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A couple of years ago I read about an exciting new approach to treating cancer: DNA nanobots. These are very simple machines made from DNA.

How simple are they? They are hollow capsules with a hinge and a latch. The one function of the nanobot is to pop the latch open under the correct circumstances.

(Note: I'm a software developer, not any kind of doctor or scientist, and I'm describing this in my own words based on my own understanding. Apologies if I get anything wrong. Links at the end so you can go to better sources.)

The latch can be configured to open only when it bumps into a specific protein. For example, a protein only found on the cancer to be treated.

The idea is that a nano-dose of strong medicine is inserted into the "nanobot" capsules. Each does of medicine is tiny but there are literally trillions of capsules. (That's why they are made out of DNA... no person and no machine can make these, they are self-assembling.) Then the capsules are introduced into the body of the patient. They travel along through the body, bumping into things, and the medicine doesn't do anything because it's contained inside the capsule. Then, when the capsule happens to bump into a cancer cell, the latch opens, the medicine is released, and a nanodose of the medicine is administered directly to the cancer cell.

What I found exciting about this is that it decouples the problems of being both safe and effective. We have plenty of effective anti-cancer drugs, but many of them are useless because they aren't safe. They aren't selective enough; they will kill healthy tissue as much as they kill cancer cells. But if we can program the latch to open only when near the cancer cells, potentially these same drugs would now become safe to use. The nanobot makes the effective drugs safe.

The research from the news story identifies many targets. If the latch can be programmed using this new data, potentially the nanobots can be tailored to attack any kind of cancer and not hurt any healthy tissue.

From time to time I check the news to see if there is anything new about DNA nanobots. The original research I read about has gone silent... I read somewhere that a major drug company had bought the research so maybe it's quietly being developed (and the staggering piles of paperwork quietly started at the FDA).

Here is the research I originally read about:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/12/ido-bachelet-announces-2015-human-trial.html

I didn't find any follow-up about the human trial. I'm wondering whether the treatment worked and the patient was saved.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5nck89/what_happened_ido_bachelet_and_leukemia_nanobot/

Here's what appears to be another research team pursuing the same idea.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212112000.htm

I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?

The first is that information related to this subject is heavily censored. The information you have provided is from organizations who are restricted in what they are allowed to publish.

Money isn't the main consideration. The impact of a single disaster is. Fukushima was four disasters at once and considering the amount of spent fuel rods stored on the site had the potential to be an extinction level event. It still does as the removal process has stalled with 566 rods remaining in a precarious position in the heavily damaged Unit 3 spent fuel pool. Tepco itself acknowledges this as the most potent risk for a much more serious disaster than the original.

At this point though it is worthwhile to point out that Tepco has removed approximately 1000 spent fuel rods - which is an enormous effort that should be commended, with gratitude to the workers and engineers that continue to risk their lives to eliminate this risk.

• Chernoby cleanup cost: $235 billion.
• Fukushima cleanup cost: $197 billion
• Total amount of nuclear power generated since commercial nuclear power became widely available: about 86000 TWh
  about 20 years ramping up from 0 to 2000 TWh/yr, plus 30 years at about 2200 TWh/yr = (20*2000/2) + (30*2200) = 86000

Cost of the above two cleanups divided by the amount of energy generated by nuclear power: $432 billion / 86000 billion kWh = $0.005 per kWh = 0.5 cents per kWh

I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?

Nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented. Even with the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it has killed fewer people per TWh generated than any other power source.

What's going on is that people are really bad at appraising big but rare risks. Their mind focuses on the magnitude of the risk, exaggerating the larger risks. Simultaneously, their mind glosses over the lower frequency of the risk. Consequently, big, rare events like nuclear disasters get overemphasized in people's minds, while small, common events like maintenance workers falling from wind turbines get overlooked.

Comparisons rarely get more stupid than this. Events like Chernobyl and Fukushima impact not only the people who died as a direct consequence of the event (for example during or in the direct aftermath), but they have long lasting effects on the environment and the generations that follow those who worked and lived there. A maintenance worker falling from a wind turbine usually only impacts the ground directly beneath.

It's the same reason plane crashes are splashed over all the TV news, while car crashes rare make the news, even though going to a destination by car is 1-2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than going by plane. The magnitude of the carnage from a plane crash is greater and overwhelms our minds, while the much lower frequency of plane crashes is overlooked. Or on the flip side, it's why people spend money on lottery tickets even though on average they'll lose money. The magnitude of the payoff if you win overwhelms our mind, to where we completely ignore the infinitesimal odds of winning.

No, this has nothing whatsoever to do with assessing the risk of nuclear energy. A more apt comparison with plane crashes would be terrorist attacks.

Nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented. Even with the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it has killed fewer people per TWh generated than any other power source.

What's going on is that people are really bad at appraising big but rare risks. Their mind focuses on the magnitude of the risk, exaggerating the larger risks. Simultaneously, their mind glosses over the lower frequency of the risk. Consequently, big, rare events like nuclear disasters get overemphasized in people's minds, while small, common events like maintenance workers falling from wind turbines get overlooked.

It's the same reason plane crashes are splashed over all the TV news, while car crashes rare make the news, even though going to a destination by car is 1-2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than going by plane. The magnitude of the carnage from a plane crash is greater and overwhelms our minds, while the much lower frequency of plane crashes is overlooked. Or on the flip side, it's why people spend money on lottery tickets even though on average they'll lose money. The magnitude of the payoff if you win overwhelms our mind, to where we completely ignore the infinitesimal odds of winning.

