While I don’t disagree that it’s going to be too late, I do think SMRs are likely to go the distance, at least abroad.

The reality is that we aren’t going to hit 90% carbon free by 2030 without a huge social and political shift. There’s just no way that is happening in 6 years. I really hate being a downer about it but I think we need to face the facts on it.

The storage capacity is the hard part. Batteries aren’t really a viable option (we don’t really have good enough batteries, limits on how many can be made with current resources, etc).

Dams would be good (pump water uphill when electricity is cheap and release when you need the energy back), but dams are not a viable option everywhere and also have a high environmental impact and are arguably not the safest thing for a community.

I read somewhere recently about the idea of putting smaller batteries in individual homes, basically distributing the power ahead of time to a certain number of places so they are not taking from the grid in peak times, but it would be hugely expensive still, and I also question if we have the ability to make so many batteries, much less get enough people to install them.

To be fair, Plant Vogtle just turned on Unit 3 earlier this year and Unit 4 should be coming soon.

So freaking expensive. But honestly I love mine. Sometimes I travel for work and I’m gone all week. Come home and there’s still no smell. Worth it.

OoO this would be fun to try to do the whole song…

Cruise ships are more about the amenities on board. Not sure how many amenities you could get on an airship because of the weight. So it would be a two days boring as hell trip and most people aren’t going to give up the vacay time to sit around and do nothing.

I actually don’t think that is true. Caitlin Dougherty on YouTube has a video on it though. It’s pushed by funeral directors because it’s a big money maker for them.

I have mint too and haven’t had much trouble with bandwidth. But to be fair I don’t use my phone for very much while not on wifi, mostly just streaming music and Google maps.

Lol, I have 8 nibblings. It’s always been a chore.

Want to drop some links for where to get started? I only sort of understand what you just said but I like the idea of my own network and it being easier than it seems!

Only very briefly if I really needed the money. I used to work a corporate job and for a while I was a contractor doing data analysis. Those jobs left me feeling like I wasn’t doing anything of value and that was enough to shift me into the public sector, which I enjoy immensely. I’d rather not go back but I could see myself needing more money than is generally on offer in public service.

If I opposed the organization ideologically I’d probably sell plasma before I took a job there. But I don’t have a family relying on me so that makes it easier.

Does this take into account the value of the land? Solar notoriously takes up space so I’m curious how much space you’d need for a solar farm that could produce as much power as Vogtle…

This might be true for large reactors but I don’t think it will hold true with small modular reactors. We need the stability of nuclear too, as power demands overall rise.

Renewables should definitely be a priority still, but nuclear shouldn’t be kicked out of the conversation.

Not too late if we make small modular reactors a thing. Once you build one, every one after it will become cheaper and faster to build. Link 10-20 SMRs together and you could have a plant. Or just put 1 or 2 where they are most needed. SMRs are the future of nuclear, no doubt. But the current big reactors will mostly be around for a while, too.

Personally I think we’re looking at it wrong. ChatGPT is a thing now, so teach it as a tool. Instead of write me a 5 page paper about Shakespeare it’s “here’s a five page paper on Shakespeare - figure out what’s wrong with it, edit it, check sources, etc.” Because that’s the stuff ChatGPT can’t do, and skills that will be valuable in the future.

We can check if students know material via tests (including their ability to write). But we should be teaching the new tool, too, not trying to get around it. Imagine today if your teacher said all your research needed to be done without the internet (in library and paper book only). You’d be rightfully pissed, because in the real world you have the internet to help you do research, and that tool should be available to you as a student.

Just my two cents. I used ChatGPT to help me write some stuff for work for the first time just a couple weeks ago. I would say it only got me about halfway to where I needed to be. Just like the ability to Google stuff doesn’t mean we no longer have to know how to research (source checking, compiling information) ChatGPT doesn’t mean we no longer have to have writing skills. It just shifts it a bit. Most tools throughout history have done that.

I don’t think the real problem is that the vulnerabilities exist. It’s a question of how many people are looking for those vulnerabilities and what those people’s intentions are. With big open source projects, as someone else already pointed out, the number of good actors far exceeds the malicious ones, so when a vulnerability is identified it’s more likely to be by someone who just wants to patch it, not exploit it for gain. In a closed source project, fewer good actors are looking - only the people allowed to work on the code - but the bad actors are probably pretty much the same. Of course, popularity of the program and what it’s actually doing matter, too, in terms of how interested bad actors are going to be.

I love the idea of open source software for exactly this reason. I see it as a reminder that most people are good.