IMO, because that way they can claim to landlords they get target ocupancy rates with the higher price; if one landlord in the area knows the price others get, he could try to get higher occupancy rate by lowering his price, aka "competition", by requiring "compliance" to RealPage prices, they are effectively coordinating and price fixing the market, which is the ilegal part. After all, landlords could see regular posing on other channels and adjust their prices in the "normal" way.
Depending on your sector, I would argue that in IT, lives can be at stake. Imagine the IT department of a hospital, a power company, or other vital infrastructure.
Most mitigation tends to be in the form of backup and disaster recovery plans, which, when well implemented and executed, can restore everything in less than a day.
The issue is that some threats can lurk for weeks, if not months, before triggering. In a car analogy, it would be like someone sabotaging your airbag and cutting your seatbelt without you knowing. Preventing a crash in the first place is far more effective and way less traumatic. Even if the mitigation strategy allows you to survive the crash, the car could still be totaled. The reputation loss you suffer from having your database breached can be catastrophic.
Prevention in the car analogy would be like adding a breathalyzer and not allowing it to start if the person in the driver's seat fails.
It's been a gimmick idea for decades but I'm not aware of any car that actually comes with that as a feature. Kinda think there's a reason with how much friction it would add - I just did a quick search to double check and found there are add-ons for this, but without even searching for it most of the results were how to bypass them.
I´m not an expert, but, I remember reading somewhere that Mars does not have enough gravity to support an atmosphere suitable for humans, most water molecules can evaporate "into space". Due to Mars lower gravity 3.71 m/s^2 (roughly 38% of earth´s), its more feasible for "normal" molecules to achieve escape velocity and thus bleed into space....
TBF, Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions and tackle climate change. It is nice to see China go this way, hopefully they will lower their dependency on carbon and fossil fuel sources for energy generation.
If only the rest of the world would also adopt this mentality; Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
I don’t know what you mean by efficient and “cheap” but even China’s lower costs for nuclear construction vastly exceed the cost of wind and PV solar that China is building. They built more renewable power generation capability in just part of 2023, even adjusted for capacity factor, then all 26 reactors they had under construction. All that remains is storage, and China is also massively dropping the prices on battery grid storage.
I would contend the coal lobby successfully killed terrestrial fission power. It would have been a good replacement in the 60s and 70s when solar was still underdeveloped but now solar has worked out enough kinks that it's intrinsic advantages (larger exposed construction surface allows for better parallelization, less significant failure modes allows for weaker regulatory environment, less significant scaling advantages allows for easier "right sizing" of installations, and others) are going to be hard to surmount.
No, solar still hasn't figured out how to replace the power demands of the grid. It can only supply daytime power (if that) and makes the grid more unstable requiring fossil fuel peaker plants to supply gaps in production. Grid batteries are still insanely expensive and remain production capacity limited, not to mention all sorts of other problems that will come up installing that much battery capacity. Solar is only cheaper than Nuclear when you ignore the battery requirements to make it a more fair comparison of ability - when you include battery requirements, solar is more expensive by a fair amount which is ridiculous when you consider that Nuclear has gotten more expensive since the 1960s which doesn't happen to technologies unless you stop producing (which we did).
> Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions
This is false. New nuclear is much more expensive than renewables in most cases. It's possible there are places in the world where renewables are particularly expensive and new nuclear could approach being competitive now, but even that will not last as renewables continue down their inexorable experience curves -- experience curves that nuclear has failed to exhibit.
This comment is being grayed but is it wrong? I want to believe that nuclear is just a miracle solution, but my impression was likewise that it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world
> it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world
Correct with that caveat.
China is able to build it cheaply enough that it rivals solar/wind + gas, which is what the West is doing. (Solar/wind + battery is cute, but it's been crowded out by the quicker-deploying gas infrastructure, as well as the higher prices EV manufacturers are willing to pay for supply. The threat to gas was nuclear baseload, which could support a smaller battery footprint, but the gas lobbyists seem to have successfully dispatched it.)
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(The Henry Hub natural gas price on 6/11/2024 was $2.71/MMBtu, or $2.17/MMBtu in Dec. 2018 dollars.)
Interest in the US "nuclear renaissance" evaporated once it became clear fracking would make natural gas cheap for the foreseeable future. What's interesting about renewables in the US is they are plowing ahead with large deployments even in the face of cheap natural gas.
Sure. They're maxing out production of renewables and supplementing with nuclear. As renewable production ramps, it displaces more nuclear. We're doing the same thing, except with natural gas. If we could deploy infinite renewable energy instantly, that would obviously be preferable. But we can't. So China gets nukes and we get gas. Almost certainly for the next 50 years. (Good luck to whoever has to fight natural gas's lobbyists in ten years when they think the brand-new LNG terminals are going to go down without a fight.)
