Well, by their teenage years, why not all the reasons adults need smartphones fully accessible? Looking up information from authoritative sources? Emergency contact? Coordinating schedules for office hours?

Schools often simultaneously demand more from children than workplaces do adults, and give them less opportunity to excel.

I’m not saying work-inappropriate phone use should be accepted, but taking them away entirely is downright irresponsible. Just like schools who still demand students write on a notebook instead of using a laptop. Raise your hand if you had RSI-related issues for a decade or more after high school? We old people tend to forget how bad school used to be (and can be) for physical and mental health AND for learning.

I’m not sure I agree with how you’d be able to execute on that level or organized construction safely, but I think we’re also reaching the “impossible-to-be-sure hypothetical” territory, so I’ll concede the point for now.

I think my problems of cost and time still stand. It looks like adding rooftop solar with batteries to every building is still cheaper (on startup, and likely per MW) than nuclear plants. Regions that cannot support solar, onland wind, geo, or hydro can justify nuclear (at least unless shipping batteries or hydrogen conversion becomes cheap enough to compete), but I don’t think they amount to nearly 15% of the power needs in the world since they represent fairly distinctive regions with low energy demand.

Agreed. It doesn’t end up saving a penny, but it definitely leads to greased wheels along the way and richer politicians.

Of course. That happens. Luckily, we have countries like China with less red tape to use to measure. They’ve been building a lot of nuclear and solar. Their end-to-end solar looks like around $750M per GW (possibly including storage? Not sure. About $2.2B for a 3.3GW plant). Looks like they’re spending about $5B per GW of nuclear.

Sorry I don’t have the solar reference anymore. I was building a math equation for another comment and realized they weren’t talking price, so scrapped it without thinking.

Since those numbers seem to match US figures, I think people in the Western World forget that a lot of bid cost increases or “escalations” are due to the fact that companies try to low-bid to win the contract, knowing every little inconvenience will require a cost increase. It evens out more than people want to admit.

Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).

That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.

Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.

I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…

Care to substantiate that the red tape amounts to more than 100 years worth of the same MWH of solar? Or is that just your gut feeling?

Also note, even if the construction cost were 30% inflated, nuclear is still losing handily to solar by the figures I cited.

Cheaper than $140, or cheaper than Solar? Someone just got back to me with claims of lower Nuclear numbers… and even in those claims, Nuclear simply could not get anywhere close to Solar.

Strange. I must be mis-reading your numbers, because the chart I’m reading on your link shows an LCOS/LCOE between $88 and $98… The numbers I was quoting was probably conventional nuclear, and that’s a fair correction. I would really appreciate if you are able to address why my references disagreed with your reference, as I didn’t come out with my numbers off-the-cuff. Is it conventional vs advanced nuclear, or is it a different measurement entirely?

Note also, however, that Advanced Nuclear still loses to Solar handily in every single chart presented in that document. In addition, none of that addresses the front-loaded cost of nuclear vs solar, which amounts to an entire order of magnitude.

Seems an odd question. Since I’m not sure what you’re getting at, my answer might or might not be of value.

The only thing I know offhand about the breakdown is 60% of the total lifetime cost of electricity is in construction costs, a number that is disgustingly through the roof and why using nuclear power for the whole world is unfeasible. It’s that bad.

The rest is “day to day costs” which are far lower with nuclear than other forms of energy. Which would be great if it didn’t cost so much to build a nuclear plant.

I’m not sure you know what you’re arguing. You seemed to get really defensive when I said we should reduce the police. So I explained why it is smart to reduce the police.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction for people who have experienced criminal behavior to want more police and harsher sentencing. Often times it helps to shake them out of it to discuss efficacy. To ask “what if more police and harsher sentencing doesn’t work, or has the opposite effect?” Ultimately, you seem to want the same thing as me - less crime, less violent crime. So why not support things that are more likely to work over things that are less likely to work?

Even if you cut the budget in half you are going to have a really hard time funding and finding people like social workers that want to do that job at 3am.

You’re not going to have a hard time finding/training social workers, and they tend to make less than half of what police officers do in most states. They actually spiked really high unemployment rates a few times, and the low demand and low wages of social work is the only thing keeping people from pivoting to that field. You are right about one thing. Social workers are actually required to be properly trained, unlike police (who often don’t even know the law they’re supposedly enforcing). But I guarantee if the funding showed up, the workers would as well.

There is a part 2 to that of course. There are a lot of people who would more readily spend $1b in police than $1m in social work because “poor people don’t deserve anything for free”. But you talked like you care about violent crimes not happening, and you aren’t getting that by maintaining the current huge police spend.

