> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades.
Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways.
My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.
It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.
The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was computing.
Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win.
A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!
Am I the only one annoyed by the continual low-level background radiation (heh) of pro-nuclear propaganda?
It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if we use it to power everything. It'll be coal and oil all over again.
And now we don't need one because solar is already here.
We have less than 100 years of uranium assuming we use enriched uranium once, don't reprocess the "spent" fuel, don't use breeder reactors to make plutonium for further energy production (going from 100 to thousands of years at current usage rates), and don't use breeder reactors to produce U233 from thorium, which is so much more abundant and available than uranium that it would extend current use by another 100-270 times, meaning current usage at hundreds of thousands of years, with already known deposits of nuclear fuel. These aren't breakthrough technologies, but just engineering, because we already know how to do this. Electricity was forecast in the 1950s to be too cheap to meter within a few decades of building reactors, and that future was completely practical. We just chose (at least temporary) stagnation, instead.
Solar is definitely cheaper than current nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly, while battery cost is also improving apace. In the short term, solar can meet most of our needs and let us turn off more coal and oil, and that's certainly useful! In the medium term, though, we can't get back on the Henry Adams curve without denser sources than sunlight, which takes up quite a bit of real estate even if we move most capture to space.
I don't know how you can say with a straight face that solar power is a stopgap and nuclear power is a long-term sustainable solution. I cannot rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement.
Well, I said “medium” term. But ultimately if we stayed on the curve (that is, longer term), humanity would be using the entire output of the sun in less than 2000 years, requiring a Dyson sphere or something. Solar power can’t keep up with human flourishing. We’ll have to have something that is denser and more distributed. :)
I feel like we're talking past each other. If we are to get back on a steady growth rate in energy/person, solar on earth is a great short-term part of that, fission is required for continuing it in the medium term until we figure out something else (fusion, but then whatever we might unlock down the road).
You're globalizing what I said about having enough uranium and thorium in known deposits and at current power usage, but obviously we would outgrow that as we expand into the rest of the solar system.
My point is not that we should stop or slow investment in solar (we shouldn't!), just that we'd all have been much, much better off if nuclear had continued to be adopted at speed in the last 50-60 years rather than being demonized, and for high density or unlit areas, it's still a great option and has no risk of running out of available fuel in the next hundred years.
We don't have to assume infinite growth. We can reach a comfortable sustainable point. We're already living in a pretty comfortable future (but it's not equally distributed). But if you do assume infinite growth and worry about the long term, then why stop at a Dyson sphere? What happens when every single human being wants more power than exists in the observable universe?
We've actually seen a decline in energy-per-utility ratios. We've got a lot more people and (apparently) a lot more utility per person, so we're still using more energy in total, but if we held those constant for the past several decades we'd actually be using a lot less energy per person and in total. It's not at all inevitable that energy/person/time only goes up. The Jevons paradox eventually maxxes out - if we could teleport anywhere instantly for free, we'd still only be making a finite number of teleportation trips each day. The crew of the Enterprise replicate a finite amount of food, and so on.
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Possibly, nuclear could have been a better intermediate energy source for the past 50-60 years than the fossil fuels we did use. In countries that did adopt nuclear energy (like France) it did seem to work out that way.
Now, in the present, which is when we are making decisions, it's time to go all in on renewables (and long-term infrastructure, much more generally). This brings some challenges, but not insurmountable ones. We'll probably need more load shifting, more cross-border power trading, and more batteries. (Hydropower is also renewable and works at all times of day, but it's not available in all locations, which brings us back to cross-border trading).
I don't see why you'd need nuclear power for high-density areas, or "unlit areas". High-density areas are full of all sorts of stuff, including power cables which can import power from the surrounding countryside - there is absolutely no need to build a fleet of nuclear reactors in the middle of New York City. Even with the substantially-lower-than-Chernobyl risk levels assumed by nuclear proponents, I think the idea of building a fleet of them in the middle of NYC should still be concerning to them. And for "unlit areas" - I assume this means extremely rural villages or whatever - you know a medium-size solar farm, a couple of wind turbines, or even a small diesel plant, takes a shitload less maintenance than a nuclear reactor, right? You're not importing nuclear technicians to permanently work in the middle of the Sahara or the Amazon - you're either connecting them to the grid properly, or you're giving them something set-and-forget that can hum away in the corner for years on end.
Big batteries coupled to diesel generators will remain a great local backup source for critical systems for the foreseeable future - if I was world dictator, I wouldn't ban them outright. Somewhat interestingly, the opposite is already also true: battery-buffered solar power is used in remote sites where you might expect to need the reliability a diesel generator, because a small chance of the thing being down outweighs having to keep it refueled.
It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or globalization making extra translate into increased shipping costs from the other side of world.
What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of different elements of the process.
Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
> Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable
Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.
For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality.
Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less annually.
The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where you need to replace them, but something more important would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it.
IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.
> The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking?
That is the stated justification, yes. However, in practice pre-1970s models will happily knead bread dough for years on end, and more recent models tend to explode within the first few times you attempt to make a loaf of bread (leading home bread makers to have to spend more on an expensive commercial model...)
> The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking?
That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point that the manual mentions it).
That is an objective decrease in quality and fitness for purpose.
Lighter can mean worse quality, but it doesn't have to. For example, a whole lot of things don't need metal enclosures, and plastic can be molded into more ergonomic shapes too. Now, whether the plastic enclosure is made tough or super thin is up to the manufacturer, and of course most of them choose the more profitable planned obsolescence route.
It's hard to distinguish "worse because lighter" from "worse because planned obsolescense". Historically, both effects correlated in their introduction into design and manufacturing consumer products. Attributing everything to just once of the two is not doing justice to the actual mechanisms.
It doesn't, but heft of a product is used as a proxy for quality, to the point that electronics will sometimes have a weight glued inside to pretend the item is heavier than it is, in order to seem of higher quality.
Which greatly illustrates the point that it's mote of a feeling than inherent property. People got used to expect crap quality from lighter products, because at the same time as plastics became more available and more versatile, so did planned obsolescence. So they are fallaciously expecting a heavy item to not having been cheaped out on so much.
Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways.
My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.
It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.