> The US is really big and a lot of people have rural 30+ minute commutes
The size of the country in which a commute is contained is immaterial to the length of that commute. What you mean is not "the US is big" but "things are really far apart in the US". Which they are, but precisely because of car-centric (car-only, actually) design.
Because it yields a simple corollary that to make travelling safer you can reduce the number of miles driven. Mostly by giving people viable alternatives to driving, be it long-distance rail or bike lanes to move around quicker and safer in the city.
> Don't forget to add rail incidents to that metric. I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured.
Yeah and how many in the 15 years prior? 112. Of which 80 were in a single (TGV) crash.
How many people die each year in Spanish roads? Thousands.
> The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year.
Can't have rail accidents if you don't have rail *taps side of head*
> Portugal had 15 death after a tram derailment.
Oh my god, after a 140-year old tourist attraction malfunctioned! Hardly representative of any transit system whatsoever.
> In Amsterdam, the tram is more dangerous than the car.
This is just not true, by any metric.
And also, why are cars comparatively less dangerous in Amsterdam than in most other places? Because it is not designed for cars first, there are low speed limits enforced by traffic calming (like speed humps and narrow cobbled streets) everywhere.
Trams in Amsterdam should be replaced with busses. Busses stop much faster and don't weigh as much. Trams are literal death machines. It's really scary to ride bicycle in Amsterdam and hear the ding-ding-ding when you are about to be run over by a tram and you quickly have to move over.
Also you seem to be a bit confused, Amsterdam does not use narrow cobbled streets for traffic calming. Maybe you are thinking of France or Belgium.
No. The traffic rules for trams or tram stop positions should be adjusted and people in Amsterdam should be educated to behave around trams, i.e. in traffic in general if they want fewer deaths.
There are literally marks on every step of their path "tram is going through here, coming from there", so those that die anyway should be the ones at fault. It's horrible that they die, but banning trams is not a valid response to it. After the people have started behaving like that around trams, there isn't really a reason to assume they won't start being (even more) reckless around the less predictable and bulkier busses. You fixed braking time, but cyclists get clipped more often going out of their track as they do already. I mean, look at the description of an accident: allegedly she wore a hoodie with headphones and some stops after the intersections incentivize higher tram speeds.
Start fixing that before banning the safest and the most efficient form of transport (57x more than cars, with the amount of cars they have, number of close interactions with cyclists/pedestrians, and the imposed traffic rules for cars, isn't really a valid multiplier), scrapping all the tram lines and adjusting road tracks widths just to have buses brake harder on asphalt isn't really a fix of the problem, just a reaction to a symptom.
You sound like someone trying to justify guns. "People should be educated to behave round them". No. Trams in Amsterdam are very dangerous and replacing them with long busses makes everything better.
Tram is not the safest form of transport, that would be the bus. As stated trams are way more deadly than cars.
And no, trams are not marked. Not in Amsterdam. Trams share the exact same path as pedestrians and cyclists, they don't have their own lanes for most parts of the route.
What about people who are visually impaired? Have hearing troubles? Should those people just stay home?
Well, I hope you don't have a say in that matter, not because you disagree, but because you ignored all of the reasoning behind my points, just to repeat the same.
Your analogy about guns is irrelevant because all the negative aspects of advocating for guns are missing here, while education is always helpful. I am advocating for the safest and the most efficient option for everyone. And I said why is it so. You only mentioned braking time/distance without any evidence about buses being less lethal in the long run when substituting trams:
The same braking time can be achieved by decreasing the trams' speed (30 km/h to 20 km/h) around pedestrians and cyclists, which is more efficient than removing the tram network, making space for buses, buying and maintaining twice as many buses for the same throughput, and replacing the asphalt quite often. Keeping the trams will decrease the likelihood of pedestrians and bicyclists being clipped by bulky long buses (double the number of encounters compared to trams), while still making it easier for everyone to know where the tram may come from whenever they see the tracks (and it can't swerve, so a person knows exactly how to move in a close encounter), so that they can steer clear of its path and only cross it after they make sure there is no tram passing. Introducing the buses either reintroduces toxic exhaust gases, or buses' weight advantage gets massively decreased by carrying the batteries, while increasing the tires' and asphalt damage and shedding. Also, it doesn't mean that the trend of increasing recklessness won't continue around "safer" vehicles: I bet people were more wary of trams before, just like they are in other cities with trams.
Recklessness and abandonment of personal responsibility for own safety shouldn't be a reason for everyone else to bend over backwards. There is enough of a safety net for the wannabe Darwin award winners as-is, with trams in place. Decreasing speed, moving the stations ahead of intersections, and raising awareness that the trams are still dangerous is a reasonable change of policy. Even a pilot-project driving buses on a dangerous tram lane could be reasonable, to gather data. Blindly overhauling the whole network without a strong indicator that it's even a move in the right direction, just to maybe find a way to prolong the lives of those who themselves don't really care about their lives.
Btw, visually impaired and those of bad hearing generally know very well to use their other senses to stay safe in this as well as even worse conditions. And are better off with rails marking the trams' path (or even other markings, if introduced), than relying on the buses' braking distance.
