So, I'm going to talk about Elon Musk again, everybody's least favourite eccentric billionaire asshole and poster child for the Thomas Edison effect—get out in front of a bunch of faceless, hard-working engineers and wave that orchestra conductor's baton, while providing direction. Because I think he may be on course to become a multi-trillionaire—and it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, NFTs, or colonizing Mars.
This we know: Musk has goals (some of them risible, some of them much more pragmatic), and within the limits of his world-view—I'm pretty sure he grew up reading the same right-wing near-future American SF yarns as me—he's fairly predictable. Reportedly he sat down some time around 2000 and made a list of the challenges facing humanity within his anticipated lifetime: roll out solar power, get cars off gasoline, colonize Mars, it's all there. Emperor of Mars is merely his most-publicized, most outrageous end goal. Everything then feeds into achieving the means to get there. But there are lots of sunk costs to pay for: getting to Mars ain't cheap, and he can't count on a government paying his bills (well, not every time). So each step needs to cover its costs.
What will pay for Starship, the mammoth actually-getting-ready-to-fly vehicle that was originally called the "Mars Colony Transporter"?
Starship is gargantuan. Fully fuelled on the pad it will weigh 5000 tons. In fully reusable mode it can put 100-150 tons of cargo into orbit—significantly more than a Saturn V or an Energiya, previously the largest launchers ever built. In expendable mode it can lift 250 tons, more than half the mass of the ISS, which was assembled over 20 years from a seemingly endless series of launches of 10-20 ton modules.
Seemingly even crazier, the Starship system is designed for one hour flight turnaround times, comparable to a refueling stop for a long-haul airliner. The mechazilla tower designed to catch descending stages in the last moments of flight and re-stack them on the pad is quite without precedent in the space sector, and yet they're prototyping the thing. Why would you even do that? Well,it makes no sense if you're still thinking of this in traditional space launch terms, so let's stop doing that. Instead it seems to me that SpaceX are trying to achieve something unprecedented with Starship. If it works ...
There are no commercial payloads that require a launcher in the 100 ton class, and precious few science missions. Currently the only clear-cut mission is Starship HLS, which NASA are drooling for—a derivative of Starship optimized for transporting cargo and crew to the Moon. (It loses the aerodynamic fins and the heat shield, because it's not coming back to Earth: it gets other modifications to turn it into a Moon truck with a payload in the 100-200 ton range, which is what you need if you're serious about running a Moon base on the scale of McMurdo station.)
Musk has trailed using early Starship flights to lift Starlink clusters—upgrading from the 60 satellites a Falcon 9 can deliver to something over 200 in one shot. But that's a very limited market.
So what could pay for Starship, and furthermore require a launch vehicle on that scale, and demand as many flights as Falcon 9 got from Starlink?
Well, let's look at the way Starlink synergizes with Musk's other businesses. (Bear in mind it's still in the beta-test stage of roll-out.) Obviously cheap wireless internet with low latency everywhere is a desirable goal: people will pay for it. But it's not obvious that enough people can afford a Starlink terminal for themselves. What's paying for Starlink? As Robert X. Cringely points out, Starlink is subsidized by the FCC—cablecos like Comcast can hand Starlink terminals to customers in remote areas in order to meet rural broadband service obligations that enable them to claim huge subsidies from the FCC: in return they get to milk the wallets of their much easier-to-reach urban/suburban customers. This covers the roll-out cost of Starlink, before Musk starts marketing it outside the USA.
So. What kind of vertically integrated business synergy could Musk be planning to exploit to cover the roll-out costs of Starship?
Musk owns Tesla Energy. And I think he's going to turn a profit on Starship by using it to launch Space based solar power satellites. By my back of the envelope calculation, a Starship can put roughly 5-10MW of space-rate photovoltaic cells into orbit in one shot. ROSA—Roll Out Solar Arrays now installed on the ISS are ridiculously light by historic standards, and flexible: they can be rolled up for launch, then unrolled on orbit. Current ROSA panels have a mass of 325kg and three pairs provide 120kW of power to the ISS: 2 tonnes for 120KW suggests that a 100 tonne Starship payload could produce 6MW using current generation panels, and I suspect a lot of that weight is structural overhead. The PV material used in ROSA reportedly weighs a mere 50 grams per square metre, comparable to lightweight laser printer paper, so a payload of pure PV material could have an area of up to 20 million square metres. At 100 watts of usable sunlight per square metre at Earth's orbit, that translates to 2GW. So Starship is definitely getting into the payload ball-park we'd need to make orbital SBSP stations practical. 1970s proposals foundered on the costs of the Space Shuttle, which was billed as offering $300/lb launch costs (a sad and pathetic joke), but Musk is selling Starship as a $2M/launch system, which works out at $20/kg.
So: disruptive launch system meets disruptive power technology, and if Tesla Energy isn't currently brainstorming how to build lightweight space-rated PV sheeting in gigawatt-up quantities I'll eat my hat.
Musk isn't the only person in this business. China is planning a 1 megawatt pilot orbital power station for 2030, increasing capacity to 1GW by 2049. Entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the giant Long March 9 heavy launcher is due for test flights in 2030: ostensibly to support a Chinese crewed Lunar expedition, but I'm sure if you're going to build SBSP stations in bulk and the USA refuses to cooperate with you in space, having your own Starship clone would be handy.
I suspect if Musk uses Tesla Energy to push SBPS (launched via Starship) he will find a way to use his massive PV capacity to sell carbon offsets to his competitors. (Starship is designed to run on a fuel cycle that uses synthetic fuels—essential for Mars—that can be manufactured from carbon dioxide and water, if you add enough sunlight. Right now it burns fossil methane, but an early demonstration of the capability of SBPS would be using it to generate renewable fuel for its own launch system.)
Globally, we use roughly 18TW of power on a 24x7 basis. SBPS's big promise is that, unlike ground-based solar, the PV panels are in constant sunlight: there's no night when you're far enough out from the planetary surface. So it can provide base load power, just like nuclear or coal, only without the carbon emissions or long-lived waste products.
Assuming a roughly 70% transmission loss from orbit (beaming power by microwave to rectenna farms on Earth is inherently lossy) we would need roughly 60TW of PV panels in space. Which is 60,000 GW of panels, at roughly 1 km^2 per GW. With maximum optimism that looks like somewhere in the range of 3000-60,000 Starship launches, at $2M/flight is $6Bn to $120Bn ... which, over a period of years to decades, is chicken feed compared to the profit to be made by disrupting the 95% of the fossil fuel industry that just burns the stuff for energy. The cost of manufacturing the PV cells is another matter, but again: ground-based solar is already cheaper to install than shoveling coal into existing power stations, and in orbit it produces four times as much electricity per unit area.
Is Musk going to become a trillionaire? I don't know. He may fall flat on his face: he may not pick up the gold brick that his synergized businesses have placed at his feet: any number of other things could go wrong. I find the fact that other groups—notably the Chinese government—are also going this way, albeit much more slowly and timidly than I'm suggesting, is interesting. But even if Musk doesn't go there, someone is going to get SBPS working by 2030-2040, and in 2060 people will be scratching their heads and wondering why we ever bothered burning all that oil. But most likely Musk has noticed that this is a scheme that would make him unearthly shitpiles of money (the global energy sector in 2014 had revenue of $8Tn) and demand the thousands of Starship flights it will take to turn reusable orbital heavy lift into the sort of industry in its own right that it needs to be before you can start talking about building a city on Mars.
Exponentials, as COVID19 has reminded us, have an eerie quality to them. I think a 1MW SBPS by 2030 is highly likely, if not inevitable, given Starship's lift capacity. But we won't have a 1GW SBPS by 2049: we'll blow through that target by 2035, have a 1TW cluster that lights up the night sky by 2040, and by 2050 we may have ended use of non-synthetic fossil fuels.
If this sounds far-fetched, remember that back in 2011, SpaceX was a young upstart launch company. In 2010 they began flying Dragon capsule test articles: in 2011 they started experimenting with soft-landing first stage boosters. In the decade since then, they've grabbed 50% of the planetary launch market, launched the world's largest comsat cluster (still expanding), begun flying astronauts to the ISS for NASA, and demonstrated reliable soft-landing and re-flight of boosters. They're very close to overtaking the Space Shuttle in terms of reusability: no shuttle flew more than 30 times and SpaceX lately announced that their 10 flight target for Falcon 9 was just a goalpost (which they've already passed). If you look at their past decade, then a forward projection gets you more of the same, on a vastly larger scale, as I've described.
Who loses?
Well, there will be light pollution and the ground-based astronomers will be spitting blood. But in a choice between "keep the astronomers happy" and "climate oopsie, we all die", the astronomers lose. Most likely the existence of $20/kg launch systems will facilitate a new era of space-based astronomy: this is the wrong decade to be raising funds to build something like ELT, only bigger.
"Assuming a roughly 70% transmission loss from orbit (beaming power by microwave to rectenna farms on Earth is inherently lossy) we would need roughly 60TW of PV panels in space."
So that's 42TW being pumped into the atmosphere on a continuous basis. Presumably that ends up as heat? Does that have a noticeable effect on global temperatures or is it small in climate terms?
If musk can do even a fraction of that, he could buy off the astronomers out of small change by providing them with enough free space-based telescopes.
A bigger problem would be avoiding Kessler cascades, so he would have to invest in a space broom of some sort.
Noticeable but not huge. A back of the envenopt calculation indicates that the earth receives c. 200,000 TW, some of which is reflected.
If we're beaming huge amounts of power through the atmosphere, does anything happen if you go through that beam? I don't know of any consequences coming out of microwave phone relays, but this is at a vastly different scale.
Remember the volume of space increases as the cube of the orbital radius? And SBPS would be built at geosynchronous orbit or even further out -- multiple orders of magnitude higher up than Starlink. So the risk of a Kessler cascade from them (or affecting them) is zero (which is a good thing: they're huge and the pieces effectively stay up there forever).
Thanks, I did wonder where Musk was going with all of this, and it sounds all too plausible.
As a professional astronomer, I've seen several large optical telescope groups already discuss mitigation strategies for Starlink and the other satellite constellations that will go up soon. Long story short, it will impact the observing efficiency, most seriously for long exposures that are going for faint galaxies, and the radio leakage in sidebands will be very severe for radio astronomy.
For casual night sky observers, it will be a huge impact - in Summer at higher latitudes, you'll see these streaks all over the sky. Ah, well. It was nice while it lasted.
Well, if he pulls it off then it may offset his personality a bit.
Until he starts cutting off entire countries power supplies for dissing his submarine designs.
It will really piss off the "wifi is cooking your brains" crowd, not to mention "5G is an evil conspiracy by Bill Gates!!!" crowd. In real terms, though, the power flux is too low to be harmful. It's not like the tens-of-megawatts ballistic missile warning radars of the cold war era that cooked flocks of birds in flight.
Won't people be worried that Elon might find a way to focus that multi-TW power source on to a small area on the ground? That would be proper Bond villainy.
Yes and I wonder if the blocking effect of the arrays would actually act as a sunshade. You can't beam out more energy than you put in so it may even have a cooling effect.
That would be proper Bond villainy, but it's probably impossible. Beam spread is a thing, especially across a transmission distance of tens of thousands of kilometres.
I think it more likely that Musk will gain first mover advantage and it'll last precisely as long as it takes for one of: (a) Trump to be re-elected and ban renewables, (b) for Exon-Mobil to buy the US government and ban renewables, (c) a ghastly coalition of Jeff Bezos, Exon-Mobil, BP, and Aramco to throw up a competing cluster (coming from behind, but only 2-5 years behind: I think Blue Origin is lagging b/c Bezos took his eye off the ball and put a trad aerospace executive in charge, and that could change very fast), or (d) China or the EU or Japan or Russia to do ditto.
