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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • As for what France does, as I mentioned, the US has not developed or built that tech because there is ultimately no profit in it and the US is unwilling to spend tax money on it.

    First Ford, then Carter stopped commercial re-processing in the United States. Reagan brought it back. G. H. W. Bush then put the brakes on it but stopped short of an outright ban. Clinton stepped on the brakes even harder but again stopped shy of a full ban and when Bush Jr came into office he started a slow process of bringing it back. That’s as far as this CRS Report goes although there may be an updated one somewhere out there.

    Still, the US has spent money on it and was doing so at least as recently as 2008. It appears the biggest worry we have is proliferation of nuclear material, not profit or cost.



  • It wasn’t until somewhere in the last 15 years that air type type heat pumps, as opposed to ground loop, could cope with the cold temperatures in the northern states without having to fall back to resistive heating for weeks at a time.

    When you have to run resistive heaters the electrical usage skyrockets and makes a heat pump system vastly more expensive to operate.

    If you live in a cold State, Zone 6 or higher, then you need to be careful when purchasing an ASHP to make sure that it has an HSPF of 10 or greater. If it doesn’t then you’ll be paying big electrical bills trying to keep your home warm. Those units are also more expensive to purchase than a regular Heat Pump like you would run down under.

    Frankly nowhere in Australia experiences cold anything like what I do on a yearly basis. The coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere in your country was a mere -9f. Here in the United States there’s quite a few places where that is a common daytime high temperature in the winter, even in the lower 48. There’s quite a few places even in Zone 5, see previous map, that will get to -9 and stay there for days at a time.

    It’s not uncommon for overnight lows in Zone 6+ to hit -20f and temperatures even lower are definitely possible. At my house in Wyoming last winter we touched -40f / -40c for a some hours one night.

    Air type heat pumps simply could not handle those kinds of temperatures until relatively recently. That’s why so much of the US doesn’t have them already. They just didn’t work during the winter in northern half of the country.