YouSaid · the spoken record

Austin Vernon

lines on the record: 158
first: 2022-09-08
most recent: 2022-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I do think that. I don't know what the counterfactual is. We don't know about the people that. Didn't have posts go to hacker news. So it could have easily been, I mean, I think that the alternative for me is I just would have blogged way less, you know, if one of those early posts hadn't gotten more attention. So yeah, it's hard to know what the counterfactual was, how many people have just like abandoned blogs that did like three posts and they would have written one more. Maybe it would have been better.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be hard to measure. Like, given my own experience, I'm blogging for free, but the benefits I've gotten from learning about what I'm blogging about and then like a few connections I've made that then help me like with what my projects I'm working on, you know, like there's like huge returns and it could be my project successful like it could be just like almost immeasurable So yeah, I would guess very hard to measure and probably inefficient that more people could blog because it's hard to predict the returns to what your blogging might have. But I guess if you're going to do these blog prizes, I don't know if the blog prize, you know, because the blog prizes are about specific topics. I don't know if that. How much does that help the efficiency there?”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean to build a brand like Waikobenador you have to like understand what tech founders want. So they use that knowledge to create a place that's great to go do your startup.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's just like a lot of this Intangible capital and labor are complements for regular capital. And I think you can see it too. Like, you know, if you build a brand around that you're a good investor, you can raise money from other people and charge the money on it more so than if you're just like a no name. So I think there's lots of examples of that where Building a brand or building relationships is extremely valuable and can just like specific knowledge can juice your returns. I mean, it's like a type of specific knowledge.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there was actually a paper, I think it was on marginal revolution a couple years back. So I'm pulling from my memory here so I could be missing a little bit. But basically it studied all these businesses and what happened to the business after like a founder unexpectedly died. And like the profit just like, you know, and it looks like on, you know, these are capital returns that it's like many people would see them. But then the earnings just like drop like a rock. because they lost some irreplaceable human capital there. And you know, they didn't spend any time training them because they died unexpectedly.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That way and be significantly less smart. So if you want to just take farmer's paper and like, how do I make money? Like, okay, well, I should find legal ways to acquire this information, and then I don't have to be a super genius to make money on it.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if I was going to like turn that post down, like I love Fama's original paper where he lays out this efficient market hypothesis thesis. And he's like, there's multiple types of information. And so the first is, you know, if you just have pricing data for stocks or whatever securities, you can be the smartest person in the world and you're not going to make any money doing that because it's just random. If you start incorporating more information like what's in 10Ks and all that, if you're like super, super smart, you might be able to make a little bit of money there. And we see that with people like Renizon's technologies. And you can debate about worn buffet and all that. But then there's the third category, which is like the strong type information. And it's basically you have legally acquired private information. And you can make money.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, we benefited from them doing that. We didn't have to, you know, we still do spend some subsidies on solar. I think they're very poorly designed So it would be better just to get rid of them. But the thing with fusion, if you're just heating up water to make steam, is that technology, there's no learning curve for anymore for steam engines, basically, because that technology is so mature. I mean, now, so that's why some people are looking at supercritical CO2 cycles is because, well, maybe this could be a little cheaper than doing steam turbines. That's some possibility there, but it's, and there's some other technologies that maybe someday you have like thermoelectric generators and stuff like that. But I think the direct conversion technologies.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just saying if they were, if it took such a small amount of substitute to do it, like someone will be foolish enough to do that. In this case, it was Germany. They spent a lot of money doing that. That was, you know, they're not reaping the benefit from.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I really disagree with the subsidy solars had actually. And I think it just like if you actually look at the numbers, it proves the point. People say like, oh, because Germany did the feed-in tariffs that made solar cheap. So if you had a country that's 1% of the population, they spent a tiny portion of their GDP and that was enough to scale the technology. Well, you should just let some other fool do that. You don't reap the benefits. So I would be supportive of taking away most of the subsidies for energy in general.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I don't know too much about the same as you. I don't know too much about their. Specific technology, but if you're pursuing a direct conversion technology, it's just you actually have a chance of success. I think a lot of people I've talked to in like the fusion space are like, well, I can make, you know, electricity for $50 a megawatt hour. And because I'm fusion, people should pay me $50. And it's like, well, not everyone may want to pay you $50.