Even factoring in Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power remains the safest power sources man has ever invented. It's safer than wind and solar (helluva lot safer than hydro, which is responsible for the worst power generator-related accident in history - about 170,000 killed, 2 million left homeless).

The problem with obtaining insurance is not due to nuclear being unsafe. It's due to a quirk of statistics. The more times you throw the dice (the more individual items you insure), the tighter the distribution gets. The bell curve becomes narrower, and you're more likely to get a result close to the predicted average. So it's easier for the insurance company to figure out what to charge (or for the casino to guarantee a profit) if they're insuring tens of thousands or millions of items. If they want to be 99.9% sure their collected premiums exceed their payouts, they only have to charge a few percent more than their expected payout based on the average (middle of the bell curve).

But there are only 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. With a sample that small, the bell curve ends up very broad. If an insurance company trying to insure them wants to be 99.9% sure they've collected enough money, the premium they have to charge ends up being several hundred or thousand times higher than the average expected payout, instead of just a few percent higher.

> No, we did hit peak oil.

You need to keep up with the news:

US Oil Production 9% higher than peak in 1970 and will be about 20% higher next year

It seems like there are some theories about how to slow down, at least if you're aiming for the Alpha Centauri system (which is a 3 star system).

4. The opposite case, for objects coming from deep space into the Solar system, or into galaxies, their acceleration is increasing so they should gain inertial mass by MiHsC and slow down anomalously, just like an inverted Pioneer anomaly, and of the same size (it will appear as though there’s unseen mass at the outer edge of the system).

It's interesting because just recently I read about detected anomaly in Oumuamua trajectory, which for now was attributed to not observed out-gassing, i.e. out-gassing, which was not seen, but had to happen - not sure though whether the effect would match the one predicted by QI (article didn't provide details about the anomaly).

We can dump iron in the oceans as a fertilizer which produces bigger fish harvests and sinks co2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We could use calcium too.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
https://www.wired.com/2008/07/...

We could farm Kelp.
https://www.scienceforums.net/...

But unless we stop emitting co2 this will not be enough. We should really consider Thorium reactors especially if they are as safe as scientists are claiming.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Sorry about the quality of the links but it should be a good starting point for some research. None of these by themselves will be enough but we have many options even terrible ones like reflective aerosols.

~matthekc

Per MWh of power generated, wind is actually more dangerous than nuclear. The month of the Great Tokoku Earthquake, a high school student in Ohio was killed when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up. So the month of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, wind power actually killed more people than nuclear power.

So because the kid was an idiot, wind power is bad? Because solar installers aren't wearing safety harnesses on roofs, solar is bad. The TEPCO executive are criminally negligent and obliterate the community surrounding their reactor.

So what you are saying is if you are stupid with wind or solar you die and the community moves on. If you are stupid with Nuclear Power everyone around it has to be evacuated and the community is destroyed even if no one dies.

Nuclear power kills communities when it goes wrong.

Per MWh of power generated, wind is actually more dangerous than nuclear. The month of the Great Tokoku Earthquake, a high school student in Ohio was killed when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up. So the month of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, wind power actually killed more people than nuclear power.

The deaths due to wind (and solar) just fly under the news radar because their power production is so small compared to other energy sources. But if we're going to scale them up to provide double digit percentages of our power, their industries really need to address the high fatality rate. The problem with sparse power sources like wind and solar is that you need a lot more infrastructure to generate the same amount of power as concentrated sources like nuclear. So it requires a lot more manpower to maintain (with a corresponding higher risk to maintenance workers), and it's much more difficult to keep all that infrastructure secure against thrill seekers who might get themselves killed. Everyone is paranoid about something going wrong at a nuclear plant, so those are guarded with almost military-grade security. Not so for the wind turbine in Ohio, which some teacher or custodian probably forgot to padlock.

That said, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are far, far safer than fossil fuels.

And too little too late, China is an order of magnitude more
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Is Molten Salt Reactor the same as Pebble Bed Reactor?

China is now leading our clean energy future. Here is an actual link for that, and related ones:

China spending US$3.3 billion on molten salt nuclear reactors ...
SINAP T-MSR Promotional Video
Why China’s 600 fte MSR program wants to cooperate ...

It should be mentioned that China's efforts stem from Kirk Sorensen's rediscovery and publication of the brilliant MSR work done at ORNL many decades ago, which was foolishly cancelled and lost in obscurity. He has since founded a company to further that work in the US, and there is a good overview of the vision here:

The Flibe Energy LFTR49: the triple ace in nuclear GEN IV design

We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power. But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem, environmentalists insisted that we dismantle that existing solution, and roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.

Fortunately a lot of people are working to make nuclear power safe.

China has started its first pebble bed reactor and has plans to build more

No, the claim is it is more appropriate energy infrastructure for the 21st century, now that we've had the internet for decades and we can read.

Yes, I can read and I do have access to the internet. That does not exempt you from citing a source to back up your claims. I'm not going to try to chase down your claims for you, tell you I can't find it, and then you simply get smug and tell me I'm not looking hard enough. Cut the unsubstantiated claims and provide a link once in a while.

I think lead cooled reactors would be better.

Why? And cite a source.