Then Musk will merely be a very rich man with the funds to build out his let's-colonize-Mars boondoggle and help a lot of libertarians commit suicide or build a people's republic that will make life in North Korea look luxurious and tolerant of individuality.
You would need a larger, and hence heavier transmitter to focus the beam on a smaller area.
You can pretty easily calculate how tight the beam can be from the wavelength and antenna size so a microwave doom sat would be pretty obvious.
You could create a virtual antenna with a array of sats that could do a better job I suppose. Fiddly and expensive though.
Assuming he has that, and tries to demand a meeelion dollars, how long would it be before his front door is kicked in and he is dragged away in chains?
It doesn't seem practical until there's a truly self sufficient, nuke proof colony on mars.
One thing we learned today: While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there's one thing he hates: space solar power. "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate?" he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. "Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"
Although that's from 2012 and he is quite happy drastically changing his mind when reality bites.
In a century, Starlink will be recognized as the beginning of this star's Dyson Swarm.
Yeah. Back in 2012 PV cells cost an order of magnitude more, were an order of magnitude heavier, and his people had barely started work on Falcon Heavy, never mind Starship.
The world has changed a lot in the past nine years.
I must admit that I have a hard time with the "beam down sunshine" idea.
It seems that everybody only looks at the easy inverse square part of Maxwell's Equations, while ignoring all the trouble the rest of them cause for this idea.
First, the TX antenna has to be massively distributed, low-loss microwaves are direct semiconductor to antenna and the semiconductors are typically single digit watts.
Second, from space, the receiving array is going to look like a mathematical point, which means that some pretty precise beam-steering will be required by the transmitter.
But horray! Those two play together: A phased array tx-antenna.
... Which can then be pinpointed on any spot on Earth, visible from the tx-antenna, with gradually increasing loss as it is pointed further away from nadir.
It can also be pointed, with almost no loss, at anything in orbit not currently behind Earth.
In fact it will be, because any finite phased array antenna, in fact any directional antenna, will by definition have side lopes.
Even assuming good intentions, the consequences of a steering mistake are so grave that siting the RX-array in a location from which you can transport the power to needy consumers seems impossible.
Getting to the assumption of good intentions and trusting it enough to start haggling over the maps is going to be even more impossible: Nobody will want their Palace or Holy City anywhere near the target zone.
I guess he could buy the rest of Hawaï, but getting HVDC from there to any place relevant ? Nope.
Next: A perfectly coherent signal of this magnitude will ionize the atmosphere, I'm not even going to attempt to predict the consequences, but a good guess is to say goodbye to both low-ish loss and to any kind of sub-GHz radio-transmission on that side of the planet.
Next: It is also going to heat the atmosphere. A lot. Most of the loss will be the last 20km.
Precisely how that heat is distributed through the narrow cone shape is a bit tricky to estimate, more so what kind of wind you will get as a result.
The most likely RX location is in the middle of some equatorial waters, (I'd pick 0°NS,0°EW :-) but then you have just built a prototype of the theoretically predicted weaponized hurricane seeder.
All those problems are of course reduced if you build a lot of smaller, say MW scale, plants in closer orbits, but then they have to beam-steer constantly between a large number of RX-plants, which is far from trivial.
For instance you can only light up any single receiver from one plant at a time, because otherwise you would get modulation.
And remember the sidelopes ? They now continuously wash over a large fraction the planets surface, causing EMI from hell.
Of course smaller wavelength helps, but I'm not sure basing it on a massive infra-red laser would make it any more viable.
So nope: I dont buy it.
More seriously, I think SpaceX is going to throw Starship at the wall and see what sticks.
For example, why not stick a camera on every Starlink satellite and get a real-time full-Earth-coverage optical surveillance system? Resolution won't be keyhole-level, but I bet you could do something fun by filming the same point simultaneously from 50 satellites.
"All those problems are of course reduced if you build a lot of smaller, say MW scale, plants in closer orbits, but then they have to beam-steer constantly between a large number of RX-plants, which is far from trivial."
Interestingly, this is basically the principle on which Starlink works.
Could just be a coincidence.
Yes, certainly reminds me of the Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle yarn "Fallen Angels", minus the SF fandom service.
You can build a rectenna over the surface of the ocean. In the style of off-shore wind power.
Ofc, any efforts to get us all fossils and avoiding the collapse of the biosphere is welcome, but I would suggest taking a look at the latest rethink report who suggest we can get 90% of the way there with renewables by 2035 without concocting elaborate energy transfer schemes and repeatedly launching giant bits of metal into space. https://www.rethinkx.com/
ghastly coalition of Jeff Bezos, Exon-Mobil, BP, and Aramco
It's worth keeping an eye on the newcomers: Rocket Lab and/or Relativity might surpass Sue Origin. The latter has been having morale problems for a rather long time, and the latest shenanigans seemed to prompt a bit of an exodus.
The US military is deploying single-digit-kilowatt lasers as weapon systems.
I don't think it's obviously crazy from an engineering perspective to imagine someone leveraging that to get power to the ground. The weapons and the power delivery have the same problems -- in what wavelength is the atmosphere most transparent? How do we stay on the point despite atmospheric distortions? -- which means the weapons research is likely relevant.
(It also creates the orbital death ray scenario, or at least closer to it.)
The other thing is that a whole lot of energy use is for things like process heat. Electricity is not an optimal source of process heat. Firing infrared lasers from space at heat exchangers might be a much better source of process heat.
0/0 lat, long is in the Bight of Benin, so not that far off the coast of Africa.
"You can build a rectenna over the surface of the ocean. In the style of off-shore wind power."
There's a reason it's called "off-shore": It's seldom more than 20-50 km from the coast-line.
That's very close to a death-ray from space.
Musk was reading the same Scottish lefty scifi we all were in the 90s at least. I'd like to think I understood it better, or at least got more of Banks' jokes! I still don't think solar satellites are going to compete well with long duration storage; as much as I'd like to see off-Earth industry happen, competing with the battery learning curve over the next decade is going to be hard ($10/kwh iron/air cells seem to be this months hotness). The major rocket company CEO that talks up SPS publically is Tory Bruno of ULA, and he seemed to think conventional solar power was still really expensive the last time we exchanged Reddit comments.
I am pretty sure that people are already getting worried about the risk of collisions in geosynchronous orbit. Yes, there is a lot of room, but there is already (as you say) a lot of stuff up there, and dead kit stays indefinitely.
Satellite Power System (SPS) Mapping of Exclusion Areas For Rectenna Sites
1978 US DoE/NASA paper on trying to find suitable sites for the rectenna farms.
For GEO, on-orbit servicing of satellites is already a thing -- see ViviSat's MEV Mission Extension Vehicle: they dock with a crumbly comsat and provides reboost/positioning using ion thrusters. Two launched and in service so far. In principle they can also shunt dead comsats into graveyard orbits.
LEO comsats are paradoxically safer in event of loss of control: dead Starlink units should re-enter naturally within 12-36 months of total loss of control, due to atmospheric drag, and are normally proactively de-orbited at end of mission using onboard ion thrusters.
Silently, and without anyone outside the industry paying any attention, ion rockets have gone from being SF in the 1980s to being a ubiquitous enabling technology today, propelling deep space missions as well as significantly extending the working lifespan of satellites that previously relied on chemical fuels for maneuvering/orientation.
ground-based solar is already cheaper to install than shoveling coal into existing power stations, Except it isn't I did an analysis on the costs of getting solar panels on the WSW-facing roof of my house & the approx SSE next wall ... No return ion capital for more than 40 years ... forget it. I suspect it's a deliberate rip-off, of course.
At that cheap an outlay per launch, that Astronomers simply put all their kit into orbit, as well, or on Luna.....
As EC says: Beware Kessler. & P H-K: "Beware!"
The "power generation in spaaaaaaaaace!" fun is the easy part. As the current problems in New Orleans demonstrate, the hard part is getting all that power where it needs to go. (There's plenty of power into the distribution centers in New Orleans, despite Ida; getting it to customers, not so much.) Remember, too, that an unknown, but significant, portion of the wildfire problems in California right now are being caused by aging and/or fundamentally misconceived in the first place problems with the power grid. How would you like to run those lines all the way from a rectenna station in, say, the Bay of Bengal up to Kanpur? Then keep them in good working order?
Although lurking behind that "fun part" is the spectre of ransomeware and endemic bad security practices allowing a teenager somewhere to cause significant damage somewhere as a joke — or worse. Consider the Sunderland megafan who hires a neighbor kid to damage the pitch at St James's Park (the kid would have done it for lulz, but happily earns a few hundred quid on the side). Then consider what happens if the kid missed...
If musk can do even a fraction of that, he could buy off the astronomers out of small change by providing them with enough free space-based telescopes.
In the US there are WAY more "amateur" astronomers than "pros". And they carry a lot of weight as they do real work.
The local astronomy club around here has a lot of members. At the low end you have the guys who built their own. Their investments over 5 to 10 years is $2k to $5k. Others have over $50K in equipment. Some likely $100K. And they spend their vacations going to viewing retreats which have to cost a fortune.
And these guys do impressive things with computerized controls that deal with CMOS sensor stuck bits and such to clean up images.
My point is that there would be a LOT of folks to "buy off".
It will really piss off the "wifi is cooking your brains" crowd, not to mention "5G is an evil conspiracy by Bill Gates!!!" crowd.
Maybe they'll just go catatonic.
There is a very vocal local group here that is convinced that the low power wifi enabled power meters are ruining their health. And they are all over 5G. But can't tell you why. And asking them if it is the improved signalling methods or just the the 6mm wave lengths they get really pissed at you. And to really upset them point out that the wifi power meters are putting out less RF than their in house wifi or cell phones.
The WiFi power meters around here form up ad hoc networks to talk to each other and send the usage details to the few that are actually wired to the power network data systems. (And yes I have to wonder just how secure all of this is but that's not what has the "againsters" up in arms.
Aye, SpaceX deciding not to go above 550km makes them pretty safe as far as Kessler syndrome goes. OneWeb and China's constellations, both a little over 1000km, would be more of a problem for that. ESA have an (unflown) air-breathing ion engine which seems like it could be great for unlimited mission lengths at low altitude and, depending on scoop efficiency, maybe for satellite/debris deorbit too. Raise apo, dock with GEO bird, lower peri into atmo, undock, raise peri to scooping altitude, refuel half an orbit later, and do it again.
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Yes. Like many problems, whether it becomes a routine nuisance or a complete fiasco depends almost entirely on whether it is tackled promptly, competently and continually.
It's not as if we don't have horrible lessons to look at :-(
At $20 there are lots of fun things that suddenly start to look feasible.
Putting your own private 8 inch or 12 inch space telescope into orbit will actually be cheaper than buying the hardware. (OK, Kessler cascade still an issue).
Space tourism: a human with consumables for a week is going to be a few hundred kilos. So that's maybe $10,000 plus capital costs on the Space Hotel. Not cheap, but well within the means of quite a lot of people.
Lunar mining. I've thought for a long time that the way to colonise the moon isn't to send people, it is to send robots. The robots mine and refine metals to build more robots, and those robots build anything you like. Basically you create a swarm of von Neumann machines, all controlled from Earth and initially supported by sending up supplies of high-value manufactured items like microchips. Eventually the moon will have its own chip fab, but those things are the pinnacle of high tech.
Oh, yes. I was assuming that he would provide open and free feeds to such people and, possibly, a mechanism by which they could request particular views. No, they wouldn't all be happy, but he wouldn't have the unified opposition that a "sod you" approach would engender.
The Wikipedia article on SBPS mentions a very ingenious solution to the beam guidance problem. In the middle of your rectenna array you put a small pilot transmitter. Each element in the orbiting phased array receives the signal and synchronises on that. Hence the entire array creates a perfectly formed beam in exactly the right direction without any other guidance (other than telling it what pilot signal to listen to).
