Casey Handmer

Nuclear, coal, and gas powerplants only differ in how you produce heat. After that they work the same (heat water, make steam, drive turbines). There is usually a few stages of turbines to extract as much work as possible. Reaction time is 1 hour or more.

The waste heat can be used for district heating no matter how you produced the heat (in my city they use coal powerplant for this). It's not just gas. And it's not "perfect efficiency", it's about 80% for the best cogeneration powerplants compared to 60% without cogeneration. It's a little less in practice cause most powerplants aren't as modern and as efficient.

All of these is usually used on regular (not peaker) powerplants, because it's only useful if you use your powerplant for long periods of time.

There are also peaker powerplants. They work differently, and they are optimized for quick reaction time (so the energy they produce is more expansive and efficiency is lower). Reaction time is about 15 minutes. They don't only burn gas - they can also burn any liquid fuels (but gas is indeed the most common). Usually the efficiency of peaker powerplants is about 30-40%, can be almost as good as the regular ones but it's not worth it to install cogeneration if your plant runs for few hours a day.

I'm not sure which kind you were talking about. If they use cogeneration it means they must run for long time, and peaker powerplants running constantly is wasting money and fuel. Do you know what reaction time (from 0 to 100%)…

What you just wrote reads like bad LLM output. I read very little "puff pieces". Instead I've followed him and directly what he says for about the last 8 years. And I've seen how the media has turned against him, and him doing mostly the same things he did before is now somehow bad.

Nah. He's the same man. And every common argument against him is so easily shot down. But you don't seem to care and act like a flat earther, given my first link shoots your "counter-argument" down given it's about people you as a HN reader should know saying that the praise said about him is just quite simply true.

>Most of those companies have been bailed out by goverment contacts. To be devil'ls (yours) advocate, NASA did save SpaceX. But. NASA is one of the very few agencies that could hire SpaceX, especially due to things like ITAR. But it is obvious to anyone that SpaceX has always more than deserved those contracts, delivering value that is about 20x as high when compared to NASA's own efforts in cost to orbit, a figure that is bound to go 100x with Starship which is progressing not unlike Falcon 9 which is by far the most successful and most used launch system in the US, and the world.

Tesla benefits from selling some carbon credits yes. Which is by design. Remember that they were THE guys who managed to turn EV's from compromises to cars that can surpass ICE's. Actual good cars instead of inferior hippie mobiles like the G-whiz. Tesla operates in a system that anyone would call very…

Starlink gets a lot of bad press from astronomers, so I want to leave this here to balance it out. It's written by Casey Handmer, an (ex) NASA astrophysicist. Source: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/

Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it's worth reading:

Starlink will ultimately be a network of tens of thousands of satellites connecting to hundreds of millions of user terminals located all over the Earth. Its radio encoding scheme adapts the signal rate to measured atmospheric opacity along the signal line of sight across 10 different frequency bands in real time. Collectively, the system measures trillions of baselines of Earth’s entire atmosphere every day. This data, fed into standard tomography algorithms such as those used by medical CT imagers, can resolve essentially all weather structure in the atmosphere. No more careful scrutiny of remote weather station pressure gauge measurements. No more reliance on single mission oxygen emission line broadening. Instead, complete real time resolution of the present state of the entire atmosphere, a gift for weather prediction and climate study.

Starlink satellites are equipped with perhaps the most versatile software defined radios ever put into mass production. Each antenna allows the formation of multiple beams at multiple frequencies in both send and receive. With sufficiently accurate position, navigation and timing (PNT) data from GPS satellites, Starlink satellites could…

> Instead I've followed him and directly what he says for about the last 8 years.

and you are comparing that to the first hadn experience of some of his closest associates. The dude pays 3 different PR companies full time salaries, you haven't followed him, you have followed his propaganda.

> him doing mostly the same things he did before

When he said that he was proud Tesla got 100% on the lgbtq score 4 years in a row, and that homophobes should nt buy his cars in 2017 has that not changed?

> And every common argument against him is so easily shot down

if "you sound like chatgpt" is your idea of shooting somethign down, then yeah everything is easily shot down.

> Tesla benefits from selling some carbon credits yes.

thats not what I said though. I said the company was saved from bankruptcy due to goverment contracts. For Tesla the credits where only part of the equation. First of all they got a 480 million loan, on almost no interest in 2010. The EV credits of around 7,500 per car totalled a goverment investment of over 3 billion of free money. Despite this Elon said the company was around 1 month away from bankruptcy in 2017 when making the Model 3.

He took 480 million almost for free, and 3.4 billion for free and still was weeks away from insolvency. That company is literally unviable without goverment funding.

> Tesla operates in a system that anyone would call very capitalistic

Goverment funded sports car for tech bros is not a system anyone would call…

Casey Handmer did a couple of excellent articles on this topic:

- Space-based solar power is not a thing: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-solar-power-is-not-a-thing/

- No really, space based solar power is not a useful idea, literature review edition: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/no-really-space-based-solar-power-is-not-a-useful-idea-literature-review-edition/

You can get into the weeds of the detailed costings, safety, etc, but I think the clearest argument is this:

> The problem with beaming power using microwaves is that the monetizable value per Watt is incredibly low, because essentially unmetered electricity comes out of the walls of every building. The trick is to increase the value per Watt, by increasing the value and decreasing the power. The value is increased by modulating the microwaves with high speed data, and the power can be reduced by a factor of a million or so without hurting this method. Indeed, customers pay only for the data, and not for the transmitted electrical power, which is pathetically low at the receiver. Communications satellites remain the killer app for the commercial space industry

And then you look at the fact that almost every satellite communications company has gone bankrupt at some point. SpaceX with Starlink being a notable exception, but OneWeb which superficially looks pretty similar has already gone bankrupt once. If communications, which is many more orders of magnitude more…

agree on the stupid decision. but more important: the way forward.

- building up new nuclear reactors takes _many_ years and is still quite expensive, so its not a short-term solution. long term due to climate change the cooling might be a problem (like france already has issues in the summer when rivers run dry and they had to throttle nuclear reactors)
- fossils must be phased out, not an option
- hydrogen is at best a storage option for surplus energy (like solar), but highly inefficient to begin with
- renewables are already cheaper than everything else and prices are dropping still [1]

so either people want to believe climate crisis doesn't exist and want to double down on fossils, or believe nuclear will solve it but it can't right now, or hope that some miracle happens somehow and energy/climate will be a solved problem somehow.

I'd prefer to focus on the here and now, which means renewables, plus some storage in any form, instead of beating dead horses over and over again.

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[1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/radical-energy-abundance/