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just so expensive to do the like literally like just pitting in like the steam turbine and the condenser and all that kind of stuff you need for that basically makes you uncompetitive at most on most deregular power markets.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of the same thing. I'm not pessimistic about fusion. I'm pessimistic about fusion technologies that heat up water to make steam and run it through a steam turbine.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sharing the same safety system, sharing the same cable tray. So they have to build all new cable trays and clean out the mess of the stuff they already built and redo it. Super expensive. So NRC has like tried, they tried a pilot program where they did like a performance-based safety on, you know, as opposed to like just the strict cable separation rule. And like I think Oconi was one of the PowerPoints that tried it and ended up being more expensive than just the simple rule. So the reality is often very complex. And I think when you have these complex plants, it's just hard to do. So it can always be improved. But, you know, I think the small could end up greatly outcompeting the large because they have less complexity.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to improve the process, but it's very complex. I'll give one example, the Browns Ferry accident, the main thing that came out of that was you can't have control cables for safety systems on redundant safety systems on the same cable tray because that cable tray catches on fire, you lose both systems. So it's very, very expensive to run extra cable trays and all this cable separation. And that's actually one of the problems that's like delaying Vogel and Georgia right now is they had like 500 issues of”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Eli finds out about these new startups that fit this bill and sends me the information on because he knows I'm excited about it. So I think he's also, like, of course, his specialty is governmental affairs. So there's still, I'm sure there's still lots of opportunity to improve the process at NRC. Like recently, IMPO, which is like the industry group that's very much like a German style industry group. It's very powerful. Their goal with NRC was like reduce the nuclear rules by like one third. And then you also have NRC writing new standards for Gen 4 reactors that's supposed to be done in a couple years, but Congress instructed them to do it. So there's lots of opportunity.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So there could be some markets in there, but that technology then still has to compete with those places building solar panels or all these other technologies that you could do. And, you know, then there's the whole argument, well, nuclear can do this and that. But I think the people building the reactors clearly don't want to build them. Deregulated power markets because it's not economic. You know, that's why I'm excited about the small because there's alternative markets other than selling this substitutable commodity that's very cheap.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, like, if you look at what the cost of electricity. If they ever build the reactors that just got proven or just got approved, it's quite expensive. I think usually it's around like $40, $50 a megawatt hour best case, but more likely it could be up to like $80 a megawatt hour. They're not building it in deregulated power markets because you lose money. But there are places where it could make sense. Some places like in Europe have very expensive electricity.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get through faster with less money and then there's real markets and like remote power space military where people are willing to pay the premium for these initial models.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, making it fat. I mean, you can always streamline processes, but the thing is, like, people are submitting designs that are extremely complex. So whether your design is ultra safe or not safe at all, to do all the engineering to prove that costs about the same either way. So that's part of why these new plants are so much safer than the NRC standards. It's just not that hard to make them that much safer in a lot of your licensing is going to be you're going to spend the same engineering resources no matter what based on your plant complexity. So that's like the difference why Kresty was able to go through so fast their thing is very simple. They don't have very many moving parts. There's only so many things that can go wrong with it. And so that I think that's what's exciting to me about these other startups is they have the potential to”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I understand it, they were able because it was on the ocean with fast currents, they were able to use a lot of seawater to keep the reactor from getting too out of control. But they were just dumping a lot of the radioactive stuff into the ocean, but it was dispersing quickly. It wasn't a big deal. So, you know, if you're on like a freshwater reservoir like most U.S. power plants are like your risk equation might have been different there. I don't know enough about it to know if that really matters, but I think the main thing is because the precautionary principle, people are still going to get removed from their homes. And people don't like that.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I'll go backwards a little bit here on answering those questions. So, more so than I think what people are responding to. Just because Fukushima didn't have airborne radiation, that was very dangerous. But people still got removed from their home. And there's a lot of costs associated with that. And it's hard for me to believe that if we had a similar thing in the US, that there wouldn't be some type of mandatory evacuations that were really unpleasant If you could get your power from coal or natural gas without that risk, I mean, a lot of people would make that trade-off. And I think the other thing with Fukushima is...”