"The lower prices drop, the closer I get to my dream of a diamond-studded, gold-plated toilet"
As soon as space-based mining is a "thing", the precious metals markets on earth will collapse. Gold and platinum are relatively common in space and relatively rare on earth because most of it sank to the core during planetary formation (It's believed most crustal deposits are courtesy of the LHB)
Even if undersea mining takes off you'll see a step-drop. Metals concentrations around various volcanic vents are 10-50 times higher than land-based deposits, which more than makes up for the cost of having to send grinding equipment 5000 feet down, especially when you factor in the lack of overburden blocking access to the minerals.
"We can make cultured pearls but you don't see cheap pearls all around the place."
That's because cultured pearls are still expensive to produce, but if you go to Tahiti/Rarotonga you can get black ones at 1/10 the retail price (that's where they're cultured).
Uncultured pearls are fabulously expensive. They make emeralds look cheap.
One that's of particular interest to me snaps plates and calculates vehicle speeds - I live in a street with a particularly irksome speeding problem (some drivers are regularly hitting 80-90mph in a 30mph zone) that the local authoritries refuse to address.
It's known they've run long-term speedchecks on the road but have repeatedly refused FOI requests for the data, although it's known that "The average speeds is 33mph, so that's OK" - they went silent and started covering tracks when asked about the 85th percentile, stats over time (the egrarious speeding happens at night when the cops refuse to stand around with lidar guns) and mitigation measures. At one point they issued an official denial of any measuring taking place despite email exchanges with the officer running the checks already admitting to them.
"And how do you know the Iranians don't think they can use nukes?"
For starters: MOSSAD - yes, the Israeli secret service - issue a report in the mid 2000s stating that they Iranians already had more than enough enriched uranium onhard to build several dozen bombs and had shown no inclination whatsoever to actually do so.
Instead, Mossad reported that all of it had been sequestered for use in their civil nuclear reactor.
Quite simply: after 60 years of being screwed over by the west and by the russians for even longer, Iran wanted to ensure it could maintain its own supply and not be dependent on someone else's political whims.
Netenyahu may be carping on about the iranians having nukes but not even his own secret service believes that.
The "shah" put on the throne was an army flunky. He may have had some claim via dubious royal bloodlines but the reality is that he was a puppet dictator installed to keep US and UK interests happy and he did what he was told, whilst trousering large quantities of the GDP and ruthlessly suppressing opposition. (The religious nutjobs now decreasingly in "control" effectively got their training from his secret police, but despite appearances and foaming-at-the-mouth speeches from past leaders, the people of Iran are moving inexorably towards a freer society. Having several resident ancient religions probably helps them in this respect.)
Ditto the ba'athist guy in the country next door.
Virtually ALL of the 20th century middle east problems can be laid at the feet of the UK and France and the way they carved up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman empire. The French went out of their way to draw boundaries which split tribes and pitted rival groups against each other for control of the newly created "countries".
It might be possible to redraw maps along the lines that T.E Lawrence recommended in 1919, but I suspect that there are simply too many egos and too much money invested in the status quo for anyone to even consider it.
"ten active air craft carriers (the nations with the 2nd largest fleets of aircraft carriers all have 2 or less)."
That's 10 supercarriers. The US has a _lot_ more flat-tops than that (it has 8 active wasp-class USMC carriers alone, just retired 5 Tarawa class ones, 1 America class one (of 2) and is building more Wasps. Most other countries' aircraft carriers are the same size as USA marine flattops which is why I'm using them for comparison)
The UK's 2 supercarriers are likely to be useless as they're oil-fired and can _only_ use helicoptors/V22s/F35Bs off their skiramp decks (BAE quoted more than the cost of building a whole new ship to replace the skiramps - coincidentally the same amount they would have expected to lose if they lost the maintenance contract for the F35Bs which are intended to go on the boats), which practically means that for the forseeable future the USA will continue to be the only nation operating supercarriers.
