I’m the same age, and also seem to have heightened hearing at this range. I went to an audiologist for a tinnitus flare up, and did an ultra high frequency hearing test, which confirmed I had abnormally good hearing at 8-16k.
He told me that many audiologists in this specialty believe there is a class of people with sensitive hearing, who are more perceptive to threshold changes in hearing (hence tinnitus). But there’s been no real research on it.
I’m not sure to what extent I believe it (given audiology is somewhere close to physiotherapy in terms of rigour)
It’s a shortage of floor space that is the issue. The problem is the Anglo countries have mostly made it illegal to supply it, in both dimensions. Auckland clearly showed this when it upzoned.
It is primarily restrictive zoning. When Auckland up-zoned there was a clear relative decrease in prices. You can also see it in the massive price discontinuity on the city’s rural-urban boundary.
It’s a pretty simple problem: existing owners have an interest in restricting new supply, and there aren’t many costs associated with being a nimby. Housing stops being a good investment when supply is responsive.
Nuclear drops down to within the same order of magnitude of the best solar, when you take exclusion zones into account(according to Vaclav Smil in Power Density). But solar (and certainly) wind couldn’t be called more space efficient overall.
Turbines limit how close other turbines can be located, but nothing stops you using that land for other purposes. Nobody is going to complain their corn, cows, or house aren’t seeing high wind speeds.
Meanwhile the plant operator would strongly object to someone building their house inside the exclusion zone, that land is actually occupied.
My understanding is that naval reactors mostly (if not all?) require near-weapons grade uranium. Though I assume this is to allow a compact design. How highly enriched would it need to be in this case? Any more than current land-based civil designs?