Nuclear doesn’t provide the kind of dispatchable power you need to supplement a renewable grid. Nuke plants of the type China is building can’t be spun up and down fast enough. China is currently planning to build a renewable grid backed by fossil fuels just like the US, except they’re using modern coal plants (and paying them not to generate) and we’re using gas. Ultimately it seems likely that coal will be replaced with pumped hydro and battery storage as prices drop, and the nuclear plants will have fewer and fewer profitable applications.
But there’s nothing wrong with all that. China conducted a natural experiment with multiple technologies and renewables and storage appear to have won big. The important thing is that those of us outside of China can learn the lessons without having to repeat the experiment.
We (and the Chinese) can deploy renewables (and storage) much faster than nuclear.
I suspect the only reason China is continuing to build NPPs is inertia, and a desire to not amputate that part of their industrial sector. The grandiose plans have been scaled way back. But that can continue for only so long before it's written off.
Total power consumption went down due to industry moving out of the country due to increasing electricity cost due the country exiting nuclear power. It's depressing.
What's depressing is how wrong your comment is. You seemingly ignored the Ukrainian war which has lead to sanctioning Russia and the end of cheap Russian oil and gas in Germany. Spot electricity prices are at pre-war levels nowadays, so whatever lack of nuclear power you are imagining is seemingly irrelevant.
There was a dip due to COVID, and it doesn't help matters that their biggest customer is China, which locked down their population for nearly a year during the pandemic.
Sure, China makes widgets, but Germany makes the robots that make the widgets.
So the link shows in 2001 nuclear generated 482.92 TWh; in 2022 wind plus solar generated 485.12 TWh. Granted coal was down in that time but gas was pretty much flat (except for 2022 when there were extenuating circumstances).
Yes, I realised that while having trouble getting to sleep last night. France produces around 350-400TWh from nuclear, so that should have made me question the number I quoted.
So the graph is a bit misleading in that various qualities of energy are lumped together.
The claim was that Germany has now become dependent on carbon based energy sources, the link I posted shows it has always been dependent on carbon based energy sources. The dependence hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years, it went down a bit but not much.
Oh, come on. Nuclear can't help us because it is too slow to be built out and too expensive today while all renewables technologies are cheaper and on a continued downward price trajectory.
New Nuclear won't matter. Keeping existing running is a no brainer.
But they aren’t. China is building nuclear faster than the West, but they still require seven years per new plant. Their original plan was for nuclear to be 18% of the grid by 2060, but their renewable buildouts have made that number seem much too high. The existing nuclear designs can’t really provide dispatchable power for the vast renewable grid they’re building, either.
The answer for nuclear (if there is one) is factory built SMRs. Those exist in the experimental phases. If SMRs take off, the current designs aren’t going to matter. If SMRs don’t take off, nuclear itself probably isn’t going to matter.
I call them HMRs, Hail Mary Reactors. They're the last gasp before nuclear flatlines. People are proposing them not because they're likely to succeed, but because they're the only option left.
> Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
This bullshit narrative needs to die. Germany is less dependent on fossil fuels than it has ever been before, and weathered the withdrawal from Russian sources without any serious problems.
(And here's where you move the goalposts to "it could be even less less dependent!!")
Electricity costs skyrocketed and manufacturers moved to lower-cost countries. If everyone moved back to farming the land by hand and stoped using tech, they would also be less dependent on fossil fuels but I don't think many want to make that trade.
No, unless you count 2009 as "recently", which was the time when the last coal power plant construction in Germany started (GKM 9). And yes, that was a mistake. But it was certainly not "recently".
In 2020, the last coal power plant was connected to the grid (Datteln 4). It was delayed, as it wasn't clear for quite a while whether it was even legal. But the decisions that have been made to build these plants were made 15-20 years ago.
and also lots of >hazardous compounds such as arsenic, bromide, strontium, mercury, barium, and organic compounds, particularly benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes.
This will likely contaminate the land, rendering it unsuitable for agriculture and, I dare say, potentially transforming it into a barren wasteland incapable of supporting organic life.
Salt will definitely render the land unusable, but most of those other things are the consumer’s problem, not the producer. I find it highly unlikely that governments in Texas will ever successfully prevent a farmer from growing food on poisoned land, for the same reasons that governments in Texas let these wells become seeping messes in the first place.
Nuclear is the future and I would say the only way to achieve a "green" one. There is the issue of spent fuel disposal, but hopefully if fusion technology advances, then even this could be solved.
Also the issue of mining the uranium, which is horrible for the areas mined. Nuclear isn’t an option because of financial reasons anyways and probably never will be, and that’s as a person who loves nuclear and used to be a budding nuclear power plant operator.
