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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of amazing to think of the people who saw these changes - from steam to diesel, from props to jets, all this in a relatively short period of time (first flight to landing on the moon was about 60 years!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYXEBcZpNQQ

I've seen quite a few lasts (the last shuttle flight, the last 747 rolling off the line, etc) but we do have smart phones and rocket stages that land themselves so there's that.

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In science fiction they were talking about nuclear powered trains. Its kind of a shame that never happened. Alas, the real world is more complicated than our beautiful stories.

Also, in a way, there are nuclear powered trains, just the power is delivered via electrical lines.

If you read the Donald Duck/Uncle Scrooge comics from the early 50s everything is "atomic" or "uranium" - clearly it was a very forward-looking time, and not unreasonably so.

In a similar way we will eventually have nuclear powered aircraft and cargo ships. Power and heat from nuclear plants on land will be used to manufacture synthetic liquid fuels.

Synthetic fuels need an energy price of about $1/MWh to be competitive. Intermittent solar will be that price in a few years, I doubt that nuclear will ever hit that price.

I'm probably missing something, but why $1/MWhr? That's far cheaper than gasoline or residential electricity.

Because it takes a lot of energy to make synthetic jet fuel from nothing.

Why does that matter? Anyone with a brain would design a process to start with something better than nothing energy content, perhaps biomass or plastic.

We know how to make synthetic fuel, and right now you either need "real" fuel to go way up in price, or you need $1/mw energy. It's not literally "made from nothing" but it's not made from petroleum products.

If you want to sell synthetic gasoline at $4/gallon and make a profit, $1/MWh or so electricity enables that.

Perhaps, but fuel synthesis processes usually have to run continuously. They can't really start and stop intermittently based on momentary solar power availability. Those plants will represent huge capital investments, the workers will have to be scheduled in advance, and they'll have to make fixed delivery commitments to customers. Some form of carbon tax on fossil fuels might make this more economically viable.

Heat is an input to these processes, so restarting is expensive. That cost has to be weighed against the increased cost of continuous electricity.

> start and stop intermittently

Solar & wind electricity is actually fairly predictable, based on the weather forecast. You don't know what it's going to be next week, but you do have a good idea what it's going to be in an hour. That helps a lot.

> fixed delivery commitments to customers

Maybe in the future, but that's definitely not an issue at the moment because excess production can always be sold without the green premium.

Along the same line of thinking though, they are nuclear powered already. The fossil fuels owe their energy to the sun which is nuclear powered.

I think nuclear powered should be used to something that has a nuclear reactor on board directly supplying power.

Nuclear usually refers to nuclear fission. Fossil fuels are not the product of nuclear fission. Even if they were, saying that things powered by fossil fuels are nuclear powered is just a terrible take.

There were actually plans for nuclear powered locomotives in the 1950'ies. E.g. the X-12 by Lyle Borst. See e.g. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ot...

There were also parts of the country that saw "the last electric train"... transitioned to diesel! By 1920, the Milwaukee Road was running 645 miles of electrified railroad between Montana and Tacoma, WA (there was a 216 mile stretch they operated on with steam locomotives). They ran it up until the 1970s!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Milw3_-_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Road

The Milwaukee Road is also a good business school case study on what happens when a company experiences:

a) overburden with debt

b) deferred maintenance spending on physical plant that's pushed further out all the time until it becomes catastrophically bad

They also screwed up the accounting on the pacific extension, and double entered expenses for it - the only profitable part of the road for years was the pacific extension.

Most of the country didn’t have cars in 1910. People born in 1900 saw the world go from horse driven to space travel by their 70s. With antibiotics saving countless lives, clean water, running toilets, air conditioning, heat, …

Ha, I came here to post a link to that song. Anyway, here's the Guy Clark version!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxsTZyIS1ck

Many years ago, the Amtrak station near my house had a pedestrian bridge across the tracks, and in those days it wasn't enclosed like it is now. My mother worked and so I spent most days with my grandfather and we would often go fishing in the park nearby. On the way home we'd stop at the station, walk out on that bridge and wait for one of the trains to come through. I had not yet heard "Texas, 1947" then, but when I do now I'm six years old again, watching the express come screaming up from DC on its way to New York. I never did get to lay a nickel on the track.

Yeah, most people have experienced a train coming to a stop at a station; it's way WAY more impressive when it barrels through without even slowing down.

Someday I want to see live steam like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eggYBVAYiI

I was somewhat set back when a train barreled through the station just feets away at 50mph. Sure the p/a warned about that (moments earlier), but still, I didn't expect that from a "nanny" state like Germany.

> I never did get to lay a nickel on the track.

We did it with trams in the city. Somewhat safer ;)

My grandfather went from seeing an early biplane fly over the family's farm in Florida to ending his career working on Navy aircraft and saw us go to the outer planets before he passed. Literally from a couple of years after the Wright brothers to Neptune in one lifetime. We would talk about it; he thought it was pretty cool.

You could reframe the “lasts” as being the “first” moves toward a greener economy.

Yeah, there's been tremendous advances, but many of them aren't as "in your face" as older ones would have been. The A380 would be up there, but that's even on its way out already.

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