for state or local restrictions, they’ll just build elsewhere. as far as nationwide–very unlikely that anything happens.
You just really need the local restrictions, after all the data center need to be somewhere. If you get a no from any place you try, it effectively stop you.
As nationwide, given how the US people thinks, I do not think that a “fuck the locals government, we override them” will fly.
Go try to buy a human organ. It may not be impossible to stop you, but it sure is hard to accomplish and you take a pretty big risk of prison time.
Yes, you can effectively stop people from spending their money on bad things. Money isnt a god.
I get your thinking but you out of target: I am talking about something legal (buy billboards or TV times) and you about something illegal, it is not the same thing.
It is like buying cocaine and a boat: you can stop me from buying cocaine because it is illegal but you would have a hard time to stop me from buying a boat, which is legal even if you don’t like boats.
Bad things means illegal things, not things that you don’t like.
And how can be illegal to say that you support some politician and buy with your own money at your own name a billboard to write “support [candidate] because he is awesome”. ?
No, it is a lucid analysis of what could happen.
In the end there is no way you can stop someone from spending their money how they want, I am sure you understand that. And this is true for everyone, not only billionaires.
You can stop donating to parties (in my country you can donate to a party only a very small amount) but what it would be really antidemocratic would be to decide how someone can or cannot use their money.
No, you cannot.
Blocking the donations to a party does not stop a billionaire to spend his money to push for a specific law proposed from politician, you simply change the way it happen.
And you also don’t stop billionaires to ask for a specific law, a billionaire could simply say that he will support the proposer of a law he is interested in, politicians will learn fast that if they propose a law some billionaire like (ask) such billionaire will use his money to push for this politician election.
In all this you don’t donate a single dollar to the party.
Looking for an alternative to Google, this reminded me to look into Waze. And, wtf, I was not aware of the history of waze. I feel like I’ve caught an unregulated Wikipedia edit, too.
Everything else aside, did not Google acquired Waze in 2013 ?
False accusation is one of the more difficult things to write laws for, because it’s very difficult to prove.
In case of shoplifting is extremely easy: you accuse me of stealing an item, you check me and I have not the item, you accused me falsely, I can sue if I want (but more probablu I will just stop to shop at your place) and you handle the accusation badly.
Not rocket science.
Remember that this people exist in US…
You cannot really block these things unless you want to decide how someone can use his own money.
I agree that lobbying should be illegal (basically I see it as legalized corruption) but in the end Brin could simply had bought billboard on every street or commercial time on TVs and newspapers.
I think that the problem is that big companies have made “an offer they cannot refuse” regarding the problem of AI cloning commercial products.
Not sure that a surcharge so low could do something, you sell the game at 2 Euro and you need just to sell 50 copies to break-even, it does not seems a target that high for crapware.
Or maybe it is why you should not use NASA as a piggy bank for politicians.
And more expensive games (who do you think will pay the 150K in the end ?) and a goodbye to Indie studio or solo developers.
Yep, so why we would be a problem to store waste from a nuclear plant (which I suppose would be less then what the hospitals produces).
Fun fact: at the end of 2025 (so last year) Italy has increased radioactive waste by volumes which then have a lower radioactivity, so maybe even the radioactivity of the waste is a problem that is going to be solved
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage
We can safely store nuclear waste. What do you think happens to all the radioactive waste produced by hospitals ?
One thing is to build them, another thing is if once built they deliver
First, you don’t have to install the solar capacity in one huge blob.
We are comparing a nuclear power plant with renewables, it make sense comparing them this way.
Solar farms also don’t have to be the only use of the land. You can still farm crops that like shade, you can hold cattle, build the energy storage right beneath the solar farm, a car park or what have you. There is also a lot of currently “wasted space”, such as roof tops or existing car parks.
Partially true. but still, we are comparing solar with a nuclear plant not with a distributed system.
Obviously you can make some use of the land under the panels but you still need the same surface if not more.
There are also swimming solar pannels that have the added benefit of keeping lake temparatures in check in the summer. You also have wind turbines that can contribute their fair share to the energy mix. So no, you don’t need to build huge over-capacity
You still need over-capacity unless you are planning to use some other sources during the night. If your needs is 1000 MW/h during the day and 300 MW/h during the night, during the day you need to generate the power you need and all the energy you will need for the night. It is the reason why if I put solar panels on my roof the system come with batteries.
and you don’t need to bulldoze huge swaths of land to install solar.
Yes if you want to make a comparison with a power plant, no if you talk about distributed installations (roofs and so on) but at this point you are comparing apples with oranges.
And the price to build solar and battery storage is still going down.
True, but this is the same as saying “some technology will solve the problem in the future”. What is the cost now to build a plant based on renewables source that can be a drop-in replacement for a 1000 MW nuclear power plant ?
Where are the nuclear plants that use “safer fuels”?
Thorium for one.
Renewables are cheaper to build and run, meaning that renewable energy is always cheaper than nuclear power. You’d need to artificially limit the amount of renewables companies are allowed to build or subidize nuclear, otherwise renewables will price nuclear out of the market.
