You're right that the variable operating and maintenance cost is low. VOM is fuel and all costs that scale linearly with the amount of generation. Simple wear and tear, some labor, that sort of thing.
However, nuclear power plants have significant capital investment requirements. CapEx are expenses on infrastructure that depreciate over 5, 10, even 20+ years. CapEx investments are necessary to maintain a safe, efficient plant, and are often executed during a refueling stage. As plants get older, CapEx gets even more challenging because more investments are necessary. Because you might be replacing parts on something designed 40 or 50 years ago, replacements aren't always easy to obtain "off the shelf," driving up prices even more.
In the United States, we've had several nuclear power plants retire in the past few years because, despite "already built and running," their VOM + CapEx requirements penciled out at more than the ~$30MWh that we're seeing for wholesale electricity prices (plus very low capacity payments in many markets). Dozens more have been placed on the dole, receiving (or claiming need) for subsidies to remain open.
A strong case can be (and is being) made to pay the subsidies to keep the plants open, because the sheer quantity of very-nearly-carbon-free electricity is enormous. But the claim that nuclear power plants are "dirt cheap to operate" isn't true on a multi-year basis, because of the CapEx requirements.
Metalogic Inspections Services (Oil and Gas, Power Generation, Fabrication, Pipeline, Services)
Intelligent Energy Solutions (Heat Pumps, Solar Panels, and Biomass Boilers)
AltaLink
BH is actively investing in utility companies that own power plants, in power plant supply chain (both fossil and RE), and its utility companies are actively building power plants (both fossil and RE).
Your comment is written like someone who doesn't understand just how big NYC and the metro area really is.
New York City has gained an average of 64,000 people per year from 2010 -- 2017.
Furthermore, NYC has the best commuter rail access in the country and 20,000,000 people live in the NYC metro area. 0.2% of that population is Amazon's 40k. I'm not arguing against loosening zoning restrictions, but the idea that you can't find room for another 40,000 people in 13,000 square miles is pretty absurd.
I work a professional job in a major city. I have a spouse and two kids, and fully participate in our household and parenting. I travel for work, and commute by mass transit, bike, or foot. We have a "home" phone. Up until December 2017, I didn't own a cell phone at all.
It ain't hard folks. You just get used to planning a bit more ahead of time.
It doesn't "beg the question." It raises the question.Begging the question is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. It is a type of circular reasoning and an informal fallacy.
Not New York's. Or Boston's, or Chicago's, or Philadelphia's. Their streets pre-date private cars. Indeed, there weren't many privately-owned horse-drawn carriages before then; some for commerce, sure, but by and large folks got around the neighborhood on foot.
My question is this: what percentage of traffic in $megacity is rideshare? Truly private autos? Taxis? Local commercial vehicles? Surface public mass transit? Something else?
I have no doubt that rideshare adds to congestion. But all the other motor vehicles do too. Just because they've been using the streets longer doesn't mean they're not just as contributory to the problem.
You need baseline power plus on demand power from a reliable source.
False! (well, the first half is false)
You need enough "on demand power [generation ability]" and/or enough demand response ability to ensure supply meets demand. None of that generation ability need be "baseline," commonly called base load.
Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
False! (with no caveats whatsoever; this is just plain wrong and OP has no source to verify it)
Why? Which part of the constitution, or amendment, does this violate?
My state has a sales tax on books, with exemptions for religious texts (bibles, etc) and textbooks. How is that any different than taxing this other specific form of media?
I'm not saying that I think the tax is a good idea, but I don't see how taxing something specific violates the constitution. Please explain.
Utilities are not "freaking out." It's true that utilities make their profits not from selling electricity but from building infrastructure. The article states that
The problem is, with demand stagnant, there’s not much need for new hardware.