I was assuming that he would provide open and free feeds to such people and, possibly, a mechanism by which they could request particular views.
These guys are like the US Ham radio operators of the 50s into the 80s. They are as much into building the stuff as using it. And writing their own software control systems. Or more likely modding the open source systems.
Think of the current RaspberryPi and Arduino folks.
But I'll defer to Matthew for anything else on this topic. I'm more of an interested observer at the local meetings.
There is a rather entertaining scifi novel called Solarstation by Andreas Eschbach about a prototype orbital power station which beams down on an array in the ocean. Then terrorists invade the Kourou space center, hijack a capsule, launch and try to hijack the station to roast a piece of Earth. One astronaut isn't found by the hijackers and Die Hard in Space ensues. It's sometimes very 90s – the station is Japanese – but the author was an aerospace engineer in former life and it shows. And it's the only novel where the author thought about the problem of cooking in space. Sadly only published in german, never translated to my knowledge.
I really ought to do a new CMAP piece -- or rather, a rant -- about the reason Anglophone SF is so remarkably insular about world SF in general, but I think it'd be best left to a guest post by an English-fluent non-Anglophone writer (I can think of a few I maybe ought to ask).
Ok, so, a solar cell in space gets about 4x the solar irradiance as one on the ground. Being in the sun 24 hours a day is another 4x. But microwave transmission losses make it about 4x worse, so one of those cancels out. But let's say one acre of solar cells in space puts out as much as ten acres on the ground.
Ten acres of Nevada desert costs $2,000. Can Elon launch one acre of solar cells into space for that price?
Of course, you do have to factor in the costs of transmission wires and other infrastructure - but on the other side of the ledger you have to factor in the costs of rectennas (and the political cost of people being freaked out about them).
The predictable 24-hour duty cycle is worth a lot, but energy storage systems can do that job too. Those technologies haven't been built out at scale yet, but neither has SBSP. Which one is likely to come online first?
It's an exciting idea, but it still feels like a long-shot bet to me.
Is GEO actually 24x7? Does it not pass behind the Earth at some point in its orbit?
sigh
As I post every time this subject comes up, an Environmental Impact Statement was done for a SPS around 1978, and it passed.
In the early eighties, we had a speaker at PSFS (Philly club) who told us about that, and also no, it's not a Death Ray, because they were planning on beaning it down in watts per m^2, not killowatts. No cooked birds, even - and you would expect birds to note the temperature going up, and go around it. I don't expect that they fly through smoke from smokestacks, either.
Yes, satellite watchers and operators know this as the geosynchronous eclipse season. Short but significant.
http://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Category/Educational/SatelliteEclipse.pdf
And you're against launching why?
And, I suggest that it won't take that long to launch from the Moon, instead. If you can mine the minerals you need, manufacture and send them up from there.
If it's any consolation, in my published novel, there is no indication of language that they speak... and I have an extremely international crew.
I even got a 5 star review from Italy. (Ok, ok, it's an old friend who works for this religious leader as an astronomer, who I Tuckerized....)
And in the next story, a lot of the major characters speak French.
You can pick other orbits that don't get blocked by the Earth's shadow, but the aiming issues become headachy.
Note that the modern lightweight PV panels aren't slabs of etched silicon, they're printed organic polymer (plastic) sheets. Hence the light weight.
Um, yeah, about Kessler and Space War.
Here's the problem with solar farms in geosynchronous orbit: they're big, fragile targets. Not to Kessler cascades--maybe--but to jackass militaries lofting suborbital (or orbital) lasers to blast away at them and dive back into the atmosphere. And they're as hard to armor up as were the grain fields of medieval lords.
Anyway, geosynchronous orbits aren't empty, they're rather full already, so starting a Cascade may be easier than we might wish. But either way, they're big, obvious, fragile, and we've got lasers to shoot at these buzzards with, dammit.
The problem here is that there are multiple futures oonverging. One one hand, it would be nice to have big peaceful solar power birds up there funneling energy for us. It really would.
On the second hand, there's the absolutely vital need for weather and communication satellites to deal with climate change. Hurricane Ida went from tropical depression to Cat-4 storm in 72 hours, which is too fast for most evacuations. But without satellites spotting Ida, that big ol' patch of hot water she predictably ran through, and so on, Louisiana wouldn't even get 72 hours. But if push comes to shove, we can do solar on the ground, but we need weather satellites to keep any sort of super-efficient shipping system working.
And now we get to the nasty third hand in our dirty jeans. I can't find the articles, but earlier this year, the US military bragged about getting a satellite from spec-sheet to launch in something like three weeks, using rapid prototyping blah blah blah. It was suggested that the US military is planning for a Kessler Cascade. And once the Cascade is upon us, they plan to survive it by simply launching mass quantities of rapidly designed, cheap satellites. Like Starlink. The satellites' lifespan is painfully short, but so long as more being lofted than are getting taken out by the Cascade, we've still got a space presence.
This is a remarkably grim picture. But given that Space War I, if it happens, will almost inevitably trigger a Kessler Cascade, it may be the most survivable strategy. Which sucks, but again, we need weather satellites for civilization to survive, rather more than we need solar farms in space.
So it may be that Musk's Starship is either designed for (or ends up being) the equivalent of a half-gauge shotgun in a shotgun war, used for launching mass quantities of vital but ephemeral weather and communication satellites into a cislunar space that's too dangerous for human presence. This last would be due to people getting stupid, launching Space War I, and creating the last and biggest garbage patch our species will ever produce.
I hope not, I really do. But that's the way I'd bet. Satellites launched by the Starship load every day to replenish the losses, shooting stars every night, and astronomers finding other things to do with their time.
As for Mars, pffft. Until Musk has a fully functioning, closed-ecosystem farm in the Southern Plains that doesn't require groundwater, he's not even seriously trying to do the necessary prototyping. And we need those farms, he could make money on them.
Um, no. Even now, in most wars, certain things are off-limits, at least to large countries with real militaries.
China's looking at them, and I'd be shocked if Russia isn't also. This is "you don't permanently knock out our SPS, and we won't do the same to yours."
"The predictable 24-hour duty cycle is worth a lot, but energy storage systems can do that job too."
No, they can't.
The problem seems simple, but is extremely tricky to do at scale necessary to "phase out fossil fuels", because of issues like comparative energy density of batteries vs a tank full of gasoline, availability of resources like lithium, the rate at which you can build supply chains for building supply chains for building energy-grid-scale storage, the price of battery storage+overbuilding of renewables vs burning natural gas and so on.
Belgium is switching off their perfectly operational nuclear power plants soon, so is Germany. They're not replacing them with mega-batteries, they're replacing them with natural gas power plants (sorry, "grid stability units"), and Germany is going to extremes to build Nord Stream 2. They're also pondering converting their coal-burning plants to shredded old-growth forests, excuse me, "renewable biomass".
If beaming power from space was feasible at large scale, fossil fuels would be dead.
Unfortunately, I predict that pesky engineering problems will turn out to be extremely difficult to solve, just like, say, building a network of Hyperloops or building cheap self-driving cars or other things that Musk wanted to do but turned out to be surprisingly more difficult than one would imagine by reading sci-fi books as a teenager.
(Remember, for each gram of physics handwavium in SF you have a ton of engineering unobtainium hidden behind the scenes)
The economics of solar has strong returns to scale - bigger is much cheaper.
Solar on a household roof is 5-10x the cost of utility-scale solar. Every roof is different so there's high design & compliance costs, fixed costs for balance of system, and working at height.
Solar at full scale is single design, ground-level, just lay out field after field after field.
How big is full-scale right now? Bhadla Solar Park is 14,000 acres and 2 GigaWatts in a desert in Rajasthan. That's what's killing coal.
When you can throw huge masses to GEO you can do all sorts of things. Need comms stuff & weather sensors? Astronomy sensors? If you’re building a bunch of large SPS platforms, make plug-in space for Extra Stuff. Supply plenty of locally sourced organic power! What neat stuff could you do with a 20+ tonne optical astronomy setup that has access to near infinite power to process data and transmit the results? Or Earth sensing with huge local compute power? Or SETI gear. Build large equipment busses instead of hundreds of individual satellites and avoid many aspects of “lack of room”. Include a construction shack so items can be serviced, added, removed. Pretty soon a lot of the power is for not-on-Earth use. Some of the SPS will be orbiting the Moon. Some, Mars, perhaps powering landed atmosphere processors to make breathable air and fuel for landers. If your launchers can land, load up locally made fuel and resources, and return to an orbital processor, you can make more stuff.
Vulch @ 13:
One thing we learned today: While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there's one thing he hates: space solar power. "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate?" he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. "Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"
Although that's from 2012 and he is quite happy drastically changing his mind when reality bites.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but what if they just used a laser & aimed it at a PV farm here on earth? Wouldn't that save a couple of conversions?
I think the problem here is that solar just keeps getting cheaper. Five years ago when Belgium/Germany were planning to get rid of nukes, building a gas plant was cheaper. What OGH is pointing to is that this is not the case anymore.
I, for one, welcome our orbiting overlords.
There's a new technology that makes space-based solar power more viable - metamaterials for microwave lenses.
The lenses themselves don't look like optical lenses. They're thin sheets of insulator printed with fancy copper foil patterns, so can be very light, potentially as light as the solar panels.
Metamaterial lenses let you do a whole host of weird shit - negative refraction, invisibility cloaking and optical illusions. In this case, a lens in the beam path lets you control beam spread and spot size. This means more end-to-end efficiency in your power transmission which is always a win.
That said, SBSP means solar->high voltage AC->microwave emitter->microwave receiver->grid voltage AC. That's lots of steps and lots of losses. Ground based is just solar->grid voltage AC. SBSP end-to-end efficiency sucks.
Whether SBSP will ever be cheaper than ground-based solar, that we'll only know once we try it. I expect SBSP will be cheaper than ground-based solar is right now, but that's a moving target.
My suspicion is that by 2040 ground-based solar will be rolled out like we roll out paint and most of the costs will be in storing electricity from when it's generated (midday) to when we need it (evening).
Make getting to Mars a bit easier by adding huge multi-acre ‘wings’ to Starship. PV sails, whatever you want to call them. Power has always been a major issue for any space project. The ISS has strict power limits for equipment and imagine having a few MW instead. Ion drive to speed up Mars transit. To provide better living quality on the mission. Safer, happier crew. Send a few prototypes first to test the systems and land a bunch of fuel/air processors to start building a reserve. Land a couple of Starships to act as extra space for humans, return a couple to use again. Send another full os StarLink units to make a full coverage comms setup - and make sure al the rovers and orbiters currently there can work with them. Pick up Sojourner, service and set her off again! Retrieve John Carter!
Photons from the Sun, converted to electrons in the orbiting array, which then converts the electrons back into photons in the laser, which is "captured" by more PV arrays and converted into electrons again.
paws4thot @ 24: 0/0 lat, long is in the Bight of Benin, so not that far off the coast of Africa.
Looks like the nearest land is 360 miles away between Akwidaa and Dixcove in Ghana.
Is it killing fossil fuels, though? Germany managed to build a lot of renewables, while replacing nuclear reactors with natural gas. facepalm
You can't kill fossil fuel without storage, and nothing exists yet that will allow it to happen. There's no battery to sustain a country for 14 days of windless overcast skies.
No. Space power has never made sense and it still does not. The solar panels will deliver far more power on Earth under the clouds.
30% efficiency is being extremely optimistic. Realistic efficiencies from power on the DC bus of the satellite to power on the DC bus on the ground will be more like 0.01%, if that.
Even at the first step, and assuming you're using top end GaN RF power amps (or heavily optimized magnetrons) for converting the DC power to RF energy you're getting 60% max.
