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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1746 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

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One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.

I know what you mean, but right now we're seeing everywhere around the world that capitalism can also do stuff just from the supply side. Solar and batteries are getting so cheap (especially in grids that are still below 50% renewable), they are displacing almost all new generation capacity. Once that capacity is online and starting to get amortized, electricity prices should drop, which will bring up demand. It's the slow way, but it should work. Historically, cheaper energy has always resulted in people ending up spending MORE money on energy - because it gets used for so much more things.

My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands.

This is certainly true, but I'm not convinced nuclear ever had a chance against the fossil capacity of the past and the renewable capacity of the future. Reactors are large and complex, and such projects often resist scaling laws (see also: housing, hospitals, dams, bridges). I'm curious to see what the Chinese manage to do with their modular reactors. I'm skeptical: nuclear reactors work better if they are large. But making them in a factory might unlock some extreme efficiency gains. We'll see.

I hate using the word "hope" for this, because I honestly just want human society in general to produce a lot of energy as efficiently as possible. But I hope that wind and solar build-outs slow down, if only for aesthetic reasons. I think they take up too much space relative to a nuclear plant's output.

I know intellectually this planet has so much space it shouldn't matter at all, and that we're generally smart about where we put these generation centers. But from an emotional standpoint, I prefer to leave even sparsely populated or classically ugly landscapes as untouched as possible. When I see massive solar or wind farms, I can't help but shrink back a little (admittedly more for the former than the latter).

I'd love it if Solar were something we could realistically just put on top of already industrialized space and be successful, and if offshore wind farms were more viable.

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