Yeah, except in the technology your thinking of leaves a brand new waste stream and doesn't address the old one.

Bullshit. Citation needed.

So what. They don't take up multiple exclusion zones when they blow up (3600sqKm for Chernobyl) and they can be put in places where people aren't.

Nuclear power is still safer than any other energy source we have access to.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

No one has any plans to duplicate the RBMK reactor at Chernobyl, so bringing that up as a case against a future design does not follow. You can bring up solar power and I can point to Boy Scouts getting food poisoning from a "solar oven". You can bring up wind power and I can bring up Grandpa's windmill on the farm used to pump water. Ford's Pinto was not a safe vehicle but that has nothing to do with the decision on the purchase of a 2018 model year F-150.

If you want to criticize nuclear power then do so on designs that people are actually proposing to build. I can agree that these old nuclear reactors, built about the same time as those at Chernobyl, should be replaced. They cannot be replaced by wind and solar any time soon at current rates of development. That can only be done with new nuclear. Citation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Three dead in German off shore windmill accident
https://www.thelocal.de/201204...

Two dead in windmill fire, multiple windmill fires reported worldwide
https://gineersnow.com/industr...

You can hardly proof something wrong.

You can prove me wrong by finding data counter to my own. If you bothered to actually look for data instead of making unsubstantiated claims then you'd find articles like what I linked to above and articles with data showing nuclear power to be very safe. Like this one:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

If you have so many wind mill fires in the US, then there is obviously something wrong with the mills.

We do have a lot of windmill fires, as they do in Germany. If you want to claim that German windmills are safer than those made in the USA then I'm not going to believe you without data.

If you want to split hairs on me not finding a specific combination of fire, death, Germany, and wind turbine, then go look for yourself. I got sickened from trying to sort through all the dead from wind power accidents I found.

I noticed a lack of citations on your claims. Here's mine:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Nuclear power is in fact the safest source of energy we have today.

The claim on nuclear power being a prime target in war is cute. Have you seen a modern nuclear power plant? Did you notice something? A big concrete dome perhaps? I'm sure if someone dropped a big enough bomb on the dome it would break open but if that's your standard then consider this, how well protected are windmills from an attack in a time of war? What of solar panels? You want to put windmills off shore too? I wonder how well protected those would be from an attack, or a drunken container ship captain.

If you want to talk about making land unusable then consider how much land would have to be plastered over with solar collectors. We can't grow crops in the shade. Oh, we put the solar panels on the roof you say? That doubles or triples the cost. When prodded on price solar power advocates talk of the price on utility scale solar, which by some estimates is as cheap as coal. When prodded on the enormous amounts of land use it suddenly and magically becomes far more expensive rooftop solar. Well, make up your mind. Do we get cheap solar and make that land unavailable for crops or housing, or do we get expensive solar and put it on our rooftops? You get one or the other to make your case, you can't have both.

Oh, another argument I hear often is that solar will get cheaper in the future. Well, nuclear will get cheaper in the future. We've been subsidizing solar for decades now with the promise that someday, with enough research and development, it will be cheaper than coal. Well, why not subsidize nuclear too to make it cheaper than coal, safer than wind, and lower CO2 output than solar? Oh, wait, we don't have to do that because nuclear is already there. You think that's "bollox"? Show me your numbers.

Nuclear energy is not safe and is not inexpensive when humans are involved.

It's safe...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

It's inexpensive...
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
https://insideclimatenews.org/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Decommissioning costs are running two orders of magnitude more expensive than proponents said they would be.
* This means that nuclear is actually much more expensive than it's stated cost and that means the next generatiosn subsidizes nuclear power used by the prior generations.

That's just a lie. The Forbes article above explicitly point out that decommissioning costs are included in the price. They also point out that past cost overruns in nuclear power were often the result of poor money management, not any flaws in the technology or construction.

Securing the nuclear waste costs millions of dollars per site per year for the foreseeable future.
* This cost increases over time. What cost $6 million 10 years ago, costs $8 million a couple years ago.

Prove it.

Private insurance will not cover the risk. That's evidence right there that the risks are unknowable or larger than proponents say.
* This means citizens are on the hook for unlimited losses. Corporations and executives get the profits up front and dump the costs on citizens.

The risks are large. That's what happens with any large project. A multi-billion dollar anything will be more than any private insurance company is willing or able to cover. This is a financial risk, which again is often a problem of poor money management and not any flaw with nuclear power itself.

It has benefits for CO2 but we sail thru the 2 degree celcius increase about 2024. Nuclear plants wouldn't be done for 20 years.

Mean construction time for a nuclear power plant is about 7.5 years, though many have been completed in 3 years. Just because the TVA took 42 years to complete a reactor at Watts Barr does not mean all reactor projects are doomed to take as long.

The public hate them.

That's changing.
https://www.statista.com/stati...
https://www.thedailystar.net/o...

I've seen people flip on their stance on nuclear power right before my eyes when I point out that Fukushima was older than Chernobyl. We don't build nuclear reactors like Fukushima and Chernobyl any more. People understand this. You can complain about nuclear being unsafe, too expensive, and so on, but that's technology from 1980 if you are lucky. I can make wind and solar look bad too if I'm taking state of the art from 1978 and compare that to modern nuclear. Should I base my car purchases from what I learned by reading Unsafe At Any Speed?