+1 for the deterrent effect. Many many countries have (or are attempting to) procured these weapons as a last resort. The problem is that if anyone was to ever use one, the "pile on" effect of everyone else joining in is too tempting for politicians. Military tacticians and nuclear-authorised USA staff simply won't use nukes (This came out of a RAND report in the 1980s, studying 1970s battle simulations. Nuke-authorised commanders only ever used them in simulations once. In any ensuing simulation they would surrender rather than deploy the things, presumably because it's better to have your civilian populations alive and conquered/resentful than dead and ashy).
It's worth noting that the rise of all religion fundamentalist extremism in the 20th century _follows_ the post-WW2 rise and export of USA religious fundamentalism. It may have been heavily promoted to fight the "godless communists" but the long-term effects of this particular cold war relic are likely to echo for decades to come.
This is lower than lost GDP per crash - and in most of the civilised world things like healthcare are paid by taxation so its in everyone's interest to reduce spending on vehicular-related deaths/injuries.
Insurance companies won't care. They'll just adapt and continue. Auto-repair shop numbers and employment are already less than half of what they were 40 years ago and still falling.
The biggest resistors would be car companies - they make more from selling parts than from selling complete machines - however they know that they face a choice of playing in a market that's half the size or not playing and finding they have no market at all.
" Plus, last time I checked, I can't get a train from right outside my doorstep."
The funny thing is: London expanded to where the train stations were built.
Not the other way around - and apart from the USA or other countries with appalling public transport structures, this is the normal way things happen.
So, you may not be able to get a train right from your doorstep, but if you live in a metropolis like London or Paris, you almost certainly CAN find one within 5-10 minutes walk (10-15 in my case but I'm in the wilds of suburbia (aka the "Green Belt") beyond the M25). Trains are only setup to go in/out of London though and if you want to go other directions there are bus routes. These are usually within the same easlking distance but may need a couple of changes.
I have a car. It's necessary for my work as I travel in the opposite direction to most commuters, to areas where there are few busses and the timing means a 20 minute drive or a 3-4 hour bus ride, arriving at entirely the wrong times (it would mean arriving at work at 7 or 10am, and leaving at 3 or 4pm, neither of which gel well with the need to knock over servers or networks outside of working hours for minimum inconvenience to other staff). I don't bother with the car if I need to go "into town" and I can see how automated vehicles would be a godsend for elderly rural dwellers who end up being more and more isolated because there are only 3-4 busses a day in some areas.
It's very much horses for courses. There is very little need _now_ for eu urban dwellers to have cars, other than aspiration. If there was a more convenient way to get to/from work than driving, without having to pay $60/day in taxi fares I'd take it.
"As for my own preference: I'd like to see most private cars go away, and more mass transit instead."
Your wish is likely to be granted.
Most people drive because they have to and they have to because they can't afford a cab or can't hail one because there aren't enough. both are artifacts of the (expensive) human behind the wheel and protectionist policies which have some value in keeping utterly incompetent drivers from controlling cabs.
Automated vehicles mean that professional drivers will end up on the same scrapheap that professional drivers ended up on at the start of the 20th century.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see redundant cab drivers trapping and torching a few JohnnyCabs at some point along the way though its more likely that what will happen is that as they retire there won't be replacements.
The most likely immediate consequence of practical vehicle autonomy is this:
Getting a driving license will get a _lot_ harder and a _lot_ more expensive.
Even now there are parts of the world where all you need to get a license is to pay a fee (no testing) or there are no license requirements at all.
In many parts of the world the only test is "drive around the block" or its equivalent and any theory test might be 5 verbal questions. No eyesight checks (or if there are, only cursory ones) - and if you're an older driver you don't face retests or simply have to declare that you're still a fit and capable driver (even if your relatives tell you not to).
Even the current UK tests (which have a high first time failure rate) turn out a lot of drivers who seem to forget the laws within months of getting a license - and they're tough enough that some people just drive around forever with "L" plates on their car, never actually taking the test.
