The road we were told not to take | Hacker News Reader

The road we were told not to take

aspendailynews.com

23 pointsmpweiher13 comments

Something people forget is that France went all in on nuclear also to produce enough weapons grade plutonium for its independent atomic bomb program. Plutonium production was considered a feature rather than a bug of the reactor program.

This turns out not to be the case.

Like all nuclear powers, military use preceded civilian use in France.

In addition, the military actually pushed for a French-made dual-use reactor design for the civilian program, but instead a purely civilian Westinghouse design was chosen.

The first generation were built to produce electricity and plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNGG_reactor . Civilian-oriented version chosen later.

Hmm...these are the primarily military reactors I was referring to, even if they also produce some electricity. At that point, France had a military nuclear program.

The civilian nuclear program started in earnest in 1974 with the Messmer plan, and that was based on the purely civilian Westinghouse reactors I mentioned.

So dramatic

"The math fits on a cocktail napkin. Keep all the efficiency and solar. Change one thing."

It's Claudian sass. Although we've reached a point where it's hard to tell if it's the machine writing it or a person who uses it uncritically copying it.

Whole piece has that Claudish sense of a complete absence of theory of mind. The LLM has all this background knowledge in context - it’s just read all the historical facts about what happened and who said what when - so it jumps around trying to thread a narrative among those facts but it has no sense of what the reader is likely to be familiar with or what is novel; there’s no storytelling.

It could just be bad writing by someone who knows the subject well and is done explaining all the background needed to understand their thesis. Or it could be extracted from chapter 10 of a book where the prior 9 chapters laid all the groundwork so you can start weaving together a thesis like this from the pieces you’ve already planted.

But it reads a lot like Claude.

Stack overflow brain rot escaping containment.

this essay makes a very important point - that embracing nuclear power could have given us so much more runway on climate change, and the campaign to fearmonger on nuclear power was bad - but it's hard to take in his point because it's nearly incomprehensible at times.

"RMI’s Basalt headquarters makes 114,000 kilowatt-hours of rooftop solar a year, sparing about 40 tons of CO2 (net-zero premium for the building: $1.34 million). At that pace, 115 billion tons takes 2.7 billion years. Or every building on Earth, all 2.75 billion, matching RMI’s best work (built in 2015, not 1976) for a year, spending a mere extra $3.7 quadrillion. To pay for one essay."

What the hell does this mean? It's a bunch of numbers in a row seemingly measuring stats of different units against each other? And then this disconnected rhetorical flourish, 'to pay for one essay?' what?

My local grocery store has a display with the annual output of its rooftop solar installation, it sits around 180,000 kWh. Can't comprehend what's special about RMI's Basalt HQ to be a benchmark...

And manages to ignore that solar power is now the world’s fastest growing source of electricity. Given this is largely driven by economies of scale you could just as well argue if we had gone all in solar in the 70s we would have had today’s solar cost/benefit by the 90s

I don't think that's true. The technologies that have made solar panels efficient enough to be worthwhile were being worked on at a pace that was not effected by not "going all in".

cleaned up url: https://www.aspendailynews.com/opinion/whiting-the-road-we-w...

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