I could see using Nuclear only in extreme lattitudes where alternative energy is less practical.

Then you need your vision checked.

I'm a bit more optimistic than most on the timeline. Here is a company that wants to get it done by 2030. There are a couple of other interesting and serious Tokamak designs that are actively being built. I also think that with global warming concerns becoming more pressing governments will be looser with the purse strings to accomplish something sooner rather than later.

As much as finding H3 is concerned, I do think that terrestrial sources will be more viable than any possible moon source.

Wind and solar are safer? Try again (Sorry for the formatting)

Deaths per terrawatt hour (Worldwide):
Coal (world) 244.00
Oil 52.00
Biofuel/Biomass 50.00
Peat 50.00
Natural Gas 20.00
Coal (US) 10.00
Wind 0.15
Solar 0.10
Hydro 0.10
Nuclear (world) 0.04


Data from here. The Nuclear number is inflated by Chernobyl, which represents over 95% of the deaths from nuclear power.

These represent numbers from the entire history of power production. Solar is getting safer (mostly because of already installed panels continuing to produce power) but the installation of solar panels is still the 7th most dangerous job, with a fatality rate of over 32 workers per 100,000.

It makes perfect senses. You're not taking into account opportunity cost. Money you spend tackling this problem, is money you don't have available to tackle other problems.

Given a multitude of problems, and limited resources (money) for tackling those problems, you maximize the reduction in problems by applying your resources most efficiently. By tackling the worst but easiest-to-fix problems first, even if that means leaving smaller but more-costly-to-fix problems unresolved.

Your way of thinking is why we waste billions of dollars trying to make air travel safer to prevent a few hundred deaths per year, while over a million people die in car accidents every year. Or why nuclear power is a pariah, when statistically it's the safest power source man has ever invented (yes, safer than renewables). You prioritize tackling the problem which has the greatest emotional impact (i.e. in proportion to news coverage), rather than the problem which will yield the greatest numerical decrease for the smallest expenditure.

This site claims Falcon 9 already has Skylon beat price wise (just with block 5). Falcon Heavy and BFR have it beat by a lot: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

BFR is a privately funded next-generation reusable launch vehicle and spacecraft system developed by SpaceX

SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by 'a Few Hundred Meters'

In-orbit refueling

It's a huge capital investment, huge on-going maintenance, outrageously huge decommissioning costs,

You've just described renewables perfectly, or do you think that they are exempt from maintenance and end of life costs? Considering that they use enormously more resources, and are spread over vast geographic areas, the eventual recycling and disposal efforts will be substantially more costly. They also don't last half as long as nuclear plants.

and the penalty for falling asleep at the wheel (i.e., hiring a few MBAs to improve 'efficiency') is catastrophe. It's also centralized and makes a nice juicy target for terrorism.

A reminder that the Fukushima meltdowns didn't kill anyone, nor did Three Mile Island, and only about 50 died from the Chernobyl accident. They were a financial disaster for Japan because of the extreme and irrational overreaction, including the subsequent replacement of all nuclear power by fossil fuel imports and new fossil plants.

As for terrorist targets, you underestimate the difficulty of attacking a renewable+gas grid. All of the gas plants are fed by pipelines, which present a large attack surface, and damage could easily knock most of the grid offline. The renewable super-grid, assuming it ever gets built, would also be vulnerable, because of the extremely high complexity and degree of interconnection over vast geographical areas.

Oh, and it costs more than solar or wind--once you fully account for all the actual costs. Westinghouse just went out of business (ask South Carolina).

Solar and wind generation don't ever account for their actual costs; that is left to the utilities that are forced to integrating their unreliable energy. The true system costs are captured by retail electricity prices, and renewables penetration is strongly correlated with much higher prices.

Westinghouse was a mess, to put it politely. However, the main driver of cost has been the extreme hostility toward nuclear power in the US. With sane regulations and factory production of modern rectors, nothing could hope to compete with nuclear on cost. It is a natural result of the tremendous energy density of nuclear, which also concentrates and minimizes environmental impact.

I'm guessing the future [for most of the US] looks like solar roofs with local battery storage, connected to a grid backed by natural gas peaking/backup plants and various other forms of utility power generation and storage.

This is the dream, and it is deceptively attractive without numbers. Industry, transportation, and heating alter the picture, and the task rapidly goes from daunting to utterly hopeless. See Actually getting rid of a USA worth of coal usage within a decade for a serious approach to decarbonization; one which also happens to be much cheaper.

Don't equate the failure of a plant processing nuclear weapons waste with a plant that is processing nuclear power waste. Anyone that can think should be justifiably suspicious of people that need to use the failure of a military weapon producing plant to prevent contamination to argue against civilian nuclear power.

Nuclear power is in fact very safe. I'll see opinion articles mention the deaths caused by mining uranium and such as a case against nuclear power but make no mention of how many deaths there are from wind and solar power. This is lying by omission. If people want to make the case against nuclear power then they need to make an honest assessment of how dangerous the alternatives would be by comparison.

Go ahead, show me how dangerous nuclear power is compared to wind, solar, natural gas, or whatever else you believe should replace it. I already know the numbers. I saw them here:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

We should be moving to nuclear power based on lives saved alone. It's ability to compete on price with solar is another reason to use it. My source:
https://www.lazard.com/perspec...

The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.

