I wanted to highlight a few recent pieces; hopefully they will be of interest to some of you.
A moving tribute to the Voyager probe on CrookedTimber, written by Doug Muir
Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.
Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan Am, F.W. Woolworth, Fotomat booths, Borders bookshops, and Pier 1. Americans were watching Happy Days, M*A*S*H and Charlie’s Angels on television; their British cousins were watching George and Mildred, The Goodies, and Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If you turned on the radio, “Hotel California” by The Eagles was alternating with “Dancing Queen” by Abba (and, if we want to be completely honest, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce). Most cars still ran on leaded gasoline, most phones were still rotary dial, and the Internet was a wonky idea that was still a few weeks from a working prototype.…
A good interview of John Lovett by Jess David Fox about writing jokes for politicians. They have smart things to say about comedy and joke construction and about working in politics.
David Roberts interview with Jigar Shaw about nuclear power is extremely informative:
David Roberts
Yeah. Well, this is another question, I think, that energy people have about this, which is, "Okay, let's accept this story that we lost the ability to do big things. We lost the workforce. So now in order to build nuclear at scale, we not only have to build big projects that take a long time, we have to sort of rediscover our ability to build big projects and train an entirely new workforce. That just sounds big and difficult and slow. At a time when we're frantically short of time, why would we think that we can rebuild that entire sort of national capacity in the timescales we need?"
Jigar Shah
So, let's go back to the beginning of our conversation, and I'll answer that question. I think the question is, what do we need? Right? I think we need solar and wind to go faster, farther, jump higher, like scale tall buildings. So they're at whatever they are now. I think it's like 47 GW or something per year. That number needs to get to 100, and then that number needs to get to 200 GW a year. So no one is questioning the trajectory of the solar and wind industry. No one is slowing them down. No one is saying, like, "hey, guys, we need to make room for nuclear."
No one's saying that. But when you think about what's changed: In 2019 when we were having this conversation, everyone was talking about replacing plants that were being decommissioned. So we need solar and wind to replace the power coming from retiring coal plants and natural gas plants. Today, we're talking about persistent load growth that's six times higher than what we've experienced the last 20 years. And we have AI saying — I mean, Microsoft alone, I think, is saying we need 10,000 MW for ChatGPT. You've got Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta. Then you have EVs, right, — which, by the way, is not as big of a problem, but we can get into that at some other podcast.