You already get this in the UK, and also in other countries, most of which have royal families and associated aristocrats.
There are also - notoriously - foreign-funded influencer, lobbyist, and donor operations.
And the traditional industries - fossil fuels, property, finance, arms - also have a huge say.
The reality is most decisions aren't made in Westminster. Parliament is a device for packaging and legitimising decisions made by the oligarchy. And the House of Lords is largely ceremonial.
It's not there to shape policy, it's there to provide a reward for loyal service to the country's real rulers.
Being in the Lords is a very nice deal. You get up to £371 a day just for turning up, with the option to claim expenses on top of that.
You get access to high quality heavily subsidised food and drink. And you get the status of being a lord, which opens doors if you happen to be someone for whom they weren't already open.
371 x 250 days is about $100k...in London...that's pretty middle class if you ask me. Just look at how Congress makes out in comparison. They legalized insider trading for themselves and only themselves. What you describe is quaint by comparison.
If you are in a position to be appointed to the House of Lords, it is reasonable to assume that you were not hand-to-mouth before that happened. At worst, you had a good job in one of the classes that gets you access to British Costco. At best, you have an estate and staff.
If you don't have competent government, that's not the fault of renewables.
This is not snark. With forward-looking rational planning the transition could have started decades ago, and we could have had a low carbon energy economy by 2010 at the latest.
But fossils make so much money they can buy the policy they want, and here we are arguing about national tactics instead of planetary strategy.
A nuke plant is concrete, pumps, fuel storage and (re)processing, a huge pressure vessel, some very complex moderator machinery, and some of the most complex industrial plant control on the planet.
Even if you ramped down the safety, it still wouldn't be cheap or simple.
"Fuel storage and reprocessing" isn't that much of the cost and a significant proportion of that is compliance costs and extreme safety measures. The pressure vessel is likewise a small minority of the cost.
Industrial control systems are fundamentally sensors, actuators and a computer. None of those is actually that expensive. Nobody should be paying a billion dollars for a valve.
Older reactors have somewhat high operating costs because they're so old, many of them were built more than half a century ago. Newer reactors often have higher costs because of the lack of scale. If you only build one or two of something you have to amortize the development costs over that many units, mistakes that require redoing work are being made for the first time, etc. Build more of them and the unit cost goes down.
Nuclear, inclusive of construction costs: ~$181/MWh, only better than natural gas because no CO2. Nuclear, cost of continuing to operate an existing reactor once it's already built: $31/MWh, basically the cheapest thing on the market, half the cost of continuing to operate an existing natural gas plant (because you need so much less fuel).
What this implies is that if you build a nuclear plant you're going to want to continue operating it for 80 years, and even then you probably want to just modernize it again instead of actually decommissioning it.
The long-term average returns from ordinary investments (e.g. S&P 500) are ~10%/year, implying that even if you require decommissioning to be prefunded (unlike any competing form of power generation), the amount of money you need is less than 0.05% of what the cost will be in 80 years. Adding $500 million in decommissioning costs isn't $500M in net present costs, it's only $250 thousand in net present costs, because you take the $250k and add 80 years worth of interest (1.10^80) which multiplies your starting capital by more than a factor of 2000.
It's really just the construction, and that's in significant part because you have to build more of them to get economies of scale for building them.
This is disingenuous. Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did.
I wasnt comparing nuclear power to gas anyway I was comparing it to solar and wind which produce no CO2. FIVE times cheaper LCOE.
Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.
It isnt a competitor with gas or batteries it is a complement to gas and batteries, just like solar and wind.
> Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did.
The majority of the cost is construction, which is expensive when you're trying to amortize the costs of a plant design over only one or two plants instead of a hundred, which is what I said.
> FIVE times cheaper LCOE.
Five times cheaper as long as you want the most output when the market price is the lowest and the least output when it's the highest. And "five times" is with existing subsidies.
> Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.
Nuclear power is baseload. All three of those do different things.
Suppose you have 10 GW of minimum load (e.g. late evening to sunrise) and 20 GW of peak load (e.g. late afternoon to early evening). Then nuclear is good for the former and solar+storage is good for the difference between the former and the latter.