As I said, cost is not the only factor. Renewables are cheaper, but less than you think when comparing the output, but they have other limitations: solar is good only by day and the generation highly depends on how much sun is out, now panels can produce even if not in optimal exposure but of course they produce less; wind turbines have a range of wind they can be used else they broke for example.
You can combine them, it is the most intelligent thing to do honestly, but if you want to use only renewables you need to generate more power than you need and then store the surplus to be used when it rain or there is not (or too much) wind.
No, solar farms don’t need centralized grids nearly as much as nuclear power does. What is much more important for renewables is monitoring the local grids, so they don’t get overwhelmed by people providing power to the grid with their solar pannels.
Still, you are comparing a single nuclear plant with a distributed system.
To the grid a nuclear power plant and a solar farm are no different: both introduce 1000 MW/h in the system.
In both cases you have a single point of entry to the grid and what is behind this point is irrelevant: you can also have an army of hamsters on wheels.
What are you saying is the obvious thing: if we had n-thousand entry point we need to monitor the grid but even this is not dependent on how you produce the power. If you connect to the grid n-thousand 1 kW/h gas generators you have the same problems.
And people already absolutely do provide power to the grid with their own solar pannels, you denying that just shows that you haven’t mich thought about/experienced local “grass roots” energy production.
In Italy we’ve been doing this for ages, at the time we were even paid to provide the surplus to the grid. It is nothing new to me.
And like I said in other comments already, hydrogen/natural gas power plants are a much better fit to handle extended lulls in wind and solar.
Maybe natural gas, not hydrogen at the time
Nuclear is simply incompatible with renewables, if the price tag is of any concern to you. Nuclear reactors take long and cost a lot to build, still aren’t cheap to operate if you include the infrastructure cost of getting, handling and storing the fuel, can’t respond to chaning demand quickly and are centralized.
The fact is that the price tag is not the only factor.
It is true that a 1000 MW nuclear plant cost about 10 times the equivalent solar field (about 6-9 billions for the nuclear plant Vs about 800 millions for panels) but at this point you use about 15 square Km to just match the output of the nuclear plant, with no storage, and only in the best case scenario.
In a real case scenario the price tag of building a solar field that could replace a nuclear plant is probably not that different anymore.
To produce the same amount of power in every condition you could not install the exact amout of panels, you need way more (double ? triple ?) with the associated costs and space requirements.
And then you need batteries to be able to offer energy also at night and to store energy for the days when the sun is not enough to produce the energy required.
I would say that to match a nucler plant a solar field would cost about half of it for the same power generation but with the additional problem that you need way more space, which itself is a cost.
Nuclear power plants need subsidies over their whole life, mainly to handle the risk inherent with nuclear fuel and the finincial risk of having to handle spent fuel for centuries to come.
We have nuclear power plants that uses less problematic fuel which is easier to handle and less risky.
Nuclear power plants need to run at full power, which costs money every time renewables are pushing the energy price into the negatives.
True, but when the renewables are not producing enough ?
Nuclear power plants need a centralized power grid.
Like a solar farm.
Renewables work in exactly the opposite way. They are cheap to build and maintain, they are variable and decentralized. So to use renewables effectively, you need to build a decentralized grid and ideall, on-premise energy storage.
No, they work in the exactly same way. What is different is that renewables can be made decentralized. Solar panels on the roof produce only for the house, not for the power grid (even if you can connect them to the grid to fill in the surplus).
I think you are comparing a nuclear plant with the small panels you install on your roof but you cannot make such comparison.
So the energy grid of the future will be purpose-built to accomodate renewable energy.
As far as I remember, what was told me when I worked in the field was that power grids does not care about the source, only the power: a power grid do not care if the 10 Gw power it transfer comes from a nuclear plant, a solar farm or from a squirrel on a wheel.
And the grid is already ready, we are already able (ok at least here) to send to the grid the surplus generated by the solars panels on the roof. And adding the batteries will not require anything done on the grid itself (at least this is what my collegues said).
Trying to force nuclear energy generation into that mix only makes sense, if you have a clear, non-monetary reason to do so, like enriching uranium for bombs. For strictly commercial use, nuclear power is dead.
What about being sure that a 5 days of bad weather cannot stop a society ?
Cost is the single largest factor in the deployment of new power plants, and solar is just impossible to match right now.
I would say that even availability is an important factor, maybe more important then the mere price.
Maybe cheaper in money terms, not others, first of all space.
But how much would cost to build a solar farm with the same output of a nuclear plant, both on days and night ?
And I agree, but now the problem is: why or how do you think you can stop someone to spend his money on something legal ?
To solve the problem you mention you should make donating to a party illegal again and at the same time to make illegal to buy billboards or tv spots to say you support this or that politician.
In the end there are a lot of ways I can support a politician in legal ways even without donating to his party, stopping all these ways simply means that you decide how people can spend their money while making illegal a lot of things.
Say that a county support a given politician: how can you stop a billionaire to donate a new school to the county ? Do you think it is a good idea to make this illegal ?