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it makes it hard to promote that technology. If you could have a phone that you never tried to charge, like people would love that. They'd be like, I don't care that it's nuclear. I just have a phone that. Know never goes dead.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are several startups now that are working on improving that technology and commercializing it. So that's the kind of like nuclear stuff that, you know, why I talked about small nuclear micronuclear is really exciting to me. It has so much potential, and when you start putting nuclear in that small form factor, there's no other energy source that can compete with it on energy density. So you can do things you could never do before. Whereas like selling to the grid in a large power plant is like, well, I can do that lots of ways. And if you think through this lens, then you see the entire nuclear debate is. The nuclear proponents trying to claim that nuclear is not substitutable and that we should pay more accept the risk or whatever. And maybe we should.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real, these are hard to make. There's a lot of problems, especially on power density. Like, you know, the nuclear is very energy dense, but not necessarily power dense. So you have to do a lot of work on that to get there. But one of the most exciting examples of recent nuclear technology is. People at some national labs, and NASA got together and created this Kresty reactor. It's like only one kilowatt. So it's small. I think the thing weighs like 400 kilograms. It fits in the room. Got the whole project done in a couple years for like less than $20 million. And it worked great. It's very safe just because partly because it's so small, but it has almost no moving parts. Like the whole thing is. Has like a Sterling engine on top, and that's like the only moving part. It's really”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you see the opinion change very fast when nuclear power is no longer a substitute? Like all of a sudden, you know, Germany is like, well, we could turn our reactors back on or Japan same way. They've had these reactors off for years, but now that there's an energy crunch, they're like, well, let's turn them back on. So I think the future for nuclear power, which would be a better future, is you create products that impact less people's lives or have the potential to impact less people's lives and also are not substitutable. And I think that means small reactors. Like if you have a battery that can power your phone or you have like a little battery out in your garage that can power your house.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“but also they're selling an easily substitutable commodity in most cases. And so I think a lot of times on the political side, if you can substitute nuclear power, people will, even if it's coal or whatever, people don't really care that much about the emissions. Like they just care about their electricity turning on”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After you build it because of the rank and cycle and all that, is it going to generate economic power? And, you know, it's not necessarily going to, I think one way to think about this is my father-in-law, he always says, you know, when people ask him about why we're not doing more nuclear, he says, well, you got to think about the politics first and the economic second. And those are like the important ones. And so people are submitting designs and when to build plants that are big enough to impact lots of people's lives, even if that risk is very low. Some people still are bothered by that.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're building down in Georgia can be orders of magnitude safer than the running plants. And it's not. Just changing how you Do these things. And in fact, like, if you look at all these all the literature for them, they're actually supposed to be less complex and easier to build. But, you know, you're talking about a project that... So complicated, it takes thousands of workers years and years to build, work it every day. It's like if you're going to go through and do the engineering in great detail to prove that your plan is safe under the probabilistic risk assessment, it's going to take hundreds of thousands of hours of engineering time. I mean, it's going to take a long time. And that's why you see, I mean, investors are willing to pay that at this point. It's just like, you know,”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Risk factor, you know, should we how much risk should we take, like with the actual numbers as opposed to just like, oh, I'm mad that we're not building nuclear power plants? Actually, it becomes just like very inexpensive to actually improve the risk probabilities because the old plants that we're running now, they have active safety systems, which means you have to maintain them and they have to work. So if you want to move the control rods back into the reactor, well, there's like a mechanism and a motor that does that that can fail. So that, you know, when you're calculating your risk, you have to calculate, oh gosh, what if this motor fails? Or what if my control fails? Or what if I don't have a properly trained operator to do it? And it's the same for the cooling systems, but this new generation of plants, they have passive safety systems or like natural convection can cool the reactor in an emergency or the rods are more like dead man switch where something happens they just drop in from gravity and so the new power plants like this one that just got approved or the one”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just takes a lot of engineering time to get it through. Like if you look at how hard it was for SpaceX to get Falcon 9 and Dragon through NASA's loss of crew risk calculations, it took years, took hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's kind of funny that people see that as a success. And especially when the stakes were only a few lives for people that volunteered for danger. And then you have like a nuclear power plant where we're going through the same probabilistic risk assessment. And it could impact many more people's lives. And, you know, it's like, oh, it's not, you know, that's not good enough. So, I mean, I think it would make more sense to argue about, you know, if