Yes, but those are a priority below massive solar and wind deployment because nuclear is another way to say emissions will rise for decades before the plants come online and start displacing fossil fuels. There are a few edge cases where nuclear might be necessary but there is an enormous amount of fossil fuel usage which could easily be replaced except for political capture by the oil and coal industries.
Making this argument is a strong indicator that you are extremely under-educated on this subject or motivated to make dishonest arguments.
There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...
"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.
Nuclear is good for the last 10% (and very contextually - it maybe makes a lot of sense in Alaska but far less sense in Arizona, for example), but mostly we should be building more solar/wind/batteries, as they can be built both faster and increasingly cheaper over time (the cost of batteries has dropped ~97% in the last 20 years IIRC, solar and wind have similarly been dropping in price).
The main argument for nuclear besides "baseload" is that nuclear plants can potentially last for a century and will thus amortise its capex quite easily and afterwards become relatively cheap for most of its life. Except, given just how quickly solar is dropping right now, it's unreasonable to assume that 50+ years from now (so, in ~2076) already-built nuclear will be cheaper than contemporary solar tech (I.e. solar panels built in 2075). In fact, it's unreasonable to assume that nuclear plants will necessarily be longer-lasting than future solar panels, given current research into self-healing solar panels (which clearly isn't commercially ready, but very likely will be within 50 years). Even if they can only self-heal 3 times, that's 4x the lifetime for 120 years total, and much longer if the base lifetime of the panel is more than 30 years. And frankly nuclear will never beat solar panels on operational costs - nuclear has a 24/7 guard, a nuclear reactor and a turbine, whereas the closest thing PV has to moving parts is the de-dusting machines.
Similar logic for solar also applies to wind and batteries, of course - their price has been dropping like a rock for decades. And that compounds - if both solar and batteries get twice as cheap and their lifetime lasts twice as long, then the whole package becomes 4x cheaper. And the cheaper wind turbines get, the fewer batteries solar needs to plug the holes in intermittent generation.
A quick aside: a lot of focus on solar lifetimes assumes the minimum will be the average, but e.g. 1980s solar panels are still in operation with only 10-20% performance degradation IIRC so the popular assumption that solar panels last only 30 years seems a bit ridiculous.
China's nuclear stats should be kept in perspective by the way: IIRC ~90% of the generation they're building is non-nuclear renewables. They're also building more of basically everything than the rest of the world combined, so an absolute stat like "they're building 37 of X" isn't particularly useful except for conveying that China is building a lot of stuff.
To repeat, though: the US should still build nuclear plants (unless/until they get financially blitzed by renewables). My point here is to keep it in perspective.
And I don't mean to insinuate you said otherwise, I'm just kind of pre-emptively responding to a stereotype/common set of associated arguments, I guess.
»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.«
You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.
A rat taking out a DC resulting in a black start event isn't the same thing as being able to turn a DC on and off at will. The thousands of computers in an DC running various bits of software don't just power on like your Windows computer and result in a working data center after a couple of minutes automatically.
Are the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?
But that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability.
AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively.
So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclear energy and Germany's decision to fade it out is now driven more by emotion/ignorance than reason.
Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity.
Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically.
Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections)
But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades.
I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
- nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants....
- nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
> I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage
Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
> nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them
Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future".
Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants.
It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike)
> nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US.
Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.
This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
All power projects have to look at economic viability. Every project has different needs and market dynamics. THERE IS NOT A ONE TYPE OF PROJECT WORKS FOR ALL LOCATIONS. Resources mixes vary as do the demands of the power.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
> Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense
Is it?
The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point.
Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation.
People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels.
To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more.
But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing.
In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting.
> It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.
> There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point
This is sort of like saying the economy is air or the economy is sand. (What is closer to correct is the economy is, within approximation, energy.)
> the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels
American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita. Europe’s malaises are broader than this.
> This is a certainty if we don't do anything
If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party. If, on the other hand, it’s a rewiring, it’s rational to do.
I thought we learned our lesson around hyperbolic environmental doomerism, but apparently not.
> American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita
GDP is artificial. Did you ever check how they correct for inflation? GDP is worth nothing for science, it's just there for economists to do... whatever they do.
