61,300 karma · joined March 30, 2012
http://www.metaobject.com/
http://objective.st/
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.
It can get you most of the Smalltalk (Python/Ruby) conveniences with most of C's speed. In fact, if you do it really well you can leverage them together to get better than both. Simultaenously.
Doesn't mean that people don't manage to wield it in such a way as to get all the convenience of C combined with the performance of Python/Ruby. Which always baffles me. You .... did .... WAT?
To me the Right Thing™ here always seemed the obvious and simple thing to do, as in: just don't spend extra effort to mess it up and you'll be fine. YMMV.
Plug: my book gives fairly detailed instructions on how to achieve the positive combination. [1]
Other plug: Making it easier to get this right is the 2nd of the four stages of Objective-Smalltalk. [2][3]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Objective-C-Performance-Tuning-...
[2] https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv...
What Alan Kay called "the Wirth school of non-programming".
Hmm...
Microsoft just introduced MXC:
"...for running untrusted code (model output ..."
It also allows for coding at a higher level, meaning that code is closer to the prompts.
Is it actually true? OF COURSE IT IS!!!
So no idea, but after long dismissing that idea precisely because it looks like a "just so" explanation for my obvious favorite choice I am starting to come around to the idea that it might just be true in spite of the obvious bias...and definitely worth testing.
No.
It was just as true before as it is after.
> You were the one using that phrase.
I was using that phrase to describe what people were doing. Do you understand the difference between doing something and describing that thing that people are doing?
>> I did not present the Google answer as "the truth". I presented it only as what it is: "what Google said".
> Oh baloney.
That is literally what I wrote: "Because I sure couldn't find any. So I asked Google. This is what Google said:"
Again, if you can't tell the difference between "this is what Google said" and "this is the truth" then that is most definitely a you-problem. On three levels:
- first, they are literally and undisputably different words.
- second, believing that those two different sets of words mean the same thing is..."interesting".
- third, even if you yourself believe that these words mean the same thing (which, again, "interesting"), assuming that others partake in that interpretation is at best presumptuous.
As I wrote before: your "claims" are largely just your opinions, some misunderstanding/misinterpretation of the relevant information, but most importantly they are irrelevant.
And I won't engage in your Gish gallop.
Of course, you could have understood that the first time I wrote it.
But feel free to further demonstrate your lack of understanding.
Your call. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2. What you claim is false. The processes are quite different.
3. I did not present the Google answer as "the truth". I presented it only as what it is: "what Google said". In the context of "I couldn't find any online corroborations of the previous poster's claims".
If you confuse "this is what Google said" with "this is the truth", that's a you-problem.
4. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -- Hitchen's Razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
The claim that ABWRs are "unprofitable" has now been asserted several times without any evidence whatsoever. Therefore, the only thing I actually have to do to dismiss that claim is say "wrong".
If you answer on point to the point, we can have a discussion.
Otherwise: gish along...
Maybe not.
For example, Aalo Atomics has split the construction process in such a way that the on-site pour that happens after the reactor is delivered from the factory is (a) very simple (b) standardized, and (c) non-nuclear. In addition, the site work that is required is very repetitive, so you get a positive learning curve, again without the slowness of nuclear construction.
Copenhagen Atomics has heavy thorium salt shielding inside the nuclear core and a "Cocoon" that is delivered in 12 prefab parts installed on a regular concrete pad. So on-site construction is making the non-nuclear concrete pad, installing the pre-fab cocoon on pad and then placing the reactor core inside the Cocoon.
Westinghouse apparently ships the entire eVinci microreactor pre-assembled with shielding.
X-energy puts the reactor in a hole underground.
etc.
The very license TFA is about took 14 months.
The NRC completed its review in 14 months—four months ahead of schedule—after concluding that TVA’s application met applicable safety requirements.
https://thebreakthrough.org/press/release-the-nrc-approves-c...
a) backup/firming, both day/night and seasonal.
b) lifetime of plant.
c) land use.