Then, immediately after you transmit, no matter how directional your antenna and reflector are, you're losing 1/2 of the power by about 10 wavelengths away. For a 400km path, even with a very large directional antenna with 40 dB gain (very large relative to wavelength) on both the space side and ground side, you're still getting 70 dB path loss. Every 3 dB is losing half the power. Transmitting RF power over 400 km means you will receive almost no usable power on the ground even before the conversion loses.
If Musk is making Starship/etc for space based solar power he's already lost.
"My suspicion is that by 2040 ground-based solar will be rolled out like we roll out paint and most of the costs will be in storing electricity from when it's generated (midday) to when we need it (evening)."
This is the smartest comment I've seen so far. Want to solarize your house in 2040? It's a weekend project. Buy a roller and a can of solar and paint your roof!
whitroth @ 50: China and Russia are not in the same dimension --
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Heihe,+Heilongjiang,+China/@50.2016943,127.5943486,564m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x5e8941c8a139649d:0xc55d814f205a1cf1!8m2!3d50.245129!4d127.528293.
Um, no. Even now, in most wars, certain things are off-limits, at least to large countries with real militaries. China's looking at them, and I'd be shocked if Russia isn't also. This is "you don't permanently knock out our SPS, and we won't do the same to yours."
You do remember how the US military rapidly knocked out the Iraqi grid back in 2002? It's something we do.
Having a fucking US Space Force is also something we do. Ideally we don't use it, just like we've had but never used our nuclear forces. Since, um, 1945.
Unfortunately, we're in the situation we got into with Mahan and sea power in the 1890s, where suddenly every Great Power started building battleships and aiming to control choke points, and world war became increasingly inevitable. The US has shown the advantages of space power, and the US (at least) is preparing for space war. And like WWI, we've got jackasses leading the lions to slaughter.
What will change this dynamic isn't the peaceful use of space, it's the proliferation of nonviolent warfare, which in this case is more like meta-warfare being used to make violence against space machines less politically useful. Making a Kessler cascade irrelevant to global politics will help make the space war not happen. I have no idea how to do that (it's partially diplomacy, and I'm about as diplomatic as a raccoon) but that's where we need the radical innovation.
Until Musk has a fully functioning, closed-ecosystem farm in the Southern Plains that doesn't require groundwater
That's a different Musk working on that side of things.
Vulch @ 28: Satellite Power System (SPS)
Mapping of Exclusion Areas
For Rectenna Sites
1978 US DoE/NASA paper on trying to find suitable sites for the rectenna farms.
Your link doesn't work. It just loops back to this blog post.
what if they just used a laser & aimed it at a PV farm
All that does is change the frequency of the downlink, exactly the same number of conversions.
Carp, sorry about that...
Satellite Power System (SPS) Mapping of Exclusion Areas For Rectenna Sites
Aha, F6 to change focus to the address field doesn't work in this browser when it's displaying a PDF. YLSNED.
Yes, renewables are killing coal.
UK electricity has gone from 40% in 2021 to 2% in 2020. US total energy has gone from 22% in 2010 to 12% in 2019. China has gone from 70% of total energy in 2010 to 57% in 2019. Coal is dying and if you disagree then feel free to invest in a coal company.
As for storage, yes it's a problem but it's a problem with plenty of already-viable solutions. Wherever there's geology for pumped hydro, we're doing it. NZ has a suitable basin for a dam that could store months of power. Batteries are popping up everywhere. They're sized to fit daily cycles because the operators want to get paid on a daily basis but there's no reason not to make them larger. Then there's new options like high-temperature thermal storage (disclaimer: I'm an investor in a a company doing just this).
How much storage is needed? That depends on your energy grid and your weather. Australia has reliable winter sun so mostly needs to store power from midday to evening. New Zealand has lots of hydro so needs to store power from rainy autumn for an occasional dry winter. UK has lots of wind but might get a few days of cold still weather in winter so needs a few days of storage (or better links to European grids). Texas ... is a fucking shitshow for many reasons but gets occasional cold snaps. Texas just needs better interconnects to the rest of America coz when it's cold in Texas it's not cold across the whole continent.
None of this needs space-based solar power. What we're heading towards are larger and more connected continent-wide electricity grids. SBSP as a feed-in to those would be nice and would increase reliability, but not necessary.
My suspicion is that by 2040 ground-based solar will be rolled out like we roll out paint and most of the costs will be in storing electricity from when it's generated (midday) to when we need it (evening).
Nice idea, until you realize that the "paint spatter" might gather enough energy to spark a fire. Solar panels now are not the firefighters' friends, because they produce electricity even when not wired to something. Firefighters are learning to haul blankets to cover the panels prior to fighting fires under them.
That said, I agree that solar will get a lot easier. What I hope is that they get lighter in ways that makes it easier to retrofit them on to old structures. Reason is, we've got a lot of roofs that weren't built to optimize solar gain, which is why it's often easier to build solar farms in rural areas that to pave city rooftops with solar. Finding sneaky ways to get solar on, say, a 1950s roof would be golden, especially since that 1950s roof probably can't hold the weight of a current slab array.
As for house batteries, I'm currently stuck in a trilemma: 1. Waiting for Chevy to haul the Bolt in and replace the entire fracking battery pack so it won't ignite ("manufacturing flaws" which means it gets really hot right after it finished charging.). They recommend we park the Bolt outside until it gets rebuilt. 2. Should I buy a Tesla powerwall or two to put in the garage right next to the Bolt? Lithium ion fires are so much fun! Especially when there's most of a ton of battery and at least one-third of it is bolted to the wall. 3. Or do I wait another year and get one of the hydrogen power cells they just started making in Australia: add distilled water, do hydrolysis when there's surplus energy, then do electrolysis to get electricity when needed. And vent the hydrogen when things get scary, then start over again with more water. Is this more or less dangerous than having a ton of lithium ion batteries sitting in the garage?
Fun stuff.
Charlie Stross @ 41: I really ought to do a new CMAP piece -- or rather, a rant -- about the reason Anglophone SF is so remarkably insular about world SF in general, but I think it'd be best left to a guest post by an English-fluent non-Anglophone writer (I can think of a few I maybe ought to ask).
I blame my teachers. I didn't get foreign language education early in life while my brain was still young & plastic enough for it to do any good. It has cost me dearly several times throughout my life that I only have one language.
That said, I do read NON-Anglophone SF ... when I can find an English translation. I know that's a drastic limitation, but what am I supposed to do?
You need a shed outside your house for the lithium-ion batteries.
Jez Weston @ 52: The economics of solar has strong returns to scale - bigger is much cheaper.
Solar on a household roof is 5-10x the cost of utility-scale solar. Every roof is different so there's high design & compliance costs, fixed costs for balance of system, and working at height.
"Solar on a household roof" is also a BIG SCAM in the U.S. right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8ZPFOxJEc
I get just about as many calls every week from contractors wanting to install solar panels on my roof as I get from house flippers wanting to make me a "cash offer" 1.
Solar at full scale is single design, ground-level, just lay out field after field after field.
How big is full-scale right now? Bhadla Solar Park is 14,000 acres and 2 GigaWatts in a desert in Rajasthan. That's what's killing coal.
Around here the Public Utilities seem to be building relatively small fields using land that doesn't have much commercial value.
Case in point:
35.83803177689665, -78.66896784095061
This is located on a bit of land on the Crabtree Creek flood plain. Crabtree Creek has been experiencing 500 year flood events every couple of years for the past couple of decades. The insurance companies finally wised up and talked the government into enacting flood plain zoning so people can't build there. But you can still put up a solar array.
1 "Cash offer" means they think they're going to swindle me out of my home.
Anyway, geosynchronous orbits aren't empty, they're rather full already
I think you have a scale problem.
GEO is 35,786 km straight up, or a radius of approximately 42,164 km from the Earth's centre. So roughly 265,000km in circumference. There's room for an awful lot of satellites up there!
Also, objects in GEO aren't really moving relative to one another -- not like satellites in LEO which may be in different orbital inclinations at similar altitudes, so with closing velocities that are a high component of their orbital velocity. You could have GEO satellites approaching with high relative velocity, but then they wouldn't be geostationary.
Anyway, point is, it's almost impossible to start a Kessler cascade in GEO. It's like the difference between plinking at supertankers in the Straits of Hormuz to block a shipping lane (that'd be LEO) and trying to blockade the Pacific Ocean by sinking tankers (that's GEO).
I didn't get foreign language education early in life while my brain was still young & plastic enough for it to do any good. It has cost me dearly several times throughout my life that I only have one language.
Depends on how you want to use the language. The conventional way to break it down in decreasing order of difficulty, which I more or less endorse, is speaking, listening, writing and reading. If reading will do you for most purposes, like catching up on the news in the morning, that's a lot easier than carrying on a complicated conversation in real time. Most major languages now have news channels like Telemundo with text and video that you can watch over breakfast and get both reading and listening practice.
I'm not sure of the calculations here, does beaming with all the losses definitely outweigh space trucking batteries? How about if we assume an order of magnitude improvement in battery technology and extremely cheap space trucking, with rockets shuttling up and down repeatedly and automatically with low turn around time?
Anyway, I do love solar panels in space, a good first step on improving earthlings rating on the kardashev scale - eventually you switch to solar orbiting power collectors and end up with a dyson swarm I guess.
On Musk, I'd spotted the same dynamic (that you need something for those rockets to be doing, since planned capacity is awfully big compared to traditional demand), and assumed that he'd build a space hotel.
@kyb: Shipping batteries to and from orbit isn't going to be viable.
The best batteries might get to an energy density comparable to rocket fuel. To get a tonne of rocket fuel to orbit takes something like 50 tonnes of rocket fuel. To get a tonne of batteries to orbit will take about the same ratio.
The mass of hardware for a microwave beam is so many more orders of magnitude better than the equivalent mass of batteries. Even if it's 0.1% efficient beaming beats batteries.
Actually, per Wikipedia, there were recently 652 satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Some are separated by 0.1 degree longitude, or 73 kilometers apart, because parts of the ring are much more desirable than others.
And the biggest satellites are around 7 tonnes. Whether blowing apart a big satellite in a densely crowded space over North America or China would initiate a Kessler cascade is one of those fascinating questions. The debris would be moving in the kilometers/sec range, due to the propellant explosion (plus whatever energy the laser dumped in), not to the orbital velocity. But that's probably enough to hole another satellite, since there's no friction to slow the pieces down. So I'd suggest a cascade might be possible. Make the satellites 1-2 orders of magnitude bigger and crowd the desirable spaces even more, and I'd upgrade that to a probable cascade.
Where it gets dangerous is when someone models that it's possible to, say, blow out all the big satellites over North America or China without affecting satellites in the other clump, through a localized cascade. Then things become a wee bit politically unstable. This also is a disadvantage to whoever puts up the first solar sats, because they're vulnerable to threats.
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Here's another though of what Musk might be thinking: all those satellites... why not real space stations in GEO, and they have SP wings, and do communications (you know, cell towers these days carry multiple carriers' signals), etc? And you go up to one (well, three) places, and repair from there - or have robots to repair.
You have left out the requirement to tow it 30 degrees closer to the equator. Sorry, mate, but that is just not true even at 52 north, with the maximum requirement in the winter.
IIRC, microwaves go through clouds and the atmosphere more efficiently. Plus, you don't want a Death Ray.
A few decades back, I tried to find something that would help me restore my French reading ability, which was once pretty good, but ALL the courses were listening-based. Well, that's NBG for me, as I have been seriously deaf since childhood and (literally) cannot hear French. The problem of monolingualism isn't quite as simple as it is often made out to be.
Well, yes, a frakkin great big bus with a construction shack and huge PV wings etc is basically a space station - just not one intended for political purposes above all else. You could clean up a great deal of ‘tight space’ at GEO that way and massively reduce any risk of collisions. Not to mention that with loadsapower, a few meteorites & comets, you could start building an elevator.
