this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
35 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2301 readers
25 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Given the state of renewables and energy storage, this feels a lot like the final opportunity for nuclear power in its current state to actually do anything at all, and the “move fast and break things” crowd have no idea about building physical things more complex than a datacentre which honestly, isn’t that challenging in comparison.
Other things that might not last that long include the government of the country in which you’re trying to build massive piece of infrastructure that represents a significant ongoing maintenance burden and risk.
renewable generation, i'm with you, but i'm not sold on storage. i'm not even sure if there's enough lithium for grid batteries to seriously matter, so it might need to use something else. the boring, working option (geographically limited) is of course pumped storage hydro, but other than that, i think that the right way to do things is to use energy when it's made, not when it's needed. in particular, water heaters have tiny duty cycle and hot water just sits there, which means you could, in principle, make it so that water heaters soak up all, or at least as much as practical, of excess power, wherever it is available
some countries do fund nuclear power as a kind of strategic energy independence hedge* no matter costs, most prominently france and russia, and to some degree india and a couple of others
*also for military use
i hear sodium batteries are emerging as an alternative to lithium, but note that I also don’t know shit about this domain
sounds good, no obvious critical materials but also first facilities are just in single MW range and came online like two months ago. needs like four orders of magnitude more. already matches lead acid on durability, still less than li-ion. maybe it's solvable, but in case it's not you can just burn it down because there's nothing worthwhile to recycle and it's nontoxic
this happens a lot. lithium anything has this problem obviously, but so do flow batteries (vanadium or zinc bromide - bromine is commercially sourced just from either dead sea or some american underground brines). some lithium batteries also use cobalt. hydrogen generation or fuel cells use a lot of platinum, (some of) new power electronics are made from GaN. etc etc
We should transition to NIMH technology. As in, let’s experiment on some rats to make them superintelligent and get them to solve all our problems.
nahh first they'll gonna try to build machine god and then any announcement will be in form of 30000 word long notices wait nvm
@swlabr @techtakes
I assume the problems in question are billionaires, and superintelligent rats could probably do a good job of Brown Jenkins-ing them.