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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Four points:

    The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.

    1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.

    It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).

    5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.

    Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.

    That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.

    Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.

    It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.










  • No. Humans have lived in walkable villages and towns built at missing middle densities (hundreds to a few thousand people and markets all within walking distance linked by long distance travel corridors you walked to or what you are calling ‘urban’) with local services and a handful of people living on the outskirts.

    Endless suburban seas of <500 people per km^2 were invented for the automobile. The past you are counterfactually claiming exists did not have half an acre of roads, car parks, 4-car garages, set backs and car yards per resident, nor did it have all the services in a central gigantic box building 20 miles away through a sea of identical houses, nor did your rural people demand those in higher density regions provode them with infrastructure for heating, cooling, water and sewerage. Nor did they demolish all the houses around the market just in case they wanted to leave a cart there.






  • If the garage is used as internal space, then row houses are plenty high enough density. The occupant could have a much nicer back yard without the setback (front yards are car infrastructure), but the road is not too wide, just awful to be on.

    If we assume 1.8-2.1 people per house, then these blocks are about and 300m^2 with about 100m^2 out the front in tye public spacs e per house (property boundary to middle of road]. 5000 people per km^2 for the residential area, assume 50% as much commercial/parks elsewhere (~100m^2 per resident) and you’re at over 3000 people per km^2

    This is in the ideal missing middle range if a little bit low, it’s just awful missing middle (that will probably also have its density ruined hy a sea of carparks in the commercial areas and a highway, but that’s a separate issue).