Takes about a week for the new cleanness to wear off, usually. We try to keep him out of the rain, that would ruin him immediately.

Smells better afterward.

They mean that encryption/decryption takes place on the source and destination devices, so in theory the servers and attackers in the middle can't read the traffic.

In practice, whoever holds and applies the keys can read the traffic. So if your end device is using code from the server to do this, potentially the server could give you malicious code and read your traffic. The solution is to have the encryption and the storage/transport done by different companies or projects. Use an encryption package such as PGP or Mailvelope, and then a service such as normal email.

We have or will have N types of renewable generation (hydro, solar PV, solar-thermal, solar-hydrogen, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, maybe biomass, maybe some kind of engineered plant things generating electricity, who knows) and M types of storage (pumped-hydro, thermal, P forms of chemical battery, hydrogen, gravity, flywheel, bio-fuel, compressed-air, who knows). Fairly soon they will give us costs lower than nuclear, and far less climate damage than fossil. We won't be "constraining" ourselves much by using a mix of the best choices, instead of trying to keep an also-ran tech such as nuclear on life-support.

Distributed, cheap, steadily-getting-cheaper renewables and storage are even better ways to get "known quantities" that Russia can't affect.

That time was for the first reactor, not four. And it's one plant, not four plants.

Sure, a non-democratic govt will be able to do things faster and thus cheaper. No lawsuits, no loss of focus or change of policy. But even they can't do nuclear quickly and cheaply.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates#Barakah_nuclear_power_plant , it looks like the first reactor was scheduled to produce in 2017, but didn't start producing until mid-2020. That's 8 years after start of construction. Price tag for 4 reactors is somewhere from $20 to $30 billion. I wouldn't call that either quickly or cheaply.

Nuclear is costly even in countries that are very much in favor of it.

We can have diversity while only using renewables and storage; we have a wide range of types of them, with more being developed.

I wouldn't bet against another few decades of cost decreases in renewables and storage. Graphene, organics, new catalysts, bio-fuels (not corn ethanol), flow batteries, all show a lot of promise.

> the past year’s supply chain disruptions have made nuclear more appealing, showing just how volatile energy prices can be.

Um, a tech that requires many years or a decade to build, and then 20-40 years to operate to be profitable, is a good fit for "volatile energy prices" ?

Well, you do need inverters and grid-tie and space and permits etc.

One problem is that you're trying to compete in a market where costs of renewables and storage decrease every year. You can't just hold steady with cost and schedule, you have to be something amazing. And steam-based nuclear never will be that.

I think they're still at the "demonstrating that we can heat and contain plasma" stage, not any kind of energy production.

> Purely due to over burdensome regulatory compliance.

No, it's happening even in countries which are VERY much in favor of nuclear.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220112-france-s-new-generation-nuclear-plant-delayed-again

Batteries have greatly improved in performance and cost, and we're deploying them at utility-scale. And chemical battery is far from the only form of storage.

No, nuclear inherently is a complex, ponderous, costly technology. Unless there's a major breakthrough and someone invents fusion-direct-to-electricity, no steam plant involved, nuclear will dwindle and become niche.

We're going to end up paying trillions to remediate climate change damage. We can afford to deploy renewable energy. It will be more at a neighborhood level than in one huge installation for the whole world. We can deploy solar PV on frameworks above parking lots and roads and flood basins etc, for example.

He said "100 miles square" (https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-requires-100-miles-square-of-panels) which is 10,000 sq miles.

Better to put them in neighborhood "farms", maybe above parking lots or roads or flood basins. Easier to install and maintain and upgrade.

Nuclear is losing the cost competition, and every trend line says the gap will get worse. And expecting some new nuclear tech to arrive in some reasonable time and hit its cost targets is unrealistic. The industry has a long history of schedule slips and cost overruns, sometimes by big factors.

> we need a better battery chemistry... and we need it quick.

Multiple are being developed, some have been deployed (e.g. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/03/sodium-sulfur-battery-in-abu-dhabi-is-worlds-largest-storage-device/). But we don't need them "quick"; we have plenty of room for more renewables in existing grids before we absolutely must have storage.

Better to put solar PV on light frameworks above parking lots, roads, road medians, etc. Easier to install and maintain, and we have plenty of space there.

I want my web site to survive me for several decades, and even this is hard to arrange.

No, don't give up. At least say "I disagree with you because of fact X" and then stop there. It's worthwhile to let them know you disagree, give them a fact that they may chew on, and let anyone else listening hear the same.

I thought much of the value was in the crawler behind the search, not the search (page) itself. I see no reason to think that Google's AI on top of Google's crawler won't be dominant.