sir_bearington

Why on earth would it make sense to think that someone is saying solar powered trains only run at night? I'm a native English speaker so I don't think you're in any position to try and lecture me.

It's absolutely a valid reason to accuse you of willful misinterpretation, especially when you bring this up more than a month later in an unrelated topic. Your reply was downvoted with good reason.

Yes, trains can only run at night when it's also windy. I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that solar powered trains can only run at night, short of willful misinterpretation.

Except we don't. Where's my single-core 100GHz processor?

Improvements still happen, but not always in the same way. If you implemented an application in 2003 assuming we'd have such a processor you'd be very disappointed. Counting on exponential improvements to continue is risky bet.

Correct, the bulk of nuclear waste is from nuclear weapons development and manufacture. In power generation the containment vessel and cooling water also get irradiated. But that's not persistent waste, and doesn't require long term storage.

The comment said that solar powered trains would only be able to run at night if wind generation is sufficient to power them in the absence of solar power - at least not without massive amounts of storage to account for this intermittency.

Regardless, I'm not sure why the inability to detoxify waste is such a concern. First of all, we do have the ability to reclaim >95% of it through reprocessing. This isn't detoxification per-se, but does represent a sizeable reduction in the amount of waste. And the remaining waste is stored underground. The danger of uranium entering the water supply already exists from naturally occurring uranium. The additional risk presented by waste buried in a known location, with no groundwater contamination risk is zero. Sure, if you want to be pedantic, it's not exactly zero: some nefarious group could dig it up and use it as a weapon. But any group with that level of capability could easily deal more damage through conventional means - so for all intents and purposes the risk is zero.

> Before you try to sink billions into nuclear energy, explain why we can't do it with solar + storage alone? Just one good reason. I've yet to hear anything substantive.

The fact that storage at anywhere remotely close to the required scale doesn't exist is a very good reason.

"Healthcare for all" and "single payer healthcare" are two very different things. Most countries still have private health insurance companies, but the government subsidizes healthcare.

The main blocker of doing this in the US is that the focus tends to be on building a single payer state. ~80% of the population already has insurance through private companies, and they're mostly pleased with it.

Because then you end up with a ministry of truth that has to determine what speech is "clearly false". E.g one could make the argument that "nuclear power is unsafe" is "clearly false" given the facts based on deaths per watt-hour generated. You've already highlighted examples where partisanship breaks this down, in the case of BLM.

What happens under this setup when, say, a Republican president wins under an extremely narrow margin and subsequently suppresses discussion of electoral fraud? If in 2000 the government cracked down on people claiming Florida was fraudulently tipped towards Bush, would you support such a system?

Also, harassment is already prohibited. People mistake what harassment really is (people receiving speech they didn't consent to receive), with other people saying things they don't like between each other. For instance a university administrator claimed students bad-mouthing her on YikYak was harassment. It's not, since this professor could simply not use YikYak. Harassment protects against things people say to you, but not what people say about you between each other.

Terrorists are going to break into a government facility, go a mile deep, retrieve massive concrete cylinders, and transport them back to base. Just to get access to low level nuclear material? If they want to poison people en-masse there are way better options. Uranium is a relatively slow killer. And we test our water supply for it because it's a heavy metal like lead. So any real attempt to poison people with it will get detected pretty promptly.

Groups that have the expertise to covertly retrieve spent fuel could probably just buy guns and shoot up a stadium. And that would cause more damage. The relative risk presented by nuclear waste is trivial.

The whole point of power to gas (methane) is that we can reuse the existing natural gas storage, distribution, and generation infrastructure. Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Namely grid scale deployment of energy cells, storing hydrogen. Basically it's swapping one set of challenges with a different set of challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.

Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. No, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a good candidate for this, since it's at very low concentration. Theoretically one could use biomass, but thats a very inefficient method of carbon collection.

Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient, just for the power-to-gas step. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.