Imagine a world where you'll have to have 100 hours of simulator experience coupled with substantial supervised onroad experience from an _accredited_ supervisor (not just another driver) and with comprehensive theory and practical tests lasting a few hours at the end of it. That's going to drive the costs up to the point where only those who _really_ want to, will do it - your insurance premiums will be sky high because companies will be even more risk-averse than they already are - and given the preponderance of automated cars there will be no legal reason to compel them to offer insurance to those they deem excessively risky.
In such a world, a manually operable car is likely to be only switchable into manual with a licensed unlocking key and v2v communications means the automatons will know which cars are manually controlled, therefore keeping their distance.
There may be some form of manual override which allows unlicensed low-speed operation under manual control, but it's quite likely that by that stage people won't even bother trying to use it. The same stuff which would allow v2v systems can be used to call for help from a remote concierge.
IMO we should be worrying less about vehicle automation, v2v and monitoring than we should be about hardening all this stuff against spoofing attacks. Communications networks are woefully underprotected from bad actors (state or individuals).
(Such a world will not allow a manual license from countries described above to be valid in countries with automated systems. You would have to pass the more stringent tests to be accredited - there is already precedent for this in aviation where some pilot licences are worth more than others in terms of where you can fly and some are effectively useless outside the country of origin,
Except Australians won't touch fosters with someone else's 10-foot bargepole (much like everything else that's marketed as from XYZ country, when presented to natives of XYZ country)
BTW, the real phrase is "XXXX - because australians can't _spell_ 'beer'"
"Nuclear fusion research has limped along on a shoestring for decades"
ALL nuclear research (except bombmaking) has limped along for decades.
The only reason we have water-moderated uranium civil reactors at all is because the US Navy was willing to bankroll the research to get them into their submarines.
The reason we don't have Molten Salt Reactors is because until recently noone in private industry was willing to invest the research to make them practical after the US cancelled its 1950s-60s in the 1970s in favour of breeder reactors ("jobs for the boys" in California being the main driver) with liquid sodium coolant for kicks (yeah, like a metal that catches fire on exposure to air is really good idea around a nuclear plant. Thanks Mr Nixon.)
Current nuclear technology (and all the coal/oil/gas burning plants too) are effectively a giant tea-kettle driving a steam engine and they don't run hot enough to be efficient (Yes, I know about gas turbine generators, but they're not economic without a steam plant running off the exhaust gas). It's time for the next-generation plants which run hotter, more efficiently and don't produce toxic lakes of sludge (coal) or risk venting radioactive crap in a steam explosion.
Sure. Peak output. Solar doesn't work at night, so halve that. It's only at peak output at local solar noon, so reduce it again, starting and ending at zero at dawn and suck, on a sine curve.
The reality is that your 2959MW only outputs about 15% of that as an annualised average and that 15% isn't going to comfort you much on those cold dark winter nights of the future when burning gas or oil for heating is banned. In any case it's only the same as 3-4 _small_ gas-fired congeneration plants which can run 24*7
Similar issues apply to wind, with the end-result figure being around the same or slightly lower.
"Storage", people cry. Sure, why not? Throw 30% of the generated energy as overall losses from charging/discharging batteries (it's even worse if you try compressing air), so you need to make your wind/solar farm that much bigger. (Pumped storage systems are about as efficient overall as batteries and there are only a tiny number of suitable locations for them, usually nowhere near the generation sites.)
Fusion is the fuel of the future - the far future - well beyond the end of this century. Fission is needed now, with gas plants covering the period until they're online. That's going to have to be conventional water-cooled/moderated fission plants until LFTRs (or similar tech) is commercialised in 20 years time.
Get building. Those cold dark winter nights are one problem that's going to be here a lot sooner than you might think and I wouldn't worry so much about ocean levels rising in the next 100 years as what happens when the ocean dieoffs we're already seeing the start of start snowballing in the next 20-50 (see: "Global Anoxic Event")
" if you can't cool it, the thing will melt down."