> If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party.
I don't know how you read that from what I say. I say, "if we don't do anything, we're completely screwed. The more we do, the better it gets". But yeah, if we keep doing what we are doing, we're doomed, that's certain.
…all economic metrics are artificial. Society is artificial.
How are you defining an economy? Or is your original statement (“economy is fossil fuels”) just a tautology?
> don't know how you read that from what I say
There is no political system on the planet that can enact and survive economic collapse. If that’s what’s required, this is a fool’s errand.
Fortunately, again, you’re wrong. It’s not required, though I’m sure we’ll keep seeing governments who try the silly route replaced. The best we can do in the meantime is politically sideline folks who believe this stuff.
I said it above. The economy is what we produce and consume. Because the metrics economists use (like GDP) make no sense does not mean that the economy does not exist.
There are physical metrics to measure how the economy is doing (that I mentioned above). For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks. If many trucks move a lot of stuff, then it means that stuff is being produced and consumed.
Another one you can measure is the surface that is being constructed. When humans in a country build houses and buildings, it is a sign that "the economy" is growing.
And it is difficult to cheat with those "physical" metrics. Whereas cheating GDP is absolutely trivial. Do you know how they correct for inflation? There is no way to "measure" inflation, it's a guesstimate. But depending on how you guesstimate it, you increase or decrease the GDP.
What we see in Europe since 2007 (the peak of fossil fuels for Europe) is that trucks are moving less and less stuff, and the surface built by humans in Europe is slowing down. Those physical estimators show that Europe is slowing down, completely correlated to fossil fuels. GDP is growing, sure... but again GDP is "manipulated" (consciously or not, that's not the point) by the numbers we put in the "inflation" box.
> For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks
Gross tonnage is a good input into "what we produce and consume." It's incomplete, however. Grossly. It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
(A better one is electricity production, which you can estimate remotely from fuel levels and thermals. It’s also woefully incomplete—the nutters trying to forecast based solely on it are influencers, not fund managers or policymakers, for good reason.)
> Do you know how they correct for inflation?
Yes.
> There is no way to "measure" inflation
This is nonsense. It must be estimated. But so must e.g. "the surface that is being constructed" depending on how one defines surface construction.
There are various measures of inflation of various utility. Some are used to deflate GDP.
Mankiw's Principles of Economics might be a good start if you're serious about your questions. Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
> Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
Not sure if you're consciously being manipulative or not.
Sure, you are more eloquent than I am. But do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics? Making me say that "any kind of metrics is always folly" is just manipulative, I'm sure you understand that it is not what I mean.
> It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff. But I am convinced that there is value in seeing that after 2007, indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels.
We cannot eat services, or use them to heat our apartments, can we? Services are a luxury for when everything below works. The risk with the end of fossil fuels is that it will disrupt everything on top of which services are built. I don't think GDP is bringing much in those discussions.
> do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics?
Yes. I’d argue inflation metrics are about as easy to fuck with as any emissions math I’ve seen. That doesn’t make either fundamentally wrong. But if one is irredeemably wrong, so is the other.
(In any case, you can deflate your own GDP. Nominal GDP contains zero deflation. There is no similar easy fix for emissions calculations, which I read with much wider error bars than any OECD inflation print.)
> Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff
Not the billions of people employed in services?
> indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels
Global gross tonnage is growing [1]. On the sea, your correlation works because that fleet runs on fossil fuels. If you were trying to measure Chinese economic activity using fossil-fuel metrics, on the other hand, you’d fail.
(Again, your instinct isn’t wrong. Energy is, more or less, the economy. That’s why we can decarbonise without lowering living standards. We can keep energy constant or even growing while reducing fossil-fuel use.)
Fossil fuels can be replaced for every use case by electricity from carbon-free sources and some chemistry. The price point for replacement of course varies by application. There is no reason to assume that we can't have the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels. Some things will naturally become more expensive, but other things might also became cheaper.
> There is no reason to assume that we can't have the same kind of economy
Has there been, in history, the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels? No. That's a first reason.