The current US plants are all getting extensions to 80 years of operation, and experts see no problems with going to 100.
How many times do you have to fully replace the panels in that timeframe?
How many times the batteries?
And what about seasonal storage?
Something not being 100% certain does not imply the opposite being 100% certain.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -- Hitchen's Razor, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
You made a claim that you did not support with any evidence whatsoever. Twice, actually.
So it is you has to "do better than that", not me.
In fact, I actually did go to the trouble of disproving your first unproven claim with actual data, which was more than I had to do. A simple "wrong" would have sufficed there as well.
You just wiped that away with another completely unsupported and also wrong assertion.
And if "all of the public figures" support your position, it would be trivial to actually cite that evidence. [Narrator: it won't, because they don't].
Nuclear power is cheap, as the IEA data clearly shows, in addition to all the real-world evidence.
And your point on the Ukraine war is also the exact opposite of the truth: if you actually look at the evidence, or ask the Ukrainians, you will find that nuclear power is what is keeping the country afloat, energy-wise.
Which is why Ukraine has started construction of at least two more nuclear reactors during this war:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/work-under-way-f...
And has ordered a total of nine AP-1000s
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/interview/1169371.html
But hey, what do the Ukrainians know about nuclear power in Ukraine?
When isolating the existing, completed Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWRs), they are highly profitable—provided they are actually allowed to operate.
Not only could it not complete the small task, the code was obviously wrong from looking at it and did not even compile.
When I pointed that out it got pissy and insisted the code was perfect and I didn't know how to use a compiler, or the compiler was buggy. Pasting the compiler errors did not help.
Surreal.
The way it usually goes with anti-nuclear activists when they make pronouncements like this is as follows:
1. It will take at least 15 years and cost 100 gazillion dollars
2. Are you sure?
3. Yes, this is 100% what will happen. It is 100% certain, because nuclear does not and cannot work.
4. OK, then let's put some money where our mouths are. Your 100% certainty means you should be willing to give me infinite odds, because any money I put up is automatically yours. Completely risk free income for you. But I am happy to reduce those odds to just 100:1, so I put up $100 and you put up $10.000.
6. <crickets>
I note that you have no actual information to counter it. Nor do you have, by your own admission, any information to back up your claims.
The "YouTube video" is by a professor for nuclear science from the University of Illinois.
Professor David Ruzic, head of that department, to be precise.
https://npre.illinois.edu/people/profile/druzic
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Hv__SVAAAAAJ&hl=en
And yes, misinformation about nuclear energy is widely disseminated and thus "well known". Are we really at the point that Trump's "people are saying" is the standard for evidence?
I think we can do better.
Do you have any evidence for your claim?
This meme that nuclear power plants are unprofitable and require subsidies has been spread wide and far by the anti-nuclear lobby, but is still false.
As an example, when the Greens started to come into government in Germany, they tried to force nuclear operators out of business by creating onerous safety rules just for the purpose of forcing them out of business.
It didn't work.
The plants were so profitable that they could afford even the most ridiculous additional safety requirements. So they had to make them illegal.
Furthermore, you can look at France. EDF has been immensely profitable, despite having to sell a large amount of electricity at discounted rates.
Here's an explainer.
Citation needed.
> Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK
That's not evidence of them being uneconomic or unreliable.
> (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment)
Excuse me? The regulatory environment that is responsible for the 7000 design changes at Hinkley Point C and thus most of the eye-watering delays and cost overruns? The regulatory environment that required the £ 700 million "fish disco" that will save a few salmon at a cost of around £ 280000 per fish?
A series of "radical, root-cause solutions" is required to simplify the UK's nuclear regulatory system in order to speed up the construction of new nuclear projects at a lower cost and on time, an independent taskforce has concluded.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/radical_reforms_...
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
For details in a model, see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
More reactors = riding the cost curve more quickly.