I am getting crushed because I said not all cops are monsters I definitely think the system needs to change.

I don’t like the term “crushed”. I expanded upon you saying “Cool let’s not have cops” with pointing out the value of changing from a police-oriented society to a solution-oriented society. Your points were:

1. With fewer police, crime will go unsolved, to which I pointed out that only a tiny percent of police are tasked with solving crimes and pointing out that “solving crimes” means we failed to prevent those crimes from happening

2. That you’ve seen horrible things, therefore we need to support police. To which I tried to dismantle that and show you that the police did not, and do not, prevent those horrible things from happening, including referencing (without citation I’m afraid. I was tired/lazy) studies that showed reduction in police funding does not actually increase crime rates.

I’m sure other people are giving you more harsh replies, but I’m sticking to just the facts of the situation. In most (but not all) situations, the need for police represents failure by society to do something, something they could have done cheaper without the police. The #1 such failure is insufficient welfare and safety nets, that benefit far more per-dollar to reduce crime than police ever will.

A small “response” crew dealing with volitile situations like a domestic disturbance being escalated beyond the scope of a social worker, and a smaller “combat” crew dealing with things like hostage situations and ultra-high-risk situations… that’s mostly all the police need/do that could effectively protect us. Hell, you don’t even need a guy with a gun to handle most common infractions like DUIs.

You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.

Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.

As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.

My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.

Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.

That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety

Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.

If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.

What do you do for work, and how much time do you spend in depressed areas?

I grew up adjacent to two cities with some of the highest crime rates in the US. The one that went easier on the cops and heavier on local programs and improvements had its crime rate plummet. The one that doubled-down on policing still has a gang problem (and drug OD problem) today. The former had the higher crime rate, including a street that hit the top 10 deadliest streets in the country.

As for what I do, immaterial. But I live with emergency workers, and they are saints who put their lives at risk every day. They also don’t like cops, but are afraid to say it because cops can fuck up their lives. Yes, sometimes they need cops for the direct prevention of a violent situation (see my point below), but as often the cops get in their way. They are required to obey a lawful order even when they’re doing their job, and sometimes that costs a patient’s life. Very often, accountability on that is more politics than justice.

I have seen babies shaken to death mothers cutting their wrists while their children are in the next room, people placing gasoline bombs in banks around town, a guy set his ex wife’s house on fire with her in it, a guy shot in the stomach for the cash in his register, a pregnant woman stabbed in the belly 9 times by a stalker abd Countless other awful things and for these reasons I am glad cops are working

How many of those didn’t happen because of the cops’ presence? The math (see below) says zero of them. If you could be confident that 50% defunding police and replacing them with social programs would cut the rate of those things substantially, what would your opinion be? More crime and more thugs to punish it, or less crime?

I’d like to take note that everything you said in your last reply might be appropriate if I were some punk kid saying “let’s get rid of all the cops in the world” or somesuch. I’m saying let’s stop funding them beyond their need and stop trusting them to do the things they are not qualified for. Of all the horrible things you’ve seen, police still cause more deaths than they prevent, committing 5% of homicides themselves… while police budget and saturation does not have any detectable correlation to homicide figures. That means, $1 spent on policing causes a net increase to homicide rates.

Again, that’s NOT saying those figures would stay the same if we cut 90% or 95% or 100% of police funding, but they sure as hell would if we cut 30% or 40%, and if we reallocated that into programs that DO solve those problems? We have those programs. They’re just underfunded by people who don’t think we deserve free mental healthcare, free food, etc. EVERY $1 that goes into welfare does more to cut crimes than $1 into police.

And yet you made simple mistakes like assuming that nuclear reactors only last 40 years?

No. No I didn’t. I was using the lowest life expectancy for nuclear because it steelmanned nuclear for my other critiques. You want to use longer ages, that means you’re prepaying 60% of that longer age at cost. I find it interesting that you called me out on trying to give nuclear more benefit. That said, IAEA holds with 30-40 year life expectancy on a nuclear plant so I think the steel-man I chose is acceptable.

What magic technology have we invented? You realize that lithium ion batteries are 1980’s technology right?

Lithium Ion batteries are being used at large scale now, sure. It’s dishonest to say the ones being built today for utility-scale power are 1980’s technology, just as it’s dishonest to pretend that nuclear power is what it was in the 1950’s. But there are also advancements in molten sand batteries, and even utility scale water energy storage is going down in price (though I believe it’s still slightly more expensive than nuclear).

