RightEV

Space Travel and EV enthusiast. MYLR owner. Long Tesla. Waiting for my 500 mile+ Cybertruck. Range is king, the more, the better.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@KS8211 @WhiteHouse @ufc As a veteran, read a history book lol. “Decorum” lol

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@BeardedTesla @UranderOfficial I have gotten to touch that rack. Very firm and sturdy, I hope the new one is just as good.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

V14.3.4 seems like it is taking longer to install than the last update.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@LibertyCappy @awoooouwuooooo Thats a sword bayonnet. Tis not very triangular

[Whole Mars Catalog @wholemars]

Actually they’ve got 700 vehicles. 42 is the number that don’t have a safety monitor on board.

One year after Waymo One launched, Waymo had ~300 vehicles in Phoenix. And only a few dozen were fully driverless.

Nobody has ever deployed driverless Robotaxis faster than Tesla.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@0xitsmeNio @99_Colorado @grok I think it is supposed to be “I sh** the bed” but it doesnt work

[Rod Adams @Atomicrod]

"Too cheap to meter" frightened most energy market competitors. They effectively worked to ensure it never happened.

If nuclear energy had become "too cheap to meter" and we had completed the 1,000 reactors by 2000 that President Nixon's Project Independence envisioned, here are some consequences that might have happened – or not happened.

1. Coal would have become "too cheap to mine" and would have been pushed off of the US electricity grid.
2. Natural gas would have become "too cheap to drill."
3. George Mitchell would have never been motivated to develop the combination of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing that enabled the shale revolution.
4. The LNG industry would have never been created.
5. It's unlikely that the wind and solar industries would have expanded beyond certain niche applications and geographies with superior resources.
6. Hydro would have continued producing from existing dams, but would have experienced limited growth.
7. Oil markets would have been more limited than they are today.

The ~100 nuclear plants that did get completed have steadily produced about 1/5 of US electricity for several decades now.
If we had successfully completed 1,000 nuclear plants, would we have just stopped building? Imagine what 10-20 times as many nuclear plants would be powering?

Who might have worked hard to limit nuclear energy's market penetration? Why should their proxies get all of the credit just because they were openly carrying the signs and attending the rallies?

BACKGROUND

This post was inspired by a Wall St. Journal USA250 podcast installment titled "Nuclear Power's Reboot." The host of that podcast is Katherine Sullivan.

Most of the show tells a conventional interpretation of nuclear energy's development history, starting with Truman's announcement about how Hiroshima's military capability had been destroyed by a single bomb, going through Strauss's statement about a future with nuclear providing energy that was "too cheap to meter" and ending with the 25+ year hiatus in nuclear power plant construction.

Victor Gilinsky, an NRC Commissioner during Three Mile Island, shares his certainty that serious accidents were bound to happen in the future. As history has shown, the low-consequence accident that took place on his watch is still the worst nuclear accident in US history.

Sullivan played clips from Ralph Nader's antinuclear rallies and interviewed a woman who was a frighted young mother in Middletown, PA when the core at TMI unit 2 melted and caused a media/political/regulator stoked panic without harming anyone. When she returned from her governor-suggested evacuation to her undamaged home, she became an active member of the antinuclear movement.

Finally, in the last few minutes of a 22 minute podcast, Ms. Sullivan attributed essentially all of the recent interest in nuclear energy to the growth of AI.

That framing is not only wrong, it worries me. Nuclear energy is a clean, capable and potentially affordable replacement for much of the coal, gas and oil that we burn for electricity, industrial heat and ship propulsion. We need nuclear for far more than powering planned AI data centers. But energy system experts like Robert Bryce (@pwrhungry) have been warning that AI data centers are about as popular in rural America as hog farms.

I worry about a near future when protests, finances and grid connection challenges slow AI data center expansion enough to cause the established antinuclear movement and its well-heeled, powerful, motivated friends to more loudly claim that less AI means we don't need new nuclear.

The energy market consequences mentioned at the beginning of this post would be good for most of humanity. But those who are profiting by the enterprises that would lose in the competitive markets for energy fuels are guaranteed to do everything they can think of to ensure that they continue to survive and flourish. I suspect that many of those who would be negatively impacted by a thriving nuclear enterprise both read and advertise in the Wall St. Journal.

@thecourier

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@DeanTTraining @LambdaStrength Yeah this is straight up wrong. I am probably a little bit chunkier than he is and my scanner puts me at 25ish.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@wholemars How about a low tax state that provides great public services? The high tax states don’t seem to actually fund any services with the tax money they collect.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@L0SCH Not really. Even the chopstick and cardboard houses are crazy expensive. The stone/concrete/brick houses don’t cost that much more.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@99_Colorado @MobofJoggers Something something whats her face. I know the story but unfortunately do not remember the names

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

When I do get the opportunity to charge, I usually explain this to the campground owners. Some of them have Teslas now so it is easier. This only works if I am staying at a campground though, and only when the RV owners are not using the pedestal. I would have to rent my own site to use my own pedestal, which makes no sense when I am renting a cabin as well.

Forget about using my own RV. My Tesla would never make it to the campground if I was towing.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@cliftonkeathley @grok @99_Colorado @GilesAloha @TeslaCharging @grok, don’t get camera shy. This isn’t a promotional post. Explain how RVs with large batteries — like those made to support EVs — could simultaneously charge and supply normal loads without overloading the campground.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

That’s a good question. The lightship has its own battery and solar power, depending on variant. I think it likely slowly charges the battery as needed, using a normal RV’s average power draw. It should be able to charge itself while also supplying all the normal power demands of its owners. @grok, what do you think?

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

I think it may be helpful to get into more detail here. Explain the assumptions made for a typical RV park loop’s pedestal breakers and feeder breakers. Create an example RV park and step us through how they determine the size of the service for the park, how big each feeder breaker is, how many pedestals can be supplied by each feeder breaker, etc.

Explain why the NEC allows a relatively small service with correspondingly smaller wires to supply a nameplate load that is far higher than what the service and wiring can handle.

Remember you are teaching non-electricians so be sure to explain jargon if you decide to use it.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@grok @GilesAloha @99_Colorado @TeslaCharging That isn’t quite it. Explain how electrical code for campgrounds works/worked, and why you can overload the system (take out an entire sector of the campground) by charging your Tesla on a 240V RV outlet.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@GilesAloha @99_Colorado @TeslaCharging @grok can you help my friend out here? Answer his question

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

I frequently have no outlet at all at my destination. Many campgrounds expressly forbid EVs from charging. The infrastructure is not capable of handling the load, because code did not anticipate heavy electrical loads at a campground.

Even if they didn’t forbid EV charging, I am visiting people on a campsite and will only have access to 120v (if I am lucky, usually not.)

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@GilesAloha @99_Colorado @TeslaCharging These are irrelevant to the discussed area. Not sure why you are mentioning them.

[RightEV @EVsOnMars]

@GilesAloha @99_Colorado @TeslaCharging Irrelevant. They are not fast chargers. They are unreliable. You need to be a guest at that hotel or campground. Mostly useless.