• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 1st, 2026

help-circle

  • I am a nuclear fanboy, because it is a clean and safe form of energy. But the EPR costs and building time are a tragedy for the entire sector and I have no problem in admitting that. But there are good third generation reactor like the hitachi abwr that are fast to build (less the 48 months) and relatively cheap (less than 5 billions).

    The real problem is the amount of safety changes required to gen3 design after Fukushima (that was a gen2 reactor that suffered the worst earthquake and tsunami ever in the history of Japan and caused maybe a 1 single death after 4 years, just to put things in prospective).

    But this is a problem in general for European nuclear. An APR-1400 costs 4.5 billion in Korea and 9 billions in Europe.



  • I understand your point, but I think you are having a lesser opinion of new trek because you are missing some of the messages they want to share with the viewer.

    In Ko’Zeine the conflict is not between self and tradition, but more about the internal conflict of Darem. The enemy here is his own crippling self-expectation, not society. I think this conflict resonate a lot with modern morality topics such as LGBTQ+ acceptance.

    In Vox in Excelso is the same: the fake battle is a compromise. Both the federation and the klingon knows it is a farse. But they go with it anyway as a way to preserve their own self representation in a post burn galaxy. To me Vox in Excelso is political realism. The klingon are not treated as an obstacle to be tricked, but as political partner in a mutual charade. In the episode this is explicitly framed as a klingon solution to a klingon problem.


  • I am not disagreeing with you, but old trek does this all the time.

    In season 5 episode 17 (the one with the J’naii androgynous race) the setup is exacly the same as Ko’Zeine: from the start you get the answer that suppressing your true self is bad. The J’naii are seen as bigoted and the federation position as the right one. I do not think there is any ambiguity about which side the viewer is supposed to take. The only difference is the end result. Or look at how Dr. Crusher treats Klingon ritual suicide in season 5 episode 16: their culture is treated entirely as a stubborn, barbaric hurdle to be overcome by the ‘sensible’ 24th-century human perspective.

    And TNG is also full of examples of “the federation knows best”. In Season 7 Episode 13 the federation works around a similar problem with the forced migration on the holodeck. Or Season 2 Episode 18, where the enterprise force the merge of the Bringloidi and the Mariposans. Or when in Season 1 Episode 8 we dismiss Edo society position immediately as immoral despite them living in a paradise society.





  • Speed is relative to a frame of reference, so my understanding is that percentages of impulse are about power, not about speed. The 0.25c limit is a safety limit against a fix reference (maybe the center of the galaxy?) to reduce the relativistic effects, and does not require power to maintain. Effectively, with “full impulse” you are asking for the maximum power output until your speed relative to the galaxy center is 0.25c. Given in this example it is said we need to keep at 1/8 impulse because of power constraints I can only assume this is referring to power, not speed. With no reference frame and time component, none of these dialog make sense whatsoever, but we should be used to writer not understanding physics by now 😬








  • solar + enough battery capacity is still dramatically cheaper that fossil fuels

    This is not true everywhere. Solar + battery is dramatically cheaper if you only care about daily, 4h storage, to manage peaks. It is not cheaper if you need to manage multi-week lows with high reliability (like the one a gas power plant provide). To cover that use-case you need more investment in the grid, in solar overprovisioning (4x the usual capacity) and a lot of batteries. That makes the solar + battery solution costing around the same as nuclear and fossil fuel in most places. It is already cheaper in places like Australia, Texas, MENA region. It would be double the cost if done in places like Germany, or Scandinavia.

    Nonetheless, battery + solar is the future for places like Spain, Italy (still not in the north plain as fog can stop solar production for weeks): the price will go further down, and hybrid storage solution and small nuclear reactors could optimize the battery + solar combo even further.



  • renewables are cheap, solar don’t work at night. Portugal has 37% hydro, 35% wind, 4% solar. Not all the countries have access to that much wind and hydro capacity. Italy is a stark example of a country with zero wind potential in the most industrialized areas (the padana plain). Having a big hydro potential is also great as hydropower is dispatchable. That means you do not need to build batteries to address the instability of renewable like wind. Renewable is great, but is not the universal solution. Each country and each grid need to work with what is given by nature to optimize the best for the use-case and level of consumption. Not all countries are lucky as Norway, Denmark, Ireland or Portugal. Italy is great for solar, but you said it yourself: solar do not work at night. So you either need nuclear or tons of batteries to decarbonize the grid.


  • Discovery lacked much needed love for the franchise, with lot of nonsensical, lore breaking episodes. The same is true for Picard sadly. But I am finding STSA boasting some of the best episodes for a Star Trek season 1 series so far. Star Trek was always woke, and that is why it was so loved. STSA is no more woke than Voyager was. I see lot of respect from the writers to the previous series. STSA makes me think of TNG much more often than any other nutrek series (except lower deck, but that is nearly fanservice). Being into the future you have a lot of flexibility to do something new, and I like that a lot. Nahla Ake is a different character than Picard or Janeway, and that is fine. A great character nonetheless in my opinion.


  • With current and near future technology, it is cheaper to have that 20% being nuclear and the rest renewable and battery than to have only renewable and batteries. Not only cheaper, but also more environmentally friendly. Using fossil fuel is not really an alternative.

    Nuclear can do grid load following (not peak due to thermal inertia but you will have batteries for that): nuclear power plant in France are required to be able to cycle to 30% power when needed.

    If the target is to get to 80% renewable + batteries and 20% nuclear, then why do you think nuclear investments is removing money from renewable? Those are complementary technologies and we need both. By sabotaging nuclear we are just making it more expensive forcing polluting fossil fuels as the only alternative. Fighting nuclear is just delaying decarbonization.

    Nuclear is the only technology that enabled a decarbonized electric grid in countries without natural low carbon source of energy such as hydroelectric.

    The fact that solar is cheaper is inconsequential if you produce electricity when it is not needed and you do not when it is needed.

    Nuclear costs more to produce, but lower the prices due to how the electricity market works.