The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.
A lot of the time I'd prefer to see "HDI recalculated without income" because income per capita doesn't seem like a direct indicator of human development. It's more of a proxy measure. Of course, I could say the same thing about how it measures education. Educational outcomes (like highly developed literacy) are better than how many years of schooling someone has. But these better measurements are also probably harder to collect across a broad group of countries.
"EDF estimates EPR2 programme cost at EUR72.8 billion"
France's EDF has said its preliminary cost estimate for the project to build six EPR2 reactors at Penly, Gravelines and Bugey totals EUR72.8 billion (USD85.3 billion).
Each reactor outputs 1650 megawatts of electricity running at full power. Assuming they run at 92% capacity factor, that's $9.38 per real annualized watt.
Great. So 538TWh per year is 61 GW so roughly 61 GW * $9.38 = $576 billion staggered over the 80 year life of nuclear plants is $7.2 billion per year of capital expenditure.
For comparison, wind is about $5/W. Assuming a 35% capacity factor and a 30 year expected lifetime for the latest turbines that comes to $10.0 billion per year of capital expenditure with no storage or fossil backup systems or extra capacity given weather variability.
PV solar is between $.97 and $1.16 per watt, so that's going to be the front line. With storage you can get from $1.60 to $2. This is already the bulk of the power generation in Europe and is only going to increase. The idea that you're going to run nuclear plants at 95% capacity factor economically is also very suspect in a continent saturated with cheap PV solar.
US NREL Puts it at $2/W with no storage and ~20% capacity factor. Lifetime of latest panels is unknown but optimistically is 25 years. Assuming perfect and free storage that comes to $24.4 billion per year of capital expenditure for a country the size of France to be 100% solar. So no, it would not be more economical to use solar over nuclear. Wind would be better but when you add the full system costs of storage and backup intermittent heavy systems are vastly more expensive and emit more carbon than nuclear ones.
https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...
Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.
I would like to be able to pull content out of the Wayback Machine with a proper API [1]. I'd even be willing to pay a combination of per-request and per-gigabyte fees to do it. But then I think about the Archive's special status as a non-profit library, and I'm not sure that offering paid API access (even just to cover costs) is compatible with the organization as it exists.
[1] It looks like this might exist at some level, e.g. https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader, but I've been trying to use this for a couple of weeks and every day I try I get a HTTP 5xx error or "connection refused."
Yes, there are documents and third party projects indicating that it has a free public API, but I haven't been able to get it to work. I presume that a paid API would have better availability and the possibility of support.
I just tried waybackpy and I'm getting errors with it too when I try to reproduce their basic demo operation:
>>> from waybackpy import WaybackMachineSaveAPI
>>> url = "https://nuclearweaponarchive.org"
>>> user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
>>> save_api = WaybackMachineSaveAPI(url, user_agent)
>>> save_api.save()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<python-input-4>", line 1, in <module>
save_api.save()
~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
File "/Users/xxx/nuclearweapons-archive/venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/waybackpy/save_api.py", line 210, in save
self.get_save_request_headers()
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
File "/Users/xxx/nuclearweapons-archive/venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/waybackpy/save_api.py", line 99, in get_save_request_headers
raise TooManyRequestsError(
...<4 lines>...
)
waybackpy.exceptions.TooManyRequestsError: Can not save 'https://nuclearweaponarchive.org'. Save request refused by the server. Save Page Now limits saving 15 URLs per minutes. Try waiting for 5 minutes and then try again.
Reach out to patron services, support @ archive dot org. Also, your API limits will be higher if you specify your API key from your IA user versus anonymous requests when making requests.
I wish there were some kind of file search for the Wayback Machine. Like "list all .S3M files on members.aol.com before 1998". It would've made looking for obscure nostalgia much easier.
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
Does yours measure wavelengths that short? A lot of low cost spectrometers don't, because inexpensive glass and plastic optics transmit visible and near-IR radiation but significantly impair shorter UV wavelengths.
There are diminishing returns to further optimization of lower-climate-impact meat sources. Look at greenhouse gas emissions per 100 grams of protein in various foods:
Beef is really high at 48.89 kg CO2e, but pork is only 7.6 kg CO2e. Farmed fish is 5.98 and poultry is 5.7. If you can get people to switch from high-climate-impact meat to low-climate-impact meat, you've already reaped most of the possible climate gains from dietary change. To meet a given protein consumption target, you cut 88% of the emissions by getting protein from chicken instead of beef. Trying to get people to eat unfamiliar and potentially "icky" protein sources after they've already switched to chicken can only produce minor gains.