Yes, that’s what I said. Remember we’re in it for long term solutions. Not bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.

So how is $140/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear plant “the long haul” over $77/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear farm? Do we need to discuss how that kind of math works? Building solar+battery plants, running them till EOL, rebuilding them from scratch and repeating several times is still **half ** as expensive as producing the same amount of energy with a nuclear plant until it reaches EOL.

And considering that cost is effectively more like $1,000/MWH or more for the first few years, how exactly are we going to get carbon neutral any time soon by literally adding an order of magnitude to our costs?

Yes 100,000 little projects vs 1…

Sure. Being able to plop it down at a massively high price does have its uses. Note I said there CAN be appropriate uses for nuclear. Just not many of them. The price is just unreasonable. And very often, space isn’t really an issue. Those 100,000 little projects are still cheaper than that 1 project nuclear for the amount of energy created.

And I’m not even Anti-solar… after all it’s literally just second-hand nuclear production… But it’s just that. Second-hand, and why settle for “Second” when we can harness first hand?

For several reasons. First, the sun is in a state of nuclear fusion which is at least 4x more efficient than can be achieved with fission. Second, the sun is gonna burn whether we harvest that energy or not. Third, the most expensive part of a any nuclear power prospect is causing and containing it. We get to skip that step with solar.

I’m just not dumb enough to assume it’s the answer to all our problems

I guess I am “dumb enough”. Between the power created from the sunlight itself, and wind and hydroelectric power created indirectly by it. The numbers all work out.

No way. Batteries are expensive as hell

Batteries+solar runs $77/MWH with current technology. Nuclear runs $175/MWH with current technology (both of these numbers are TCO, not just running costs) 1 and 2. Months back I did a fairly exhaustive analysis on reddit. Wish I’d kept a link of that, but I cut and ran. More importantly, a nuclear plant is usually “locked in” to current efficiency for 50 years or more, where solar farms and battery farms can be traded up. By end-of-life, that nuclear plant will still be a $175/MWH-TCO plant, but could be competing against solar+battery in the order of $50/MWH TCO as large scale battery tech is skyrocketing of late.

I ended up anti-nuclear from a position of knowledge and research, not a position of “omg it’s nuclear”. I started pro-nuclear until I did the math a LOT.

You’re in the green after about 10-15 years with nuclear. So I’m not sure why you bring this point up repeatedly

Per Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring, the capital cost accounts as 60% of the total cost of ownership. Yes it’s in the green (capital-wise), by year 10-15. But 60% of Every penny that needs to be spent on a nuclear plant is spent before you hit the “on” button. Solar plants go green in 5 years, but more importantly, you amortize the cost (and continue to do so) over the life of the plant. The latter is always more feasible for a large scale project.

There’s plenty of decommissioned coal/gas/oil plants that are perfect sites for nuclear. Ironically it costs more to clean up the radioactivity left behind by these plants than the nuclear plant will release in it’s whole lifetime.

Compare that to solar roofs, solar parking shades, windmills that can often be installed in “spare lots”, etc.

EDIT: And to be clear, I’m not even saying there may never be an appropriate use for a nuclear plant in going green. There’s just very few of them. Going solar in a big city is a custom gig, but dropping a nuclear plant in its outskirts, not so much. Luckily for me in the US, there’s a whole hell of a lot of unused or unusable land just begging for solar plants.

Honestly, I’m not super married to the idea of “solving” crimes. I would rather prevent 1 crime than solve 2. The idea that solving crimes is more important than preventing them only works for the punitive model of justice, one that I do not ascribe to.

If we could cut the crime rate 90%, but the people who committed crimes went free, I’d still strongly consider it.

That’s despite the fact I don’t agree that big crimes wouldn’t get solved. Of over 650,000 police officers, only 10,000 are detectives, who are trained and tasked with solving crimes. That’s a LOT of cops that solve crimes for a living at all. They “keep peace”. Sometimes you DO need a cop to keep peace, when the most important thing is the presence of mitigating force. The rest of the time, a social worker is more effective.

Watch some Police Audit videos. About one out of 10, a cop does something spectacularly good (or at least not horrible). Once, they even arrested another cop on the scene because the other cop crossed from “merely bullying” to outright criminal behavior.

The other 9 out of 10 are disgusting and disappointing. So your view of them sure isn’t far off reality.

Considering studies show dollar-for-dollar we can effectively do what good police do by putting their budget money in other services (mental health, welfare, etc), I’m ok with having a LOT fewer cops with a lot more limited mandate.