Nuclear is really just metal in a big water tank. The cost comes from trying to maximize safety. It can be cheap if we mass produce it. People are pretty much engaging in special pleading every time they declare nuclear to be uneconomical.

If you really believe that, then you’d support nuclear power. It is extremely safe these days and is a much better option than to deal with more climate change. You want more options, not less options, in this fight.

A lot of this dives deep into wishful thinking territory. We will need to spend trillions of dollars to make a pure renewable energy solution viable. People will find out that nuclear is not magically guaranteed to be more expensive. If it wasn’t the case, why are new nuclear reactors still being built and more are being planned?

Germany is definitely rethinking it’s anti-nuclear position. Ignore the viewpoints of the current political group in charge. They are deeply unpopular. Politicians outside of that group are advocating for a return to nuclear.

France is keeping and building more reactors. This is not a “more complicated story.” It is simple proof that nuclear is viable.

Just so we’re clear, it is cheap fossil fuels that made nuclear uneconomical. Solar and wind provide a very different type of power in comparison, and do not really compete against each other. There’s a reason why countries that abandoned nuclear are suddenly thinking about restarting nuclear again (see Germany). Meanwhile, countries that fully adopted nuclear (see France) are seeing no pressure to abandon it.

GM had record sales figures, just before they filed for bankruptcy. The problem with the car industry is that if you’re willing to sell at a loss, any level of sales can be achieved. But that is not a viable business. In reality, too many car companies are selling BEVs at a loss. This will have consequences soon.

In the end, the solution will be to just ban most firearms and make it nearly impossible to get one outside of specific circumstances. It’s the same way gun violence was stopped in every country, and the rhetoric against that is the same broken record for 30+ years.

Eventually, the concept of a “right to mass-murder/terrorism” will self-destruct, no matter how deeply embedded it is in legal the system. Even the constitution will eventually self-destruct if it gets too far away from meeting the necessities of modern life, something it is well on the path to doing so. So it’s time to stop pretending there is a trick solution to the problem, and start recognizing the problem exactly as it is.

Then you’ll have to deal with Lunar gravity, which may be unacceptable for long durations. Humans may have to live in giant space stations if we want to live in space. And since they can be truly massive, it may be more desirable than what some might think.

Yes, that’s the point. It’s far beyond the actual city of Tokyo in terms of construction difficulty and scale. But it doesn’t need any new technologies to be invented to be doable. Just the ability to build on that scale.

This is sci-fi stuff. No one is seriously saying we could build this anytime soon. It will require a radical advancement in space travel capability. But the interesting part of this is that it doesn’t any new technology. It needs only the technology that we currently have, just scaled up massively.

As it is an O’Neill cylinder, the raw material needs will be truly huge. We’re literally building a city on the scale of Tokyo but in space. So we are just assuming that someday, we can move around that amount of stuff in space.

The cheapest materials would be what can be acquired in space without having to launch from Earth. As a result, you’re going to want to build your O’Neill cylinder out of some combination of iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon dioxide.

The last of which might be particularly useful, as it is the main ingredient of fiberglass while also being the most common substance on Moon and asteroids. As a result, you probably want to build your cylinder primarily out of fiberglass. You can get pretty decently sized cylinders, as fiberglass has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. Apparently, 24km diameter is a viable figure. Scale up length the same way, and you’ll get 96km. So a 24km x 96km O’Neill cylinder made out of fiberglass.

That would be about 7238 km^2 of usable surface area. Half that to 3619 km^2 to make room for windows (as originally envisioned by O’Neill), and assuming a density comparable to New York City (about 11,300 people/km^2), you’ll get around 40 million people. Or about the population of Tokyo.

That’s seems plenty for any sensible space colonization strategy we might adopt in the future. And what’s best is that you don’t really need any fancy technology. Just use solar power to power mass drivers and deliver raw materials from the moon or asteroid via electricity. And it won’t be any special materials either. Raw regolith can be made into fiberglass, so cost can be kept surprisingly low. The only question is scaling it all up, which may unfortunately be too expensive or will take a very long time to happen. Ultimately, this is still sci-fi, albeit on the hard side of it, since no fancy new technology is require.

Lemmy needs to move away from downvotes altogether, or make it totally pointless. Just because Reddit uses it doesn’t make it a good idea.

Itis impossible to get data that recent FYI.

Again, green hydrogen adoption is rapidly growing and is following the trajectory of wind and solar growth in the past. Your rhetoric is just mirroring the anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past. They too were always looking backwards. You will end up no different.

Wrong. You have totally fallen for fossil fuel propaganda. All of that rhetoric originated from the oil and gas industry. After all, if “both sides are equally bad” then there would be no motivation to move away from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the battery industry, which is really just an extension of mining industry and China’s governmental policy, is adopting this type of rhetoric.

Again, you are 20 years out of date. As in more than one decade. As in literally decades out of date. You won’t even google the term and yet you think you know everything. This is Ludditism at its purist.

And you have developed Ludditism.

It is not a fantasy. In fact, the opposite is true. The problem is that you are wildly out of touch with recent events. You are still pretending like it is 2004, not realizing that that was 20 years ago. Green hydrogen is a rapidly growing market and is following the trajectory of wind and solar.

Except you’ve actually debunked your own argument.

At 9.3 kg of CO2 for one kg of H2, and assuming 110 km/kg of H2 (normal fuel economy for an FCEV), you get 84.5 grams of CO2 per km of driving.

Meanwhile, a BEV gets anywhere from 70-370 grams per km, depending on dirtiness of the grid: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions/

In other words, an FCEV is comparable to a BEV when it comes to emissions. You can even double the numbers for the FCEV if you want to include possibilities like upstream losses or production. The numbers would still be very comparable to BEVs running on most grids.

And this is the problem here: You’re so deep in your anti-hydrogen conspiracy theory that you failed to notice that the math works against you.

Those people are Tesla fanboys and investors. They are blatantly lying about competitive threats to BEVs. In reality, they have become a type of climate change denier. For them, the only “solutions” that can exist are the ones that make them money, and all the others must be stopped.

So was electricity until recently. Nearly all of it was made from fossil fuels. The difference is that we can make it from renewable energy.

And the exact same is true with hydrogen. If you cared at all, you’d google it yourself and realize that significant green hydrogen production is coming online. Not only is it all over the news, there are huge government programs supporting it now.

The fundamental problem is that you are either closed-minded or totally out of touch. It’s time realize that it’s 2024 and whatever outdated thinking you have is long over.

That’s climate change denial rhetoric. Same was said about nearly everything until we started to build more wind and solar power. This is just a repeat of that tactic.

No. This is just a return to the days of the IE-only web. It will be problematic but it won’t be the end of the web.

This. People are basically in denial over how poorly Mozilla is handling Firefox. They are genuinely going to drive their product to zero marketshare pretty soon.