To begin with, solar output actually partially aligns with the latter. Load is higher during the day. It's also high just after sunset, but that's only for a couple hours, and then you don't need a lot of batteries to cover it, which you can charge with more solar. But you'd need a lot more batteries (or gas plants) to make it through the whole night. That kind of sucks if load looks like it currently does, and it really sucks if you want people to switch from fossil fuels to electric heat, because then the highest load is going to be in the hours of darkness on the days with the least sunlight.
Meanwhile it's not just a problem that there is no solar output when it's dark. Sometimes renewable output is low for an extended period of time. It could be at 20% of typical for a month. Having enough batteries to last a month rather than just overnight is prohibitively expensive. So instead you'd have to build five times as much generation, which is only the same cost as nuclear because of government subsidies (which would require a much larger government budget allocation if you tried to build that much of them), and only if you're using the recent high price of nuclear that comes from building very few plants instead the lower prices that would be possible by doing it at scale.
And even using the subsidized price for renewables against the current price for nuclear, if you actually tried to build five times the capacity in renewables, the "generates the most when the market price is the lowest" thing would destroy you. The price on most days would then be zero because of huge oversupply and you'd have to recover the same total cost as current nuclear from only the days when your output is lowest.
Meanwhile if you use nuclear for what it is, i.e. baseload, and build only as much of it as you have minimum load throughout the day, it not only doesn't require any storage, it avoids the need for solar to use storage to supply power at night. Then you use solar for the incremental load during the day, to charge the batteries to use for the incremental load in the early evening and for charging electric vehicles by putting chargers in workplaces.
Are you implying that a coal plant doesn't have literally every single one of these? I have done industrial controls engineering for both and coal plants are actually quite complex. Take my word for it, they're well within spitting distance of one another, at the most basic level. The only difference is the enormous level of surety provided in a nuke plant design.
The UK's deep mines would be spectacularly uneconomic. Some have been sealed permanently (for expensive values of permanent) and the supporting knowledge and infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.
Coal makes as much sense as a modern fuel as horse drawn buses do for transport.
...and, oddly enough, coal provides over half of China's electricity supply.
I suppose nobody told them about the future, where bauxite reduction can be done w/ wind energy.
Oh no somebody told China about the future. That’s why they sell everyone cheap PV panels, and are now building out the equivalent of the entire UKs existing solar and wind capacity every year. Plus they’re getting faster.
In 20 years time China gonna be entirely powered by renewables while we’re still having this silly argument about what the future is going to look like.
The Globe is full of tourists, so it's multibrow at best.
Bourdieu's take was that the working classes like simple sentimental art, the middle classes like aspirational, middlebrow art because they feel they have something to prove, and the upper classes often prefer kitsch.
Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.
Most opera lovers have no idea who Luigi Nono was, and would care less if they did know.
> Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.
Are you sure it's more sentimental than technical? Like, with-your-ears sure?
Note that it took something like 140 years for someone to write a tempo fugue using a piano technique in Chopin's 4th Ballade. That is to say-- sentimental composers are as good at hiding their technique as audiences are at missing it.
But the economics don't work. A bronze steam engine would have been extremely expensive and it would have taken multiple attempts to work out the best alloy mix. Without refinement the result would have had a low power output and short working life.
Even if you have a blueprint, a bronze engine is still a major research project.
The economics don't work only when compared to the modern alternative. The economics of a grindstone attached to a waterwheel don't work today but they did historically. A steam engine with low power output could still have been extremely useful in the right context despite not being up to the more strenuous tasks of historical variants.
Agreed, there's a lower bound set by the other available tech. I didn't do the best job articulating there. In the context of the thread my objection is that the economics of the finished product aren't the issue.
The problem is arriving at working knowledge of the tech in the first place. But that's clearly not a logical impossibility, merely expensive and dependent on lots of surrounding factors.
The obsession of a single rich elite, not economics, is precisely how much of early chemistry came to be.
There are also - notoriously - foreign-funded influencer, lobbyist, and donor operations.
And the traditional industries - fossil fuels, property, finance, arms - also have a huge say.
The reality is most decisions aren't made in Westminster. Parliament is a device for packaging and legitimising decisions made by the oligarchy. And the House of Lords is largely ceremonial.
It's not there to shape policy, it's there to provide a reward for loyal service to the country's real rulers.
Being in the Lords is a very nice deal. You get up to £371 a day just for turning up, with the option to claim expenses on top of that.
You get access to high quality heavily subsidised food and drink. And you get the status of being a lord, which opens doors if you happen to be someone for whom they weren't already open.
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