Come on, man, this is just blatant FUD. "Periodically" meaning 3 real incidents, EVER. Compare deaths from nuclear to constant deaths from solar (workers falling off roofs), wind (workers falling of turbines), hydroelectric (workers falling off dams, dams failing and wiping out entire towns), natural gas (workers dying in fires), coal (workers dying in fires AND dying in mines AND bystanders dying from lung disease), and you see that nuclear is far and away the safest energy source out there. Three completely separate references for you, all of which concur:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

There are a few good reasons to be wary of nuclear - frequent schedule/budget overruns being chief among them. There's also a huge cost for facility decommissioning that hasn't really been handled adequately. But safety concerns are outright lies - nuclear energy is literally and provably the safest form of energy that exists. That argument is bad and you should feel bad for making it.

Why care about wind energy first? Don't you have better priorities?

Nope! The most expensive nuclear power costs lives, lots of them, by far more than residential solar, though of course, some roofers will die, this is an unfortunate reality, but they'll die installing roofs anyway. Can't have houses without roofing, not unless you want to make us all live in caves.

Prove it. Show me that nuclear is not safer than rooftop PV. Here's something that tells me nuclear is the safest energy source we have, safer than even rooftop solar.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

I've had people tell me in the past that this is not fair comparing deaths from rooftop solar to utility scale PV. That's true, it's just as unfair as comparing the costs in dollars between utility scale PV and rooftop PV. If you want to make the case that utility scale PV would be both cheaper AND safer than nuclear then I'll listen. Just don't tell me that rooftop PV is safer than nuclear because I know that's a lie.

Well, obviously we know you're wrong. In reality, there are a variety of means besides solar thermal that can store power.

Yes, there are ways to store solar energy than solar thermal. The problem I see is that this is the only storage means I've seen that has given real and actual costs of both collecting and storing the energy in a way that is even close to being something I can compare to nuclear. If we start talking about electrical storage, like pumped hydro or utility scale batteries, then we can use that same technology for things like load following on nuclear. Once we get past solar thermal storage then any other storage applies just as equally to address problems with coal and nuclear not load following, wind power being intermittent, or whatever else might come up for competitors to solar. Electrical storage is good for solar but it can also be good for nuclear.

If you want to go to utility battery storage then be prepared for it to be used against solar as much as for it.

Meanwhile, solar installations and wind farms are going up EVERY DAY.

Yes they are, and according to the experts they are doing so at a price higher than that of new nuclear and natural gas. The only reason these make business sense is because the government is forcing them by law to do so, not because it makes them money. We're seeing new nuclear getting built now too. You think that's because people are beating down doors to get them built? It think these anti-nuclear idiots are getting held back with the piles of money the utilities are saving on going nuclear instead of solar.

Nuclear installs? Nope! They aren't happening.

The NRC lists at least 20 license applications right now. We saw Watts Bar unit 2 go first critical last year. We are seeing two new reactors being built right now. I see hints of three, four, or five new plants breaking ground next year. It's happening.

Across the world, nuclear plants are over-budget, past schedule, and their companies are giving up on feeding the white elephant since the rest of us are finally realizing what failures they are.

I'm pretty sure that China is planning on 19 GW of new nuclear capacity in the next year or so, India plans 7 GW, and new plants are planned in Poland, Japan, South Korea, UAE, Indonesia, Egypt, and more.

Sadly, you're obviously too much of a jackdaw to do it.

I don't know what that means, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. A jackdaw is a bird noted for being curious, so I'm too curious to look things up? That doesn't make sense.

Then that brings me back to the beginning of what you wrote.

Why? What will it tell us that we didn't already know?

So, you tell me to look things up because I'm ignorant but if I suggest the same to you then you merely claim you know it all already. Maybe you should actually read the report and learn something.

Maybe you don't already know it all.

fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.

Citation needed. Here's mine that says you're full of shit.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Nuclear fission is the safest energy source we have available today. It's also cheaper than solar, hydro, and offshore wind.
https://www.instituteforenergy...

Nuclear also has a lower carbon footprint than solar.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...

If there is an energy scam out there then it's solar. Onshore wind and hydro aren't too bad but they are limited in utility by geography, nuclear energy is not. About the rest of your claims, I think you have your aluminum foil helmet on too tight.

The nuclear parts of the plant itself survived both the earthquake and tsunami just fine even though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.

The failure was loss of power to run the plant's cooling systems. Basically, the tsunami swamped the backup power generators and contaminated the diesel fuel reserves for the generators. The destruction of the surrounding roads prevented new generators and fuel from being brought in in a timely manner. And when they eventually did arrive, workers discovered the power couplings for the trucks were different from the ones the plant used, and they had to gerry-rig a connector. All of this took critical time which could've mitigated the severity of the accident. This wasn't an explosion like Chernobyl, it was a gradual event as the cooling water slowly evaporated allowing the fuel rods to melt.

A single diesel generator situated on higher ground with an independent fuel source could've prevented the entire accident. Instead, in stereotypical Japanese fashion, they placed all the generators in a neat row right next to each other in the basement, where the tsunami swamped all of them simultaneously. See, the thing about redundant backup systems (e.g. multiple generators in case some do not function) is that they have to be different to be redundant. If they're the same model, in the same location, using the same fuel source, then any single event which affects one generator will affect all the generators, defeating their redundancy. In fact the two newer reactors at Fukushima on higher ground were just fine because their generators and fuel supply worked as intended. They just didn't have a really long extension cord to reach from those generators to the problem reactors. Basically the failure at Fukushima was the same as when you store your backup drive next to your computer (although the consequences were much more severe). If your house burns down or you're burglarized, both your computer's main drive and your backup drive will be lost. Because you're storing both in the same location, the redundancy of a second copy is defeated by any event which affects that entire location.

Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences. Basically, because of unwarranted paranoia about nuclear power, everyone concentrated on going over the nuclear parts of the plant with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was safe. As a result, the non-nuclear backup systems didn't get enough scrutiny, and that's what failed.

It's like airliner safety. Air travel is already far safer than other modes of transport. But because any airplane crash gets disproportionate news coverage, we spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the couple hundred airliner deaths per year even further. Meanwhile the tens of thousands of people dying each year in car accidents gets very little attention. Even including the estimated future cancer deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is still the safest power source we've invented (yes, safer than wind and solar based on both on deaths and lost man-days per unit of electricity generated).

I took a look at deaths per terawatt hour by energy source. This is what I found:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Nuclear is in its own category here, as the safest energy source we have available to us today.

From TFA:

Itâ(TM)s a tired myth that there is a conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, Partin said.

If we want environmental protection without killing the economy then we need to take a list of what's "green" and what's cheap and see where they overlap, then use those.

What's low on CO2 output? Look here:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...
(Page 7 has a nice chart BTW)

What's cheap? Look here:
https://www.instituteforenergy...
(Charts and graphs near the bottom of the page.)

Looks to me like the winners are wind, hydro, and nuclear. Of course future developments will shift these numbers around so let's not stop the analysis there but now, today, those are our best three choices.

This is not hard people.

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm sure people will bring up issues of safety so let's have a look:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Look, still wind, hydro, and nuclear at the top. To those that think solar has any part to play in this I say look again at the costs, it's easily double or triple what we pay now for natural gas. Natural gas is so cheap now that it will be impossible to do away with it but even then it's got half the CO2 output per MWh compared to coal. If we have to choose between coal, natural gas, or our energy costs doubling then I choose natural gas. Wind, hydro, and nuclear are already cheaper than coal so that choice is obvious.

So, there's our solution, wind, hydro, nuclear, and some more natural gas until we can make the others cheaper. Anything else means more CO2 and/or much higher costs.

Saying "safer than wind" or "safer than solar" is "trolling".

Perhaps. By the way the answer is "nuclear fission".
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

If taken as a global average, where Chernobyl and Fukushima are included then hydroelectric wins on the "deathprint" metric. Since I assume we've learned out lessons from both, and are not letting engineers from Soviet Russia do the building, then nuclear comes out on top.

Here's an article from GreenPeace that does a different analysis claiming to be more "honest" but still shows nuclear as safe or safer than wind. http://www.greenpeace.org/inte...

The costs metric shows nuclear, natural gas, and geothermal as cheapest. We might want to rule out natural gas on "deathprint" and "carbon footprint". Geothermal is great unless you don't have a place to drill for geothermal. That leaves nuclear.
https://www.instituteforenergy...

Another cost analysis shows nuclear cheaper than only coal and solar thermal. Which doesn't help nuclear here but people want reliable power, and so long as it's cheaper than coal I suspect they'd choose that.
http://www.renewable-energysou...

Finding a source on energy reliability with a quick Google search was proving to be more difficult than I thought. The best I could find was that same link above on costs where it listed capacity factors.
https://www.instituteforenergy...

This use of capacity factor to measure reliability is likely pretty fair for wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, coal, many forms of natural gas, and biomass, since these are the kinds of energy a utility is going to want to keep up as much as possible for reasons of costs, legal requirements, and such. However this metric really takes a dump on hydro and natural gas turbines since those are kept in reserve to meet peak demands, they are in fact very reliable and that's why they are kept in reserve. With that said, the top of the list includes nuclear and geothermal with capacity factors at 90% or higher. If we account for the peak power technologies of hydro and natural gas turbines we can include those as well.

Let's end with an analysis on carbon footprint, since most people already suspect that fossil fuels lose out big, but let's just take a look at an aggregated "meta-study".
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...

Nuclear, wind, and hydro are effectively tied. PV has more than triple the carbon footprint, but still far better than natural gas. Natural gas being half that of coal might just make it a not so bad choice given it's price, not bad "deathprint", local availability, and reliability.

Best I can tell we have at the top of the list nuclear and maybe natural gas if one considers halving carbon footprint from coal as "good enough". Wind, hydro, and geothermal might beat them out if one has them available nearby. Solar, PV and thermal, are not that great and should be left to off grid situations. Putting solar on the grid only adds to the cost, reduces reliability, and isn't that great on carbon footprint or "deathprint" compared to wind or hydro.

Saying "safer than wind" or "safer than solar" is "trolling".

Perhaps. By the way the answer is "nuclear fission".
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

If taken as a global average, where Chernobyl and Fukushima are included then hydroelectric wins on the "deathprint" metric. Since I assume we've learned out lessons from both, and are not letting engineers from Soviet Russia do the building, then nuclear comes out on top.

Here's an article from GreenPeace that does a different analysis claiming to be more "honest" but still shows nuclear as safe or safer than wind. http://www.greenpeace.org/inte...