This is wrong, for several reasons:
Existing generators wear out after lifetimes of 30, 40, 50 years, and even with flat sales, utilities will need new sources of power
New low-cost generators (natural gas fired and renewables) have different operating profiles and will be built in different locations -- so the utilities will have to build different grid stabilization infrastructure and transmission to interconnect those new generators
With customers installing PV, distribution circuits will have to be reconfigured, requiring new distribution hardware investments
Widespread EV charging? We'll need to beef up distribution wires for that, requiring investment
Advanced ratemaking, so prices are low when utility costs are low (lower demand, high renewable output) and higher when utility costs are high (higher demand, low renewable output) will require investment in meters, distribution system infrastructure, and billing infrastructure
Widespread battery storage will require utility investment
Sales will climb again as we electrify transportation and heating to cut CO2 emissions, requiring electric utility investment
Sales are flat, but Americans are moving south, west, and into cities. That means that those places will need traditional electric utility investment to meet the growing population
Sales are flat. Natural gas generation is increasing. Renewable electric generation is increasing. Coal is being squeezed. That's all true. But the electric system will go through unprecedented change over the next 4 decades, and all of it will require electric utility investment. The power company isn't going broke any time soon, and the utilities are decidedly not freaking out.
The threshold of 28% doesn't make a lick of sense. For higher salaries and higher home prices, employees can easily afford to pay more than 28%, especially if it is two cohabitating people sharing finances (married or otherwise).
Consider:
The price of a Honda Civic is the same plus or minus a few bucks whether purchased near Google HQ or anywhere else in California.
The price of electricity, gasoline, natural gas, water, Netflix, Hulu, or just about any other utility is the same plus or minus a few bucks whether purchased near Google HQ or anywhere else in California.
The price of groceries, prescription drugs, cell phone service, all that crap one buys on Amazon, etc. is the same plus or minus a few bucks whether purchased near Google HQ or anywhere else in California.
So if we think of purchases as [housing] plus [everything else] and we increase both wages and housing by $40,000/yr, the percent of money being spent on housing increases, but the ability to purchase everything else remains unchanged.
In areas where wages and housing costs are high, the 28% metric is out-dated. People can and do spend far more on housing, in total dollars and as a percentage, without necessarily sacrificing groceries or prescription drugs or Netflix.
I live in New England. I've got a wife and 2 young kids. The only vehicle we own is a bicycle. When we need something that can carry us more comfortably, or longer distances, or with cargo, we use something else. Zipcar. Rental. Subway. Amtrak. Airplane. Taxi. Uber. Lyft. Carpool. Delivery service. For our lifestyle, the frequency with which we use those things costs less money than the rent we charge other people to park their cars in our garage.
I don't have a cell phone. At all. I'm nearly 40, work a white collar job that requires about 40 nights of travel per year. I've got a wife, a young school aged child, and a pre-school aged child. We live a perfectly normal American urban/suburban lifestyle.
How do I manage without a phone (smart or otherwise)? Well, I've got lots of phones. I've got one at my desk at work. I've got a landline at home. My wife has a cell, so if we're traveling as a family we've got access to one. The rest of the stuff is a combination of good planning (let's meet at a place that serves beer or is out of the rain or whatevs), knowing where to find a payphone (they're still out there), and having a tablet or laptop handy to use email/texting/Internet.
I'm not estranged in the least. I,live a busy life balancing work, home, social, and community needs. I use lots of technology, just not a cell phone (well, my family doesn't own a car either).
But what if there's a convenience call, like asking the wife if she needs anything from the grocery store on the way home? Well, we communicate well in advance, and sometimes we miss out on that convenience. But what if there's an emergency? What emergency could I really solve on the telephone that the person on the other end of the line couldn't solve for himself or herself? It turns out that cell phones aren't necessary for engagement; they are simply remarkably convenient for most.
They make money from using our information, provide little benefit to us...
I'll bite. I agree that, as individuals, it doesn't feel like they provide a benefit. But by providing somewhat-accurate financial history to lending institutions, those lending institutions can more precisely estimate the risk associated with each loan. In doing so, they're able to lend more money, and at lower interest rates, than they'd be able to do otherwise.
