Why are my appliances allowed to be designed to become landfill? Why isn’t there the digital equivalent of putting stuff you don’t want on the street for people that do want it?
But there is that digital equivalent, it’s called ebay and Craigslist. I have purchased a used washer and dryer for $100, both worked for over a year after. I sold my entire desktop PC for parts on ebay a few months back, receiving $600 for 5 year old hardware, and I put the unsellable metal case on the curb and posted it to Craigslist.
There’s a couple of factors here. One, due to the time value of money, a cheaper appliance now may very well be cheaper, even if it only lasts 5 years, than a more expensive appliance with a longer lifespan. Another is that consumer goods are moving over time, as factories get more efficient, to a model where the cost is the (raw materials + manufacturing cost + IP license). Once manufacturing cost trends near zero—something that machine learning driven robotics should allow in the Soonish future—you are left with raw materials + IP license. Turn in the old one to be recycled, and that just leaves the license. Prediction: the stable way it will work is that products will be rented, not bought, and when the hardware wears out or deprecates you get a ‘free’ or minimal cost replacement. Lower end goods will have a very cheap or free license (open source) and will cost almost nothing, although they will be years behind the state of the art. Present example is the raspberry pi, which is a computer that would have been decent 15 years ago for as little as $5.
Why don’t they put nuclear reactors underground?
I found this paper, but I think the reason here is simple. There are many possible improvements to nuclear reactors. Each has a development cost. And a development risk. And nuclear is alreadytoo expensive to be viable, probably from now until the singularity*. So there is simply not the market scale to develop any substantial improvement to the existing examples that we have now. Scale matters—if it costs say the cost of 10x nuclear reactors to design and debug a new form of nuclear reactor, and you earn 10% profit on each reactor you build, you need a market size of 100 over say 10 years or it isn’t worth the investment. Right now the market size for new nuclear reactors is 2.
Why is so little of my house designed to be easy clean and filth repelling? Or for that matter, easy to alter and upgrade? Why isn’t there such a thing as house lego where you just have a base with a bus of utilities on which you can just arrange some rooms as required?
I agree with this but I think that the fundamental problem is local building code and permitting systems. If the system were national, then lego-like modules would have a market because it would be worth the investment to build the factory and distribution system to make them cheaply, given you could use the modules anywhere. But here local committees might vote down the modular house simply because the logical modules are rectilinear, and the resulting structure would be ‘too boxy’. Or because it has electrical runs with the wrong kind of wiring. (most places, romex in walls is ok. Chicago: conduit only)
*definition of the singularity : self amplifying cascade of algorithms and AI hardware, with the endpoint of intelligent systems that are asymptotically limited by physics. At which point, you can ask/command such a system to develop a new nuclear reactor and it’ll get done, and be nearly perfect and free of error, at minimal cost in time and materials.
Following the Fukushima accident and consequent pause in approvals for new plants, the target adopted by the State Council in October 2012 became 60 GWe by 2020, with 30 GWe under construction. In 2015 the target for nuclear capacity on line in 2030 was 150 GWe, providing almost 10% of electricity, and 240 GWe in 2050 providing 15%.
However, from 2016 to 2018 there was a further hiatus in the new build programme, with no new approvals for at least two years, causing the programme to slow sharply. Delays in the Chinese builds of AP1000 and EPR reactors, together with the bankruptcy in the U.S. of Westinghouse, the designer of the AP1000, have created uncertainties about the future direction. Also some regions of China now have excess generation capacity, and it has become less certain to what extent electricity prices can economically sustain nuclear new build while the Chinese government is gradually liberalising the generation sector.
b. Nuclear power is not economically feasible with updated numbers, as evidenced by lazard’s data, for new plants.
I think a reasonable conclusion would be that nuclear has no future. If you disagree,
a. Where are you getting your evidence from? Please link.
b. What reasoning do you use? If the cost of electricity is higher for nuclear, what is going to justify it? National governments can fund inefficient projects but even inefficient governments have limits on what they are willing to throw away (versus a cheaper option on the market) and they have to have a vendor to buy from to buy the reactors.
Why are my appliances allowed to be designed to become landfill? Why isn’t there the digital equivalent of putting stuff you don’t want on the street for people that do want it?