The costs metric shows nuclear, natural gas, and geothermal as cheapest. We might want to rule out natural gas on "deathprint" and "carbon footprint". Geothermal is great unless you don't have a place to drill for geothermal. That leaves nuclear.
https://www.instituteforenergy...

Another cost analysis shows nuclear cheaper than only coal and solar thermal. Which doesn't help nuclear here but people want reliable power, and so long as it's cheaper than coal I suspect they'd choose that.
http://www.renewable-energysou...

Finding a source on energy reliability with a quick Google search was proving to be more difficult than I thought. The best I could find was that same link above on costs where it listed capacity factors.
https://www.instituteforenergy...

This use of capacity factor to measure reliability is likely pretty fair for wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, coal, many forms of natural gas, and biomass, since these are the kinds of energy a utility is going to want to keep up as much as possible for reasons of costs, legal requirements, and such. However this metric really takes a dump on hydro and natural gas turbines since those are kept in reserve to meet peak demands, they are in fact very reliable and that's why they are kept in reserve. With that said, the top of the list includes nuclear and geothermal with capacity factors at 90% or higher. If we account for the peak power technologies of hydro and natural gas turbines we can include those as well.

Let's end with an analysis on carbon footprint, since most people already suspect that fossil fuels lose out big, but let's just take a look at an aggregated "meta-study".
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...

Nuclear, wind, and hydro are effectively tied. PV has more than triple the carbon footprint, but still far better than natural gas. Natural gas being half that of coal might just make it a not so bad choice given it's price, not bad "deathprint", local availability, and reliability.

Best I can tell we have at the top of the list nuclear and maybe natural gas if one considers halving carbon footprint from coal as "good enough". Wind, hydro, and geothermal might beat them out if one has them available nearby. Solar, PV and thermal, are not that great and should be left to off grid situations. Putting solar on the grid only adds to the cost, reduces reliability, and isn't that great on carbon footprint or "deathprint" compared to wind or hydro.

It's also one of those things we can't do much about.

Recently saw a suggestion from NASA JPL to try to tap some of the heat to stabilize it.

Wow- that sounds like a plot for some disaster movie where they try it out and the whole process gets away from them. Interesting though!

It's also one of those things we can't do much about.

Recently saw a suggestion from NASA JPL to try to tap some of the heat to stabilize it.

Citation needed.

Nuclear is the safest energy source we currently have. My citation: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

There does seem to be a pattern though of SpaceX artificially limiting their hardware. The engine thing, there was evidently a now-ended limit on performance and acceleration

Have you ever heard of continuous improvement in your life?

Why would you build another Hoover Dam if 96 people died building it? Because it's quite likely 150 people would die producing the same energy from wind.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

If the goal is safe energy production in the USA then nuclear is at the top. Next comes, by a wide margin, solar and hydro. In fourth comes wind.

Every time I hear people speak of a carbon free future they will mention wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal but add the caveat of something like "with a little bit of nuclear" as if to try to please the entirety of the crowd.

Musk is doing the same in his talks, he'll say that solar would work to meet our energy needs. Of course he'd say that, he's a salesman trying to sell his products. I ask, how much would it cost? Not just in dollars but in lives.

According to this study the safest energy source we have is nuclear power.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

According to the EIA nuclear is very low cost in dollars too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I've had people dispute the numbers on nuclear power safety by claiming those numbers did not include large scale accidents like Chernobyl. As far as I can tell the numbers not only include Chernobyl but also expected reduced lifespan from the survivors. Chernobyl is also largely irrelevant, no one builds nuclear power like that any more and no one would be foolish enough to do so in the future.

People then tend to dispute the solar death numbers by claiming that trip and fall deaths "don't count" for some reason. These are still people dead from the construction and maintenance of solar power, even if it's because people failed to follow the safety rules and paid with their lives for it. By this metric we could say Chernobyl deaths "don't count" because they failed to adhere to proper safety protocols and many died as a result. Dead is dead, and if we are honest about the deaths then nuclear is much safer than even solar.

Then there is the carbon footprint, the whole reason we are having this discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Nuclear power has nearly half the carbon output per energy produced than solar photovoltaic power. Concentrated solar thermal power has a lower carbon footprint than nuclear but that is not what Musk is selling, likely because those cannot be put on the roof of your house and because at current estimates it would cost double what PV does.

I look at the math and I found that Musk has it backwards. The future isn't solar "with a little bit of nuclear", it's nuclear with a little bit of solar.

Explain how a wind turbine or a solar panel generating electrical energy is creating pollution.

http://www.nationalreview.com/...

http://cyprus-mail.com/2017/06...

Nuclear is fine until your have an accident.

Solar power is fine until someone falls off a roof. Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have today.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

Solar power is expensive, unreliable, toxic, and just generally a bad idea. Nuclear power is ten times safer, ten times cleaner, ten times more reliable, and just generally a better idea ten times over.

The first vat-grown hamburger cost $325,000. The cost is now about $12 per pound. That is a decline in price by a factor of 30,000 in four years. Progress happens.

China is trying them too, perhaps their pebbles will be more resistant to those issues. Maybe we will need to use some type of chemical vapor deposition diamond coatings on them to keep them from cracking if their triple Pyrocarbon coating doesn't cut it.