I think you're missing the point, which is that I agree with Jez's idea that Solar is getting cheaper and cheaper, and will soon be the least-expensive way to get Green energy.
Would not kick starting an asteroid and/or a lunar mining manufacturing industry be more aligned with Musk's long term goal of a Mars colony. I would have though a functioning Earth Lunar industrial base make a Mars colony more economically viable and easier to supply and could at the same time help with shortages of rare earth and other materials?
Or do I wait another year and get one of the hydrogen power cells they just started making in Australia
Depending on your tolerance for a tank of bromine you could buy the slightly pricey RedFlow setup that solves most of the problems... except price. Mind you, the hydrogen systems I've seen make RedFlow look cheap and efficient, so maybe that's not a concern.
RedFlow are currently ~$AU20k installed for a 10kW PV + 10kWh storage + 5kW fuel cell setup. They explicitly say "not targeting residential except for a few weirdos who are willing to pay for it" and I suspect you and me fit quite happily into that market segment :)
https://www.seven20electrical.net/projects/private-hampton-east-residence (probably more like $40k there but a good example of the sort of customer)
No, I quite take that point. But the point you are missing is that it doesn't matter HOW cheap it is, if the energy isn't there! Yes, there are ways of generating power at 30 north and shipping it to 50-60 north, but they don't come cheap. So the project cost is high, even if the actual generation cost is peanuts.
That's one of the things that is driving the ideas that OGH floated in this blog entry. Is energy beamed from orbit The Way Of The Future? I require some precise engineering, financial and risk assessment calculations to even make a guess :-)
Heh, I noticed this new thread just after reading the article linked below about graphene aluminium-ion batteries, which are currently in commercialisation stage here in Brisbane (with tech developed at UQ):
https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/australian-aluminium-ion-battery-breakthrough-129973/
The side comment is that a specialist automotive classifieds website now has more reliable general science news than most Australian traditional newspapers and their online channels.
You need a shed outside your house for the lithium-ion batteries.
Or you just bolt them to a brick/concrete wall on the outside of your house, which seems increasingly common here. Probably next to the solar inverter(s) which are usually next to the electricity distribution board and meter, also next to the front door. In our houses anyway, coz that way the meter reader could just come to the front door, look round, spot the meter, copy the readings ... and now a magic machine does that using telepathy. But I digress.
For my granny flat I am thinking of a row of those toys along the south wall, likely all bolted to a steel frame that's bolted to the slab, and with a sheet of fire-resistant MgO board behind it because electrical fires are likely regardless of whether you have LiPo bombs there or not.
The good news is that stationary batteries are increasingly LiFePO4 rather than LiPo so the fire risk is much lower (as is the peak discharge rate, hence you don't get those in cars).
Also, contra the pretty architecture above, in the last few years PV prices have dropped in Australia to the point where even cheapskates are bumping up against the 5kW per phase limit that grid operators like. So a bit of wankatecture like that would probably have a 10kW array if built today, not the 3.3kW they have.
"Extreme Weather events" Let's suppose all of this stuff gets built And then there is a Carrington Event?
GEO spacing is generally set by frequency allocations. Particularly for things like DBS the ground receiver is going to be a small dish with a corresponding wide angle of view. You really only want one satellite in that view to be using the interesting frequency to avoid interference. The Astra satellites that provide Sky in the UK share an orbital slot but use slightly different frequencies making them appear to be a single source to the average Sky dish on the ground.
Older GEO satellites tended to use monopropellant station keeping thrusters, newer ones are generally ion or hall effect thrusters using a basically inert propellant. You don't get km/s velocities out of boiling that with a BFO laser, it's more likely to start a leak pushing the bird off station before it goes pop in any destructive way. Ideas for doing serious damage to GEO tend to involve sending a couple of tons of grit around the moon to get the necessary plane change and to put it retrograde. Being clever with a couple of adjustment burns on the way back in before emptying the builders bags could mean that an arc of GEO gets most of the benefit.
GEO has two stable points at ~75 deg E and 108 deg W which have collected inert obejects over the years.
Yeah, I'm kind of disappointed that there doesn't seem to be an enterprising bunch of engineers in Shenzhen designing modular scopesats and offering them for sale on AliExpress.
Only a matter of time, I'm sure...
I haven't read all the comments, so pardon me if I'm doubling up.
To work, an SBSP requires efficient transmission of electricity and requires that the receiver be cheaper than the cheapest solar panels.
Neither of these are the case, but if they were... what does that look like?
It means that shooting your energy from the ground up to space and back is also efficient. It's cheaper to outfit your SBSP with receiving rectennas than solar panels (the SBSP idea doesn't work unless rectennas are cheaper than panels), Which means putting your solar panels on the ground and relaying the energy to anywhere on the world is going to be cheaper.
The imaginary technology that makes SBSP possible also means that SBPS is economically impossible. Maybe orbiting power relays (if the imaginary efficient radio power transmission happens)
We don't have world wide Internet links via satellites, because cables are cheaper, more efficient and carry more. The same thing applies to SBSP. Right now you can send electricity from one side of the planet to the other at 50% efficiency via cables. Since that's the worst case, real transfers will be more efficient than that on average. The arguments against cables all apply far more to SBSP. "what if some country wanted to cut off your supply" Well, orbiting facilities are a lot easier to find than a hundreds of crisscrossed cables on the sea floor. "we can't be dependent on another country for essential power" So you're happy to be dependent on Musk, who might drop dead any second? I guess it's better than the current situation of being dependent on Russia for gas and the Middle East for oil.
I just can't see it. It depends on lightweight solar panels in orbit being cheaper than cheap heavy panels on the ground. Even the increased daily output is going to struggle to make up that difference once you include efficient global energy transfer via relay sats.
Sounds like you need a Halon system in your garage. You might die but the fire will likely be out.
"...comparative energy density of batteries vs a tank full of gasoline, availability of resources like lithium..."
These and other problems of similar kind are either exacerbated by or actually caused by inappropriate or just plain mistaken thinking and direction of effort.
Solar energy supply does not have to be achieved only by maximising the efficiency of ambient-level solar collectors and mounting them in high-quality sites to produce output in the form of electricity. Storing the energy does not have to be achieved with batteries, and if it is so stored the batteries do not have to be made with lithium. The contrary position is mainly a result of taking a couple of ideas that we were doing already in situations where they have a specific advantage, and trying to apply them to everything regardless of whether that advantage remains, disappears, or even becomes a disadvantage.
Eliminating the use of fossil hydrocarbons as fuel is not the same thing as having to abandon hydrocarbons altogether regardless of where the carbon comes from. The contrary position seems to arise from a mixture of an idea that nobody can be trusted to do their job unsupervised without fucking it up, therefore instead of supervising them (ah, the horror!) you have to only give them jobs that can't be fucked up, and tribal signalling in an irrelevant, synthetic and silly petrolheads vs. greenies conflict.
As others have pointed out the losses inherent in space-based power supply are enormous; whereas the amount of ground collection area required to meet energy needs, even at crappy efficiency, is tiny compared to the amount of naturally dead land that already exists. Musk's resources would be far better directed at what has too long been comparatively only a fringe area of research, at developing some readily-achieved arrangement of widely-available chemical resources (rocks count) to perform solar-powered reduction of atmospheric CO2. This could be deployed at mass scale over large areas of otherwise entirely useless land, its simplicity compensating for its (likely) inefficiency; the facilities which already exist for transporting hydrocarbons out of desert lands can then simply switch to getting their input from the solar farms instead of holes in the ground. And you don't bother regulating the output from the farms, you just use those holes in reverse to stuff any excess back underground.
A significant advantage of this approach - though of course not from Musk's point of view - is that it does not achieve the desired result (solar energy supply) as a side-effect of, and bait to get people to pay for, the development of capabilities which we are far better off not having. There is pretty much nothing good at all (since I am assuming the use of more practical alternatives to space-based power supply to address energy problems) that calls for the ability to heave 100 tons of junk into space in one hit; once in a blue moon there might arise some scientific project for which it would be useful, but since we got to the actual moon without it I reckon we could get by.
Outside such negligible rarities, it's only good for things that begin at pointless extravagance and waste of resources on a large scale ("space hotel" ffs; Mars colonies which as Heteromeles keeps pointing out he can't bloody do for far more mundane reasons), proceed through commercial excess, support for sustaining the unsustainable in ways we should already have learnt from the plague to avoid, and facilitating surveillance, manipulation and authoritarianism (think Google and Facebook etc, not just governments), and ending up with all the various situations (both "official" and "unofficial") whereby the wrong person wakes up with an itchy arse and chooses some means of scratching it which kills millions of people (nearly all of these are points which various people have alluded to already, but mostly it seems without recognition).
a Halon system in your garage
LiPo cells are self-combusting, the only way to get them to stop is cooling them down (the fire triangle: fuel, oxidiser, heat... LiPos have two of those built in). Which is fine for a little pack, you just drop it in a swimming pool and weight it down. But for anything you can't pick up and carry to the pool you just have to wait it out.
LiFePO4 are slightly different, the more discharged they are the less self-combusting they are. Sadly fires are most likely in the final stages of charging (inevitably?)
Either way the electrolyte and smoke are toxic. So rather than tanks of halon you might be better off with tanks of air, so you have something to breathe while the fire burns itself out.
I'd guess we want a sun-synchronous orbit for shade - a noon-synchronous one? Noon over empty parts of the Pacific, probably.
Reducing top-of-atmosphere insolation is a much more benign method of geo-engineering to cool the climate than the current favourite, spraying sulphate particles into the stratosphere (which later rain out as acid rain).
One or two million square km of sunshade would be useful, and now it might be feasible.
Putting the telescope in orbit is the easy bit. Getting the tracking and pointing working right and then getting the data down to the ground will cost you rather more...
Oh, I know. I was being a bit sarcastic as a few decades back people actually DID put Halon in their houses. Who didn't really understand how it worked.
As to mounting the PowerWall on the concrete exterior wall, well, in the US the amount of construction of outside concrete walls outside of Florida might be below 1%. I'm referring to houses designed for 1 to 4 families. And even with row/town houses and apartments under 6 stories many/most are made of engineered lumber systems. Again, in the US.
And building new with concrete just now sort of kind of may be worse than burning coal in terms of CO2 mitigation.
"Finding sneaky ways to get solar on, say, a 1950s roof would be golden, especially since that 1950s roof probably can't hold the weight of a current slab array."
I was having a look at "camping-sized" (they were about 0.6m2) solar panels the other day. There seemed to be 2 main patterns: ordinary rigid ones at about 40kg each IIRC (might have been only 20), or flexible ones of similar size and only a little lower efficiency at 2kg each. Cor. Those might be a good place to start.
At the manufacturing level, solar panels have to be waterproof; roof tiles have to be waterproof; why not make the same flat object perform both functions, and save half the weight?
"Especially when there's most of a ton of battery and at least one-third of it is bolted to the wall."
Why is it bolted to the wall, and not stacked on Dexion racking with quick-release electrical connections and mounted on castors so you can quickly push it outside?
Compared to sending it down from space? Yeah. I get it. Bad angles. Long, long nights. Poor weather? Five years from now it will still be cheaper to solarize a British home than send the power from space.
Of course. I was being facetious.
Amateur astronomy will have to change, though, and there may be opportunities as well as threats.
Let's suppose all of this stuff gets built And then there is a Carrington Event? Those who are concerned about the land-based power distribution system have been worrying about the possibilities of such events for many decades, so they've worked out hardening reasonably well. Other parts of the infrastructure, not so much. Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse (Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, SIGCOMM’21, August2 3–27,2021) Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. ... However, Internet researchers and operators are mostly blind to another black swan event that poses a direct threat to Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate the impact of solar superstorms that can potentially cause large-scale Internet outages covering the entire globe and lasting several months.
Space tech people include solar weather events in their models; whether the models are complete will always be a question.