The uranium doesn't "melt down" - the heat generated melts the metal that the fuel rods are made of and dumps uranium oxide powder in the bottom of the reactor vessel.
This is a classic example of poor engineering -
1: a coolant (water) which can't handle maximum excursion temperatures involved in uranium nuclear reasctions (1200C and then the reaction is self-limiting due to doppler effects)
2: A container which can't hold its contents under the same conditions (ceramics would be better)
3: The centre of a operational fuel rod is easily 900-1000C. Uranium oxide is a _very_ poor heat conductor. That's why there is so much heat coming out of a conventional nuke plant after it's SCRAMed. The nuclear reaction has stopped but the heat energy already dumped into the oxide takes days to fully percolate out.
4: The choice of coolant means that they don't run hot enough, so the thermal efficiency is crap and to have a hope of working well they need active water cooling, which in turn means locating them next to rivers/seaways, putting up with the attendant natural disaster risks and derating them in hot weather.
5: The choice of coolant also means exponentially increasing engineering problems as you size them up. Slightly acidic water at 500C and 10-20 atmospheres pressure is not a good thing, especially when it's in direct contact with those fuel rods mentioned above. This is where you get steam explosions, etc (the single biggest risk in any water-driven plant, compounded in a nuke plant by the steam inevitably carrying radioactive contaminants plus eventual hydrogen/oxygen explosions and "meltdowns" when the water level gets low enough.
Uranium reactor designs were great when they were prototype 6-12MW units in submarines directly driving steam engines but scaling them up to to 600,1000,1200,1400MW without fundamental redesign and safety modelling is a bit like mandating that a Neucomen steam engine is the "one true design" and then working from there, prohibiting the new-fangled Watt engines from being built because more money can be made from the current designs.
Nuclear energy is safer than any other electricity generating source on the plant bar none, but it could be safer and one of the best ways of improving safety is to remove water and pressurisation issues from direct contact with the fuel. Using Molten Salt fuel loops addresses that AND handles maximum heat excursions AND allows the operational heat to be dialled up to the point where atmospheric cooling of the "cold side" is sufficient and that in turn allows plants to be sited in safer locations as well as being more robust in the event of things like earthquakes. It also means that if anything "springs a leak", what you'll mostly have is radioactive stalactites instead of radioactive particles dumped into the atmosphere - cleanup being mostly a matter of scraping it up and dumping it back into the holding tank - AND allows dialling the power up and down quickly - something that's impossible with any encapsulated nuclear fuel source thanks to "neutron poisoning".
Slashdot Mirror
"The lower prices drop, the closer I get to my dream of a diamond-studded, gold-plated toilet"
As soon as space-based mining is a "thing", the precious metals markets on earth will collapse. Gold and platinum are relatively common in space and relatively rare on earth because most of it sank to the core during planetary formation (It's believed most crustal deposits are courtesy of the LHB)
Even if undersea mining takes off you'll see a step-drop. Metals concentrations around various volcanic vents are 10-50 times higher than land-based deposits, which more than makes up for the cost of having to send grinding equipment 5000 feet down, especially when you factor in the lack of overburden blocking access to the minerals.
"We can make cultured pearls but you don't see cheap pearls all around the place."
That's because cultured pearls are still expensive to produce, but if you go to Tahiti/Rarotonga you can get black ones at 1/10 the retail price (that's where they're cultured).
Uncultured pearls are fabulously expensive. They make emeralds look cheap.
"I'd imagine that synthesizing diamond would be uncompetitive for industrial abrasives"
You'd imagine wrong. The vast majority of industrial abrasive diamonds are made using TNT (yes really).
Look up Detonation Nanodiamonds.
"One purchases diamond jewelry to hide the assets and keep its ownership and sale out of official record keeping"
No, one buys proper precious stones such as the carborundum family. Rubies and emeralds in particular hold their value quite well.
