Yet, solar does not produce electricity reliably, needs additional electric backup power and uses large amounts of material and area for producing relatively small amounts of energy.
Nuclear works everywhere, everytime. There is a reason they put nuclear reactors into submarines and aircraft carriers and space probes.
> There is a reason they put nuclear reactors into submarines and aircraft carriers and space probes.
The first two have ready access to infinite amounts of coolant, which is absolutely not the situation "everywhere", and the last one actually never delivered more power than solar panels due to very inferior power/weight ratio of all space-based nuclear reactors produced to this date -- the most widespread space-based reactor BES-5 generated something like 7-8 W/kg.
I am in favour of nuclear power but it is not so black and white.
You have just listed three types of project with access to vast resources. The number of nuclear powered vessels is vanishingly small. And spacecraft overwhelmingly use solar when they can. If your goal is to move a ship or launch a communication satellite then the last thing you want to do is add the considerable extra complexity of nuclear power. Nuclear engineering is hard.
Neither does nuclear. 80% of the population of the exclusion zone in Fukushima prefecture have already returned to their homes. People can even move back to Futaba, a town next to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Nuclear power produces cheap, emission-free and reliable electricity. It's as safe as wind power and it's life-cycle emissions are even less.
> Nuclear power does not produce cheap, emission-free and reliable electricity
Fixed that for you. Nukes produce the most expensive electricity of all. Always have, counting subsidies. Their value proposition gets even worse each day, as renewables cost continues on down. They will be mothballed soon as too expensive to continue operating at all, as people choose to buy cheaper power elsewhere.
As the amount of time they can find a market for power declines, their cost per delivered KWh multiplies without bound.
_IF_ Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak on research that Fauci funded and promoted AND he colluded w/ a group of scientists to hide this fact, it literally is the greatest conspiracy of our generation.
It isn't a big if. The recently released e-mails support this line of reasoning but don't confirm it. To argue the opposite of this, you should have better than ad hominem attacks.
It isn't muckraking. Fauci has a clear conflict of interest. Further he argued in favor of GoF research while acknowledging it could lead to a pandemic. He literally wrote that in an academic paper.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of...
>In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario...
>Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.
So the basic risk calculation Fauci is using (which is disputed by many scientists and virologists) is this:
Lives saved by GoF research > lives lost by inevitable lab leak + lives lost by inevitable natural pandemic
Gain of function research has been going on for decades now. What evidence is there that this research has actually served its purpose to help save lives? Did GoF help us at all with the current pandemic?
> There are better ways to spend our resources than on redoing the world's HVAC
Before we had vaccines, ventilation improvements likely prevented a significant amount of transmission. If ventilation can reduce the transmission of other illnesses, and prevent the next COVID, it's pretty hard to argue that it's a bad use of resources.
> climate change
Yes, that's important. But it's not a zero sum game where investing in public health somehow takes away from investing in environmentally friendly technology.
Smart contract platforms are only four years old. Only in the last 12 months have we seen significant throughput on public chains like Solana and Avalanche.
This post and the comments has convinced me that all the weirdoes and revolutionaries have left HN. It is now dominated by statist near-boomers concerned about the youngsters trampling the lawn.
Sure Bitcoin is boring but so is gold. If you weren't interested in gold in the first place you likely aren't interested in Bitcoin either.
The proof-of-stake, smart contract platforms are truly exciting. Stable coins and Uniswap are real innovations w/ more to come.
