Nuclear in its present form is withering on the vine as geometrically increasing solar and wind installations reshape the grid away from a centrally-managed baseload + peaker model to a more resilient network in which power flows in different directions to take advantage of the wind when it blows and the sun when it shines. Energy storage over various timescales is improving on a geometric experience curve, most recently with sodium batteries, and the Chinese are demonstrating what an HVDC-linked large scale network can look like. To take advantage of solar overbuilding and the often dirt cheap energy that it brings, designing many industrial processes around demand response will give humanity access to cheaper raw materials and possibly even desalination on an agricultural scale.
Nuclear's problem is not just that it always takes three times as long and costs three times as much as the initial estimate, that it's uninsurable and that the cost of storing the waste is never factored in because there's no plan to do that. The real problem is the centralized, huge bureaucracy, high tax and uncertainty it forces on society. Most power consumers would be happy putting up a few solar panels in a nearby field with a battery in the basement and a fat wire to the grid to even things out. This is becoming a reality now, and in less than a decade anyone will be able to make it happen with a few calls and a wait of a couple of months, as opposed to the decade or two it takes to get a nuclear plant permitted and built.
If you think small nuclear or thorium will save the industry, build a production line and sell a few. But bet your money on it rather than mine.
A solar and wind based energy system makes a substantial cognitive demand on a society, perhaps not as much as a nuclear energy system; but you need enough smart people to build, install, maintain and run solar panels, windmills, batteries and such. And the evidence suggests that humans are trending dumber over time. One likely cause is the dramatic drop in infant and child mortality since the start of the industrial revolution. In the old days it was eugenic on average for the Tiny Tims - the kids born with high mutation loads - in people's families to die young so that families' elders could invest the available resources into their genetically hardier kids who stood a better chance of maturing and reproducing.
Now the Tiny Tims aren't dying so much any more (I think about this every time I drive by Phoenix's children's hospital), and they are more likely to grow up and reproduce with their less than optimal genes. Human intelligence apparently reflects the human organism's "system integrity," namely, the degree that the human body as a whole works efficiently. Throw in enough mutated genes, and the efficiency drops so that people wind up with not particularly bright brains.
I actually don’t think that is quite accurate, at least as far as intelligence is concerned. Especially since what counts as intelligent, and what cognitive strengths are needed in a society or for an individual to flourish does depend on what era we are in. I know a lot of wealthy, successful people on the spectrum who would have been sidelined as idiots or weirdos 200 years ago.
On the other hand, there is evidence that human reaction time has declined noticeably since the Victorian era, and reaction time is a proxy for intelligence.
Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time
Nuclear in its present form is withering on the vine as geometrically increasing solar and wind installations reshape the grid away from a centrally-managed baseload + peaker model to a more resilient network in which power flows in different directions to take advantage of the wind when it blows and the sun when it shines. Energy storage over various timescales is improving on a geometric experience curve, most recently with sodium batteries, and the Chinese are demonstrating what an HVDC-linked large scale network can look like. To take advantage of solar overbuilding and the often dirt cheap energy that it brings, designing many industrial processes around demand response will give humanity access to cheaper raw materials and possibly even desalination on an agricultural scale.
Nuclear's problem is not just that it always takes three times as long and costs three times as much as the initial estimate, that it's uninsurable and that the cost of storing the waste is never factored in because there's no plan to do that. The real problem is the centralized, huge bureaucracy, high tax and uncertainty it forces on society. Most power consumers would be happy putting up a few solar panels in a nearby field with a battery in the basement and a fat wire to the grid to even things out. This is becoming a reality now, and in less than a decade anyone will be able to make it happen with a few calls and a wait of a couple of months, as opposed to the decade or two it takes to get a nuclear plant permitted and built.
If you think small nuclear or thorium will save the industry, build a production line and sell a few. But bet your money on it rather than mine.
A solar and wind based energy system makes a substantial cognitive demand on a society, perhaps not as much as a nuclear energy system; but you need enough smart people to build, install, maintain and run solar panels, windmills, batteries and such. And the evidence suggests that humans are trending dumber over time. One likely cause is the dramatic drop in infant and child mortality since the start of the industrial revolution. In the old days it was eugenic on average for the Tiny Tims - the kids born with high mutation loads - in people's families to die young so that families' elders could invest the available resources into their genetically hardier kids who stood a better chance of maturing and reproducing.
Now the Tiny Tims aren't dying so much any more (I think about this every time I drive by Phoenix's children's hospital), and they are more likely to grow up and reproduce with their less than optimal genes. Human intelligence apparently reflects the human organism's "system integrity," namely, the degree that the human body as a whole works efficiently. Throw in enough mutated genes, and the efficiency drops so that people wind up with not particularly bright brains.
I actually don’t think that is quite accurate, at least as far as intelligence is concerned. Especially since what counts as intelligent, and what cognitive strengths are needed in a society or for an individual to flourish does depend on what era we are in. I know a lot of wealthy, successful people on the spectrum who would have been sidelined as idiots or weirdos 200 years ago.
On the other hand, there is evidence that human reaction time has declined noticeably since the Victorian era, and reaction time is a proxy for intelligence.
Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470