It's not very nice to say that those who think there are too many words in your draft are "illiterate". You should welcome constructive criticism - kindness is more effective than ridicule. Your knowledge and intellect could be very helpful in leading the country (and the world) to greatly needed nuclear power if you weren't so narrow minded and sometimes even mean-spirited in your attitude toward others.
No one who reads this substack is illiterate. If you don't understand hyperbole, perhaps you should retreat to a safe space. This substack is not one of them.
I still think you could be more effective if you appealed to a wider audience, instead of just writing for other pro-nuclear professionals. I'm very much for building more nuclear plants, and hate to see your great talent and knowledge wasted when it could be a force for good.
I don' write for nuclear professionals. Almost all of them are wedded to and depend on the current murderous system. I write for the intelligent layman, his representative in Congress, and Congressional staffers. These people are our only hope for change.
I need the choir to review the slides and tell me what is unclear, what did not come across, so we can fix and improve.
Jack is a bit blunt at times, as are many top experts in nuclear power, and I agree it does limit his audience. That is where you and I and others in this choir can provide a bridge to the general public. We tried to get one of his articles published at Citizendium but it was rejected as being too much advocacy. What I have done instead is provide links to his articles on our Debate Guide pages. Would you like to help in that effort? Our target audience is journalists wailing about climate change but totally ignorant about nuclear power.
GKG eschews rating the different designs. There are two main reasons for this:
1) Nuclear's problem is regulatory, not technical. It cannot be solved by "new" technology. The LWR is a klunky, brute force technology, but it is plenty good enough. It's should-cost is about $2000/kW which would result in a base load LCOE of about 3 cents/kWh in the absence of regulatory risk.
No new technology can solve the regulatory problem. Worse, even if one of the non-LWR designs is actually cheaper than the LWR, ALARA guarantees that the cost of that technology will be pushed up to the point where it is barely competitive with the alternatives. There's no point in being better.
2) GKG does not know which is the best technology. The way to find out is competition, not some self-anointed expert or far worse bureaucracy choosing winners. Let a 1000 Flowers bloom in a truly competitive garden. But that will require an entirely different regulatory system.
BTW improved versions of both UCert slide decks have been uploaded to the Flop book site.
The Gates tragedy is that once he decided to play by the NRC rules he became a captive of and a supporter of the current regulatory system. (Not to mention a drain on the US taxpayer.)
My dream was he would take his money and vision to a country that
a) desperately needs more electricity now.
b) Has no domestic fossil resources.
c) which owes him big time for his great work on malaria etc.
And create a viable alternative which would show the world what was possible. We've lost that opportunity.
It's not very nice to say that those who think there are too many words in your draft are "illiterate". You should welcome constructive criticism - kindness is more effective than ridicule. Your knowledge and intellect could be very helpful in leading the country (and the world) to greatly needed nuclear power if you weren't so narrow minded and sometimes even mean-spirited in your attitude toward others.
Al,
No one who reads this substack is illiterate. If you don't understand hyperbole, perhaps you should retreat to a safe space. This substack is not one of them.
I still think you could be more effective if you appealed to a wider audience, instead of just writing for other pro-nuclear professionals. I'm very much for building more nuclear plants, and hate to see your great talent and knowledge wasted when it could be a force for good.
Al,
I don' write for nuclear professionals. Almost all of them are wedded to and depend on the current murderous system. I write for the intelligent layman, his representative in Congress, and Congressional staffers. These people are our only hope for change.
I need the choir to review the slides and tell me what is unclear, what did not come across, so we can fix and improve.
Jack is a bit blunt at times, as are many top experts in nuclear power, and I agree it does limit his audience. That is where you and I and others in this choir can provide a bridge to the general public. We tried to get one of his articles published at Citizendium but it was rejected as being too much advocacy. What I have done instead is provide links to his articles on our Debate Guide pages. Would you like to help in that effort? Our target audience is journalists wailing about climate change but totally ignorant about nuclear power.
Yes, I'd like to know more about Citizendium - am not familiar with your work...
Let's continue this discussion offline. macquigg at gmail dot com
What is a helpful way to contribute line edits ("nits") for typos etc.?
Joe,
You can email me at djw1 at thorconpower dot com.
Hi Jack,
This is off-topic (and it’s an awesome topic to be off)…but perhaps in another forum you could comment on the TerraPower Kemmerer project? This link courtesy of Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring (keeping all such text, oddly, within the Substack family): https://www.gatesnotes.com/Wyoming-TerraPower-groundbreaking?WT.mc_id=20240610150000_Wyoming-2024_BG-TW&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
thanks for all the great data and analysis!
Chris
GKG eschews rating the different designs. There are two main reasons for this:
1) Nuclear's problem is regulatory, not technical. It cannot be solved by "new" technology. The LWR is a klunky, brute force technology, but it is plenty good enough. It's should-cost is about $2000/kW which would result in a base load LCOE of about 3 cents/kWh in the absence of regulatory risk.
No new technology can solve the regulatory problem. Worse, even if one of the non-LWR designs is actually cheaper than the LWR, ALARA guarantees that the cost of that technology will be pushed up to the point where it is barely competitive with the alternatives. There's no point in being better.
2) GKG does not know which is the best technology. The way to find out is competition, not some self-anointed expert or far worse bureaucracy choosing winners. Let a 1000 Flowers bloom in a truly competitive garden. But that will require an entirely different regulatory system.
BTW improved versions of both UCert slide decks have been uploaded to the Flop book site.
Fair enough. Good luck to Gates et al anyway…
Chris,
The Gates tragedy is that once he decided to play by the NRC rules he became a captive of and a supporter of the current regulatory system. (Not to mention a drain on the US taxpayer.)
My dream was he would take his money and vision to a country that
a) desperately needs more electricity now.
b) Has no domestic fossil resources.
c) which owes him big time for his great work on malaria etc.
And create a viable alternative which would show the world what was possible. We've lost that opportunity.