Though most people are reacting to the headline about how humans could eat maggots, the article says that these maggots are actually being fed to chickens, farmed fish, and other animals. That approach reduces waste streams, slightly reduces the already-modest climate impact of farmed fish and poultry, and doesn't have the enormous uphill battle toward regulatory and consumer acceptance that direct human consumption would face.
And the problem with those comparisons is that they make it look like everything is swappable without any issue.
Places where we raise cows generally do not support other types of agriculture (especially milk cows in the mountains).
You may stop raising cows, but it doesn't mean you will be able to grow nuts or pulses in the same place. That causes big problems for food security and economic networks.
All the arguments around emissions or caloric efficiency are way too simplistic to accurately describe the problem.
Naval reactor power ratings are for thermal output. You can assume that about 1/3 of the thermal output can be converted to electricity when steam from the reactor is used to drive an electrical generator:
Assuming that your cited numbers are correct, "$2 billion for 2 x 400 MW reactors in Ford-class aircraft carrier" translates to 267 megawatts of electrical output for $2 billion. Or $7.5 billion for 1000 megawatts of electrical output. This is not much cheaper than "Westinghouse: ~$8 bn for 1000MW reactor."
China is the world's largest electricity producer and installs a lot of generating capacity of all types. For example, China has 29 nuclear reactors with 31 GW of capacity currently under construction:
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
The nuclear share dropping is a very clear signal about a lack of investment. Shows that nuclear energy is no longer cost competitive, even in a "low regulation" environment.
It shows that strategic investment matters and people are looking at more than a single cost metric. Nuclear is behind today, but that doesn't hold a promise it will remain true into the future unless you stop investing now.
One armed bandit says explore as well as exploit. This delta you cited indicates the pendulum currently is more exploit than explore, but its not a static equation.
chinese nuclear is extremely cost competitive at 2.5bn/unit. They have other reasons, one being the ban on inland expansion fearing of messing up with 2 major rivers that feed the country. Current chinese units are basically borrowed and improved western designs, cap is basically vogtle's ap1000, hualong is a frankenstein of several western designs.
TBH this part seems key, even PRC couldn't operate full western designs reliant on western industrial capacity economically, part of it was simple incompetence of western supply chains (business closures / regulatory drama / sanctions). Nuclear seems viable once you strip out a lot of the politics that makes them uneconomical, hence PRC had to indigenize the designs since once western supply chains enter picture, the schedule goes out the window.
The materials are still full of potential energy, but it's much more expensive to reprocess them than to mine fresh uranium. It's even more expensive to reprocess them without incidentally releasing more radioactive contamination into the environment. (Several countries reprocess nuclear fuel now or did so in the past, but the facilities have always released more radioactive material into the environment than simple storage.)
It's kind of like why old and broken polyvinyl chloride pipes go to landfills instead of being burned as fuel in power plants. Even though PVC is flammable, the cost of burning PVC and capturing its carcinogenic combustion byproducts is a lot greater than burying waste PVC and burning fossil hydrocarbons.
In the far future, uranium mining costs might rise enough that it makes economic sense to reprocess old spent nuclear fuel. In the early days of the atomic age people thought that reprocessing and breeder reactors would be necessary because uranium was believed to be very rare on Earth. Vigorous exploration programs and new mining techniques proved this belief to be false by the end of the 1960s, and the situation hasn't changed since then. It's safer and cheaper to mine fresh fuel and just store the old fuel without any sort of reprocessing.
See e.g.
Bunn, Matthew G., Steve Fetter, John P. Holdren, and Bob van der Zwaan. 2003. The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel (PDF):
Smart consumers of this flavor are a minority but they exist. People who care can already bypass the "smart" features of mainstream TVs, thereby enjoying low prices and negating the privacy risks. Or they can pair a large computer monitor and separate audio system that never had smart features to begin with. To make the business work you need smart consumers who are privacy-conscious and are willing to pay more for it instead of doing a little more work on their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.
A lot of the time I'd prefer to see "HDI recalculated without income" because income per capita doesn't seem like a direct indicator of human development. It's more of a proxy measure. Of course, I could say the same thing about how it measures education. Educational outcomes (like highly developed literacy) are better than how many years of schooling someone has. But these better measurements are also probably harder to collect across a broad group of countries.