MisterMower

> What regulations exactly make nuclear unaffordable?

Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.

Those, in a nutshell, are the incentives the nuclear industry in the US faces. Whatever you do, you must never have even the tiniest release of radiation. Safety is the overriding priority. Cost doesn't matter. If there is any wiggle room in your cost structure, you must spend it on making the possibility of a release even smaller.

Meanwhile, we accept major amounts of smog and carbon dioxide emissions from gas power plants, we accept significant environmental degradation due to mining minerals for wind and solar plants, and we tolerate radioactive fly ash from coal power plants beyond the levels we would allow emitted from nuclear power plants.

> Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.

The French did solve this problem using a large breeder reactor where they reprocessed nuclear fuel, and the US was on track to build something similar in the 1970's until the Carter administration banned breeder reactors in 1977.

Choosing to not use a breeder reactor means spent nuclear fuel has to just sit there and be guarded while we also have to go and mine and process more nuclear fuel from scratch to run our existing reactors. It's hard to imagine a more idiotic regulatory regime.

> Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record

China has 60 existing nuclear power plants that have operated safely and efficiently, and there is no reason to think that these would operate any less effectively. They will likely be even more safe and efficient.

China has a single advantage over the US when it comes to nuclear: they can ignore people like yourself who don't understand how nuclear power works and just build it. The US would be wise to emulate that approach, especially given we do already do this when it comes to flock cameras or AI data centers.

Read your comment again: you are going straight to the political activism before even explaining the difference between 120V and 240V:

> the first thing I have them do is find out the county building code engineers[1] and ask them to update the code

Based on your other comments, it doesn't appear you're qualified to be teaching kids about this stuff in the first place, given the lack of understanding about basic electrical code.

The real world is full of tradeoffs. If you also told the kids that mandating 240V outlets in garages would increase the cost of new homes by $1,000 they may have a different opinion on the matter, given that those college kids you're teaching probably imagine themselves trying to buy a home in a few years.

Years ago I owned a home built in the 1980's that had a central vacuum system. It was a cool concept but utterly useless. No new homes that I know of have these systems anymore.

Imagine you were born in the 1960's and thought that these things were the future. Think of all the vacuum bags we'll save from the landfill with this technology! Think of all the money people will save on vacuum cleaners!

> If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.

The future is uncertain. Ten years from now people may not even want to own cars if autonomous taxis take off. The whole concept of a garage may morph into something unrecognizable to us today. But if you get your way, we'll waste tons of money putting 240V outlets that never get used as intended.

What is the environmental cost of mining and producing literal tons of copper wire and installing it in new homes for outlets that never get used? What is the cost of using skilled electrician labor to install useless outlets instead of having those same electricians working on building a new solar plant?

I encourage you to discuss these tradeoffs. Don't just ride the good vibes of teaching kids how to use political activism to "make the world a better place", without ever actually teaching them how to evaluate if a certain choice actually makes the world a better place.

If people want a 240V outlet in their garage, they are welcome to pay for it. It doesn't need to be mandated. Home builders aren't stupid: they know what their customers want. If they think they can sell that amenity, they'll install it. If they suspect their customers won't use it, they'll omit it and offer them a lower price. That is the most environmentally optimum solution in the first place. Only those homes that intend to use these outlets should get them.

Put the shoe on the other foot.

Imagine I was running a non-profit that teaches middle and high school kids about the human body and the first thing I have them do is to look up their legislator and ask them to pass anti-abortion legislation.

In both situations, kids are being used to promote a political agenda.

It's no different than the parents who bring their kids to protests and make signs for them to hold. Except parents likely explain why they're bringing their kid to a protest. This guy just straight up uses them for his own political goals before even explaining why they're doing it.

You should find that icky.

Asking kids to push your political goals under the guise of “education” feels pretty icky.

It did catch on, and then it was regulated beyond the point of profitability, and nuclear plants stopped being built. The points you make are only true because of the unique regulatory regime that nuclear plants exist under.

We tolerate all kinds of externalities from fossil fuel energy production and environmental degradation due to rare earth mining required to produce solar panels and wind turbines.

Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.

It’s disingenuous to claim nuclear power is a failure because it’s expensive to build without examining the reasons why that might be.

For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants. We could do that here, but choose not to. The only missing ingredient is political will, and resistance from ill-informed people such as yourself.

The oil and gas industry loves solar and wind. You need baseload generation capacity in those outlier days where there is cloud cover and the wind doesn’t blow.

That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.

Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.

As I get older I am starting to think that there are some things people just aren’t ready to learn at a given moment in time.

I kept all of my engineering textbooks and there have been concepts in them that never made sense when they were taught in school but ten years later I re-read them and things click like they never did when I was learning them years ago.

I think one of the tragedies of the public schools is that all the kids are expected to learn certain things at specific ages and grade levels, and for some kids they’re just not quite ready.

That doesn’t mean they won’t be ready in the future. But they will get a failing grade and the associated feeling of “I must be dumb.” And I think that often changes the trajectory of their lives as you described, often in negative ways.

This is wrong. Most public school systems spend north of $20,000 per student per year. That money comes from property taxes, which anyone who consumes housing contributes to. People regularly vote for bond issues and sales tax increases to help the kids get what they need.

We spend an ungodly amount of money on education. The one problem the public schools don’t have is a lack of money. The budget for the public school system in my midwestern city of 750,000 people is larger than the city’s entire budget.

Third world countries get better educational outcomes with literally 5% of the money we spend on education. It can be done, quite easily, in fact.

This is not a socioeconomic problem. It is an incentive problem. No one is ever held accountable for educational outcomes in public school systems. Tie teacher and administrator compensation to educational outcomes and this problem will disappear in a semester.

COVID ended a lot of good things.

You’re retirement account is protected, it’s called the Fed Put. Additionally, there is always Social Security.

As much as America pretends to be all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps it’s actually far more socialist than many would like to admit.

Because we have decided as a society to protect people from bad outcomes regardless of whether they want to be protected or not. See also unemployment insurance, social security disability insurance, requiring drivers to carry motor insurance, Medicaid, etc.

This includes zoning laws that protect incumbent property owners from loss of property value by massively changing the character of the surrounding properties.

As much as I would love to live in the free country you describe, it’s not the one we get to live in. And since that’s not the America that exists in reality, there is nothing wrong with people using these rules to protect themselves.

I would add that these aren’t one sided restrictions. They’re reciprocal. A typical property owner can’t convert their property to an eight-plex, and conversely, they can and should expect the same level of protection.

Because you would be upset if a developer bought every house on your block and converted them to eight-plexes and rented them out to Section 8 tenants, and we should provide some level of protection against that from happening.

It adds up. And in a state with tens of thousands of high net worth individuals, that marginal tax increase might be the nudge that causes a few of them to relocate to a lower tax jurisdiction.

I’d rather have buffoons looking for fraud under every rock and not finding it than people like yourself insisting, without evidence, that it never happens while showing no interest in doing even the simplest things to reassure people that no fraud is occurring.

Interesting to hear how another state does it, thanks for sharing.