I'm not arguing that there aren't loads of ways that Equifax et al could improve their business habits. Of course there are. But without these agencies, lenders would have a more difficult time gauging credit-worthiness, and that would mean it would be harder and more expensive for each of us to get a loan. And that, my friend, is the "benefit" provided to us.
... including yours. I'm referring specifically to:
Most of those [pumped-hydro] locations are already tapped.
For context, there's about 21 GW of pumped hydro capacity in the United States, which is about 1/5th of the capacity of all operating nuclear power plants in the US. But are most of those locations tapped?
No. I'll give you two general counterexamples.
1. One counterexample is the "west coast" of the lower peninsula of Michigan. There is one pumped hydro facility there, called Ludington. It's roughly 2 GW in capacity (with roughly 18 GWh in storage), and about 1000 acres in surface coverage. The lower reservoir is Lake Michigan; the upper reservoir is a man-made pond. But the geological features aren't unique to Ludington, MI -- it's prevalent on much of the lower peninsula's Lake Michigan coast, the result of dunes formed over millennia as debris blew west to east across Lake Michigan. Bottom line: there's no physical reason why one couldn't build a dozen facilities the scale of Luddington, also using Lake Michigan as a lower reservoir.
2. A second counterexample can be found at Taum Sauk mountain. The Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station is a pumped hydro facility with 450 MW of capacity and 3,600 MWh of storage. The lower reservoir wasn't a pool of water at all until the facility was built; it was merely a fork of the Black River. The upper reservoir is an above ground swimming pool, built on top of the mountain. It's entirely man made. The geographic feature needed -- an elevation delta of a few hundred feet (860 in this case), with a slope common for forested mountainside, near a river -- isn't unique by a long shot.
That's two counterexamples off of the top of my head -- the Michigan coast of Lake Michigan and anywhere you've got a mountainous region with a river nearby. Plenty of technical potential.
The reason we don't have more pumped hydro is because the energy market price differential (LMP or system lambda, depending on region) between 3 am and 3 pm simply isn't large enough. It doesn't make economic sense to build more pumped hydro so long as we continue to burn coal and gas unabated, because the gap between the daily highs and lows aren't adequate. However, if we continue to retire coal and gas (and nuclear as it ages) and we continue to build solar PV, we'll see a flip where the peak price of energy drifts from early afternoon to 9 pm -- and storage will be economic, buying energy at 11am and selling it after sundown. Michigan could be the evening power center for the entire Midwest, and scattered new pumped hydro facilities on select Appalachian and Rocky terrain could easily store significant amounts of solar and wind output nearer the coasts.
The areas that pollute the most, which are urban areas, tend to have leaders who support environmental regulations.
The areas that pollute the most are not urban areas. On a per capita basis, the electricity, transportation fuel, and heating/cooling by folks in urban area is far less than suburban and rural areas. And while cities have lots of people, most Americans do not live in a large city -- they may live near one, but they've got their own local government and aren't subject to the mayor of a city of many-hundred-thousands (or millions).
With respect to carbon emissions, you don't get to the majority unless you include both cities and substantial amounts of the suburbs. Even then, that doesn't get us anywhere near an 80 percent reduction nationwide, which is what first world nations need to achieve to stay anywhere near the 2 degrees C.
be in a community that can spend that kind of money on concrete, elevators, and maintenance
be in a community with the extra land near intersections required for the additional infrastructure
This is just fine for situations where no pedestrians or cyclists are present -- access ramps to limited access highways, bridges, and tunnels, for example. But for places where people are legally allowed to walk or cycle, this is just a non-starter.
If the problem is that drivers don't have enough time when driving the speed limit to safely slow to a stop when they see a yellow light, the solution is not to allow them some go-time when the light is red. The correct solution is to extend the length of time of the yellow light.
