JasSmith

Renewables correct prices downward from where a fossil-only system would price electricity …

They would, if they weren't four times more expensive than nuclear, and 13 times more expensive than gas.

… so that’s the heart of the matter: Russia’s actions increasing the price of fossil fuels.

It's certainly one of the issues, but not the only issue. The gas price is close to historical averages now, yet UK electricity prices remain very high.

And does that make any sense at all, given Russia’s domination of nuclear supply chains? France’s nuclear program is mortally dependent on Russian cooperation in a lot of ways too.

Russia controls approximately 22% of the world’s uranium conversion capacity and 44% of its enrichment capacity. This is hardly insurmountable. It should spur investment from other nations. China accounts for approximately 70–90% of the global market across all stages of the lithium-ion battery value chain. Does that mean the world should give up on EVs and battery storage? Surely not.

Meanwhile over here in Germany, the designated chancellor and his “Christian Democrat” party quickly stowed away their pre-election rhetoric about building new nuclear plants/reviving existing plants, after an informal paper from their own party made the rounds, outlining that reviving nuclear in Germany would necessitate massive state aid or even having the state itself run the plants.

I don't know what you mean by "stowed away," but their policy shows they are still very much open to nuclear energy.

But realistically, I think they’d need 2 or 3 times that, right? Afaik, France is currently building just a single domestic plant and they’re not exactly executing there. Neither are they executing on the Hinkley Point project. And Olkiluoto was a massive shitshow where French taxpayers financed the 3/4 of the costs that constituted the cost overrun. There are basically two countries that still know how to build nuclear reactors, those are Russia and China, everyone else just incurs perverse cost and build-time overruns. And it does make sense: A centralized, dangerous, expensive technology that works best for centralized, authoritarian regimes that can afford to put all their state power behind these projects. (And yet, China is building out solar/wind much more aggressively than nuclear.)

France definitely doesn't need 2-3 times that based on current implementation of renewables.

You won't catch me defending the speed of large reactor roll-outs. Despite this, and the high costs, it's still much cheaper than renewables. SMRs will be much faster to deploy, much more flexible, much cheaper, and require much less planning.

China is also building two "mega" coal lignite power plants per week. I don't think we should use them as a role model.

New nuclear plants are also completely useless against climate change, given their decade/multi-decade build times, especially compared to renewables where plants can be rolled out in a matter of months. Meanwhile, existing French reactors need to be taken offline in summer because their water consumption is woefully ill-adjusted to climate change and they turn France’s rivers into bouillabaisse.

CO2 production is expected to continue to climb for 50-100 years, and we won't reach CO2 neutrality for hundreds of years, if ever. A 7-10 year timespan is very little compared to the enormous environmental benefits.

Nuclear capacity has been flatlining (at best) for two decades, while renewables have exploded. Even if you assume just 10% utilization for the renewable plants, yesteryear’s addition of 6GW nuclear capacity pales in comparison to the 600GWp PV/wind capacity.

This is a political decision, not one based in science or finance. Despite renewables being far from ready to replace Germany's nuclear generation, the public voted to switch to much more environmentally damaging gas generation. That gas was primarily coming from a hostile, authoritarian nation. The public voted to place the economic prosperity of Germany in the hands of Russia. It was one of the most tragic examples of democratic self immolation in all of history.

Even the author of that study admits to (latently pro-fashy shitrag) NZZ that cheaper batteries would solve the issue. Incidentally, what we’ve been seeing over the past decade is steadily decreasing battery prices, as scale goes up and cheaper materials substitute more expensive ones.

And I fully agree with the author. In 30-50 years when battery technology becomes cost effective at grid scale, we'll be having a very different discussion.

I don’t really want to know what else is wrong with that study of his, given that the largest part of it is concerned with the near-pointless thought experiment of using 100%/95% exclusively solar+batteries. It seems massively more pertinent to worry about the final 10% renewables when the time has come. One major bit that I don’t see reflected in the study is flexibilization of demand e.g., which is a thing already. I recently saw a documentary that e.g. included a cold warehouse that could scale up/down its cooling in response to renewables availability. I visited a company producing electric componentry which is doing its electronic component testing on sunny days where they have a lot of solar. I know similar concepts exist for aluminum smelters.

That's fair. It expands on the even more flawed LCOE metric which is widely (and incorrectly) used to compare wind/solar with nuclear/gas/coal.

Are there even SMR projects that haven’t been cancelled?

Rolls Royce isn't due to deliver commercial SMRs until the early 2030s. Until then designs are either bespoke (and expensive, and untested), or using the GE Hitachi BWRX-300, which is also very expensive because it's only licensed, and built on site to spec. It has many of the same issues as traditional large reactors. GE began licensing that design in 2020, and the most advanced project is I think in Canada, due to be completed in 2028. Once RR figures out their production lines, I think we see huge efficiencies of scale and much easier planning.

I was listening to an interview by one of Reform’s strategists who categorically ruled out working with the Tories, or forming a coalition. They are extremely confident that the Tories are finished. Given their abysmal track record on things like immigration, I don’t see how they could ever win back voters.

I feel like using teslas as the pic for this was somewhat misguided - they regularly rank as one of the least reliable cars going.