Are there practical replacements for every use case of fossil fuels? Most definitely not! I don't know where you get that. For those replacements we know, it has never been done at scale, so we don't know if it's possible or not. And for those we don't know... well we don't know. Just have a look at what petrochemicals are used for. And how do you make fertilisers without fossil fuels, at today's scale?
You seem to believe that proof of feasibility is impossible before actually finishing the task. I disagree. And for the record, profit oriented market economies are extremely old. Much older than any large scale use of fossil fuels.
Trade routes spanned Eurasia before we invented writing. Faster transportation and communication only expanded economic ties. Transportation is something that is fairly easy to do without fossil fuels.
Again, you conveniently forget the important part. Before we invented writing, we were not remotely transporting as much stuff as we are today.
I mean, before fossil fuels, the world ran on renewables. But that's not at all a proof that we can easily go back to renewables: it was a different world then.
> Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
Hydro is great, except for a few problems. The biggest is that they are causing extinction for several species. The second biggest in central and northern Europe is that hydro is already used in every place where its reasonable to build them, with practically no space to further expansion.
Right before the last rush to build nuclear, Europe went through an energy crisis where they did also use reverse hydro. In recent time there has been discussion to modernize and reuse those old installations, but the issue is costs. Buying energy to sell it later, while maintaining and operating the hydro power plants and pumps are not cheap (not to mention building out transmission). Even at current fossil fuel prices, natural gas and oil is cheaper and thus reverse hydro is not economical viable.
Hydro is not renewable when the basins are being refilled by glacial melt as is the case for most of Europe, and precipitation is also becoming more erratic. For example, Iceland is currently relying on hydro power for 70% of its electricity, but current models predict that glacial runoff will peak around 2060 (or earlier, if the arctic temperature continues its upward trend). After that, the potential power to be generated from hydro will gradually decrease, which is why Iceland is now diversifying towards geothermal and wind.
Countries who can do hydro are pretty much doing as much of it as they can. Like... there really isn't much room to increase hydro unless you start inundating valleys.
Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
We should make sure that the indirect cost for CO2 are added to the price of energy and imported products depending on the mix. It is one of the few areas where I think a market can fix things.
Yea but all other countries would have to pay for the C02 emissions of their militaries too. I bet many would not be able to afford to have one anymore - might be a good thing.
I’ve always thought that was a decent idea but Americans can’t even stomach higher gas prices because of the Iran war. How are they going to handle $7-$8 per gallon or more?
Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
"Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied.
Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).
Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
> Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time)
The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price.
I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time?
Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.
The politicians in Germany went to great length to promote natural gas as the green technology to be combined with renewables, a strategy they succeed in the European Parliament and still seem to follow even when the fires roams and the pipelines get blown up. There is no seasonal grid battery storage in central and northern Europe, and outside of a few hundred household sized experiment, no grid storage is being built.
Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party.
What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules.
Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
That seems very cheap if it means you don't need to build new transmission. The average cost in south of Sweden is much higher than that, which in euro would be around €100 per megawatt-hour.
Prices are also expected to further increase as EU has issued regulations that customers should subsidize regions of poor transmission, in order to enable construction of more wind and solar farms where no such transmission exist.
I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.
The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
I imagine it wouldn't be nearly in the same ballpark, since one side does not perform the classic mechanical generation from temperature difference, and deal with the associated waste heat.
It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.
> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing.
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
France's nuclear is long paid off, and there were big government investments into building the industry around it because France is a nuclear power. It's not exactly the same tech obviously but when you build nuclear weapons yourself you need a workforce and industry capable of working with the materials. Some of those costs will have found their way under defense headings instead of energy ones.
Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)
Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption.
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
Price elasticity definitely is a thing, but I'd argue not in the way you see it.
Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production.
Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?
CO2 capture is carbon negative by definition. That's not what I said.
There are some experimental methods of capturing CO2 (or rather just carbon in CO2), but I replied to a proposed negative tax on economic activities that are carbon negative as energy consumtion. There are none. There's only experimental carbon capture with no products and no services generated as an output of this "economic activity" that consumes energy and CO2 as inputs. And it costs money - a lot more money than what CO2-positive economic activities could generate if all their CO2 were to be captured.
A negative tax wants carbon negative processes to exist. That clear direction is more important than whether these processes currently exist.