Yellow light does not mean speed up so you don't get stuck at a red light. Yellow light is an instruction to come to a steady stop before the intersection if speed and distance allow. This requires a light to be yellow for the appropriate length of time. Fix that (perhaps it already is), and let the ticketing commence. Some day drivers will recognize that ensuring that accelerating to make the light puts other people in danger, or at the very least, hits 'em in the wallet.
95% of all building permits in SF were denied last year
I'm not disagreeing with the theme of your post, but a question about the building permits: does that mean that 95% of applicants didn't build, or that 95% of applicants needed some kind of zoning relief or design review, and some fraction of that 95% did in fact build after a process that was more thorough, more expensive, more challenging, and more inclusive of the opinion of abutters?
I'm not arguing good or bad, just curious about the facts. Where I live, most building permits are initially denied, but most of the applicants eventually build their structure anyway, albeit with closer oversight than they would have had they been able to build "by right."
Trump got roughly 4.6 million votes in Florida. There are just shy of 20M Floridians. The typical Floridian didn't vote at all.
But even if we restrict ourselves to people who voted in at least 2000 or 2016 in Florida, I suspect that there are few Floridians who voted for both Bush and Trump.
1. Loads of Bush voters are no longer alive 16 years later.
2. Similar to (1), loads of Trump voters weren't yet 18 years old sixteen years ago.
3. Plenty of Floridians were 18+ for both elections, but didn't vote for Bush and Trump, or failed to vote in one election or the other.
I'd be surprised if 10 percent of Floridians (2M out of 20M) voted for both Bush and Trump.
I don't want a year or a month of MLB. I want to buy by the game.
Charge me a buck or two for a single ball game. No monthly or annual fee (above the Amazon Prime fee), and let me just watch what I want, when I want, and pay for just that. Hell, I'll throw in an extra buck per game if you fill the "ad space" time with a single Amazon ad and then run sports highlights during the teevee timeouts.
What needs to be done is build more newer cities and job opportunities in them (cheaper outsourcing anyone?) so the infrastructure in the bigger cities gets a chance to catch up.
That's one way to do it. Another is to look at what's causing the emissions upwind and curb them. Could be power plants. Could be dirt roads. Could be the burning of all the litter/household trash. Could be two stroke engines. Now do two things: 1. implement (stricter) standards on pollutants for new equipment, and 2. work on retrofitting existing equipment to tighter emissions standards.
You don't need a new city to require motorcycles that pollute less or to improve the electric grid to burn less coal in central steam plants and less diesel fuel at local gensets.
That's helpful, but you've failed to include fixed operations and maintenance (O&M), fuel, variable O&M, and, most important perhaps for nuclear, ongoing capital expenditures (capex) necessary to keep the thing running. We're seeing nuclear units retiring in America right now because the $30/MWh they make on the energy market isn't enough to cover their per-unit-energy ongoing costs.
When you include the ongoing costs to keep them running, it's far less obvious that new nuclear power plants will be money makers. Even less obvious is that they will make more money than a combined cycle gas plant, a wind farm, or a solar farm.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that the variable operating and maintenance cost is low. VOM is fuel and all costs that scale linearly with the amount of generation. Simple wear and tear, some labor, that sort of thing. However, nuclear power plants have significant capital investment requirements. CapEx are expenses on infrastructure that depreciate over 5, 10, even 20+ years. CapEx investments are necessary to maintain a safe, efficient plant, and are often executed during a refueling stage. As plants get older, CapEx gets even more challenging because more investments are necessary. Because you might be replacing parts on something designed 40 or 50 years ago, replacements aren't always easy to obtain "off the shelf," driving up prices even more. In the United States, we've had several nuclear power plants retire in the past few years because, despite "already built and running," their VOM + CapEx requirements penciled out at more than the ~$30MWh that we're seeing for wholesale electricity prices (plus very low capacity payments in many markets). Dozens more have been placed on the dole, receiving (or claiming need) for subsidies to remain open. A strong case can be (and is being) made to pay the subsidies to keep the plants open, because the sheer quantity of very-nearly-carbon-free electricity is enormous. But the claim that nuclear power plants are "dirt cheap to operate" isn't true on a multi-year basis, because of the CapEx requirements.
