So wildly inaccurate. If you disconnect yourself from the cable news outrage pornography cycle you'll find most things that actually impact you happen at the state and local level. A lot of spooky things on the TV to be afraid or mad about, but for the average person there is vanishly little real effect.
They're also speedrunning a world class power distribution system and deploying a massive amount of renewable power amoung a whole mess of other infrastructure. They've got the ability to focus an entire nation into achieving technical goals and they're rapidly improving quality of life in average while maintaining an industrial base that the US can only remember fondly. They might not meet western standards for individual freedoms and rule of law, but they're undoubtedly a rising world power.
The problem is that this is a decision that costs money. Relying on a system that makes money by doing bad things to do good things out of a sense of morality when a possible outcome is existential risk to the species is a 100% chance of failure on a long enough timeline. We need massive disincentives to bad behavior, but I think that cat is already out of its bag.
I appreciate that the HN community values thoughtful, civil discussion, and that's important. But when fundamental civil liberties are at stake, especially in the face of powerful institutions and influence from people of money seeking to expand control under the banner of "security", it's worth remembering that freedom has never simply been granted. It has always required vigilance, and at times, resistance. The rights we rely on were not handed down by default; they were secured through struggle, and they can be eroded the same way.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has that acronym for a reason.
I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?
I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?
I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.
Bulk hydrogen makes a lot less sense than pumping water up a hill. We have thousands and thousands of sites throughout the country that would be great for pumped storage and require absolutely no advanced technology. They are buildable today.
I guess that with "throughout the country" you mean the US? There, building gigantic new pumped storage systems might work, e.g. somewhere on a mesa in a desert with few people living nearby (OTOH you need some source of water for pumped storage too, so a desert location is not really ideal), but in more populated locations (i.e. Europe) such a project would face opposition and interminable delays caused by all the NIMBYs living next to it.
Besides that: pumped storage is good for regulating short-term fluctuations (between day and night), not so sure about storing surplus renewable energy produced in summer to use it during winter, as the article proposes?
Location, location, location - there are many sites globally suitable for geological bulk hydrogen storage; the UK has had the Tesside site operational until recently since the early 1970s.
They were built 50 years ago. (Slightly before today).
Scaling that up to the energy storage potential of the right geological structures of the sizes needed to power cities and run heavy industrial isn't as economically clearcut as you may assume.
This isn't a good thing unless it's paired with storage and transmission upgrades. Every time this kind of story posts I make this same comment and am met with the same probably well-meaning but ignorant responses. Solar generation is easy and cheap and simple. Actually getting that power where it needs to be, when it needs to be there is complex and expensive. You either need to store it or you need to transmit it very long distances, neither of which we can do effectively right now. Most of California routinely goes into negative power pricing - this is not the mark of a healthy system, it represents a massive inefficiency and destabilizing factor.
We need to pressure politicians to subsidize pump storage powerplants and massive transmission system upgrades (which means being ok with permitting new transmission lines) it's simply impossible to continue increasing the solar on the grid otherwise, we are rapidly approaching instability.
That 'crazy' amount is not even scratching the surface of the surface of what we would need for a high-solar grid, let alone a majority solar grid. Not even within an order of magnitude. You don't have to take my word for it, the CAISO literally provides the data.
How much more do we need? 2x the capacity? 5x? 10x? The state has added a ridiculous amount of battery over the last couple years so it doesn't seem intractable
I remember looking at CAISO's graphs a few years ago and when the sun goes down we were basically completely dependent on imports and natty gas, especially for scaling up to demand around 6-7pm. Looking at today's graph, batteries were actually our top electricity source for a while around peak electricity time. Natty has been able to stay pretty flat, and even now its neck and neck with batteries
The nice thing about HN is how often posts like this are right in the top of the comments to tell you why the sensational content isn't worth your time.
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