Experimental olivine based carbon capture looks promising to this uneducated bystander, but what do I know?
In any case, I'm not expecting climate action. Many either don't know how to even start fixing this mess. Others would rather have their own children boil than to potentially give up some material conveniences.
Really? It's certainly not in actual practice - the largest actual carbon capture and sequestration projects on the globe to date are, by definition, carbon release reduction programs that are intended to store back a small percentage of what will be released as part of large natural gas extraction projects.
(eg: proposed Browse Basin (~400 km (250 mi) off NW coast of W.Australia) expansion)
It's a simple (albeit technically complex) proposition - puncture a gas basin, release large amount of CO2, grab some of that and stuff it back in the hole. Overall a net positive amount of CO2 is released, before addressing any further release as a by product of consuming the LNG, etc. But it's called CCS (carbon capture and storage) because carbon is captured and stored.
There are no larger programs at scale on the planet, they are net CO2 release programs, and less CO2 would be in the atmosphere if no LNG was extracted at all.
I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming.
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
Sorry, let me put a short rant then. The Green party of Germany forced through the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany and stood by that decision, even when it became clear the already bad impact on climate change it had was made 10x worse by the war in Ukraine (forcing Germany to switch to Coal and LNG). Meanwhile this "Green" party, unwilling to make compromises themselves, is using climate change to demand enormous compromises from everyone else, guaranteeing yet another fight to stop climate change legislation.
They do make for a good boogeyman, that's for sure. Other parties really should study them for how they manage to force everybody else to do their bidding while having no actual power. The exit from nuclear and the hated "GEG" / heating act were both conservative CDU initiatives after all, who are now retroactively being attributed to the greens to fuel the conservative culture war.
> how they manage to force everybody else to do their bidding while having no actual power
Oh the traditional European way. "You need 50% of the votes in parliament of a government. It's either us or the extreme right. Here's our list of demands, and a phone number. Kthxbye"
I truly wish I lived in your world were left of center parties actually had a significant influence on current EU and national (German) government. However, I do not, and in this world, politics is dominated by an increasingly populist and reactionary right trying to chase voters that have moved towards the extreme right.
The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need?
Today, pretty much everything you do increases oil dependency. What's clear is that we will have less and less oil (just because... physics: it's limited) and anyway we need to use less and less oil (because climate change).
So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil.
People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period.
If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
| China | 5,565 |
| United States | 1,737 |
| India | 1,395 |
| Russia | 536 |
| Japan | 492 |
In comparison, the whole of the European Union (consisting of 27 individual countries, including Germany) is emitting 587 Mt.
All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
> should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account
Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too, well above the US).
| Country | MtCO2e/ capita
| Qatar | 54.54
| Kuwait | 38.14
| Bahrain | 35.13
| United Arab Emirates | 25.62
| Oman | 24.02
| Saudi Arabia | 22.79
| Australia | 22.26
| Canada | 19.76
| Russia | 18.02
| United States | 17.34
| New Zealand | 15.59
| South Korea | 12.83
| Ireland | 11.86
| China | 10.81
| Poland | 9.28
| Belgium | 9.15
| Netherlands | 8.35
| Germany | 8.17
| Italy | 6.32
| Spain | 6.16
| Brazil | 5.93
| France | 5.68
| United Kingdom | 5.63
I've left the petro-states in the list because the fact that they have such high per-capita emissions is interesting even if not surprising, but I agree that as small countries they don't really contribute that much to global emissions. I find more interesting the position of Australia, Canada and the US close to the top, and the surprisingly low position of the UK.
As for China, an average Chinese citizen is already contributing 40% less than his average US counterpart to global emissions- do you think we should ask them to make a bigger effort because China has more people? In that case, do you think that simply splitting China in two political entities each with half the population would solve the problem of their emissions?
I know the UK has a lot of wind and solar, and then there's short transport distances: those other countries are famous for hauling goods over long distances through sparsely populated terrain, which the UK doesn't have any of.
I wonder which country is considered to own the emissions from a cargo ship?
But anyway, about China, we agree on one thing: there are a lot of Chinese who are pretty much not participating in emissions. Then there are cities, factories, power stations for factories, and the government which, and this is the important point, has control over those sources of emissions.