No, BH is not investing in power plants that I know of
Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns all of the following:
BH is actively investing in utility companies that own power plants, in power plant supply chain (both fossil and RE), and its utility companies are actively building power plants (both fossil and RE).
Your comment is written like someone who doesn't understand just how big NYC and the metro area really is.
New York City has gained an average of 64,000 people per year from 2010 -- 2017.
Furthermore, NYC has the best commuter rail access in the country and 20,000,000 people live in the NYC metro area. 0.2% of that population is Amazon's 40k. I'm not arguing against loosening zoning restrictions, but the idea that you can't find room for another 40,000 people in 13,000 square miles is pretty absurd.
I work a professional job in a major city. I have a spouse and two kids, and fully participate in our household and parenting. I travel for work, and commute by mass transit, bike, or foot. We have a "home" phone. Up until December 2017, I didn't own a cell phone at all. It ain't hard folks. You just get used to planning a bit more ahead of time.
It doesn't "beg the question." It raises the question. Begging the question is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. It is a type of circular reasoning and an informal fallacy.
Not New York's. Or Boston's, or Chicago's, or Philadelphia's. Their streets pre-date private cars. Indeed, there weren't many privately-owned horse-drawn carriages before then; some for commerce, sure, but by and large folks got around the neighborhood on foot. My question is this: what percentage of traffic in $megacity is rideshare? Truly private autos? Taxis? Local commercial vehicles? Surface public mass transit? Something else? I have no doubt that rideshare adds to congestion. But all the other motor vehicles do too. Just because they've been using the streets longer doesn't mean they're not just as contributory to the problem.
Generation of power always needs to meet demand.
True! (well, to a first order approximation)
You need baseline power plus on demand power from a reliable source.
False! (well, the first half is false) You need enough "on demand power [generation ability]" and/or enough demand response ability to ensure supply meets demand. None of that generation ability need be "baseline," commonly called base load.
Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
False! (with no caveats whatsoever; this is just plain wrong and OP has no source to verify it)
Why? Which part of the constitution, or amendment, does this violate? My state has a sales tax on books, with exemptions for religious texts (bibles, etc) and textbooks. How is that any different than taxing this other specific form of media? I'm not saying that I think the tax is a good idea, but I don't see how taxing something specific violates the constitution. Please explain.
Sales are flat. Natural gas generation is increasing. Renewable electric generation is increasing. Coal is being squeezed. That's all true. But the electric system will go through unprecedented change over the next 4 decades, and all of it will require electric utility investment. The power company isn't going broke any time soon, and the utilities are decidedly not freaking out.
So if we think of purchases as [housing] plus [everything else] and we increase both wages and housing by $40,000/yr, the percent of money being spent on housing increases, but the ability to purchase everything else remains unchanged. In areas where wages and housing costs are high, the 28% metric is out-dated. People can and do spend far more on housing, in total dollars and as a percentage, without necessarily sacrificing groceries or prescription drugs or Netflix.
Austin is more populous than five different US states.
I live in New England. I've got a wife and 2 young kids. The only vehicle we own is a bicycle. When we need something that can carry us more comfortably, or longer distances, or with cargo, we use something else. Zipcar. Rental. Subway. Amtrak. Airplane. Taxi. Uber. Lyft. Carpool. Delivery service. For our lifestyle, the frequency with which we use those things costs less money than the rent we charge other people to park their cars in our garage.
Dumb? For some maybe. Certainly not for all.