For a single section of wall just the MgO board would be fine, or you could use clay bricks or even reused concrete (meaning a cut out slab of it from another project) or worse case recycled concrete (ie, coarsely ground concrete used as aggregate). That's if you cared about carbon emissions, which the building industry in most of the world does not.
I'm looking at hempcrete for that reason - lime and biomass, rather than the traditional mud and biomass. It's almost non-flammable because the biomass is coated in lime, so it's actually a good material for this application. And can be carbon negative, obviously the biomass embodies carbon, and the lime re-carbonises as it sets, so it's mostly the energy cost to make the lime and the transport costs you have to balance against the biomass.
Hempcrete is a bit useless in places like the USA because it doesn't have a major industrial power backing it and making it insurable, but it's industrialised in the UK (and some minor irrelevant countries that don't even speak English, like Germany and France 😛)
Which is to say... there are many, many options.
One thing people forget about GEO orbits is that there is a population of debris out there that will not decay but will be pumped up into orbital inclinations of up to 18 degrees and 4km/sec by the action of the lunar gravity. So what you can see easily - MEV2 was seen in binoculars - is only part of the problem.
I saw a paper done by some guys from Warwick Uni. They used the Isaac Newton at La Palma to investigate the GEO belt and they found that by the time you get down to 1m wide debris objects most are not known and the number of objects present by the time you reach football sized was still increasing. I rather suspect something the size of a cricket ball kicking along at 4km/sec would totally mess up a normal satellite and knock holes in any solar panel - possily once a day if it wasn't destroyed.
Its also unclear exactly how secure the retirement/graveyard orbit is 300km above GEO - as the long term impact of lunar gravity and light pressure has not been thoroughly modelled.
Not saying GEO is as hostile as LEO but at least LEO cleans itself eventually.
Evidently Elon has also read "Space Doctor" by Lee Corey (1981) which features something close to the scenario Charlie described. A point made by one of the characters was "I have to get the per pound cost down to $ value".
If you check history and do some research you will find that NASA and the DOE have already covered most of the basics for solar power and microwave transmission. They might not have solved some problems but that was back in the 70's and 80's. Forty plus years of tech later combined with cheap launches?
For example: https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/SSP-DOE-1978-space-solar-power-State-Local-Regulations.pdf
Sounds like you need a Halon system in your garage. You might die but the fire will likely be out.
Don't think I would die, because there are too many holes in the garage to let exhaust out for that to put out a fire.
The problem with a liquid bromine battery is that I live on a hill, with a busy intersection downhill from me. It's not a great place to spill toxic liquids, even if most of them end up sterilizing the storm drain. And the creek below it.
As for the Australian LAVO hydrogen energy unit, turns out it stores 40 kWh, but only delivers 5 kWh of that, so pffft. No thanks.
Now if you really want novel nycteroskatic psychosis, how about putting a rather large suborbital device (perhaps shaped like a surfboard a mile long or more) that gathers sunlight at the mesopause, rides the atmospheric waves to stay aloft and keep station, and beams its energy surplus down?
The joke here is that the mesopause runs around 173 K, so it's the coldest place in the near Earth system. There are two temperature minima 85 and 100 km up. It's currently impossible to station an object there on the edge of space, but if you could, there's a really nice temperature differential that could be used to do work of some sort. Probably said object would have to be rather large to stay aloft and support any payload, but with full sunlight and really cold surroundings, it might generate some energy in some form.
The nice thing about such a device is that it's not that far up in cosmic terms. The problem is that no one has ever figured out how to fly in the mesosphere, let alone at the top of the mesosphere. Through it, yes. In it for any extended period? Not really.
A scenario that may have occurred to Elon (or more likely someone working for him) is that a big, cheap rocket with a payload is empty after the payload has been deployed. Add some orbital refuelling and some automation (or some space suited humans) and you have a ready-made satellite and debris recovery system. Do you think the NSA would be excited to get its hands on some spy satellites built by others? Or maybe they recover some of their own just to find out how they performed after so many years in space.
If SpaceX succeed with this, it changes how you deal with space from "expensive, specialised" to the equivalent of booking a flight from LA to NY.
Note that the laws of salvage in outer space are different from those on Earth, but then you can always "inspect" stuff without pinching it.
I'd guess we want a sun-synchronous orbit for shade - a noon-synchronous one? Noon over empty parts of the Pacific, probably. I agree; adjustable controls over insolation placed at L1 are a plausible project for E. Musk's future tech. And as you say, such a shield would be the most benign geoengineering approach, especially if combined with carbon capture at a massive scale to raise the oceans' PH. I would not mind at all if he had such a project in mind. Should be made be resilient enough to continue operating even if civilization collapsed. Would need an internationalized (or at least auditable) control system, else it could be used to favor/punish regions.
Putting "it" in a shed outside "your house" rather assumes a certain housing density and social structure, doesn't it? <sarcasm> Oh, I know. We'll just clad entire apartment buildings with lithium-ion batteries, with exposed wiring snaking down to charging stations in the immaculately-kept carpark below. It can be part of their insulation system. Just like Grenfell. </sarcasm>
The other reason (besides just path loss) that space based solar power beaming to earth doesn't work is that antenna arrays for information transmission and efficient power transmission have very different requirements and behaviors.
You cannot use a large number of small omnidirectional, or even moderate gain, antennas coherently (or otherwise) combined to achieve the same energy collection as a parabolic focusing surface of the same aperture. The amount of energy received from the a solid angle of the sky by any single antenna does not change depending on how you add the voltages. Creating synthetic beams "in post" does not change the beamwidth of the actual antenna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinned-array_curse
"The thinned-array curse (sometimes, sparse-array curse) is a theorem in electromagnetic theory of antennas. It states that a transmitting antenna which is synthesized from a coherent phased array of smaller antenna apertures that are spaced apart will have a smaller minimum beam spot size. Typically, the main lobe has a solid angle that is smaller by an amount proportional to the ratio of the area of the synthesized array to the total area of the individual apertures. The amount of power that is beamed into this main lobe is reduced by an exactly proportional amount, so that the total power density in the beam is constant. "
The gain required for achieving any significant energy transmission over even the 400 km to LEO (add an order of magnitude for GEO) requires a ground based aperture of about 5km in size for 2.45 GHz with a 20m dish in orbit. That is a bigger parabolic dish than has ever even been considered.
So, arrays of small antennas don't work and building the required 5km dish on earth or in orbit isn't feasible. Trying to make bigger dishes in space has even worse returns.
Don't tell us why a given partial solution doesn't work universally, tell us about the better solution you prefer.
Right now renewable energy systems at home are mostly the domain of rich people. So yes, talking about mounting systems outside, on sheds, etc, is entirely reasonable. It also considers that rich people are responsible for much more of the problem than poor people are, and if we can get the rich to become carbon neutral that's a big win. Does that by manipulating what counts as status symbols seems to work better than whining at them.
For the other 90% there's large scale generation and storage systems, that exist largely the result of decades of campaigning by the rich people you are being sarcastic about.
https://newrepublic.com/article/163305/ipcc-better-climate-propaganda
We Need Better Climate Propaganda Warnings about the catastrophes ahead need to name the enemy and give people something to do.
...Some of the most successful recent appeals in public life have involved a clear enemy (a virus, a drug, Donald Trump) and a simple, specific action. Vote. Write postcards. Get a shot. But naming an enemy can be risky if fear is emphasized at the expense of a positive message.
Worth noting that a lot of the chatter here involves people making concrete suggestions about what each of us can do. If you can pick that out of the howls of outrage and nihilism there's IMO some quite decent stuff. And occasionally comments from people saying "you know, maybe I can do something". Don't hold back just because someone else says an idea doesn't work for them...
Putting "it" in a shed outside "your house" rather assumes a certain housing density and social structure, doesn't it?
You made me look. About 70% of the US population lives in single family housing. I would have guessed more like 50%.
Owner occupied is about 64%.
"Anyway, point is, it's almost impossible to start a Kessler cascade in GEO. It's like the difference between plinking at supertankers in the Straits of Hormuz to block a shipping lane (that'd be LEO) and trying to blockade the Pacific Ocean by sinking tankers (that's GEO)."
It may be a bit easier than you think. Back in 1988, I took a class at college called "War in the Nuclear Age," which back during the cold war was a very serious class, starting with the WWII politics, strategies, and so on that led to the first use of nuclear weapons in war, then on to the present and the pre-Soviet collapse forecast of the future of war.
In a lecture on space warfare, the professor (sadly, I no longer can find his name) mentioned that one way to take out GEO quickly and semi-permanently was to send up one metric ton of coarse sand in counter-GEO orbit -- the same altitude and so on as the GEO satellites, but going in the exact opposite direction. A small scattering charge, and you have about 10 billion tiny projectiles, each with about the same energy as a 9mm handgun projectile, enough to pierce and spall off even more debris off any satellites hit, causing the cascade.
Since there would be no real way to clean it up afterwards, and not even residual atmosphere to drag it down, this would obviously be a last-gasp, burn-it-all-down attack, so it is extremely unlikely anyone would actually do it, but it was something thought about and probably planned for in case the cold war turned hot.
If someone is broadcasting power at the antenna farm next-door, and I'm in a "spillover" area where there is lower-levels of power aimed at my property, would I be allowed to set up my own antennas and harvest power? There was a case years ago where a farmer got busted for stealing power by hooking up wires to the rafters of a barn that was under some transmission lines and using the induced current to power his farm, while another farmer in a similar case actually won the right to just nail fluorescent light tubes to the rafters of his barn, because the overhead transmission lines would light them up and he didn't see the point of actually plugging them in. I suspect the courts will have to rule on that one.
Tesla fiddled around with the idea of broadcast power -- perhaps once we get enough satellites up there, instead of focusing the signals on specific targets, a more general, diffuse approach might make powering at least low-power devices through such a system, assuming the power broadcasts themselves are harmless. Need power for your house, put an antenna on the roof -- need more, make it bigger, or hook up to the grid and actually pay a premium for your power. Billing, as usual, will be difficult, but I'm sure someone will think of something.
There was a case years ago where a farmer got busted for stealing power by hooking up wires to the rafters of a barn that was under some transmission lines and using the induced current to power his farm,
Actually the farmer was taking the power from the transmission lines. And thus reducing the amount delivered at the "end of the line". Not much but still they were taking it. With intent.
Now the fluorescent tubes would light up no mater what. In this case I'd say the power company loses.
As to the spill over case, since it does not reduce the amount of power the company is "harvesting" I'd say tough. They are basically spilling it with no hope of recovery.
Of course a lot of this would depend on the legal precedents of the country involved.
Near future fiction on this topic, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future is worth reading. Spoiler : ultimately optimistic ..
Tesla fiddled around with the idea of broadcast power
If you're talking Nicola then he was somewhat nuts at the time. Einstein was/is wrong, quantum physics was/is wrong, and NT was talking about extracting free energy from, uh, whatever.
The conspiracy theories floating around about how the oil, coal, and other energy companies conspired to put him into a nut house or similar and discredit him to keep us all form getting free energy are to say the least "over the top".
In response to Poul-Henning Kamp and his post 16:
It's pretty simple to design the transmitting system to unfocus and spread the beam immediately if the transmission beam strays from its designated receiving antenna, while the power to the transmitters is cut. Paul mentioned this in post #38.
This solves any steering errors, just like the side 'lopes' (lobes) are resolved by increasing the transmitting antenna size. I won't worry about the watts per square meter, as whitroth noted in his post #44 where he noted the approved Environmental Impact Statement.
Hurricane seeder? More like a hurricane steerer; dump energy to push any tropical disturbance to where you want it to go. I'm sure the levee boards of New Orleans and vicinity will be right enthusiastic about no more hurricanes landing in Louisiana. Certainly the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce will buy in (I remember Donna).
73/best regards de K7AAY
FYI, the article (comments too) uses 'SBSP' some of the time and 'SBPS' others.
