data center. The data center is the SMRs sole customer, and the power generated never has to be competitive in a wholesale marketplace.

And that's where we should be focusing our nuclear efforts.

But as been pointed out innumerable times, China is basically building out solar at a rate equal to five nuclear plants every two weeks. They are building nuclear, but nowhere close to the same scale (0.3%, IIRC)

So I'm not buying the arguments that say we shouldn't build wind and solar today because we should be building nuclear. And then not building anything at all.

It's simply a bad faith argument for maintaining the status quo.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fworld-nuclear.org%2Finfo...

Turn on closed captioning, turn off the sound, and you can hit 2x/3x.

I believe that's subvocalization. Sublingual means under the tongue.

I can speed read up to about 1,500WPM, but as you say, it depends on what I'm reading, and what level of retention and comprehension I'm looking for...

I speed it up, turn off the sound, and turn on closed captioning (CC). Turns YouTube into a speed reading machine.

Which part of people flying FPV (first person video) drones into the enemy wasn't clear? They're not delivering to a GPS coordinate. They're being flown.

"What really matters is that we pass on values of honesty and decency on to the future.."

Ah... have you seen the bozos running the bus?

"Looks to me that Google is afraid of having to innovate again to compete."

Most of Google's recent innovation lies in coming up with new ways to screw over its users.

And how is that benefitting Ford and GM workers these days???

I use Swift. As such I dropped semi-colons years ago...

Because you need some way to tell the idiot in headphones looking at his phone that he's about to die?

"making the infrastructure work for the humans that live there"

That means redesigning things for humans, not for cars.

"You need massive upgrades to roads to get that TEMPORARY reduction in congestion."

FTFY

The only way to reduce congestion is to reduce demand. WFH is one way. Congestion pricing is another, and is only really viable here because NYC actually has a transit system.

Battery swapping means you need extra batteries, of every kind and shape that needs to be swapped. Or is a car battery the same as an SUV battery and as a truck battery and as a heavy-duty truck/semi-truck battery? Probably not.

You iterated many of the problems, but unless you're going have specifically schedule pickup times you're going to need dozens of extra batteries or each size and type. Some charging, some waiting to be charged, and so on. It's not just a five minute gas station swap if a charged battery isn't ready.

And I don't see manufacturers of personal vehicles standardizing on something that makes them more competitive than someone else ("We have longer range!", "We have faster charging!", "We're better in the cold!", "We last for 10,000 cycles.")

IMO, the only model where such a thing makes sense is long-distance trucking and the like where fleets can standardize on a specific system, and where the packs aren't structurally integrated into the vehicle. Semi pulls into a terminal, swaps, keeps going.

The economics indeed don't work out. The infrastructure costs are high, the battery costs are high, and you STILL need to build charging infrastructure anyway, in order to recharge the dropped off batteries.

With that factored in, what are you paying per swap? 3-4x what normal recharging would cost?

Besides, battery tech is improving daily. Increasingly seeing mentions of 5-6min recharge times.