If you split it into two nations, what that does is to remove the single point of control, and as a result remove the opportunity to do something about a huge portion of global emissions. Politically speaking splitting China in two sounds like an improvement, and lots of fun, but if you want some entity to control a really large amount of emissions, it's surely a giant authoritarian state that has the power to do it.
If the two halves were different in industrialization - if one had all the peasants and the other had all the factories and factory workers - that would help, since then you have a country that tops both lists, and can be firmly blamed by everyone, and we can stop getting lost in the weeds of "per capita" and the mad idea that individual scum like me and you have any responsibility to solve climate change by reusing plastic bags and so on.
Germany is in Europe and the economist is about Europe, so it makes sense to look at high emitters in Europe, no?
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
Germany is singled out because decided to close their safe and well functioning zero emission power plants for no good reason, thus exploding their CO2 emissions.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
I believe they are singled out in a feeble attempt by climate change deniers and fossil fuel boosters to discredit renewables. Which Germany played a pivotal role in kick-starting and which are currently saving the world.
The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void.
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
Unlike the states, Germany is densely populated and does not have vast uninhabited areas. Where do you suggest should they store their nuclear waste? Germany has been looking for an appropriate place for the last 50(!) years and does not expect to come to a conclusion any time soon:
In the mean time, they're keeping they're using the sites of their former nuclear power plants as temporary storage locations for the nuclear waste produced while the plants were still running.
While I would agree that it is regrettable Germany sunset their nuclear early when they should've extended the runtime for another 5-10 years to avoid excess carbon emissions since shutdown, but clean energy has already surpassed coal in Germany and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries. [My note: The US states of Illinois and California got this right, subsidizing their existing merchant nuclear generator fleets until more renewables can replace them]
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
You're free to doubt, healthy skepticism is a good thing imho, there is no will to spend what nuclear would cost and renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper. We're locked on a hockey stick trajectory of their uptake purely through the economics. Spain is phasing out the last of their nuclear for more renewables, for example.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy.
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails gracefully.
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
China is the top user of energy globally, and they are electrifying everything while moving rapidly to renewables for generation. This is the blueprint the rest of the world will eventually follow. China's clean energy generation will be used to spin the clean tech manufacturing flywheel up faster (which will lead to more global clean tech exports to the world). The sun will power the end to end supply chain for making more solar and batteries.
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
~110GW of nuclear capacity targeted by 2030. I respect their attempt to diversify, iterate, and drive down the cost of nuclear, but it pales in comparison to renewables (~90-100GW of solar installed per month, on average).
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
I disagree, but I'm not the decision maker so it's irrelevant. Nuclear is throwing good money after bad imho (based on current and projected levelized cost of energy [LCOE]), I think the next five years will prove that out.
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction and messaging gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
How can articles on major news sites have typos this bad up for over a month?
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
You don't get my point. "Everyone is making progress, in a world largely dominated by fossil fuels".
Renewables are making progress with the help of fossil fuels. We don't know how it will be without it, because we haven't tried. We as "the global economy", obviously.
> As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
Sure, but don't blame China when 90% of the shit you buy is made there, they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
You know why China became the manufacturing center of the world? Because it was lowest cost, with little regulation and lenient policies including environmental ones. Red carpet, special economic zones. Nobody forced them to.
They have to bear responsibility, and to be fair to them, they have taken steps to address that.
I don't see why CO2 emissions should be stagnant. There's now more people than ever, and everyone buys more shit per capita than ever, that's already a good reason for emissions to grow.
Something can be urgent while no one is doing anything about it. Would not be the first time. That point would be the first of many incoherences in you comment.
I don’t debate that there is urgency, that so much more should be done, etc. but your comment really isn’t helping.
The last time any company was interested to build a nuclear reactor in Germany was in the 1970s. About thirty years before the eventual (first) ban.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.
It’s really only economics, there is simply no relevant market for mechanical cassette players that would justify the investment.
I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts.
But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.
CRTs are a stronger example. The R&D Sony has lost to the sands of time means we would need decades of sustained effort to reach the same quality of shadow mask that we used to have. It wouldn't be picking up where we left off, it would be picking up at the idea of where we left off with none of the supply chain that enabled it.
