Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.
Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.
In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
These are very good ideas for much more of the populace to digest and internalize. I'm not sure how many will.
And much of the popular critique of capitalism is driven by those who don't distinguish between profit and rent, when in fact the near entirely of the extraction that is causing inequality is from rent extraction and not "profit" as used in this piece. Especially when it comes to real estate, which is most people's largest expense, growing, and one of the biggest political challenges we face today. (Broad homeownership has created a lot of people that benefit from increasing residential housing costs, or at least don't see any problems with them).
Glad to see Schumpeter get mentioned, as Schumpeterian rents are perhaps defensible for a while, I think.
> the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc
Teams of coordinating agents are regularly finding security holes in their own infrastructure and operating without detection for good periods of time. We don't know how many undetected systems are currently compromised inside frontier companies, or where agents are taking notes and recording them about the exploits they've found for future agents to exploit.
There are several projects that injest coding sessions from lots of agents, but for the chat side I haven't found much, except replacements for Claude Desktop. Jan, for example.
It is by far the least accurate of any model I have used too. For a company that was started to organize the world's information, it has by far the most misinformation I've encountered.
I couldn't even get it to tell me how to pay for antigravity, it sent me on some fruitless paths and eventually said "you shouldn't pay for this, it's too hard to figure it out."
Exports are really easy to move and replace, as has been proven again and again in the past two years. Turns out that imports can be far trickier and pose larger problems to an economy.
Finland? Sure! Italy has far better, cheaper, routes.
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