And please avoid pretending to be dumb and saying that the trams are more deadly than the cars, without taking into account how separated the cars' roads are from pedestrians' and cyclists paths as well as their passenger throughput in Amsterdam and their speed limits. If Amsterdam had the same throughput of passengers in buses instead of trams, with buses equally mixing with pedestrians and cyclists, I bet the situation wouldn't be much different, with you equally fixated only on absolute numbers multiplier, asking for trams.
Btw, why don't you ask for cars to replace the trams? Buses, despite not being as mixed with pedestrians as trams are, racking in kilometers after midnight and between cities like cars do, still cause 15x more deaths per km than cars do.
Many things already reduce road deaths and they are infinitely easier to do that driverless cars, namely: viable alternatives to driving! Trains, streetcars, bike lanes, whatever.
Prior to stocks we had feudal lords created out of vast private land holdings. Stocks at least abstract ownership out into a more democratic mechanism. The notion is sound but the current implementation is incomplete, for the same reason the prior innovations were, the initial uninformed creation become too easily corrupted.
Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).
It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).
> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........
> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.
That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.
Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
thing is, when you look at what ABWR achieved, I wish we just thrown money at hitachi for a messmer like deployment in all EU countries that want nuclear
> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.
I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in
Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".
The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.
I agree in general, but you may as well be wishing for ponies and unicorns as for change here. Short term economics is the current dominant force.
Also consider that if you’re wrong about the progress of clean tech, and it closes the gaps on storage, the kids “better outcome” is going to be being locked into paying higher energy prices for a lot of their life. (Of course if you’re right it will help them)
Sure but at the end of the day(cade) if my kids end up paying more for green reliable energy it's not a bad outcome compared to the price on betting the farm on renewables/grid update/hopefully seasonal, scalable, cheap energy storage. I'd rather hedge my bets by also investing in nuclear.
Where? In every country in the world? Because the world met something like 85% of the energy growth of 2025 with renewables. All regions of the world are seeing massive and accelerating renewables buildout. All forced by the state? Extraordinary claims require evidence.
Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.
Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable.
I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
Solar is REALLY CHEAP.
And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing.
If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet.
Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate.
We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.
I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.
"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs.
Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.
Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.
Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.
That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.
It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.
Some reactor types are better at going up and down in power fast than others. It is definitely a solved problem, though, and has been for decades.
I remember, decades ago, that anti-nuclear activists (some of them were even university professors who ought to know better) argued that it was impossible while France had already been doing exactly that for decades (at the time).
There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.
People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today, if people hadn't said that we would have a much cleaner world today. We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years, but also possible we wont have that. Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?
> People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today
That it's true today because people worked on it for 40 years? It would've been amazing if more nuclear had been built 40 years ago. But it wasn't and there's nothing you or I can do about it.
> We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years
They're already good and cheap. And more like 5 years than 20.
> Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?
It isn't a gut feeling. They'll get better faster than you can build new nuclear because that's what we've seen in the past 20 years. No one's holding nuclear back on pure vibes. Solar + batteries is already beating nuclear and will continue to increase the lead. That's just math. Its true boss fight is fossil fuels and achieving mass electrification.
If anything, when new nuclear does get built eventually, it will benefit from all the progress made on electrification and new transmission and storage capacity.
Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.
On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.
More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.
With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).
But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.
One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.
Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
The tl;dr is that instead of representing emails as type String and manually sprinkling is_email(str) throughout your code, you represent as type Email, which has a function parse(String) -> Option<Email>. The type system then ensures the checks are present whenever they have to be, and nowhere else.
This is extremely natural to do in a language like Haskell or Rust. And incredibly unnatural to do in C++ for instance.
I hope this is not trolling so I'll bite. It is incredibly natural to represent an object, such as an email, as an Email class in object oriented languages like C++. It'd then have a constructor that accepts a string and constructs the email object from said string, or maybe a parse(string) -> Option<Email> thingy. The type system then ensures the checks are present whenever they have to be, and nowhere else.
Tl;dr: there's nothing extra that functional or OO programming give you here. Both allow you to represent the problem in a properly typed fashion. Why would you represent an email as a string unless you are a) deeply inexperienced or b) have some really good reason to drop all the benefits of a strongly typed language?
I completely agree with you but I think sometimes folks carry some piece of data around as a string or int instead of something more concrete like a class or a strongly typed enum etc purely out of laziness!
I think the old Lisp tradition of using lists for everything is related to this somehow. On the other hand, in Common Lisp programmers can define custom types that have to fulfill a predicate function. Then, if they declare the types of their functions, most implementations will generate type-checking code unless instructed not to. So in Common Lisp you can use lists for everything but still have type-checking, at some cost to efficiency. :D
Well, in C++ the constructor must return a value of its class type - you can't return an Option<T> from a constructor on T, for example, and since constructors are the canonical way to construct an object, it creates stylistic and idiomatic friction when you start using free functions to create a Maybe<T> instead of constructors.
The size of the country in which a commute is contained is immaterial to the length of that commute. What you mean is not "the US is big" but "things are really far apart in the US". Which they are, but precisely because of car-centric (car-only, actually) design.
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