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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Nah, it’s mostly because all the tech reviewers trashed phones with plastic backs saying they felt cheap. If you look at any of those reviews they always talk about the premium feel.

    It also changed from aluminium to glass backs mostly for wireless charging.

    Plastic backs are better, but the tech reviewers did a lot of damage there. If they’d tried to influence people and explained why particular made sense instead of trashing it we may have more plastic phones.















  • The lifetime cost of of nuclear (build, running + clean-up) divided by the amount of electricity created is incredibly high. This report from csiro doesn’t include large scale nuclear but does include projected costs for small modular reactors +solar and wind. Generally large reactors come out behind smr especially in future projections.

    https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost

    Note the “wind and solar pv combined” “variable with integration costs” which is the cost accounting for storage, transmission etc. It’s not that high (at least up to the 90% of the grid modelled for 2030). The best end of the nuclear estimate is double the cost of that. The reasons that the storage costs etc. Are not as high as you may intuitively expect are explained in that report.

    Maybe there is a place for nuclear in that last 10%, but not in less than that. Also as far as rolling it out quickly, look at how long this last nuclear plant took to build from planning to construction being complete.

    I think that it is possible to manage the cleanup of nuclear and to make it safe, but it’s all just very expensive. To make everyone happy with the transition off fossil fuels it needs to be cost competitive and renewables are, nuclear isn’t.



  • Ah sorry, my mistake on that one. Despite how many wind turbines working at once it may take, the power from the is cheaper by a long shot than nuclear.

    The reason I don’t think nuclear is the main solution is just cost + build time. It’s horrendously expensive. Much more so than the cost of renewables with proper grid integration (transmission, storage etc.) that has been modelled.

    Maybe in a while the small nuclear reactors may come close, but currently the full sized reactors are too expensive and smr’s aren’t really a thing yet because of cost.

    If power prices can come down instead of go up it’s going to be a lot easier to convince everyone to transition away from fossil fuels, and from modelling that’s been done (e.g. by csiro) that can be the reality