SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
> So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
True. But France is 70% nuclear plus 15% renewables, with the remainder 5% fossil. In 2026 South Australia was 75% renewables, and 25% CCGT (gas turbine - fossil).
So France is 5% fossil vs SA's 25%, and accordingly has 1/5 the CO2 intensity. No mystery there - and obviously has nothing to do with nuclear vs renewables.
SA says they will hit 100% renewable in next year. [0] I struggle to believe that, but 95% at some point seems likely given the price of CCGT.
Sweden has been phasing out nuclear for 40 years, after a referendum where the people had the choice of "No nuclear!", "No nuclear", and "No nuclear". There was no "yes".
It's been phasing out nuclear since then.
Nowadays the Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are the only ones against nuclear power, but thanks to the left block winning the recent election, they may push that one issue enough that they get to continue the destruction of our planet.
Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are against nuclear because: ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons. They conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy
Sweden is currently using almost none natural gas for electricity production. How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity? wind+natural gas? New hydro dams?
> [the two parties] conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy
I would never associate these two parties with competence or intelligence, and there
certainly are people who think that a power plant is basically a bomb.
But no, their rhetoric against nuclear power today is at least ostensibly environmental. Well, as it's becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that environmentally it's at the very least the least bad option, they are shifting into trying to make it about economics. Of course completely ignoring that they want to price in (like in this thread) insurance with nuclear, but don't want to price in environmental damage of the alternatives.
How much does nuclear power cost? Well, it was literally illegal in Sweden to run those calculations until 2006. Could criminalizing thought for decades maybe drive up the costs, once the law is repealed?
> New hydro dams?
Unlikely. It's already built out where feasible and economical. And besides, the Greens would block new hydro at scale because of their environmental impact.
> How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity?
Most common argument I see is "we'll just import it", which is just greenwashing since that comes from fossil fuels.
> ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons.
I don't see the contradiction. USSR took 10% of Finland in living memory, hell that was just single digit years before Sweden started looking into becoming a nuclear state. The Baltics were under USSR control too, and during the cold war they (USSR) seized Swedish ships in international waters and killed and otherwise "disappeared" the crew.
I find the article you linked complete garbage. It's viewing 1940s defence choices through a 2020s post-nonproliferation treaties and post MAD game theory lens.
But even if we do that, would it be un-peaceful to have deterrence? Sweden preemptively surrendered to Germany in WW2 (a bit of hyperbole, and doesn't account for secret allies collaboration), rather than have the country destroyed. Having a nuclear deterrence would mean not having to surrender again, when the Russian comes.
Hopefully NATO membership has the deterrence without the drawback. But of course NATO wouldn't be NATO without its nuclear members. And with the US becoming unreliable, Sweden's defence is still backed by the nuclear agreement with France. So own nukes or not, at least by treaty Sweden still has nuclear weapons as deterrence. Is it really vital to discuss the operational control? If that's the sticking point, then fair enough. I'm not saying it's NOT a difference.
A better critique of Sweden is its relatively huge arms exports. But that too is not black and white. Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war).
It's a strange affair when swedish leftists are the economically responsible parties and the right wing wants to use government subsidies to prop up an industry which is not economically viable compared to all the other electricity generating methods are cheaper and easier to implement.
I know HN comments should be more constructive than that, but your comment is setting all these trumpesque fires in the form of lies, that no constructive debate or rebuttal would be useful. You would not be convinced, and anybody reading the back and forth would be under the misapprehension that "the truth is probably somewhere in between".
I know there was a bit of liberty with the phrasing that the leftish parties in Sweden aren’t always considered the strongest on the economic arena. But that was not my main point, and sorry if I stepped on your toes. My main point is that all science and facts point to the truth that NPP are not economically viable without significant government subsidies. No matter how much I (and perhaps you?) want NP to succeed, it should do it on a level playing field compared to the other energy industries it should never do that with unfair advantages not offered to others.
While we may not disagree on the base facts, I don't think that's a fair characterization. First of all, you say that there have never been solar panel subsidies, which of course there have been. So the advantage has most certainly been offered to non-nuclear.
By law, opting in to "green energy" on your personal electricity means to have a definition that excludes nuclear, so that's government steering of the market towards non-nuclear green energy. Certainly qualifies as incentive, if not downright subsidy by manipulating market forces. (I even contacted my energy provider saying I would gladly check a box if it included nuclear. They said it was out of their control)
Of course on oil lots more has been spent fighting over the resources. For a given country the cost of acquiring the resources may be more political than directly monetary. But I don't think you're defending fossil fuels, so I probably don't need to argue that being controlled by Russia has a cost.
