kravietz

kravietz, 5 hours ago

@partizan

The fun part with the BBC map is that it reflects… neither - that is, neither international law, nor actual control :)

kravietz, 5 hours ago

@partizan

BTW I can understand the Natural Earth disputed policy - they don’t judge, they just describe the actual state on the ground. The interpretation is up to the application maker but e.g. if you’re doing a car navigation app you don’t want your user to drive into a militia blockpost arguing “oh but my map shows this as free territory” and get shot the next second.

kravietz, 5 hours ago

@DE8AH You’re right, I corrected it. In general, we always want to look at lifecycle.

kravietz, 5 hours ago

@DE8AH

Because the former is a median value of various global nuclear power LCOE studies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies

And HPC £130/MWh is a specific business arrangement for a specific contract in a specific country for a specific company building it and operating according to a specific business model. But the consequence of the very definition of median is that there’s also projects with LCOE much lower than $60/MWh, for example for Olkiluoto 3 it was around 40 EUR (and that was including all the delays etc), because Finland secured a very rigid contract where the supplier was paying for any losses while UK seems to be mostly interested in pleasing foreign investors.

But using this case to bash nuclear power in general makes just as much sense as bashing public water utilities for how troubled British water companies are.

kravietz, 3 hours ago

@DE8AH

You are right, it was not LCOE but production cost - I think your quote comes from Wikipedia article, where it was previously described as LCOE but must have been refined as production cost since I’ve last seen it.

Still, the median value in the range of $65 (IPCC 2014) and $69 (NEA 2020) still holds.

My point was more in that neither UK nor US are good examples due to their obsessive fixation on private funding and ownership of the plants. Neither example should be generalised on the nuclear power in general, because it has nothing to do with nuclear power or water utilities themselves, but is caused by specific market failures in these countries.

kravietz, 3 hours ago

@DE8AH

Private funding implies loan rates which must ensure investor’s profit and commercial-driven discount rates. External costs (externalities) are typically ignored by commercial funding, unless enforced by regulation.

But the discount rate has a dramatic impact on the LCOE especially as these projects usually span decades. This is discussed in great detail in the latest NEA report (2020), Chapter 5, page 84 (chart taken from there).

https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_51110/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020-edition?id=pl_51110&preview=true

The result of using private funding of long-term infrastructure projects - and it’s the same case for nuclear as for hydro or wind or PV farms - is that for most of their life they’re just paying out the interest, which can take up to 60% of the total cost project.

kravietz, 3 hours ago

@DE8AH

In general, for socially beneficial infrastructure projects the recommended discount rate is in the range of 1-3% (with commercial often reaching 15%). One such case for nuclear power is discussed here:

https://www.eprg.group.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2013-Text-REV_Apr21.pdf

It was built for the UK and I don’t need to add it was duly ignored 😄 But the same logic was applied to renewables, because it makes just as much sense for any technology that leads to decarbonisation.

kravietz, 1 hour ago

@DE8AH

From this point of view, even a different in VAT rates are a form of subsidy 🤷 But I would argue that talking of “market levels” doesn’t make sense here until you factor in externalities - such as air pollution or carbon emissions. And taxes like carbon tax are a way to factor in these externalities back into the consumer price of the product. But if you accept that notion, then the subsidy is exactly the same mechanism applied to products with potential to reduce externalities, such as low-carbon energy sources.

construction of a nuclear power plant

No, I don’t limit this to nuclear power plants but to all carbon-removing sources.

kravietz, 1 hour ago

@DE8AH

Why Finland should give a loan to anyone? Quite the opposite, the state should hire a company building a plan (wind, solar, nuclear) and pay out of its state budget. There are many different solutions here, such as state-guaranteed loans, if the plant is owned by a state-owned enterprise. But state taking a commercial loan at say 20% APR to build a power plant that boosts the whole economy is just absurd.

kravietz, 9 hours ago

@Properganda

At least in case of #Syria, Assad so far is responsible for 300+ thousands of civilians killed by aerial bombing, chemical weapons and extrajudicial executions:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2023/05/behind-data-recording-civilian-casualties-syria

@nosmaharba @Strandjunker

kravietz, 9 hours ago

@Properganda

No, civilians killed by countries opposing the US are generally to be excluded from any humanitarian outrage. For example, Saddam Hussein killed around 200’000 civilians before he was toppled by the US-led coalition but it’s not really in good tone to talk about this.