I have trouble imagining any space to earth power beaming setup having enough energy to have a noticeable impact on a hurricane.
I think you a missing the scale of what is happening here. There is a gigantic fusion power source (the sun) beaming energy at the Earth every second of every day. The sun sends roughly 170,000 TWh of energy at the Earth every hour while globally, humanity uses roughly 160,000 TWh every year. You run a greater risk if you change how that quantity of energy from the sun is dissipated (absorbed, used, reflected, etc). A net increase of 1% in the atmosphere's ability to retain energy (as heat) is far more serious.
Moz @ 114: If we're going to "kill" fossil fuels (which we should; there are much, much better uses for any petroleum than just burning it), we can't ignore the bottom 90% of the population.
David @ 116: Fair point as to the US... not so much elsewhere (as my example from London might have made clearer if I was more explicit).
Musk et al are focusing on the fun stuff, the big advances, the sexy easy-to-depict-in-fiction-with-enough-handwavium; but real progress will be made through infrastructure. Just consider that pure-plug-in cars are not practicable in about 70% (by area) of the US because charging stations are too sparse; and the less said about Europe east of the Havel, and most of Africa and South America and Asia, the better. And how does one safely, and affordably, get power across working agricultural land, let alone wildlands and wetlands? It's not that a workable power-transmission-from-space system might not be better (in the abstract) than burning fossil fuels; it's that there are lots of other challenges to actually adopting it on a large enough scale to make a difference being neglected, and if it's only affordable for a few it won't reduce fossil fuel demand enough to "kill" it.
All of this rests on one huge assumption: that Spacex's new launch system will actually work out and be as cheap as advertised. I don't doubt that they will get their new rocket to the point where it flies. I do doubt that they will succeed in getting launch costs as low as advertised, and I very much doubt they will get the turnaround time as low as advertised.
As for space based solar, back in 2012, the Do The Math blog ran an entry on space based solar power, and concluded that even with massive reductions in launch costs, it didn't make sense compared to just building solar installations on the ground.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
“ All of this rests on one huge assumption: that Spacex's new launch system will actually work out and be as cheap as advertised”
Nothing else Musk has done ever was.
He’s a master publicist and master fund-raiser of venture capital. Which means he’s a world-leading expert on over-promising. That American “fake it till you make it” thing that worked so spectacularly for people like Ellison, and Thiel.
If they do $20 / kg to orbit I’ll eat my shorts. Not in the next 2 decades.
…which doesn’t make space-based power stations impossible. But at $200/kg to orbit (which is still 50 times cheaper than what cost to geosynchronous orbit now, and seems implausible cheap at startup though the they could work up to it if launch volume is high) it’s an interesting idea rather than a free lunch.
Pigeon "Dexion" THERE is a word I haven't heard for some years. Don't think it's available any more, except from scrap, more's the pity.
Pity about the real, actual calculations that show Charlie's optimism is wrong, though. As for Musk overpromising ... it loos as though another US version of this - Uber - is about to crash & burn, how terribly sad. Cory Doctorow has written a lovely piece on this.
All (nearly all?) the comments so far have assumed that the receiving stations are going to be very large. One, or single digit numbers, with high energy density a long way from population centres.
This is well outside any area of expertise I have, so I'm going to ask how else might receiving stations be distributed, in size, power and location? Especially since beam steering and following is already a thing for Starlink. Could they be: Suitable to power a home, on the roof? Suitable to power a village, in a field outside? Suitable to power a city? Country? How about on the roof of an electric vehicle in motion, with small battery to tide it over in tunnels and other areas where the beam is blocked. Could that vehicle be flying? Airliners? Flying cars Yaaay! Shipping? Currently a problem making a monster container ship in any way green, other than some displaced emission greenwashing way.
Combination of problems. Size of beam, size of antenna. Power density against the power demand at the destination. Unwanted beam lobes, frying the neighbours (unintentionally, or otherwise). Steering accuracy.
Are any of these plausible? Jen
“ All of this rests on one huge assumption: that Spacex's new launch system will actually work out and be as cheap as advertised” Nothing else Musk has done ever was.
In 2011 SpaceX promised falcon heavy would cost 100 million and have a capacity of up to 53 tonnes to LEO expendable.
It now costs 90 million per launch and can launch 63.8 tonnes expendable.
There's lots of other examples of them delivering more than promised.
a) How much will a RedFlow add to my property value? b) How much will a RedFlow cut my headline electricity bill?
89 - Which also goes to my underlying point in my ongoing complaint about how carp the English Broadcasting Corporation is at reporting actual news. 90 - I'm trying to get a handle on a comparitor here, hence the apparently O/T question; What is the typical life of a satellite dish in Australia? 96 - Hence my ongoing argument that there are other uses for light crudes (eg North Sea production) than as fuel. Some of them (plastics, lubricants) even apply to EVs! 108 - Alternative view; the LAVO stores 40kWh, but only discharges it at 5kW per hour, so is good for 8 hours. 114 - By what definition of "rich people"? Not trolling, just asking. We, the commentariat, are all "rich" by a global definition, but by a national definition some of us are actually "asset rich, cash poor". 118 sentence 1 - Do you mean a side lobe of a broadcast beam? If so, then I'd say (radar person) that you're harvesting an accepted loss from the transmitter. 127 - Well, my usual view on "multibilllionaire vanity projects" is that even when they don't work, the rest of us have probably learned something. 129 - I couldn't swear to the Dexion brand name as such, but modular racking shelves still are a thing.The usual assumption for microwave power transmission is that the energy intensity on the ground is no higher than sunlight.
So not suitable for any transport other than trains with overhead powerlines connected to a big rectenna farm.
It's very hard to focus microwaves into a tight beam, so city size is probably a minimum.
PS, they're were some ideas for powering aircraft, but it involved very low orbit satellites and death ray levels of power. Not like what's under discussion.
That idea makes hypersonic boost-glide airliners seem sane.
"It's pretty simple to design the transmitting system to unfocus and spread the beam immediately if the transmission beam strays from its designated receiving antenna"
Sure it is.
How hard is it to make the system fail-safe ?
How hard is it to keep efficiency up if it is fail-safe ?
How hard is it to make it tamper-proof ?
How hard is it to be super-villain-proof ?
How hard will it be for terrestrial authorities to trust a potential super-villain ?
The hard problems are not technical, they are political.
Everything that you said applies MORE to solar than beamed power, and it omits the fact that many (perhaps most) UK homes cannot be 'solarised' because of inadequate outside surfaces.
46 degrees from vertical isn't optimal, but it's a relatively small problem. Solar radiation is 75.5 from vertical in midwinter for me - OGH has it worse. Remember that the problems go up as the inverse of the cosine, so are about 3 times worse for solar than beamed energy in the UK.
We know for certain that 'solarising' our houses cannot be made to work, because of the basic physics. The price of the panels is completely irrelevant. We don't know if beamed power would or would not, as I said in the last paragraph of #88.
That may be true in Australia - it isn't in the UK. Any solution here HAS to be largely a centrally organised one.
Actually, in Australia, solar power is a no-brainer - a pity that also applies to so many of its politicians and even a good many of its electorate, not that we are any better in the UK.
It seemed even crazier as you looked at it more.
So the plane would take of on normal jet engines, then once it was over the ocean (so it wouldn't fry people on the ground, assuming people in boats don't matter) the beam would be started. The microwaves go through some sort of heat and pressure proof microwave transparent port, then strike some microwave absorbing surface that heats up to near 1000C. A compressor puts high pressure air over it, that's then expanded through a turbine. So basically like a normal gasturbine, but with microwaves instead of kerosene to heat the air.
So aiming a death tray at a port on top of a thin aluminium tube full of people and kerosene...
What could go wrong?
death traydeath ray
Thanks for those details - very interesting. One of the most useful first payloads would be a couple of semi-automated telescopes intended specifically to measure how much junk there really is, of what size, and in what orbits. Once we had that information for the smaller objects, we could do the risk calculations properly (rather than basing them on guesswork), and start thinking about space brooms if needed.
I spent some years as an energy market analyst and policy wonk.
I think fossil fuels are dead long before anyone puts huge solar panels in orbit. Infrastructure projects take a long, long time to happen. The energy industry plans in decades. Fossil fuels are mortally wounded, they just haven't died yet.
Earth based renewable energy systems will be cheaper and as reliable as fossil fuel systems by about 2030 without policy support.
Solar PV in good locations is already cheaper than Combined Cycle Gas Turbines. The learning curve effect for solar PV looks to be 15% or more. Deployment will probably double and double again over the next decade. Solar PV will be about 1/3rd cheaper in 2030 than it is today. There is more than enough land in the world that is not much use for anything other than a solar PV array to power the entire planet several times over.
Onshore wind is reasonably competitive on cost with fossil fuels. Learning curve effect is lower and there is a longer history of deployment but long-term cost reductions of 2% a year for the next decade are probably reasonable. Onshore wind in 2030 will cost about 85% of today's cost.
Offshore wind will see it's costs fall faster. That includes offshore wind in deeper waters built without towers. Most people live near the sea.
And those costs keep falling.
The costs of storage are falling. Part of the current problem with battery storage is that most of our batteries are designed for applications like mobile phones and laptops or cars. They are a bit sub-optimal for storing power for overnight, or till the weekend or for a few months. Other storage technologies are still being used in a fossil fuel network. For example existing hydro dams which provide peak power during the day can be repurposed to provide power in the winter just by operating them in a different commercial model.
More importantly cabling is getting cheaper and supply of cabling and cables is improving. Losses from High Voltage DC cables are a couple of percent per 1,000 kilometers. There is for example already some tentative plans to build a solar PV array in northern Australia and cable the power to Singapore. (One of the problems with the deal is that the Singaporeans appear not to trust other people with their energy supply are hesitant to rely too much on a big cable they don't control.)
The availability of interconnection means you can move solar PV generation from North Africa and Arabia to Europe and Southern Africa, from Australia to SE Asia, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to New York - and do the same for onshore wind from the US wind belt.
You can foresee a grid in Western Europe that links offshore wind farms in the North Sea and Atlantic with hydro resources in Norway and also south towards solar PV resources in Morocco which doesn't require much in the way of long-term battery storage. Parts of that are already being built.
The technology to do all of this cheaper than current energy prices already exists, it will just take some decades to actually build it.
So I'm not sure what Elon Musk is up to. Perhaps he is mistaken about the deployment trajectory of Earth based renewables (or perhaps I am). Perhaps his interest in energy infrastructure in space is to move the demand centres in to orbit too for some asteroid mining. Perhaps he is trying something else. Perhaps he just wants to build a muckle great rocket ship.
As you indicate, a solar farm in Morocco and a cable to the UK would need no more than overnight storage capacity. That's feasible, where overwinter storage capacity isn't. There's no new technology needed, let alone unobtanium.
danielwilliam @ 142 So, fossil fuel is dead, but still walking & "we" can all do the numbers on falling costs & improving efficiency. Plus the improved versions of "battery" storage, including the Rust/Air plants mentioned recently. Rust/Air storage - as a reminder.
Given this, why are people like Koch & the Shell & Octel ( YUCK! ) & various AUS companies still screaming? If they were actually smart, they would be re-investing in renewables & storage to keep their profits going, wouldn't they? But they don't seem to be doing that ....
As long as people believe in over-optimistic bullshit promises of 'grid-scale energy storage', there will be room for fossil gas, because people in rich Global North countries (which are located far away from the equator to be affected by the so-called 'seasons' and thus will have peak energy use in the autumn and winter, with peak solar generation in the spring and summer) just won't accept rolling blackouts in the winter.
This is the reasons that think tanks peddling '100% renewables for Europe soon' studies are financed, among others, by natural gas companies and why Germany is hell-bent on finishing Nord Stream 2.