Diamonds are both vulgar and common.
"I'd have said the most famous use was in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" fom the 1950s."
The sound of a theremin pretty much _defines_ 1950s B-grade scifi.
And I'd regard Forbidden Planet as more famous. :)
There are a number of ANPR packages available.
One that's of particular interest to me snaps plates and calculates vehicle speeds - I live in a street with a particularly irksome speeding problem (some drivers are regularly hitting 80-90mph in a 30mph zone) that the local authoritries refuse to address.
It's known they've run long-term speedchecks on the road but have repeatedly refused FOI requests for the data, although it's known that "The average speeds is 33mph, so that's OK" - they went silent and started covering tracks when asked about the 85th percentile, stats over time (the egrarious speeding happens at night when the cops refuse to stand around with lidar guns) and mitigation measures. At one point they issued an official denial of any measuring taking place despite email exchanges with the officer running the checks already admitting to them.
It's been tempting to start publishing stats
"And how do you know the Iranians don't think they can use nukes?"
For starters: MOSSAD - yes, the Israeli secret service - issue a report in the mid 2000s stating that they Iranians already had more than enough enriched uranium onhard to build several dozen bombs and had shown no inclination whatsoever to actually do so.
Instead, Mossad reported that all of it had been sequestered for use in their civil nuclear reactor.
Quite simply: after 60 years of being screwed over by the west and by the russians for even longer, Iran wanted to ensure it could maintain its own supply and not be dependent on someone else's political whims.
Netenyahu may be carping on about the iranians having nukes but not even his own secret service believes that.
"The Shah fled."
The "shah" put on the throne was an army flunky. He may have had some claim via dubious royal bloodlines but the reality is that he was a puppet dictator installed to keep US and UK interests happy and he did what he was told, whilst trousering large quantities of the GDP and ruthlessly suppressing opposition. (The religious nutjobs now decreasingly in "control" effectively got their training from his secret police, but despite appearances and foaming-at-the-mouth speeches from past leaders, the people of Iran are moving inexorably towards a freer society. Having several resident ancient religions probably helps them in this respect.)
Ditto the ba'athist guy in the country next door.
Virtually ALL of the 20th century middle east problems can be laid at the feet of the UK and France and the way they carved up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman empire. The French went out of their way to draw boundaries which split tribes and pitted rival groups against each other for control of the newly created "countries".
It might be possible to redraw maps along the lines that T.E Lawrence recommended in 1919, but I suspect that there are simply too many egos and too much money invested in the status quo for anyone to even consider it.
"ten active air craft carriers (the nations with the 2nd largest fleets of aircraft carriers all have 2 or less)."
That's 10 supercarriers. The US has a _lot_ more flat-tops than that (it has 8 active wasp-class USMC carriers alone, just retired 5 Tarawa class ones, 1 America class one (of 2) and is building more Wasps. Most other countries' aircraft carriers are the same size as USA marine flattops which is why I'm using them for comparison)
The UK's 2 supercarriers are likely to be useless as they're oil-fired and can _only_ use helicoptors/V22s/F35Bs off their skiramp decks (BAE quoted more than the cost of building a whole new ship to replace the skiramps - coincidentally the same amount they would have expected to lose if they lost the maintenance contract for the F35Bs which are intended to go on the boats), which practically means that for the forseeable future the USA will continue to be the only nation operating supercarriers.
+1 for the deterrent effect. Many many countries have (or are attempting to) procured these weapons as a last resort. The problem is that if anyone was to ever use one, the "pile on" effect of everyone else joining in is too tempting for politicians. Military tacticians and nuclear-authorised USA staff simply won't use nukes (This came out of a RAND report in the 1980s, studying 1970s battle simulations. Nuke-authorised commanders only ever used them in simulations once. In any ensuing simulation they would surrender rather than deploy the things, presumably because it's better to have your civilian populations alive and conquered/resentful than dead and ashy).