Modern economy cannot exists without economy of scale. It's unfortunate is that if you want something else than millions of other people the price likely will be prohibitive - small scale production is not viable economically, especially for high tech components and devices.
> I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost.
I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.
This is - in passing - why billionaire prepper fantasies of surviving an apocalypse on a private island are insane. Sooner or later spares and consumables will start running out, and without global supply chains nothing is repairable.
You might get ten years if you stock up on ten of everything you can think of, plus a few things you can't, but after that things will start breaking down, and you're going to start running out of replacement parts.
And you'll be out of consumables long before then.
> I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.
We are talking implementations details to build the slimmest walkmans made in history.
That doesn't mean we couldn't make a much better sounding tape player protoype and still a slimmer one than the We are Rewind player and what is available today on Amazon, then iterating on making it smaller and smaller over the models. The main issue is still money and market, you can't spend that time on iterating and improving the design if the market is small and you are losing money.
Tape now is very niche - it’s for data archival purposes, and often only exists for regulatory reasons. This is why it is ludicrously expensive- it only needs to be cheaper than the next credible commercially available alternative, which only needs to offset the risk of going to jail for malicious malpractice.
The LTO-10 can hold 30 TB of highly compressed data on one cassette, and will last at least 30 years without degradation (probably longer under optimal conditions). This is still useful for many things. It does take almost a full day to fill up a tape, though, so if you're trying to back up a lot of stuff fast you're probably just going back to SSDs.
The M-disc is a better option for most use cases-- but if you have a ton of data that needs archiving, the tape involves less human labor and less physical space, which is I guess how the high prices are justified for those 'niche' applications.
I imagine the typical tape user doesn’t get individual drives and instead gets fancy tiered storage servers that include ludicrously fat network pipes, RAM, flash, HDDs and tape libraries, where tapes are fed and removed to an off site location every day, hopefully to never be seen again (because, if you need those tapes, it’s because something really bad happened to your data - the servers is plan A, the library is plan B, and getting it from offsite storage is plan C).
I agree, modern Sony cameras and lenses have much more sophisticated tech in them than any Walkman ever had. Much smaller and more efficient too. The tech is not lost, it's just obsolete. The tiny motors used in a Walkman haven't been used in a Sony camera or lens for probably 10 years. They are loud, weak, heavy, inefficient, unreliable etc. we simply have much much better tech today.
It is not a capitalist conspiracy that there is no portable vinyl turn table that you carry around in a back pack so you can do rucking workouts and listen to vinyl at the same time either.
It is just a stupid idea.
I can picture myself listening to LL Cool J on a walkman in the 80s. I am not old enough for 8 tracks but I would put cassettes as the worst music media of my lifetime.
Maybe if you are into Japanese noise music there would be some kind of aesthetics of a cassette that would be interesting but it is mostly a stupid idea too in 2026.
It's interesting to see how LLMs have definitely become a force-multiplier to motivate people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have the time and effort to.
It really depends on the end goal. For personal tools that one uses, LLMs are extremely useful. But publicly used software doesn't only need to be written - it also needs to be maintained. And considering that it's extremely easy to implement features that are not used, vibe coded software tends to be, in best case, a mixed bag, and in worst (I believe typical) case, quickly abandoned.
Vibe coded software is the modern equivalent of the shovelware of the 90s.
I have been pairing with Claude Opus and it’s quite impressive. I have explored a number of possible changes to things like VTE and the Hercules mainframe emulator.
Would be amazing to implement a JIT in hercules (would make it 10x faster potentially as fast as z/PDT which implements a JIT); good timing as IBM is retiring z/PDT!
Sweet. What changes to Hercules have you been considering? I have had a long running (and maintained!) MVS instance in Hercules for quite a few years now, just for fun.
I want a telnet port connecting directly to the Hercules console when it runs headless, as that is the way it ends up running in Docker. The Hercules console does a lot of heavy lifting that could be implemented at the terminal (as even Windows now has a proper terminal). It went as far as allowing me to connect and see the console transcript, which is pretty already.