the”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the market conditions changed, you had more competitors in the coal with the gas, the inderegulated. And then you also had increased production from the existing nuclear plant. So if you're going to build an extra nuclear plant or an extra reactor at an existing site, then you know. You might not have needed to anymore because you got so much more production out of your existing plants. And just stuff like they shorten the fueling time and just a lot of like all around improvements. With electricity demand flattening that really made new plants not economic or not necessary. And you know, really, when we think about the probabilistic risk assessment,”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there's like a, you know, is it hard to get through NRC approval? Like, yes, that last one, the mini reactor you're talking about took like, I don't know, 10 years or something. But when you think about a probabilistic risk assessment assessment, no one ever says, well, gosh, NRC's current standards of like a large release, which would basically happen one every thousand years. We're not arguing over that. We're just like talking past each other, I guess, instead. So to me, that's pretty reasonable risk level. If you're going to 10 times your reactors, and that means almost certainly you'd have a Fukushima within your lifetime if you go with NRC standards. But it actually turns out that it's pretty cheap to do way better. A lot of the reason why the plants weren't built may not necessarily be because of regulation, but”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, so think about it in the 1980s, you had new sources of fuel, you had new competitors. You also, by the end of a decade, you increased the amount your nuclear power plants ran by a lot. So a lot of these new power plants that people are thinking about building were at existing sites like an extra reactor at Watts Bar or whatever. And well, you basically just got like a To get one free by running your plant better. So you don't really need them as much. So all those contributed to like just not making sense to build new nuclear power plants because the existing fleet ran better and more competitors and electricity demand slowed down”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capacity is up to like over 90, so the plants are just extremely reliable and it lowers their cost because their costs are so fixed. And you compare it to country like France. They've had a lot of reliability problems with their nuclear fleet in the last couple years. Like this year, their capacity factor, I think it saw, might barely be over 60%. They have, you know, we have like 90 gigawatts of nuclear. They have 60 gigawatts. So that's makes a huge difference for Europe that those plants aren't running full out. And it's really, and you see a lot of charts about if Germany didn't shut down its reactors, what would the energy balance be? But you don't see as many like if the French could run their reactors like American reactors, what would the energy balance be? So I think there's”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so not only to give you an idea of the safety standards that NRC has, I think for the plant taking damage is one time in 10,000 reactor years. And then for a large release is one in 100,000 reactor years. And there's 93 operating reactors at less than 93 sites. So we should only see like a three mile island under the current standards once every hundred years or so in a large release like Fukushima type situation, like once every 1,000 years. But, you know, they have just in a few years of the 1970s, like the industry had like three or four of these damage events, you know, at least. I don't know how many officially count, but probably at least three. So the safety is like gone incredible. And now the operating.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like around 1980, nuclear power plants only ran about 60% of the time. They weren't very reliable. They had all sorts of unplanned outages, stuff like that. And the safest mode of operation is just running as designed. So the more consistent nuclear power is, the safer it is. So, the probabilistic risk assessment allows you To do repairs while you're running, which was kind of like discouraged before. So it'll be like if your main cooling pump is leaking before you'd be like, oh gosh, I hope we can make it. And then eventually it just fails and you shut down the reactor. And now it's like, all right, well, we have backups the safest thing to do is actually repair it now while the plant's still running and then get it repaired and put it back online.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what the end like there's actually a time where nuclear power plants were selling for less than what their fuel was worth they had in their plant. Like around there. So, what the industry did and what NRC did is they moved to probabilistic risk assessment, which is like, you know, usually the gold standard. Like people are really happy that we use probabilistic risk assessment for commercial crew with NASA and SpaceX. And they want FDA to use more probability, more expected value. So, and what this allowed was it's basically you're rolling up some of the rules and moving into the risk assessment.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like back in the 80s, the nuclear power industry was in real trouble because their competitors in coal and natural gas got deregulated. Most of the cost of coal is the braille getting there and the rail industry got deregulated and then the natural gas industry got deregulated. So the cost of their alternatives was falling and they had the cost of, you know, they had to build more safety into their plants because of all these, you know, it wasn't just three mile island. It was like Brown's Ferry. It was Rancho Hecko. All these things that could have been really scary and to a certain extent we got a little bit lucky that we didn't have like a worse Disaster, you know, they were just like relatively limited accidents at their sites.