Me too! I've done several deep dives in various topics just in the last few weeks. I start off with some question I want answers to, and often end up with more questions along the way and I end up learning a ton.
For example I've been enthusiastic about nuclear energy for a long time and I've been wondering why don't we build more of it? It seems like such a great investment, the fuel is extremely cheap compared to the power it produces, even including disposal of waste and everything it seems to me like the best power source we have by far.
I've read things like "it's not economically viable" which I didn't really get - how can it both be cheap clean electricity and not economically viable? It turns out the problem is interest. If you spend $20B building a nuclear plant, you need to make enough money to pay the interest on that $20B. The plant itself will easily make much more than $20B over its lifetime but it won't cover the loan payments unless you can secure a contract with a customer willing to pay a very premium price for stable power for like 20 years.
On the other hand, China builds nuclear plants for like $3B which changes everything. They can do that because they've built lots of nuclear plants, so they have repeatable designs and established supply chains, experienced builders etc. We could do that too and I really think we should (we as in the rest of the world), I think we should invest in nuclear technology to build experience and supply chains etc in order to be able to make the technology economically viable for us. It seems to me that fusion will have exactly the same problem, if we ever even make it work. Good luck building "economically viable" fusion plants, they will certainly be a thousand times more complex than fission plants.
Anyway this wasn't supposed to be a comment about nuclear energy. I also did a deep dive on hydropower based on some claims I heard and learned lots of cool things about that. The LLM found lots of interesting source material for me, including a letter from our ministers of energy and finance talking about a proposed law change that might take effect next year which I would never normally read but since it basically answered many of the questions I had I ended up reading the whole thing and it was super interesting. It's also obviously a lot more credible than just the AI's claims.
Highly recommend trying it out about any topic you may be interested in. I use the free version of ChatGPT. I've also used the Google search AI a lot, I'll basically just Google a question and then proceed to ask followup questions etc.
I'm sure it's not all 100% correct but I'm also quite sure that most of it is pretty good quality, and it really helps when it includes links to sources, I often read the sources instead of the AI summary.
[–] zipy124 4 days ago
[–] sfn42 4 days ago
From the perspective of one company all you get is that one power plant that produces electricity so if that can't pay for itself you can't do it and that's the end of that story. From the perspective of a government you're also creating business opportunities elsewhere, there's a lot of economic activity that arises from these investments that is great for society at large, both on the supplier side in terms of companies delivering materials and components etc and downstream you're producing cheap electricity that can support anything from aluminium production to data centers and whatever else.
And most importantly, to me, it's clean. The only reason fossil fuels are economically competitive is because we're ignoring the future cost those emissions will incur.
If our predecessors played their cards differently, we could today be living in a world with abundant clean energy from nuclear and renewables. We could use this abundant energy to produce hydrogen from water, eliminating most emissions from transport as well - those that aren't already eliminated with EVs.
I have some hope that this vision can be realized, there seems to be movement towards it. Might end up being more about SMRs than large scale reactors though, which I think is a bit sad as SMRs seem to me like they compromise away some of the benefits of nuclear energy to solve the economic viability issue but I guess if they can make them work it's still a big step in the right direction.
This is exactly the sort of investment governments are suited to make since they have access to extremely cheap debt. Or at least they did until recently, though still cheaper than private markets. China has access to debt with interest of only 1.6% which allows these projects to be very viable.