Another thing I want that I haven't figured out is to print to my network printers - they all do lpr and ipp, but Hercules direct to socket approach didn't work for me and I need to do more research on that. Ideally, the line in the config could be a pipe command where I could turn the page into PostScript to be netcat it to the printer. or massage it through a converter that took in an IBM line printer EBCDIC stream and spat out ASCII for a "normal" printer.
It's bone crushingly dry to try and figure this kind of shit out yourself, can do everything right according to every available reference and code comment only to get compiler and linker errors nobody has ever seen or posted about. Weeks and weeks of smashing your face against a wall until it gives. Now anyone can get twice as far in an evening. And that fuckin rules
Hard to not get a little hyperbolic about it... but I can't wait for everyone to exhaust their meme projects/ports and models to get just a bit better. Feels like we're about to have something of a golden age when everyone starts really making the stuff they've always wanted.
Recently thanks to Modern Vintage Gamer on youtube, there has been a push to see if you could get Doom to run on the NeoGeo. Because of its very unique hardware (no framebuffer) it is a very unqiue and tough task.
And yet, some folks have come to the battle and have ended up extensively using LLM's to code it. It is wild to see that these things can target such an obscure platform and get some decent results in a very short amount of time.
Well, that's one vibe coded backburner'd project I can mark off my list...though maybe it would still be helpful so I'll link it here: https://github.com/ChickenParts/qemu-ia64
It booted Linux fine, was working on booting IPF EFI firmware when I got distracted by life and other projects.
I think most of the machines that could run Windows could also run OpenVMS. It’s a bit unfortunate the company behind the OS needs to make money off its licenses though.
They are in a tough spot. They have to pick between milking their legacy clients who have been running VMS workloads and don’t want to port them to anything else, and a much more risky attempt to develop a consulting ecosystem so those clients can remain on VMS indefinitely. This ecosystem would eat into their own support business at the expense of reducing incentives to migrate to different platforms.
I'll admit that "OS snob who just wants to run VMS because they once ran it on Alpha" is pretty low on the freebie list, but they didn't even say no, they just strung me along until I gave up caring.
I really wish they released it under a GPL license. Unless an event starts an adoption uptick for greenfield projects (and it'd take some time for that). I wish they had an easy way to deploy an OpenVMS instance on a cloud service the same way IBM does with their POWER and Z machines (sadly, no Linux on POWER from them).
Huh. It looks like they're actually getting rid of their as400 hosting... I wonder what that would have cost, being the only players in the game...
> Images for the Virtual Server for VPC (s390x architecture) are deprecated. Starting 28 February 2026, you can't create new instances from s390x images. Existing instances are supported until 20 February 2027. Any instances that remain after that date are deleted.
»If some businesses get killed in the process, so be it.«
The problem with this attitude is that the rest of the world often doesn’t have these strict regulations and as result, businesses aren’t killed but just leaving the country.
If a business can't be profitable while treating employees, customers, and the environment well, then it going out of business or leaving is not a loss.
Option 1: “we won’t trade humans as slaves at all costs, even if it makes us less competitive in the global market - and we don’t hold that conviction about other things”
Option 2: “We won’t trade slaves - and if we find you trading slaves we will kill you. So we don’t have to worry about competing against slaves in the global marketplace.”
Option 3: “slavery is less efficient than having the same people as market participants - so I don’t consider giving up slaves to be less competitive”
Many more options, and mixtures of any or all of them.
It just shows that the whole point of "regulation is bad" blanket statement is an intellectually dishonest argument, as what most people actually mean is "regulations that I don't like are bad". In fact, the whole market vs state thing is very confused, markets are created by the state, something most serious economists specially economic historians will admit. It's no surprise that market driven capitalism has devoleped with the expansion of the reach and capacity of the state, and that weak states devolve into things more similar to feudalism than market utopia.
This sounds like you’re arguing against an invented boogyman.
For me and my experience, it’s reversed. Someone says some measured statement against a piece of regulation and someone shakes out of the woodwork mumbling something about some horrific thing like slavery.
Arguments of the structure:
“Aha, so you do like regulation, therefore you must like ALL regulation”
Or
“Oh, you oppose this piece of regulation, therefore you must want lord of the flies”
Or
“You only like regulation you like” (which is effectively a tautology)
People can oppose the burden of a body of regulation without opposing a government enforcing contract law.