I don't have a cell phone. At all. I'm nearly 40, work a white collar job that requires about 40 nights of travel per year. I've got a wife, a young school aged child, and a pre-school aged child. We live a perfectly normal American urban/suburban lifestyle. How do I manage without a phone (smart or otherwise)? Well, I've got lots of phones. I've got one at my desk at work. I've got a landline at home. My wife has a cell, so if we're traveling as a family we've got access to one. The rest of the stuff is a combination of good planning (let's meet at a place that serves beer or is out of the rain or whatevs), knowing where to find a payphone (they're still out there), and having a tablet or laptop handy to use email/texting/Internet.
I'm not estranged in the least. I,live a busy life balancing work, home, social, and community needs. I use lots of technology, just not a cell phone (well, my family doesn't own a car either).
But what if there's a convenience call, like asking the wife if she needs anything from the grocery store on the way home? Well, we communicate well in advance, and sometimes we miss out on that convenience. But what if there's an emergency? What emergency could I really solve on the telephone that the person on the other end of the line couldn't solve for himself or herself? It turns out that cell phones aren't necessary for engagement; they are simply remarkably convenient for most.
They make money from using our information, provide little benefit to us...
I'll bite. I agree that, as individuals, it doesn't feel like they provide a benefit. But by providing somewhat-accurate financial history to lending institutions, those lending institutions can more precisely estimate the risk associated with each loan. In doing so, they're able to lend more money, and at lower interest rates, than they'd be able to do otherwise.
I'm not arguing that there aren't loads of ways that Equifax et al could improve their business habits. Of course there are. But without these agencies, lenders would have a more difficult time gauging credit-worthiness, and that would mean it would be harder and more expensive for each of us to get a loan. And that, my friend, is the "benefit" provided to us.
Adult here. I'm 38, and I still don't own a car. Nor does my wife, nor our two little kids. Your anecdotes tell us nothing more than mine do.
Most of those [pumped-hydro] locations are already tapped.
For context, there's about 21 GW of pumped hydro capacity in the United States, which is about 1/5th of the capacity of all operating nuclear power plants in the US. But are most of those locations tapped?
No. I'll give you two general counterexamples.
1. One counterexample is the "west coast" of the lower peninsula of Michigan. There is one pumped hydro facility there, called Ludington. It's roughly 2 GW in capacity (with roughly 18 GWh in storage), and about 1000 acres in surface coverage. The lower reservoir is Lake Michigan; the upper reservoir is a man-made pond. But the geological features aren't unique to Ludington, MI -- it's prevalent on much of the lower peninsula's Lake Michigan coast, the result of dunes formed over millennia as debris blew west to east across Lake Michigan. Bottom line: there's no physical reason why one couldn't build a dozen facilities the scale of Luddington, also using Lake Michigan as a lower reservoir.
2. A second counterexample can be found at Taum Sauk mountain. The Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station is a pumped hydro facility with 450 MW of capacity and 3,600 MWh of storage. The lower reservoir wasn't a pool of water at all until the facility was built; it was merely a fork of the Black River. The upper reservoir is an above ground swimming pool, built on top of the mountain. It's entirely man made. The geographic feature needed -- an elevation delta of a few hundred feet (860 in this case), with a slope common for forested mountainside, near a river -- isn't unique by a long shot.
That's two counterexamples off of the top of my head -- the Michigan coast of Lake Michigan and anywhere you've got a mountainous region with a river nearby. Plenty of technical potential.
The reason we don't have more pumped hydro is because the energy market price differential (LMP or system lambda, depending on region) between 3 am and 3 pm simply isn't large enough. It doesn't make economic sense to build more pumped hydro so long as we continue to burn coal and gas unabated, because the gap between the daily highs and lows aren't adequate. However, if we continue to retire coal and gas (and nuclear as it ages) and we continue to build solar PV, we'll see a flip where the peak price of energy drifts from early afternoon to 9 pm -- and storage will be economic, buying energy at 11am and selling it after sundown. Michigan could be the evening power center for the entire Midwest, and scattered new pumped hydro facilities on select Appalachian and Rocky terrain could easily store significant amounts of solar and wind output nearer the coasts.