Now, if nuclear is not economical as base load, I'd like to see a comparison with solar & wind for base load compared to nuclear. And it should be a calculation for the (very nearly) 100% use case. So comparing like for like. The cost of wind&solar is extremely different if aiming for 90 or 99.999%.
Some Greens say "shrug, what's so bad about power outages?" (yeah, good luck with that). Some say "we'll just import in the greater European grid!" (greenwashing).
> not economically viable without significant government subsidies.
Nor is gasoline or road maintenance. I'd like to price in those externalities first.
Oh, and as for the left-ish opinion in this issue. IIRC only Greens and Communists were actually against nuclear. The big one (Social Democrats) manifesto could be summarized as "Well, we're pro-nuclear, but we know we have to give that up because we need Greens & Communists to be able to form a government". It was very transparent.
Amazon has sold an estimated 70 million Kindle readers.
Ebook sales are at least 20% of book sales.
I read 60+ books a year. Almost all on my Kindle. My partner and my sister are similar. I know of one person who has bought a Kindle and not used it much.
Australians alone are reading 1.6 billion pages a month on Kindles.
I'd be surprised if a lot of people aren't like myself. I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.
Saying that, I rarely buy ebooks. I generally 'find' them online but only if I own the actual physical book. If I don't have the physical book whilst I'm travelling, I'll buy the eBook and then I'll usually buy the physical book too.
> I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.
Same. I prefer hardcovers, I usually look for first editions, etc. I'd prefer not to lug them around so I also have a kindle for if I want to read away from home. I usually borrow the ebooks from my library though when the ones I want are available so I'm not buying twice.
I don't think I could ever get rid of physical books entirely though. There's a somatic element to reading that I appreciate that you lose entirely with an ereader.
I didn't read OP's remark as "few people make long use out of e-readers," but rather "many more people have e-readers and don't use them," which I'm willing to believe but don't have any evidence of. At the very least it's likely to reflect the case with physical books. The people who don't read you don't hear as much from.
I don’t have any data, it just feels like a lot of my friends who got kindles for birthdays or Christmas would use it for a week and then then it would sit in a drawer for the remainder.
To be fair, I don’t think most of those friends actually read that much though.
AIUI the problem is the economics are pretty unfavorable for smaller-scale prototypes due to square-cube issues (drag and thus fuel costs is proportional to cross-sectional area, lift and thus cargo capacity is proportional to volume). You'd need a very big airship to get a competitive economic niche between sea and traditional air freight, where you're faster and more flexible than sea transport and cheaper than traditional air freight.
Hmm. Couldn't you put solar panels on top for power (and fly above the clouds) + use some sort of sail when wind is available? It might be really slow, but if you can get the systems to be fully autonomous (no people needed to pilot it) and need very little / no fuel... then couldn't it become a rather cheap way to ship things that aren't urgent?
There is another niche if you make them several miles long and width. Then can use more conventional construction materials like a concrete shell. (We are of course not ready for that)
We should first build the floating cities. Some old ships welded together surrounded by styrofoam in nets with mud on top and Mangroves, lots of Mangroves... Neptune's park.
You have. That airship's maiden voyage was in 2012. The US DoD has pretty much never stopped throwing a few dollars at airship projects. They want them as long term air reconnaissance assets, but now satellites are competitive for that.
Former Loring Air Force base in Limestone Maine has been the home of airship projects of various kinds since the 2000s. I got to see a few.
Yes, I agree on Andor. But that was a quiet side-project done by good people, and not the main focus of Kathleen Kennedy and her recruits. Both it and Rogue One were made by Tony Gilroy.
Remember the Internet.org and FreeBasics movement which was used to muddy the Net Neutrality waters? Guess which startup was excited about Internet.org
> Onavo’s founders, Guy Rosen (CEO) and Roi Tiger (CTO), are on board with the plan. “We’re excited to join their team,” the two wrote, “and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share. When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.”
Latvia, Rusia, Estonia and Switzerland have a higher modal share of freight than the US.
But the US is higher than the countries many people think about when they think about Europe in Germany, Italy, France, the UK and others. Which is really significant. US freight rail is also super efficient and cost competitive.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly
France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.
So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...
This is despite increasing solar.
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