It depends on the segment and time range and market. MotorEasy conducted a survey in 2024 in the U.K. with 29,967 respondents. The Tesla Model Y was the 9th (equal) most reliable car. However Teslas tend to fare poorly in the Consumer Reports survey in the U.S. I suspect one of the reasons for the discrepancy between this market and the U.S. is that the U.K. received Tesla shipments a lot later for new models - years, in fact. This gave Tesla time to iron out first-model issues. Another is potentially the location of manufacture. Most Teslas sold in the U.K. come from China and Germany. Most Teslas sold in the U.S. come from Fremont, California. There were widespread reports of strange manufacturing practises at the Fremont plan during the covid outbreak, like spray-painting cars in makeshift tents.

Interestingly, MotorEasy found that gas and hybrids were the most reliable. Diesel were the least reliable.

I agree. There is a lot of great content for reasonable prices and a lot of terrible content for high prices. It's a thriving industry. We just need to be intentional about our purchasing decisions.

You even had the extra doesn't in there. Perfection.

You cannot block an entire instance in Lemmy today. The best you can do is block seeing posts from that instance in your timeline. The users are still free to send you death threats. The Lemmy devs have promised this feature later in the year, but given how it will likely be used against their .ml instance most liberally, and they will have fewer victims to attack, I am dubious it ever gets released.

If I had an arts degree - which is mostly post-modernist today - I would argue there is no such thing as objective truth. Thankfully I do not, and I do believe that objective truth exists. My point isn't actually about objective truth at all. It's about pragmatism, the role of journalism in society, and specifically about the right strategy for the BBC.

"Incorrectly" is a judgement. It is a judgement that the statement is false. To illustrate the issue, let's use your example: “X incorrectly states that the sky is yellow”. Let's imagine that the BBC writes, "Trump incorrectly states that the sky is yellow." Trump and supporters reply, "but the sky is yellow during certain atmospheric events common in the morning and evening. Here is a picture of a yellow sky." Now the BBC is caught defending a truism which is, in fact, not always true. Supporters of Trump can rightly point out the BBC's inaccuracy, and would likely consider it a form of bias and partisanship. In order for the BBC to avoid this, they would need to append a long legal disclaimer at the bottom of every headline, every article, every video, and every news report, thoroughly detailing the various ways in which the judgement could be interpreted, how and why the BBC came to that judgement, their peer reviewed citations and statistics, the background of the analyst who made the judgement to ensure that they aren't biased, etc. This still wouldn't be enough, because Trump supporters would then ask, "but why didn't you write an article about all those times Kamala Harris lied about Biden's mental acuity? You didn't use the word "lie" even though she clearly lied." They'd be right. Now the BBC has opened themselves up for criticism of instances in which they didn't editorialise.

Judgements, no matter how factually correct, are judgements. They lead to a race to the bottom. I don't see how you could look at American media and argue that that is what the BBC should do.

I don't place much stock in anonymous complaints. There are many examples of bias in Palestine's favour, too. The most recent example is the Gaza documentary, funded by the BBC. It was so biased that the BBC had to apologise and remove the documentary. They literally gave money to Hamas. In the translations, all mentions of the word “Jews” were translated to “Israelis” or “Israeli forces,” and all mentions of “Jihad” were translated to “battle” or “resistance.” For example, one woman interviewed stated "Sinwar was engaging in resistance and jihad against the Jews,” but the subtitles read “he was fighting and resisting Israeli forces.”

The nature of very large organisations with international presence is that there are many people with many different political beliefs all under one umbrella. In the last few decades, journalism has tended to attract many more left wing people. It would not surprise me that more BBC employees wanted a left wing bias on reporting, and perceived objective journalism as biased.

Under the Tories the BBC would constantly say “X said the sky is yellow” and leave it at that. It’s totally impartial to say “X incorrectly states that the sky is yellow”.

There is a long history of objective journalism refraining from passing judgement. This is the distinction between news journalism and editorials. There is nothing wrong with partisan journalism, but the BBC is by and large not that. When I look over at the hellscape that is U.S. "journalism," I don't see a compelling role model. In fact, I think that is irrefutable evidence that the BBC is correct to remain impartial. Remember: impartiality is subjective. Making judgements - even ones which appear reasonable to you - open the author and publication up to endless accusations of editorialism. If the BBC were to ever switch to U.S.-style journalism, I believe they would be defunded almost immediately.

I would agree as a strictly logical exercise, but please note that I am talking about democratic politics: the system within which the BBC receives funding. What matters in a democracy is how people feel. There appears to be equal proportions of each aisle unimpressed with the BBC, and in a democratic system, this implies a healthy compromise and continued funding. Should the BBC obviously favour one side, it would eventually be shut down or gutted, and I think that is much worse than arguing over the minutiae.

The BBC is under constant accusations of political bias on both sides. The fact they have weathered this partisan storm angering both sides in the current political climate is testament to their ability to remain as close to objective as is possible. The current alternative to the BBC is no BBC, and I think that would be a shame.

That said, highlighting instances of questionable judgement, like this, has value. The BBC isn't perfect, and the public should keep leaders and management on its toes.