It's worth noting that the rise of all religion fundamentalist extremism in the 20th century _follows_ the post-WW2 rise and export of USA religious fundamentalism. It may have been heavily promoted to fight the "godless communists" but the long-term effects of this particular cold war relic are likely to echo for decades to come.
"What about lost GDP per lack of accident?"
This is lower than lost GDP per crash - and in most of the civilised world things like healthcare are paid by taxation so its in everyone's interest to reduce spending on vehicular-related deaths/injuries.
Insurance companies won't care. They'll just adapt and continue. Auto-repair shop numbers and employment are already less than half of what they were 40 years ago and still falling.
The biggest resistors would be car companies - they make more from selling parts than from selling complete machines - however they know that they face a choice of playing in a market that's half the size or not playing and finding they have no market at all.
" Plus, last time I checked, I can't get a train from right outside my doorstep."
The funny thing is: London expanded to where the train stations were built.
Not the other way around - and apart from the USA or other countries with appalling public transport structures, this is the normal way things happen.
So, you may not be able to get a train right from your doorstep, but if you live in a metropolis like London or Paris, you almost certainly CAN find one within 5-10 minutes walk (10-15 in my case but I'm in the wilds of suburbia (aka the "Green Belt") beyond the M25). Trains are only setup to go in/out of London though and if you want to go other directions there are bus routes. These are usually within the same easlking distance but may need a couple of changes.
I have a car. It's necessary for my work as I travel in the opposite direction to most commuters, to areas where there are few busses and the timing means a 20 minute drive or a 3-4 hour bus ride, arriving at entirely the wrong times (it would mean arriving at work at 7 or 10am, and leaving at 3 or 4pm, neither of which gel well with the need to knock over servers or networks outside of working hours for minimum inconvenience to other staff). I don't bother with the car if I need to go "into town" and I can see how automated vehicles would be a godsend for elderly rural dwellers who end up being more and more isolated because there are only 3-4 busses a day in some areas.
It's very much horses for courses. There is very little need _now_ for eu urban dwellers to have cars, other than aspiration. If there was a more convenient way to get to/from work than driving, without having to pay $60/day in taxi fares I'd take it.
"Statistics and tests have already proven that there are less number of accidents with automated cars."
So far _every single crash_ involving an automated car had a human in control of the other vehicle and it was determined to be the human's fault.
"Something north of 90% of accidents are preventable;"
Which is why they shouldn't be called accidents. They're crashes. Call them that.
"As for my own preference: I'd like to see most private cars go away, and more mass transit instead."
Your wish is likely to be granted.
Most people drive because they have to and they have to because they can't afford a cab or can't hail one because there aren't enough. both are artifacts of the (expensive) human behind the wheel and protectionist policies which have some value in keeping utterly incompetent drivers from controlling cabs.
Automated vehicles mean that professional drivers will end up on the same scrapheap that professional drivers ended up on at the start of the 20th century.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see redundant cab drivers trapping and torching a few JohnnyCabs at some point along the way though its more likely that what will happen is that as they retire there won't be replacements.
The most likely immediate consequence of practical vehicle autonomy is this:
Getting a driving license will get a _lot_ harder and a _lot_ more expensive.
Even now there are parts of the world where all you need to get a license is to pay a fee (no testing) or there are no license requirements at all.
In many parts of the world the only test is "drive around the block" or its equivalent and any theory test might be 5 verbal questions. No eyesight checks (or if there are, only cursory ones) - and if you're an older driver you don't face retests or simply have to declare that you're still a fit and capable driver (even if your relatives tell you not to).
Even the current UK tests (which have a high first time failure rate) turn out a lot of drivers who seem to forget the laws within months of getting a license - and they're tough enough that some people just drive around forever with "L" plates on their car, never actually taking the test.