If we actually would pour some real money into fusion, it might actually happen some time. It's always "10 years away", and we have yet to be able to keep the reaction going for more than a few seconds. China claims 102 seconds, but this isn't verified. ITER has been "officially" worked on since 2006 and isn't slated to even start up until at least 2021. Personally I think some smaller company like General Fusion or Tri Alpha Energy will make a breakthrough long before ITER even really gets seriously running.

Nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than coal. 60 deaths per TWh for coal power worldwide avg, vs 0.04 deaths per TWh for nuclear, so a factor of 1500 better.

IMHO what is mostly needed is faster memory. Modern ML often involves working with multi-Gigabyte domain models, stored in DRAM, where the access latency hasn't changed particularly in the last 10 years.

You should write advertising copy.

What is needed is faster relief. We've improved the package perforation. Now rips open 2x faster!

Faster has many dimensions, yet you fixate on just one. It turns out, however, that slapping you down was a royal PITA: all of the vendors involved in HBM{1,2,3} pony up sweet-shit-all concerning latency (wanted: an edible, colour-coded haymark).

Finally I found this comment by one Tuna-Fish from 2010:

Memory latency of many devices using GDDR5 (like GPUs) is a lot higher than on the typical device that uses DDR3, but this has nothing to do with the RAM, and everything to do with the controller.

Basically, GPUs can expect to see a lot of accesses to addresses reasonably close to each other (like reading color values out of a texture) in a relatively short time, and the devices are typically good at finding other work to do while waiting on memory accesses. Because of this, and the fact that larger transfers are more efficient, GPUs tend to delay initiating transfers a bit to wait for opportunities to combine them.

It's entirely possible to have a memory controller that does this to GPU-like transfers and doesn't do it to CPU-like transfers.

I'm not the only frustrated person.

* AMD's upcoming Fiji GPU will feature new memory interface — Joel Hruska, 30 April 2015

Bandwidth, however, is just one characteristic of memory performance. Latency is equally important, but data on HBM latency compared with GDDR5 is much harder to come by. The implication, if I've read the various slide decks and data sheets correctly, is that HBM latency should be modestly better than GDDR5's — but possibly not by much. Certainly it won't improve by anything like the bandwidth jumps we're going to see.

The gist of the fragments I managed to find is that HBM latency is roughly on par with the concurrent GDR generation, and this is—in most controllers—actually worse than the concurrent DDR generation, hence the industry-wide light-lip syndrome.

Only that's not the whole story. Because HBM has more channels than GDR and allows more pages to be open concurrently. For a sufficiently parallel workload, HBM latency as a function of bandwidth can be excellent compared to the alternatives.

And certainly the thermal density is yards superior. Which is itself interesting, because you hardly ever see plots pitting latency against J/bit-ns. Awesome! A brand shiny new thermal wall. Physical distance, aka latency, actually functions as an implicit thermal spreader, and this goes away when the engineers get too pie-eyed over rail-gun-drone–accelerated rolling drive-thru nirvana (recommended: a Kevlar fish net on a titanium pole, and a Quick eye).

A Study of Application Performance with Non-Volatile Main Memory — Yiying Zhang (2015)

The fastest of the prospective non-volatile technologies (which are thermally desirable due to lack of refresh) is NRAM.

Fast NRAM to be released 2019-epsilon by Nantero/Fujitsu — August 2016

It actually has the endurance to be used as an on-chip SRAM replacement with eDRAM access times, but I don't know whether joint fabrication with CMOS is viable (in particular, at the high end). Note that ultimate durability is as yet unknown, because their 10^14-cycle test bench is taking a while to return 0/1.

[*] I wou

Unbeknown to many, Ukraine has some very advanced aircraft technology. Its "Mria" aircraft remains the largest cargo airplane in the world. And it is not just the size — recently it was used to bring a replacement engine to a Boeing...

They are partnering with Saudis now to develop their know-how into mass-production...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
You can look at the numbers any way you want. The bottom line is that nuclear power is dangerous. Again, I'm a fan of nuclear [done right]. But I think it's irresponsible to to argue it's not dangerous.

I can link to a list of airplane accidents and call flying unsafe but that does not make it true. Try again.
Here's some help:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2...

If solar power is "safe" then nuclear power is "safer" or "safest". Also, a large portion of those nuclear accidents in the Wikipedia article are from Soviet military reactors. That's demonstrative of how willing they are to kill their own warriors in the defense of the "fatherland" than anything inherently wrong with nuclear power. Here's a hint, don't put murderous bastards in charge of running a nuclear reactor.

You are five to ten times more likely to die from slipping off the roof by cleaning your solar panels than you would from any nuclear power accident.
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Of all the energy sources by carbon footprint the ones with the lowest emissions per energy produced are wind, tidal, hydro, nuclear, and geothermal. Solar doesn't even make the top five.

Solar is a loser on "death footprint", carbon footprint, and cost. Since geothermal, wind, tidal, and hydro require favorable geography nuclear really wins out here. This is especially true since solar is just as dependent on favorable weather and geography as the others I listed. If you want to dispute the carbon footprint stats then that's fine, I'll concede that if you want to dispute it but only to a point. Nuclear is still a "zero carbon" energy source as defined by whatever definition that also includes wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, or tidal. If you claim that nuclear is not "zero carbon" then solar isn't either. If you want to fear monger on nuclear power then you need to do so knowing all the facts.

I'm sure thinking of dead solar power workers will make you sleep better at night. Now go sleep on that.

Deaths per terawatt hour produced, by energy source:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2...