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oversold a little bit. And I think actually to the extent that if people were internally consistent, then they would see NRC as a regulatory success story because the background on this is my wife's mom and stepfather are nuclear engineers that have like worked at all levels of nuclear power industry. So I get to ask them the general questions and learn a lot about it, which is nice. It's very helpful for learning about it. But”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think when you start looking at this is for large reactors. So I think those solutions for very large reactors are pretty hard. It's pretty difficult. And there's a lot of reasons why. Why did we make these weird choices? Well, there are a lot of stuff just reacts poorly when you expose it to neutrons and stuff. So they have there, like each have their own features that make them possibly good candidates. So that's really where, and I actually think like regulation is actually kind of like a”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like all the other labor and stuff is getting more expensive. Well, why don't we just add another layer and make more energy? So, those are kind of like your solar solutions to get down to like $10 a megawatt hour, and they're pretty straightforward. Whereas like nuclear is like, well, you know, the light water reactor can't get us there. Like, let's instead cool our reactor with sodium, which, you know, catches fire when it explodes, when it reacts with water and catches fire, when it reacts with air. Or there's, you know, you could cool it with lead, liquid lead. That's an option. Helium, which leaks a lot. Or you could do molten salts that corrode everything. We don't really have anything that”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pylon is like what holds the wire up, the tall tower. So, yeah, so solar is like it's much more flexible where it can go. And I think the solar getting cheaper, the obstools are just like pretty simple. It's like, well, gosh, it's expensive to pull with racking. Why don't we just lay the panels on the ground? Or gosh, this glass we're encasing with is getting expensive. We don't need it to last 80 years or 50 years. You know, we can just like fit some plastic on it instead. Or we've gotten these the actual photovoltaic cells so cheap.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, especially solar more than so than wind. Wind, I think it's limiting because it's transmission problems. And again, if you want to build out huge amounts of wind, like some of these zero Plans call for, like you're going to have to take a lot of people's land to build transmission lines and stuff. And again, it really pisses people off and they fight hard and it becomes expensive. And it's not like the wind turbines are relatively easy to sight because you pay people and you'll actually see they never put above ground power lines on the people's land where they put the wind turbines. They're always underground. So at least they get to the county right away. But when you get these giant transmission lines like you know, grain belt or something, like they almost inevitably have to go across a lot of people's lands and you can't just stuff them all in county and state right aways because they're the pylons are so big.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, if you just think about the large scale, if you're going to be Kardash, whatever scale civilization, or you're using immense amounts of energy, that's going to have side effects and you're going to have to figure out how to manage that one way or the other. And I mean, one of those is eventually Earth may just be like a nature preserve and we all live in space or something.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you just want to burn it for heat, it's okay, but it's hard to refine. This was like a, there were a lot of people that tried to do bio oil as an alternative for petroleum like 20 years ago, like Cleantech 1.0, and they all failed. So it makes me laugh that they're reimagining the process to sell, what are right now very expensive carbon credits. You could do something similar. There's actually, you could do something similar just to make straight carbon and stuff if you wanted to.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, actually, there's a company called Charm Industrial, and they're basically doing that because they take trees and they do a process called fast pyrolysis. It's where you burn biomass without oxygen in oxic environment. And it makes this bio oil. And then they're injecting the bio oil down into wells and selling carbon credit. So that's already happening, you could say.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's extremely high that it happens, and it's harder to pit the timeline on it by the end of the century might be like a little. I think I ran some numbers in there. If you 10x current plastic production and then you're just like pitting at landfilling at all. It was a little over like a hundred years to get into you're assuming like you're out the rest of your carbon output is zero in that scenario. But it's probably pretty hard to do it like in a like by the end of the century without a lot of growth, but it's kind of the exponential thing can get you where I think all the some large number of the carbon emissions have happened in the last 20 years. And it was very small before like 1950. So, you know, you could kind of like get surprised at the back half the last 10 years. It makes it hard to predict.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the limitation would probably still be just like chips for a while until you figure out a better production process for that. I think it'd be a while before it becomes energy. I think, you know, like smartphones really worry about energy. So there could be some interesting things with. Smartphones, if you had a very power dense like beta voltaic battery, it's like a nuclear battery, something like that where you don't have to worry about running down your battery. But outside of smartphones, I'm not sure that energy is the limit for a lot of this computing.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but you wouldn't necessarily want a large payload. Just want whatever the customer wants, you know, you want to size your vehicle to deliver that payload that's the most efficient.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source