pencilguin

Wind farms are a thing because a wind turbine can only be so big: for more power, you put up more of them. They are so cheap because all the costs are transparent, there is noplace to bury wholly-legal graft. A big farm amortizes fixed project management cost.

Capacity factor of nukes is not so much more than of wind turbines, though if you have a bunch of nukes, it would be rare to have many of the nukes down at once other than for urgent retrofits. Steam turbines are down a lot, so nukes are always built with two or more.

But the main thing is that nukes cost far, far more than the wind farm that produces as much; or, a wind farm at the same price produces many times the power, with near zero lead time and possibly negative decommissioning cost. After their contribution to the grid gets large enough, you build out storage, which incrementally reduces the fraction of time you spend burning NG or, later, ammonia.

A farm of small nukes would cost quite a bit more to build than a big nuke of the same capacity, because all the systems are duplicated throughout. On the up side, the farm might be built incrementally with much less of the graft always attached to monster public works; you might save 75% vs a big nuke just on that basis. If you could get the first one going early, its revenue might help pay for subsequent units.

But whatever the heat source, anything with a steam turbine is just not competitive anymore. That is another reason why fusion is a dead end: it is just very hard to compete with zero opex.

...which involves drilling.

None of these dams ever produced more than the tiniest fraction of even just the commercial value of the fisheries they destroyed. They totally didn't care.

The value extracted from the dams was never more than a tiny fraction of just the commercial value of the fishery each eliminated, wholly leaving aside the matter of causing extinctions.

California's system with dams near peaks of the Sierra Nevada range, feeding penstocks to thousands of meters below, is both massively more efficient and causes nowhere near the ecological damage of the river valley dams being torn down.

Those were largely built in the 1920s with pulley-operated (pre-hydraulics) equipment trailered up on abysmally bad roads... that still exist, unimproved.

And, a compiler that knows custom SIMD optimizations for every algorithm anyone might ever need, and can recognize when you have coded one of them so it can substitute its SIMD version.

The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.

Not just back to +1.5C, but to where you would have been by that time.

Meanwhile, the whole ocean ecosystem has collapsed as acidification continued on up. The primary protein source of a billion+ people has vanished. They do not starve quietly.