Austin Vernon writes about energy, nuclear power, geothermal, storage, and defense, drawing on his engineering background.
Commenters point to his posts on thermal storage and carbon capture as useful breakdowns, though one notes that his battery and natural gas analysis leaves out some costs.
That's just a calculator. What this guy is saying is actual construction costs, not estimated. Well, it's a bit of an estimation too, but one of the 2 reactors he mentions was actually built and hooked to the grid.
In any case, this is great news. Other recently built reactors were horribly delayed and over-budget. India shows the entire world you can deliver on time and on budget, and it does not have to be expensive.
About two years ago, some random blogger, Austin Vernon [1] wrote a piece that lots of people here on HN read, and which basically stated that there's no way for nuclear to become cheap. Among other arguments one was that half of a nuclear power plant is basically the steam turbine and generator of a coal power plant. And since coal power plants have been around for hundreds of years, and they are still expensive, there's no reason to expect they'll become cheaper anytime soon, so even if the nuclear part of a nuclear power plant comes for free, you couldn't compete with solar. Lots of people on HN bought that argument. It's incorrect, but for a subtle reason: nuclear power plants work at low temperatures (less than 350 Celsius), and have low thermal efficiency. That's not a big problem, because uranium has one million times the energy density of coal. But with coal, if you want to be competitive, you want as high efficiency as possible (above 50%), and for that you need supercritical, or even ultra-supercritical steam. And that technology is very expensive.…
wow is drone warfare going to go under RAPID evolution, but...
https://austinvernon.site/blog/starshipsuperweapon.html
Nuts and bolts: if the economics mature Starship can deliver kinetic weaponry that is more effective and cheaper than any major artillery round within 30 minutes of anywhere in the world.
... that makes big assumptions about achieving 10$/kg, but likely with the capabilities it enables, the pentagon would be happy with 50-100$/kg.
Starship is a pure economic strategic weapon. It is very difficult to engineer some sort of launch platform with such (purported) economics. While the US is usually the one playing loss leader in weapons usage, Starship would reverse this against any nation state.
It's not just artillery, imagine drones and troop delivery in 30-60 minutes around the world.
BUT, we'll see. Orbital test of Starship missed 2022, it's supposed to be attempted soon?
Starship also enables orbital battle platforms with the mass it can load.
Alas, militarization of space seems inevitable. One of the fermi filters? everyone has nukes, someone gets to space, and has strategic nuke delivery advantage (you can delivery a nuke from orbit to surface a lot faster than an intercontinental arc), that may trigger the nuke exchange before the space militarization finances a piggybacked space economy.
That’s another mostly great article you linked to. Still though it doesn’t mention the dramatic cost increase of natural gas plants when used as a peaker instead of always-on, and it assumes we can produce as many batteries as we want. It also assumes we can continue producing massive amounts of natural gas in the US and export huge amounts to the rest of the world.
The author's article on renewables and batteries states "The cost of these batteries is plummeting. Material constraints are not an issue because storage batteries do not require top-tier energy density" [1]. This was reasonable to think just two years ago but now is obviously wrong- and this assumption underpins most of the author's writings on energy.
Energy policy is very unforgiving- missing one important fact or one wrong assumption can dramatically alter the outcome.
[1] https://austinvernon.site/blog/renewablevariation.html
The construction industry is being revolutionised quickly.
"Almost every advancement in construction is small enough for a man to carry" - https://austinvernon.site/blog/construction.html
So if Katerra wanted revolutionary construction that jumps even quicker than this ongoing well documented advancement, Elon Musk style from the ground up, they need a reason why their product would work contrary to what anyone can see. They never gave one, so I don't see why it would have worked.
Prefab needs a prefab factory in every city. And think of how limiting in design that would be.
Kick ass screws need one factory in the world. And the fact people get militant about things like Square-Drive screws means screws will continue to be pushed evolutionarily. Who knows if the Phillips head can be upended but we are at a time in history that we can find out.
The site actually has several articles about why this specific criticism is silly.
To summarize: we already have gas plants, and gas storage, leaving them turned off except as a fallback insurance is the sensible option. Even when building new plants, gas plants are the cheapest to build and simplest to run which matters a lot if they're mostly idle, which is why they get used as peakers.
https://austinvernon.site/blog/gasredemption.html
I don't agree with everything they write (they seem to think "virtue signaling“ is a real thing and that renewables had nothing to do with sensible government regulation but rather the free market which reveals a bias that runs through their conclusions) but the facts are fairly incontrovertible if you actually look at them so they come to the reasonable conclusions anyway.
I disagree! It's a vital problem to solve, especially if solar becomes significantly cheaper than wind (as appears to be happening; solar has the better experience rate). And solving it punctures the last argument bad-faith nuclear advocates use to argue against renewables.
I will once again point to Austin Vernon and Standard Thermal, which has an approach that could truly solve the problem. The first principles analysis of the issue shows the problem with "sand batteries" and the like.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
https://www.standardthermal.com/