Hydrogen would also work well for ships, trains, and to some extent trucks. Basically anywhere that requires long distance travel without infrastructure in between where batteries just don't have the range or power to weight ratio to reach - at least not efficiently. And hydrogen is also specifically better for things connecting to a central transport hub, where the hydrogen production and storage and refueling can be centralized to minimize the infrastructure buildup and maximize production and storage efficiency. These would include ports, airports, trainyards, warehouses, sufficiently large bus terminals, basically everything except cars. And as a bonus it doesn't require stripping the earth or rare metals, sometimes mined by slave and child labor.
On the other hand, having some people who read a summary that skips some important parts when they otherwise wouldn’t have read the article at all, might be worth the trade off it brings of people who would have read the article now reading an incomplete summary. The net amount of people who go into the comments more informed about the topic past whatever is in the headline would be decently higher, and personally I see that as one of the best ways to increase the quality of discussion overall.
This. Economics is a social science where every theory or opinion aims to achieve different varying desired outcomes for different people and in achieved in different ways, with spectrums for every step along the process. The entire field is on a spectrum, that also generally aligns with the political spectrum because politics, like economics, strives to achieve a certain outcome for a certain group of people, in a certain way. Trying to disentangle the field of economics from people. and the politics that people create, is a red flag for not actually knowing what economics is.
Themes were added 3 days ago, currently on not-pure-black mode again. Now only missing the last 2% of features, which will come soon when the native app is released. But because it’s a PWA I can use it on desktop, so by that metric it’s already better than Apollo which I though I would never be able to say.
Nuclear, like all things do, requires investment and scale to bring the cost down. Investment is necessary for iterative innovation that reduces costs, and after Chernobyl, the west at large more or less stopped building nuclear reactors. That means the past +30 years in nuclear has been more or less stagnant, so maintenance and build costs go up as everyone trained to build and work on them either moves on in their career or retires. It's a big reason why the US dumps so much money into oil, agricultural, and military spending and subsidies. Not just to funnel money to donors, although that is a big part of it, but because that industrial capacity is a national security priority. Once you lose it, it's a lot harder and a lot more expensive to get it back, with no good alternative in the meantime. That is what happened with nuclear.
And we are only now starting to see if the next generation of SMR (small nuclear reactors) can bring the cost down. Standardizing the production of smaller units that are much faster to make and deployable in more places will go a long way. Before, every single nuclear reactor was more or less bespoke, because a certain large enough size reactor grants enough operational efficiencies that it made much more sense to build large reactors with public funds to service a large area. But now government doesn't want to make those kinds of big investments anymore, NIMBYs everywhere don't want it built near them, and that is a long term strategy that requires long term commitment and public acceptance of nuclear to pull off.
As for why we need it, well, batteries are expensive and environmentally harmful to produce and very limited in supply. Renewables are intermittent and often unpredictable, and the grid demands a base load of power. Increasing efficiencies on the demand side requires public buy in and a whole lot more effort, like better insulating everyone's house. Hydro is also ecologically not great, not suitable everywhere, and demand for power tends to spike at the exact time that it is most useless - during hot dry droughts. Nuclear is the only thing that can replace fossil fuels for the purpose that fossil fuels fill in heavily renewable countries. Germany for example shut down their nuclear reactors and went back to burning lignite coal, because wind and solar could not provide the electricity they needed. Their emissions went up in 2021 and 22, despite how heavily they are investing in renewables.
I'd argue that a lot of people are reaping what a much smaller number people have sown. Not to say that we all don't hold some blame in some part, but some are significantly more to blame than others. An emissions per capita map overlaid with a projected impact from climate change map explains it well.
This. In retrospect it's kind of amazing it even got passed, and that is the best we can do with democrats controlling 60% of the house and 58 senate seats. And unless republicans are somehow tricked into voting for national popular vote legislation and federally enforced fair districting, or we wait 25 years for all the boomers to die out and hope that millennials still want UHC, AND we also repeal citizens united, the ACA is probably the best we are going to get for some time.
Not to mention that microsoft is definitely going to replace it with bing powered by chatgpt. They probably found that it was easier starting bing from the ground up now than having to deal with whatever has been shoved into cortana's code over the years.