And when someone says “regulation is bad” - a good faith interpretation of their statement is that they mean we have a large body of bad regulation, not that we should abolish the state and devolve into trading Monero for slaves.
... Wait, are you suggesting that no-one will want to sell clothes in Europe? Like, this regulation pretty much entirely impacts companies who sell clothes to consumers.
‘Europe’ is not substitutable by ‘Germany’: a one state counter-example does not substantiate a disproof of a union. Texas is not representative of how U.S. patent law works. Florida is not representative of how U.S. business regulation works. So, the recent HN post about German incorporation slowness fails, in isolation, to disprove the claim above that the US is more regulated than the EU; you’ll need to make your own case (or relevant citations!) about the EU (or Europe) rather than just Germany to be taken seriously here. Do you argue that “many” is the minority case out of all European countries? Are you evaluating difficulty weighted by GDP? Are you evaluating EU and non-EU together or separately? etc.
Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C.
The country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.
Nuclear power is a non-starter in IReland because the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK emitted pollution of various for years but UK officials covered it up. The actual severity of the pollution is open to debate but the loss of trusthad a generational impact.
- To fix these two planks you take a hammer and a nail ... - NO! My uncle hit himself with a hammer real hard last year. It is "is a non-starter". Can we use glue? - Yes, it will be more expensive, less efficient ... - NO! My niece inhaled glue last year. It is "is a non-starter". Can we ... <Light goes out. Conversation continues in a darkness>
Exhibit 1: Why West will lose on AI – they will run out of power. LOL.
Thanks to commenters. (teachrdan and hinkley)
Yes, I know the reasoning. I am one of those who is against nuclear power stations, Chernobyl and Fukushima are too vivid.
But. If we don't "re-industrialise" the West, we die in a cold and darkness. Literally. We already killed marine ecosystem in Black and Caspian seas. Moving as planned in Gulf. With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke. And still – we keep crippling our industry with all this ... I am tempted to say "nonsense", but it's not. It's actually right thing to do but we "outmaneuvered" ourselves out of right things. Now we have to deal with survival – economy first, people later.
> With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke
If you refer to the burning Russian tankers in the Azov, that should reduce emissions. The carried oil would've been used internally in Russia, so it's better to just burn it before it gets used, the same emissions would've been there anyway. And burning the tankers and refineries restricts Russian oil production, which is is a win both for the environment and mankind alike.
There is a difference between "refining" crude oil and burning it in a dirty way. And unfortunately it's not only russian tankers ... Gulf, Black Sea, soon to be Baltic.
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but you are making a category error if you conflate hitting your thumb with a hammer with running a nuclear power plant.
One of the problems with nuclear is that, for practical and security reasons, you are dependent on an authoritarian regime to run the plant -- a plant that will be inherently not-transparent for the same reasons.
That means you have to trust the authorities in question to tell you the truth about risks like accidental discharges of radioactive waste. In the case of Ireland, which has a long history of being disenfranchised, the trust is understandably broken.
This makes building a new nuclear plant and having it run in your country by the same powers that screwed you over before with the same technology a non-starter.
It seems you didn't read the Sellafield article. If you want to be intellectually honest, I'd suggest starting there. (or at least with the "Incidents" section)
And if anyone is wrong, they will only have to deal with it for 20-50 years, then they die and the next 5000 administrations have to deal with the literal fallout.
If your uncle hitting his thumb meant everyone in his line and all of his neighbors would have a flat thumb for the next million years then the government would absolutely involve itself in hammer design and operational safety guidelines.
Fallout came from Chernobyl and Fat Boy. There is no fallout from a reactor that doesn't explode, and Chernobyl exploded for human reasons rather than structural ones.
Good point, hinkley (see what i did there?). I forgot about alternate timelines.
However. People all over the world live on top of aquifers that have been naturally radioactive for millions of years. See you at the protest against granite bedrock.
The electricity from France wouldn’t carry any radiation, their issue with the electricity from nuclear would be related to having the reactor at close distance because if mismanaged can indeed spread radiator.
China is currently building 37 reactors simultaneously [1].
> [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...