@nosmaharba @Strandjunker

kravietz, 5 hours ago

@shanecelis Google does spy through the whole OS (Android) 😎

kravietz, 9 hours ago

@samim

An anecdote from communist Poland 1980’s — my colleague worked at R&D institute and they were blessed by receiving one of earliest IBM PC clones (which were sanctioned due to potential military use, so they were acquired by Polish intelligence). The researchers were very exciting and started playing with it, learned assembly and over months wrote a classic PC demo showing some 3D objects rotating, changing shapes etc. They expected this will have huge potential for future 3D design and wanted to impress the upcoming communist party nomenclature visiting. So the party leadership came, all of them guys in their 60-70’s, and when show the PC demo they were not only unimpressed but quite angry. They said the team should have invested their time in some „tried and reliable” field, such as using the PC to manage some metal processing machines and all this „3D design” is just bullshit and waste of time that is never going to be used practically. Of course, they were all wrong but the R&D team wasted years trying to deliver the 70-years old grandpas’ ideas of retrofitting modern computers into old school metal processing. The West of course developed 3D design for a few years now, which was plagued by may false starts, dead ends and failures, but ultimately delivered a sector that is now worth billions an used everywhere.

I will play devil’s advocate here and argue that there does exist a social model that does „robust, resilient, fail-safe” — it’s called conservatism. The European Middle Ages feudalism was very stable — it survived unchanged for hundreds of years (the earlier Egyptian one survived thousands). But any change, either social or technological requires frequent failures until it converges to some new homeostasis (and sometimes it won’t).

kravietz, 3 days ago

@AubreyDeLosDestinos

Bardzo trafne. Przeczytałem “Mein Kampf” chyba około 2000 roku, potem różne prace Marksa, potem Breivika, Unabombera itd i doszedłem do wniosku, że czytanie tych bredni jest chyba najlepszą odtrutką na takie ideologie. Dzisiaj książka Hitlera jest miałka, niespójna a argumenty w oczywisty sposób naciągane za uszy. To samo dotyczy pozostałych autorów. Cała manipulacja ich współczesnych apologetów polega na tym, że wyciągają jeden cytat sprawiający wrażenie profetycznego ale pomijają całą otaczającą go masę bredni, które nawet uczeń podstawówki dzisiaj uznał by za głupie.

kravietz, 3 days ago

@kallekn

It’s true, but I read it as limited to “West forced Ukraine” claim, implying West’s exclusive influence here. But earlier they wrote the following:

Further, such monocausal accounts elide completely a fact that, in retrospect, seems extraordinary: in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.

I think this “almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war” was a far stretch interpretation by Radchenko and Charap which was unsupported by neither documents nor the events. Unfortunately, it also plays into the Russian narrative, which is why their article caused so much outrage.

kravietz, 3 days ago

@kallekn

He kind of did 😉

kravietz, 3 days ago

@kallekn

That’s all?

Well, you can see for yourself how the Foreign Affairs tweet is formulated, can’t you? Do you see any nuance here? No, it says straight away “could have resulted in a settlement jus weeks after the war began”.

Charap had a chance to correct the wording or comment on it, but he didn’t. If researchers normalize clickbaits, they are themselves become clickbait authors 🤷Because this is literally how Putin and Lavrov could then claim “it’s not even us who said that, it was Western researchers”.

kravietz, 3 days ago

@hlukasz

Wychodząc z takiego założenia można budować mieszkania z instalacją elektryczną na kablach aluminiowych i bez instalacji odgromowej “bo taniej”. Planowanie przestrzenne ma taki sam wpływ na bezpieczeństwo i komfort życia jak przepisy bezpieczeństwa budowlanego bo właśnie ze złego planowania biorą się potem sytuacje, że karetka czy straż pożarna nie może dojechać bo wszyscy parkują wszędzie blokując dojazd. Wrzucanie osiedla na 1000 osób w środek istniejącej dzielnicy bez uwzględnienia miejsca na szkołę, przychodnię, zasilanie w energię i odprowadzanie ścieków skutkuje tym, że standard życia całej dzielnicy spada bo z dnia na dzień staje się ona zakorkowana, są problemy z prądem, wywalają ścieki ze studzienek, a w szkołach dzieci muszą się uczyć na dwie zmiany. Jedyny, kto na tym zarabia to developer, który zgarnia kasę i znika.

Polecam https://czarne.com.pl/katalog/ksiazki/dziury-w-ziemi

@pgronkievitz @czerwiec