The areas that pollute the most, which are urban areas, tend to have leaders who support environmental regulations.
The areas that pollute the most are not urban areas. On a per capita basis, the electricity, transportation fuel, and heating/cooling by folks in urban area is far less than suburban and rural areas. And while cities have lots of people, most Americans do not live in a large city -- they may live near one, but they've got their own local government and aren't subject to the mayor of a city of many-hundred-thousands (or millions). With respect to carbon emissions, you don't get to the majority unless you include both cities and substantial amounts of the suburbs. Even then, that doesn't get us anywhere near an 80 percent reduction nationwide, which is what first world nations need to achieve to stay anywhere near the 2 degrees C.
It's no wonder that California Tesla employees are considering joining the UAW. If you don't treat your employees right one at a time, they're going to ask that you do so all at once.
This is just fine for situations where no pedestrians or cyclists are present -- access ramps to limited access highways, bridges, and tunnels, for example. But for places where people are legally allowed to walk or cycle, this is just a non-starter.
If the problem is that drivers don't have enough time when driving the speed limit to safely slow to a stop when they see a yellow light, the solution is not to allow them some go-time when the light is red. The correct solution is to extend the length of time of the yellow light.
Yellow light does not mean speed up so you don't get stuck at a red light. Yellow light is an instruction to come to a steady stop before the intersection if speed and distance allow. This requires a light to be yellow for the appropriate length of time. Fix that (perhaps it already is), and let the ticketing commence. Some day drivers will recognize that ensuring that accelerating to make the light puts other people in danger, or at the very least, hits 'em in the wallet.
95% of all building permits in SF were denied last year
I'm not disagreeing with the theme of your post, but a question about the building permits: does that mean that 95% of applicants didn't build, or that 95% of applicants needed some kind of zoning relief or design review, and some fraction of that 95% did in fact build after a process that was more thorough, more expensive, more challenging, and more inclusive of the opinion of abutters? I'm not arguing good or bad, just curious about the facts. Where I live, most building permits are initially denied, but most of the applicants eventually build their structure anyway, albeit with closer oversight than they would have had they been able to build "by right."
But even if we restrict ourselves to people who voted in at least 2000 or 2016 in Florida, I suspect that there are few Floridians who voted for both Bush and Trump.
I'd be surprised if 10 percent of Floridians (2M out of 20M) voted for both Bush and Trump.
I don't want a year or a month of MLB. I want to buy by the game. Charge me a buck or two for a single ball game. No monthly or annual fee (above the Amazon Prime fee), and let me just watch what I want, when I want, and pay for just that. Hell, I'll throw in an extra buck per game if you fill the "ad space" time with a single Amazon ad and then run sports highlights during the teevee timeouts.
What needs to be done is build more newer cities and job opportunities in them (cheaper outsourcing anyone?) so the infrastructure in the bigger cities gets a chance to catch up.
That's one way to do it. Another is to look at what's causing the emissions upwind and curb them. Could be power plants. Could be dirt roads. Could be the burning of all the litter/household trash. Could be two stroke engines. Now do two things: 1. implement (stricter) standards on pollutants for new equipment, and 2. work on retrofitting existing equipment to tighter emissions standards.
You don't need a new city to require motorcycles that pollute less or to improve the electric grid to burn less coal in central steam plants and less diesel fuel at local gensets.
That's helpful, but you've failed to include fixed operations and maintenance (O&M), fuel, variable O&M, and, most important perhaps for nuclear, ongoing capital expenditures (capex) necessary to keep the thing running. We're seeing nuclear units retiring in America right now because the $30/MWh they make on the energy market isn't enough to cover their per-unit-energy ongoing costs. When you include the ongoing costs to keep them running, it's far less obvious that new nuclear power plants will be money makers. Even less obvious is that they will make more money than a combined cycle gas plant, a wind farm, or a solar farm.