But there is that digital equivalent, it’s called ebay and Craigslist. I have purchased a used washer and dryer for $100, both worked for over a year after. I sold my entire desktop PC for parts on ebay a few months back, receiving $600 for 5 year old hardware, and I put the unsellable metal case on the curb and posted it to Craigslist.
There’s a couple of factors here. One, due to the time value of money, a cheaper appliance now may very well be cheaper, even if it only lasts 5 years, than a more expensive appliance with a longer lifespan. Another is that consumer goods are moving over time, as factories get more efficient, to a model where the cost is the (raw materials + manufacturing cost + IP license). Once manufacturing cost trends near zero—something that machine learning driven robotics should allow in the Soonish future—you are left with raw materials + IP license. Turn in the old one to be recycled, and that just leaves the license. Prediction: the stable way it will work is that products will be rented, not bought, and when the hardware wears out or deprecates you get a ‘free’ or minimal cost replacement. Lower end goods will have a very cheap or free license (open source) and will cost almost nothing, although they will be years behind the state of the art. Present example is the raspberry pi, which is a computer that would have been decent 15 years ago for as little as $5.
Why don’t they put nuclear reactors underground?
I found this paper, but I think the reason here is simple. There are many possible improvements to nuclear reactors. Each has a development cost. And a development risk. And nuclear is already too expensive to be viable, probably from now until the singularity*. So there is simply not the market scale to develop any substantial improvement to the existing examples that we have now. Scale matters—if it costs say the cost of 10x nuclear reactors to design and debug a new form of nuclear reactor, and you earn 10% profit on each reactor you build, you need a market size of 100 over say 10 years or it isn’t worth the investment. Right now the market size for new nuclear reactors is 2.
Why is so little of my house designed to be easy clean and filth repelling? Or for that matter, easy to alter and upgrade? Why isn’t there such a thing as house lego where you just have a base with a bus of utilities on which you can just arrange some rooms as required?
I agree with this but I think that the fundamental problem is local building code and permitting systems. If the system were national, then lego-like modules would have a market because it would be worth the investment to build the factory and distribution system to make them cheaply, given you could use the modules anywhere. But here local committees might vote down the modular house simply because the logical modules are rectilinear, and the resulting structure would be ‘too boxy’. Or because it has electrical runs with the wrong kind of wiring. (most places, romex in walls is ok. Chicago: conduit only)
*definition of the singularity : self amplifying cascade of algorithms and AI hardware, with the endpoint of intelligent systems that are asymptotically limited by physics. At which point, you can ask/command such a system to develop a new nuclear reactor and it’ll get done, and be nearly perfect and free of error, at minimal cost in time and materials.
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Craigslist has a free section.
Globally nuclear is also nearly dead.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/
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From wikipedia:
Following the Fukushima accident and consequent pause in approvals for new plants, the target adopted by the State Council in October 2012 became 60 GWe by 2020, with 30 GWe under construction. In 2015 the target for nuclear capacity on line in 2030 was 150 GWe, providing almost 10% of electricity, and 240 GWe in 2050 providing 15%.
However, from 2016 to 2018 there was a further hiatus in the new build programme, with no new approvals for at least two years, causing the programme to slow sharply. Delays in the Chinese builds of AP1000 and EPR reactors, together with the bankruptcy in the U.S. of Westinghouse, the designer of the AP1000, have created uncertainties about the future direction. Also some regions of China now have excess generation capacity, and it has become less certain to what extent electricity prices can economically sustain nuclear new build while the Chinese government is gradually liberalising the generation sector.
Bolding added by me. Please view this chart here : https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020/
Based upon the evidence that
a. China is greatly slowing their plans
b. Nuclear power is not economically feasible with updated numbers, as evidenced by lazard’s data, for new plants.
I think a reasonable conclusion would be that nuclear has no future. If you disagree,
a. Where are you getting your evidence from? Please link.
b. What reasoning do you use? If the cost of electricity is higher for nuclear, what is going to justify it? National governments can fund inefficient projects but even inefficient governments have limits on what they are willing to throw away (versus a cheaper option on the market) and they have to have a vendor to buy from to buy the reactors.