Do you have the same opinion about cobalt and lithium mining? Both are also horrendous for the environment and have major recycling issues, but people continue to push for EV's over ICE autos.
>>. Nuclear isn’t an option because of financial reasons anyways and probably never will be
The thing is......the "core" of national energy grid shouldn't operate in the "for profit" model. Any wealthy country should have enough nuclear power stations to be completely independent of any external energy source, even if they lose money operating them. It's a matter of national security, not free market. That's just my 2 cents though.
I personally would like to see that, too, and under the auspices of the naval nuclear program currently running in the USA, however I doubt it’s politically feasible.
It’s too expensive. Every other option is several times cheaper. It’ll never get less expensive because the inherent risks necessitate the expense. These expenses are mostly related to having to plan, construct, and operate a plant with perfection, which costs more than other power generation which don’t have as catastrophic a risk profile. Unfortunately, even with modern reactor designs, the risk remains high, so the cost remains high.
The rules that require perfection are not there because of actual risk. We're past the point where things are already so safe, and releasing so much less radiation than coal plants, that getting stricter just makes the world worse.
But "perfection" is like the shoreline length paradox - once you look deep enough, you will never achieve perfection, it's physically impossible, so all you're doing is making it impossible for yourself to do anything.
Case in point - UK's latest nuclear power plant has been delayed and costs literally billions of pounds more than planned because hairline fractures were discovered in the reactor containment vessel. That sounds bad, right? Anyone who hears "nuclear containment vessel" and "fracture" immediately goes into panic mode and hence why the amount of money being spent on fixing this issue is literally unlimited and the entire project will be massively over budget in every possible way.
But......other nuclear reactors in britain(and in fact across the world) operate with the same fractures in their vessels and it's not considered a reason to shut them down. It's an inevitability of the manufacturing process, the vessel is still strong enough to withstand any kind of situation it could conceivably end up in, so it's literally nothing. But because it "sounds" bad the British public are spending billions to improve something that doesn't need improving, because like you said "Nuclear requires perfection". And I don't disagree with you in principle, but I think we have to acknowledge that perfection has a number of degrees to it.
> other nuclear reactors in britain(and in fact across the world) operate with the same fractures in their vessels and it's not considered a reason to shut them down
This should be viewed as "corrupted regulators" rather than "magically strong materials".
In 1986, the Challenger blew up. We learned that although originally good safety standards had existed, over time a series of small exceptions had been made, each one on the theory that "hey it never blew up yet, a small change won't matter".
Reactor licensing works like that. Sure, the reactor vessel is cracking which was never expected to happen. Sure, the graphite bricks are cracking which was never expected to happen. The important thing is, it never blew up yet, and that means it's perfectly safe to ignore the problems.
At some future point there will be a Problem and it will be dutifully explained that a series of small deviations from safe practices became normalized, blah-blah, and everyone will nod and take the lesson to heart, until it happens the next time.
The thing to ask is whether it's part of the (current) design and fully reviewed by engineers. The original design isn't gospel. What matters is updating the analysis.
Not op, but he is probably referring to the costs of building a nuclear power plant in the US which requires a lot of safety systems, concrete, approval process, etc.... the key is that a coal or gas fired power plant would have the same costs of the steam turbine system but the reactor part of the power plant is vastly more complex in terms of controls and safety compared to a gas or coal fired plant.
Long story short, because of the reduced complexity in powerplants using fossil fuels, they are inherently cheaper per kilowatt. And therefore the more complex nuclear power plant costs more to setup and takes longer... Thus increasing the overhead and therefore rate at which one must charge for the power to be economical
Reflecting on the future intersection of AI and corporate governance, one of my underlying concerns ties directly to the concept of mortality.
Currently, the inevitability of death ensures a natural cycle of change within companies, as departing leaders make way for new visions and ideas. This turnover allows for evolution, adaptation, and sometimes, necessary redirection. However, the integration of AI into these leadership roles introduces the potential for an 'immortal' rigidity.
If AI were to maintain steadfast control, it might anchor organizations to a static set of principles or strategies, lacking the organic, transformative shifts that human mortality inadvertently guarantees.
This challenges us to consider how we might embed adaptability and growth into systems that, by their nature, could become inflexibly eternal.
Such sclerotic are vulnerable to competitors though and can only survive if they are entrenched enough to be able sit out any changes with minimal adaptations, like car makers and the weapons industry.
Universal Paperclips comes to mind.... part of the issue is that companies peruse the goal of infinite growth, yet this stands in contrast and contradiction to the economic maxim of "wants are unlimited, but resources are finite". this relentless chase is fueled and exacerbated by the culture of "disposable" and made worse with planned obsolescence,pushing us to replace products faster than ever. We need to find ways to balance this, in order to achieve sustainable progress.