Imagine a world where you'll have to have 100 hours of simulator experience coupled with substantial supervised onroad experience from an _accredited_ supervisor (not just another driver) and with comprehensive theory and practical tests lasting a few hours at the end of it. That's going to drive the costs up to the point where only those who _really_ want to, will do it - your insurance premiums will be sky high because companies will be even more risk-averse than they already are - and given the preponderance of automated cars there will be no legal reason to compel them to offer insurance to those they deem excessively risky.
In such a world, a manually operable car is likely to be only switchable into manual with a licensed unlocking key and v2v communications means the automatons will know which cars are manually controlled, therefore keeping their distance.
There may be some form of manual override which allows unlicensed low-speed operation under manual control, but it's quite likely that by that stage people won't even bother trying to use it. The same stuff which would allow v2v systems can be used to call for help from a remote concierge.
IMO we should be worrying less about vehicle automation, v2v and monitoring than we should be about hardening all this stuff against spoofing attacks. Communications networks are woefully underprotected from bad actors (state or individuals).
(Such a world will not allow a manual license from countries described above to be valid in countries with automated systems. You would have to pass the more stringent tests to be accredited - there is already precedent for this in aviation where some pilot licences are worth more than others in terms of where you can fly and some are effectively useless outside the country of origin,
"Self-driving cars have no test record in conventional commuter traffic"
Incorrect. Google and Delphi have been (and are) specifically testing their cars in heavy commuter traffic.
The infamous 17mph google car rearending earlier this year happened in that kind of situation (GooCar stopped, driver behind didn't)
Sucrose (cane sugar) is a roughly 50:50 mix of sucrose and glucose.
"High Fructose corn syrup" is a roughly 50:50 mix of sucrose and glucose
Would someone mind explaining why one is more evil than the other (apart from the massive corn lobby subsidies?)
"Fosters: Australian for Beer"
Except Australians won't touch fosters with someone else's 10-foot bargepole (much like everything else that's marketed as from XYZ country, when presented to natives of XYZ country)
BTW, the real phrase is "XXXX - because australians can't _spell_ 'beer'"
"there is no such thing as an unemployed attorney."
Offshoring is happening to these areas as well. It started about 15 years ago and has been accelerating.
You may be right about barristers, but your garden-variety solicitor may well be using an office full of offshore talent already.
Why mess with Deuterium when you can produce mega-quantities of tritium in an existing Fission system?
It's one of the nuisance byproducts of a LFTR and only "not a nuisance" in water-moderated systems because it's contained within the fuel rods.
"Sure there is: manufacturing and mining"
Anything that you can obtain from the moon you can also obtain from asteroids with far less effort and don't have to fight a gravity well.
"Nuclear fusion research has limped along on a shoestring for decades"
ALL nuclear research (except bombmaking) has limped along for decades.
The only reason we have water-moderated uranium civil reactors at all is because the US Navy was willing to bankroll the research to get them into their submarines.
The reason we don't have Molten Salt Reactors is because until recently noone in private industry was willing to invest the research to make them practical after the US cancelled its 1950s-60s in the 1970s in favour of breeder reactors ("jobs for the boys" in California being the main driver) with liquid sodium coolant for kicks (yeah, like a metal that catches fire on exposure to air is really good idea around a nuclear plant. Thanks Mr Nixon.)
Current nuclear technology (and all the coal/oil/gas burning plants too) are effectively a giant tea-kettle driving a steam engine and they don't run hot enough to be efficient (Yes, I know about gas turbine generators, but they're not economic without a steam plant running off the exhaust gas). It's time for the next-generation plants which run hotter, more efficiently and don't produce toxic lakes of sludge (coal) or risk venting radioactive crap in a steam explosion.
2,959MW Solar, 1,032 MW wind
Sure. Peak output. Solar doesn't work at night, so halve that. It's only at peak output at local solar noon, so reduce it again, starting and ending at zero at dawn and suck, on a sine curve.
