Things are more expensive when we keep reinventing the wheel and trying to do new things instead of just reusing proven designs. Remember that solar power also used to cost wheelbarrows of cash back in the day. When you do something repeatedly, it becomes less expensive over time.
Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when they EOL in 25 years? They go into landfills and leach toxic chemicals into the ground. These chemicals, like lead and cadmium are toxic forever. They have no 'half-life' in which their toxicity reduces.
Solar panels do not become useless in 25 years and need to be discarded, do not leach toxic chemicals, and do not contain cadmium. They do contain small amounts of lead, but leaching metallic lead out of landfills is very difficult and probably does not ever happen unintentionally.
A nuclear plant about 50 miles from my house was closed 15 years ago. The spent fuel rods will be stored there indefinitely until a federal facility is built.
Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. Redwood Materials (founded by Tesla's former CTO) has already established a supply chain to ingest and recycle EV and stationary storage batteries at scale. The problem is that the hardware is lasting longer than expected, and meaningful recycling volume does not yet exist.
Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions, as of this comment, and there is no plan for long term storage or recycling. Nuclear generation is experiencing a negative learning curve; we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.
(solar PV panels have a 25-30 year service life, at which point they will still produce power at ~80-85% initial rating, batteries have a 15-20 year service life, with sodium ion chemistries estimated to have up to 50 year service life assuming once daily cycling)
> Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials.
That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
> Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
Let's compare to spent nuclear fuel, which we know for sure does not end up in landfills. I am talking about today, not some hypothetical utopian future. Today, NPP spent fuel is safely sequestered while solar panels are dumped into landfills.
> nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions
It does, it's just not built yet because it doesn't make sense to do it now. In a few decades, maybe a century we will have commercialized fusion reactors. Once we do, we switch to fusion completely and build the deep geological repositories or whatever other solution makes sense then. Or we can even recycle the spent fuel–the only thing stopping us from doing that now is misguided US politics (as usual).
> we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.
It's capex. We are investing in nuclear technology. If you have a proven design and build the reactors at scale, the costs will flatten or decline, which is obvious to anyone who knows about economies of scale.
The issue with that logic there is those basic drugs are mostly generic now. That money is less, and goes to the PBM and generic manufacturers in India.
A fancy Nissin Cup of Noodle is $0.80 and 300 caloriesz. I just bought 2 lbs of hamburger meat for $15.
Food insecure people load up on cheap carbs. Most of them don’t know you to cook or lack gear and will buy a $5/16oz boil in bag rice vs. a 10lb bag for $6.
The switch to the current monetary system, followed by the elimination of taxation for rich people created this. You can only prosper with compounding.
People on the bottom are just as helpless as they were before. They carry on with benefits and modest income. They get (shitty) healthcare fit free. The next two tiers of working poor are the ones that have gotten screwed.
Well, expect more. We’ve gutted the federal bureaucracy like a fish, anyone who wasn’t fired is leaving as soon as they can.
I’m hiring lots of amazing people from the feds. My client is going to make a fortune as the smartest people regulating them are now advocating for them. The government is, as intended, going to be generationally broken.
Do you ever wonder if parroting the thing they tell you to say without adding any context or justification might have negative consequences for you in the future or just make you look dumb in public? Even good faith people agreeing with the premise here aren't going to value a mindless dismissal.
Do you have any thoughts on why that might be or any times you haven't seen that to be true?
The federal government has been trying this approach for a number of years, and it doesn't seem to make it more efficient or mobile. Justl ook at the state of it's digital services, they are stuck in 2005, at best.
Thats before you talk about the IRS. Virtually everywhere else most tax on wage is automatic, where filings are the exception.
The camera iterates significantly every other year. My kid plays baseball, from little league to now high school ball. The pictures I can take on my iPhone are incredible. (I’d do the same thing with a Pixel or Samsung if I was a Android person)
My work phones are typically on a 4-5 year cycle. I’m currently carrying a 12 or 13 pro. I would have upgraded early for USB-C with that phone, but MagSafe is good enough.
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