Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

> But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special".

You haven't even considered, much less pre-empted, any of my arguments. Energy consumption is special - as it is required by thermodynamics for manipulation of the material world. It's clear that most of it will come from the sun eventually - but as I've pointed out there's reasons to expect this to take a very long time.

> So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared, and a once insignificant alternative took their place.

Coal didn't disappear at all in that time frame - usage increased, significantly! But you only use the finished products now and don't see the cooling towers. UK economy is a rounding-error and not a meaningful model of the global energy economy, because wealthy countries like UK 'import' a huge fraction of their energy consumption. The energy required for their building materials, cars, machinery, consumer goods, etc still needs to be consumed somewhere - but it will never show up in local energy statistics. This represents the bulk of the hardest to electrify energy consumption. When you see a graph of fossil fuel usage increasing in India, China, Germany - do you not realise that is your personal usage too?

You first celebrate the fact that energy prices in UK have spiked (because lower profits for retailers, who recover their losses from whom ??), and now that UK has to import rather than produce steel (because it looks greener on paper ??).

> At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified .. So then the question only comes up for the freighters

Ah yes, it 'only' comes up for the most difficult and energy intensive types of transport. You ignore air travel too.

Bulk carriers and freighters will continue to exist for structural reasons, and their usage will increase: manufacturing has natural network effects - it makes sense to geographically concentrate it (there is less duplication of expensive capital investment), more food will be transported as population booms in regions with less arable land, and biofuels/clean carbon sources will be transported just like crude because production will naturally be concentrated in regions with more arable land and sunlight.

Air transport will continue to exist because people want to travel, and it is the fastest way to deliver many types of goods.

> In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic

30 years at current rates is catastrophic damage to the planet, I don't understand why you want this. Also wiki says this ship was 'obsolete at time of construction', essentially built to be a historical novelty, and that it was laid down around the same time that the UK's first nuclear reactor connected to the grid.

Building out a new production line for vehicles is insanely expensive. Billions upon billions of dollars. You need the old cars to sell well enough to pay for this and all of your other expenses.

China got to get into the EV space with a mostly-clean slate. Their domestic manufacturers made absolutely horrid products at the turn of the century. They did what they do best: copy successful people with investment from the successful people.

They only let Western manufacturers sell in China with the cooperation of a local vehicle manufacturer. That necessitated a bunch of investment and IP transfers to Chinese manufacturers who didn't have to shell out themselves, and when they did, it was with the complete backing of the state.

When EV technology really became something viable in the last 10-15 years, they just used that capacity, lower wages, and lax environmental regulations around mining, to undercut the rest of the world on EVs.

It's easy to act like the rest of the world just isn't competent enough, but there are layers to this.

I see quite a difference compared to the bridge example. The bridge provides a utility until it‘s EOL and replacing it, again, provides value for the generations paying for it, since they get to use it.

The spent fuel does not have a utility. In 200 years, it’s a burden left behind by a long-forgotten generation.

You can argue (or rather gamble) that those generations still rely on nuclear energy and still have an ongoing need for such facilities, but even then, a substantial portion of the facilities will be filled with something that the operating generations never received any utility from.