The reality is that your 2959MW only outputs about 15% of that as an annualised average and that 15% isn't going to comfort you much on those cold dark winter nights of the future when burning gas or oil for heating is banned. In any case it's only the same as 3-4 _small_ gas-fired congeneration plants which can run 24*7
Similar issues apply to wind, with the end-result figure being around the same or slightly lower.
"Storage", people cry. Sure, why not? Throw 30% of the generated energy as overall losses from charging/discharging batteries (it's even worse if you try compressing air), so you need to make your wind/solar farm that much bigger. (Pumped storage systems are about as efficient overall as batteries and there are only a tiny number of suitable locations for them, usually nowhere near the generation sites.)
Fusion is the fuel of the future - the far future - well beyond the end of this century. Fission is needed now, with gas plants covering the period until they're online. That's going to have to be conventional water-cooled/moderated fission plants until LFTRs (or similar tech) is commercialised in 20 years time.
Get building. Those cold dark winter nights are one problem that's going to be here a lot sooner than you might think and I wouldn't worry so much about ocean levels rising in the next 100 years as what happens when the ocean dieoffs we're already seeing the start of start snowballing in the next 20-50 (see: "Global Anoxic Event")
" if you can't cool it, the thing will melt down."
The uranium doesn't "melt down" - the heat generated melts the metal that the fuel rods are made of and dumps uranium oxide powder in the bottom of the reactor vessel.
This is a classic example of poor engineering -
1: a coolant (water) which can't handle maximum excursion temperatures involved in uranium nuclear reasctions (1200C and then the reaction is self-limiting due to doppler effects)
2: A container which can't hold its contents under the same conditions (ceramics would be better)
3: The centre of a operational fuel rod is easily 900-1000C. Uranium oxide is a _very_ poor heat conductor. That's why there is so much heat coming out of a conventional nuke plant after it's SCRAMed. The nuclear reaction has stopped but the heat energy already dumped into the oxide takes days to fully percolate out.
4: The choice of coolant means that they don't run hot enough, so the thermal efficiency is crap and to have a hope of working well they need active water cooling, which in turn means locating them next to rivers/seaways, putting up with the attendant natural disaster risks and derating them in hot weather.
5: The choice of coolant also means exponentially increasing engineering problems as you size them up. Slightly acidic water at 500C and 10-20 atmospheres pressure is not a good thing, especially when it's in direct contact with those fuel rods mentioned above. This is where you get steam explosions, etc (the single biggest risk in any water-driven plant, compounded in a nuke plant by the steam inevitably carrying radioactive contaminants plus eventual hydrogen/oxygen explosions and "meltdowns" when the water level gets low enough.
Uranium reactor designs were great when they were prototype 6-12MW units in submarines directly driving steam engines but scaling them up to to 600,1000,1200,1400MW without fundamental redesign and safety modelling is a bit like mandating that a Neucomen steam engine is the "one true design" and then working from there, prohibiting the new-fangled Watt engines from being built because more money can be made from the current designs.
Nuclear energy is safer than any other electricity generating source on the plant bar none, but it could be safer and one of the best ways of improving safety is to remove water and pressurisation issues from direct contact with the fuel. Using Molten Salt fuel loops addresses that AND handles maximum heat excursions AND allows the operational heat to be dialled up to the point where atmospheric cooling of the "cold side" is sufficient and that in turn allows plants to be sited in safer locations as well as being more robust in the event of things like earthquakes. It also means that if anything "springs a leak", what you'll mostly have is radioactive stalactites instead of radioactive particles dumped into the atmosphere - cleanup being mostly a matter of scraping it up and dumping it back into the holding tank - AND allows dialling the power up and down quickly - something that's impossible with any encapsulated nuclear fuel source thanks to "neutron poisoning".
"Wind and solar are growing faster than ever, in the US, in China, in Europe and in the developing world."
In every single case, those pushes are driven by laws, incentives and heavy subsidisation which have driven enduser pricing up.
In a lot of instances those rising electricity costs are driving consumers to find alternate energy sources, usually gas or oil based.