China is still benefiting from their incredible demographic dividend. Comparing us to them is misleading. It should be said that the west built all its reactors during its demographic dividend periods as well, maybe that’s relevant, maybe not. But food for thought.

The lifespan of the reactors are not that interesting. What matters are long term costs. With renewable power plants you generally replace a larger part of the power plant when you repower the power plant. But that’s because they don’t need a huge concrete structure and building to contain them, if you replace the part doing the work that’s already most of it. Repowering a renewable power plant is significantly cheaper than building a new one from scratch. How that pans out in the long term remains to be seen. But most likely costs will fall further as the world moves to mostly maintaining/repowering what it has rather than building new sites from scratch.

The size of the nuclear fuel (end product) is not at all interesting unless you’re building a space ship. I should say that future space exploration is one reason why I hope nuclear power stays alive in some form.

This fuel comes from ore. You need ~10tons of ore for 1kg of fuel. For the HALUE fuel needed by the SMR reactor that are supposed to save the industry you need ~40tons of ore. Still much better than oil and gas, by a wide margin. But it’s fundamentally not a renewable process and there are significant concerns around the supply chain of this fuel. Read up on France’s issues and concerns with its supplies from Niger and Namibia.

Fun fact btw: nuclear power contributes directly to global warming from the heat they emit. The effect is surprisingly significant. All thermal power plants equate to about the climate gas emissions from airplane travel if I remember correctly. The only upside is the effect disappears instantly when the power plant shuts down. But this is not an effect we can afford to multiply when we’re on the precipice of ecological collapse due to a warming planet.

Well, yeah if we had bet more on nuclear two decades ago and kept building them, this would have been relevant.

But now renewables are expanding at a rate faster than nuclear power ever did, and unlike nuclear the growth rate is not flattening out yet. I don’t see how nuclear is much more than an irrelevant distraction when it comes to new energy production (existing is another matter, please don’t shut them down).

The base load problem is essentially solved IMO. Just a few years ago the duck curve was made to be insurmountable, and now it’s basically fully solved. Long term months long storage is also partially solved for colder regions where they are the most relevant.

But most importantly, this all ties into all the work we have to do to decarbonise industry. We have to make a lot of hydrogen and build a lot of electrical industrial heat production (which comes with free energy storage). Modern gas power plants are already hydrogen ready. We just need to build lots and lots of hydrogen electrolysis plants (for steel and ammonia production) near the gas power plants, and put some aside to use during dunkelflaute. That means many places already have much of the infrastructure needed to balance 100% renewables.

As dumb as Germanys shut down of nuclear has been, I think their strategy will be considered brilliant in 30 years time. The reason they have relied so much on gas is they need a that gas for the industry they specialised in anyway. The trick now is just to transition them to hydrogen and electric heating. There are already factories and fertiliser plants with on-site hydrogen production. It has started.

If lower operating costs doesn’t lead to lower costs to the consumer, it’s not the fault of the self checkouts. Then it’s a lack of competition which would keep margins low. It’s your government at fault for not regulating the market properly.

In my neck of the woods grocery stores all operate with razor thin margins. So I’m fairly sure they’d cut prices if self checkout allows them to. There’s so many people chosing grocery stores primarily based on price.

Why would I care about doing the cashiers work? We don’t have baggers where I live. The work is essentially the same as bagging. In many cases I explicitly want to use self check out because it’s more convenient and saves me time. If I need three items I can scan them and put them in my bag and be out of the store before I’d get half way through the checkout line.

As for theft, in principle I see the problem. In practice I’ve never heard of anyone being charged for it around here.

If we can operate shops with less labor I think that’s just good. We should instead focus on creating other more meaningful jobs. Again, a government issue IMO. We need more teachers and nurses but we don’t pay them well enough.

I’ll be the first to say, if you regularly do multi-day 6+ road trips, staying at places with no over-night charging options, then maybe an EV is not for you.

But even among the people I know in the US, I don’t know of even one person doing this. I think the closest is my uncle driving Norway-Italy a few times. On the flip-side I’ve seen plenty of people writing online about multi-day EV cross continent trips in Europe. Even back when charging infrastructure was much worse.

A single 5-7 hour trip is not an issue in an EV. One or two half hour stops isn’t a big deal for most people. Nice to stretch the legs and get some coffee. You dont have to do all the charging in one stop you know. It makes more sense to stop at places you think it’s nice to take a break, and do a couple more of them instead.

Last trip I took across Norway (~5h) I took more breaks than I needed charging stops (needed just one). I stopped at a nice cafe at the top of a mountain crossing where I was surprised to see fast chargers even there, but I didn’t need a charge to get to my destination anyway.

Personally I’ve had one trip that would be hard with EV. Portland-SF if I remember correctly. ~10h. But I deeply regretted not splitting the trip over two days.

The usable range is 10%-100%. Nobody starts an EV road trip with much less than 100%. Though you may consider cutting a mid trip fast charge somewhere around 90%. Usually for me that’s because I see that I can get to my destination without going up to 100%

Charging stations will eventually be spaced at close enough distances that you don’t have to think about where to stop. In a mature EV market there’s generally many more EV chargers than gas stations along a given route.

And if we do stop for a break, it’s rarely at gas stations

I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped at a gas station to fast charge. I stop at roadside McDonalds (we have kids), cafes, supermarkets (last stop before a trip to a cabin), etc.

How, in this day and age, could you not be aware that fast chargers are put up in more diverse places than gas stations? They’re not stinky. They don’t need to be separate from the businesses where car drivers want to spend their time.

I’ve stopped at a fast charger at a small cafe in the middle of nowhere on the top of a mountain, you could take a wonderful hike there while your car charges. You do know you can walk away from the car while it’s charging… right?

we will regularly do 3-4 hours without stopping at all

My trip to my family cabin is around 3 hours. And the last 30min is through an actually snowy dirt road up a steep climb. And I still have 40% or so left. With skis in the roof. So get outta here with your arm chair expertise.

Incidentally I don’t have to fast charge on this trip at all since we have electricity at the cabin. Super slow but I can get at least 80% which is plenty to get back.

Anyone still bringing up winter in an EV conversation should be laughed out of the room now that Norway is at near 100% market share. And no, you can’t use “Norway is small” as an argument. Road trips are common here to start with, every other family has a cabin in the mountains. But Norway is also part of Schengen. The borders in EU/Schengen are open just like the US. The first post I saw on my EV car models Facebook group was a person planning a trip to Croatia.

The problem is that building nuclear is slower and more expensive than just building renewables. It made some sense when labor was cheaper. But it doesn’t anymore.

Yeah we need to electrify transportation, heating, fertiliser and steel production. What you need to consider is that these all have excellent synergies with renewable energy. Making fertiliser from nuclear power never made sense and never will make sense. But with solar power it’s just now barely cheap enough to make sense. There are already plants up and running. And you then get a huge amount of capacity to balancer solar/wind for free as well. The same goes for transportation, steel production and especially heat. We already have heat batteries in production. Both super high temperature ones to replace fossil fuels in industry, and medium temperature ones that can store energy for months to shift energy from summer to winter for district heating systems.

None of this makes economic sense with nuclear (well, EVs make sense still).

I have nothing against nuclear. I love the tech. But it’s simply dead. And no, SMRs is not gonna save it.