Many recent nuclear plants come online years late and many billions over budget. So he'd have a good point.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but nuclear has an absolutely terrible track record. Compared to the things you dismiss that are currently running circles around nuclear in terms of cost, GW delivered, etc. It's outpacing nuclear every year more and more.
If somebody figures out how to do nuclear 10-20 times cheaper and faster, I'm all for it. But so far that doesn't exist.
* fuel sources are finite ( non-renewable )
* disposal of waste is an issue.
* safety concerns makes building very costly ( have to be built to withstand an attack - not just an accident )
* nuclear energy is too adjacent to nuclear weapons for it to be a global solution.
Current nuclear tech is a transitional technology - important for providing base-load, until better storage & better distributed grids are put in place.
Yup, but the reality so sucks that we don't have alternatives proved to be effective in scale. We don't even have renewable energy that is eco-friendly through out its whole life cycle, just yet. Recycling tech is not catching up fast enough.
On the positive side - battery technologies [1] are still improving fast, there is lots that could be done on the energy efficiency side.
While big central powerstations are always going to be needed, I think the future will be more distributed generation and storage than today.
We don't actually have a problem with lack of energy - the problem is capture, storage and distribution.
[1] We need to think beyond just batteries for storage of course.
Seems hard to believe the heat it generates actually warms the planet.
At least something...
How did we circle around to using more material as an impact-reducing measure?
It should be fairly simple to see how a slightly larger input up front could result in less maintenance over time.
I bet no one ever thinks that!
We don’t have new gaming consoles every year, with iPhones being just as locked down, we could have new ones coming out every few years.
For Apple devices especially, this is incentivized by the culture around them - a lot of folks just want the newest.
Update the technology on a regular basis as everyone is on a different purchasing cycle.
It will get resold and reused.
Most people don't upgrade every year, but those that do, typically have a still very good condition and usable second hand device to sell or hand down to another friend/co-worker/etc - that same person would otherwise just have to have bought a new device. So on net, no difference.
I'm sure there are some people that both upgrade needlessly and just let them collect dust but I can't see it being a significant percentage?
(This is coming from someone who had every iPhone from the 3G through to the X on Day 1, though now I am going from a 12 Pro Max to a 15 Pro max :)
I don't upgrade every year and still was able to turn in my previous phone for some hundred bucks so far
> This past week Apple announced its first totally carbon-neutral product, its new Apple watch
I'd be happy if Apple announced an acid-neutral project (not counting other carcinogenic materials used to produce every single component in that device). Plants (even animals and, to some extent, people) can neutralize carbon compounds, but those acids can't.
And let me not start with all the necessary mining and production pollution for batteries and other components no one talks about.
Let's be honest - in terms of reliability, it is very hard to out-compete Apple. What leads you to say they produce substandard products?
If anything, the Apple products I had held their value much better than their Wintel counterparts. Writing this on a MacBook Pro from 2017 for example.