Near the equator, you just need enough storage to store solar power from day into night. In the rich, Global North countries where the ability to provide the population with power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year is a prerequisite for a political party to hold on to power fossil fuels will have a very, very long life (well, with the exception of France, UK and other countries which are not rabidly anti-nuclear), because inter-seasonal electricity storage just isn't happening on "before climate breakdown is on irreversible civilisation-collapsing trajectory" time scales.
And in current geopolitical climate, powering your country by long-distance links from a solar farm located outside of the EU is also a no-go. (Country borders and a narrowly interpreted national interest are one of the main factors which prevent successful action on climate change)
We know for certain that 'solarising' our houses cannot be made to work, because of the basic physics. .... We don't know if beamed power would or would not,
Probably would not. The DoE/NASA paper I linked to above about site selection was using a rectenna farm in an ellipse roughly 15km E-W and 20km N-S as its base installation. One of the constraints they added was for the site to be below 40 deg latitude, further north than that and the long axis increases rapidly. You might be able to find a suitable site in the UK, if the elements making up the rectenna are elevated you can use the space underneath, but you'd need to do something like cover Dartmoor from Okehampton to Ivybridge and I don't see Princetown residents (voluntary and involuntary) being happy at the metal mesh covering the sky above their chimney pots. It's another case of using bits of Morocco or Mauretania and running long cables.
It's good to know that going from fossil fuels to solar, either terrestrial, or space based will still mean supporting unpleasant governments who are on side and destabilising, bombing and invading recalcitrant countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Got to keep the
oilelectrons flowing!"the Do The Math blog ran an entry on space based solar power"
Which contains two very informative graphs showing atmospheric transmission of microwaves as a function of frequency for both dry and wet air. To my eye, it looks as if the sweet spot is around 100 GHz.
So aiming a death tray at a port on top of a thin aluminium tube full of people and kerosene...
AIUI it was not a civilian air transport proposal, but the Pentagon flying a kite: they have a perceived need for long-duration high altitude surveillance drones (read: spy planes) that don't need refueling. Beam power was one possible option they looked at, along with Hafnium nuclear isomers (google it), actual fission reactors (a big nope from everyone), and the current contender, solar/fuel cells like Zephyr.
Talking of shortages ... Isn't there supposed to be another UK/EU trade cu-off date - (?) End of October (?) Which will presumably affect many things, but, particularly, food.
I was reminded of this by reading this one on another Brexshit fuck-up .......
This is a damned good thread. Good enough to lure me back from years of mere lurking. :-)
Lots of smart explicit analyses here of the comparative efficiency of solar power from SBPS and from terrestrial structures. Many of the practical rebuttals, however, have to do with resilience -- although as I write this only Bill Arnold at #111 uses the term explicitly. Many, many of the smart ideas and perspectives here seem to be oriented towards finding solutions efficient enough to overcome concerns that are, in essence, about resilience.
This isn't surprising. The commentariat here is engineering-heavy; resilience is more of a systems concept. And one thing that many of the arguments gloss over is that at the systems level, efficiency and resilience are opposed principles. The more efficient your system is, the more likely it is to be brittle. A few key observations:
- Resilient systems favor stability over volume of output.
- Resilient systems are comparatively insensitive to the quality and quantity of inputs.
- Resilient systems are comparatively insensitive to external conditions.
- Resilient systems tend to include multiple reasonably independent modes and execution paths for included processes.
- Resilient systems have minimal critical dependencies.
- Resilient systems favor inherent configurability/adaptability over bolt-on safety & support measures.
(h/t: I got some of this from Dmitry Orlov, but that was long ago, and my memory is COVID brainfogged. Any errors or infelicities or made-up shit are not his fault.)Note that every item in the list tends to work against the efficiency of the system as a whole.
Our outlook is conditioned by prior success, of course. The entire electrical grid system is an astonishing triumph of highly efficient engineering delivering a reasonably resilient power distribution solution. So we tend to double down on the concept of the grid itself, and look to non-fossil means of sustaining the grid.
However, the measures being discussed here are mostly far less resilient than the grid itself. Making the grid dependent on such things feels like a game of Jenga: sooner or later it's apt to collapse of its innate instabilities.
It seems likely that whatever we end up building, going forward, should favor resilience over efficiency as a primary principle. We don't need to invoke extreme situations -- a Carrington event, crazy saboteurs, Kessler cascades, warmongering nations, Bond villains, or The Sisterhood Of The Red Night getting up to shenanigans -- in order to question whether we should bet the future of our civilization, and possibly our species, on measures that are inherently fragile.
Shell owns about 6 GW of offshore wind farms including an investment with Scottish Power in a floating offshore windfarm just let under by the Crown Estate.
So they do invest in renewables.
I expect countries in the Global North will use more offshore wind power than solar PV if they are that worried about the geopolitics.
The problem with offshore wind is that sometimes you get weeks without wind on a continental scale. Yes, offshore wind is great because of higher capacity factors than onshore wind (and because it provides biodiversity havens as fishing vessels do not invade offshore wind farms), but you still need something to provide power to your constituents when the wind isn't blowing in the winter.
Which is why Shell and others are investing in renewables, with catchy slogans like: "natural gas, a great partner for renewables". Which is true, except for that pesky part where natural gas, despite the word "natural" in its name is still a fossil fuel, and that small problem that methane leaks make natural gas plants as bad for climate as coal if not worse, because methane has a GWP20 of 86 times the GWP of CO2, and the next two decades are going to be crucial for the future of the Earth system: we either trip enough tipping points to guarantee hellish Earth for hundreds of generations, or we manage to avoid that fate and it will merely take dozens of generations to clean up our mess.
Thanks for coming back! Unfortunately, I'm going to savage this, because this is the kind of simplistic good intentions that can kill billions of people if thoughtlessly applied. We need both efficiency and resilience, and we can get these to some degree with complex systems.
If we want maximum resilience, we can abandon most technology and grow food locally. This works, because it's not really emitting any greenhouse gases, most people have functioning legs, and there are no long, brittle supply chains. But there are obvious problems, which is why I'm throwing this up as a bit of a straw man.
One problem is that walking is fuel inefficient. If I give you a pack of full of food and tell you to start walking, you'll get maybe 200 miles before you've eaten it all, probably less. In terms of fuel efficiency, humans are down there with Concorde Jets in terms of how far a pound of fuel will take us (granted it's food, not jet fuel). This is true for most animals, and the upshot is that if there's a widespread famine, it's hard to ameliorate it by walking food in, because you use up that food as you walk it in, and there's nothing to replace it.
Similarly, local crops are sustainable, but they're prone to local crop failures. There are certainly ways around this, but again, you get the regional famine problem: you're travel-limited, and if you can't get out of the zone of failure or find something else to eat, you're dead.
This is an example of resilience failing. If we try to run a world of eight billion on low/no-tech, we're going to fall to a much, much lower carrying capacity in the tens to hundreds of millions over the coming decade.
The solution is to move food using efficient technologies. While I happen to agree that resilience is and efficiency are opposed, I'd point out that rail, semi-trucks, and especially cargo ships are among the most fuel-efficient forms of transportation ever devised. The efficiency of ships has been known for centuries if not millennia, and it's why Rome was built around the Mediterranean more than into Europe.
Now, if you're stuck with a world where crop failures are common (ours, for example), you can move water and resources to help people grow food, or you can grow the food and move it. The latter is more efficient, because growing almost anything nutritious takes a lot of water. If you think about food as dehydrated water and concentrated elements, it makes more sense.
So if you're trying not to kill billions of people before their time, then you need to look at upgrading transportation systems to be as resilient and efficient as possible, without using greenhouse gases. That means figuring out how to power cargo ships, trains, and trucks, how to maintain roads (probably with junked plastic), possibly lining train tracks with solar panels, and trying to rationalize (hah!) agriculture a bit. This last problem is that Big Ag is mostly working in the mode of stripping resources, maximizing profits, and moving on, and we're running out of farmland and aquifers to ruin. Getting them to value agriculture as a century-long investment is one of those interesting problems.
Not glamorous, not the most resilient, nor the most efficient. But unfortunately, the easiest way to optimize human resilience is by crashing civilization. It may be easy to start, but once started, it's impossible to control and hard to predict the outcome*. If you want a gentler and more controllable future that involves fewer people dying of disease, starvation, or violence, then you need to work on more complex and more complicated solutions.
Hope this doesn't scare you into lurking again.
*This is in the realm of "what will survive a total nuclear war."
To reduce transmission and conversion losses, why not do something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeillo_solar_furnace
A Solar furnace in the south of France using mirrors to focus the sunlight on a single spot shows how it might work. Why convert to microwaves and then back again?
"We don't need to invoke extreme situations - a Carrington event, crazy saboteurs, Kessler cascades, warmongering nations, Bond villains, or The Sisterhood Of The Red Night getting up to shenanigans - in order to question whether we should bet the future of our civilization, and possibly our species, on measures that are inherently fragile."
...but when an extreme event (worldwide plague) does come along, we still don't question it; instead we insist that much more strongly on sticking doggedly to current practices even when they're making the extreme event worse.
natural gas, despite the word "natural" in its name is still a fossil fuel
It's an historical accident of nomenclature: it was intended to contrast with "town gas" (which is unheard-of today): town gas was manufactured by heating coal in anoxic conditions, and per wiki, "contains a mixture of calorific gases including hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, ethylene and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen." It was extremely toxic, hence folklore about committing suicide by putting your head in the oven: it was phased out in the 1940s through 1970s and replaced by methane (with added odourants to make leaks easier to isolate).
Rather thought you were. :) Giving the fun most amateurs have automating a scope in their back gardens, orbit was always going to be fun. Does explain why so many remote sensing systems are nadir pointing swept sensors capturing stuff opportunistically.
But can recall helpful people at work using expressions like "All you need to do is..." when their understanding of the real world issues was a tad flaky. Project Managers in particular - many of whom I wouldn't trust to chew gum and use a spreadsheet at the same time.
Secondly, not explicitly mentioning resilience doesn't mean that we're not considering it...
In #142, danieldwilliam was suggesting solar farms in north Africa, and cables to northern Europe. Were you confusing his post with some other post?
I'll point out a third class of adaptations we're not considering sufficiently: behavioral change.
There are at least two big classes here. One is the normal creep of people adapting to technological change. For example, Arthur Clarke grew up in an era of telephone switchboards. If someone told him that in 2021, people would have chronic neck problems from walking around looking at handheld supercomputers shaped like his 2001 monolith, he'd probably be torn with a combination of disgust and giggles. But here we are, and it's so normal that people who can't use smartphones are increasingly socially crippled.
This is the kind of thing where Greg Tingey buys an electric vehicle to replace his Land Rover, and doesn't comment on it because everyone's getting rid of their gas cars, so what's the fuss?
Another is land use changes, big and small. Big ones involve things like the Colorado River running dry. That's going to cause people to move out of southern Nevada and much of Arizona and eastern California in the next decade. This sounds catastrophic, but most of them moved there a decade or two ago, so while it'll be played up as if they're leaving their homeland...for most of them it won't be. Yes, Vegas is currently boring a drain hole into Lake Mead to get the last drops out of the reservoir, but what then? Anyway, that's a big land change, and there will be a lot of them in the Southwest. We did the fuck around and find out thing, and we're in the find out phase.
Then there's smaller stuff. For instance, has the pandemic killed office culture? Possibly somewhat. People have demonstrated that in some companies, there's little need for an office, since people work from home well enough. Assuming the managers don't force everybody to share aerosols again, there are two knock-ons that are rather important. One is that, with office culture, the biggest electricity demand is between 4 and 9 pm, due to people coming home, cooking, doing homework, laundry, and so forth. If they're already at home, parts of this hump get spread through the day, potentially decreasing the need for battery storage to buffer peak demand at dusk. This won't solve the demand problem, but it may well help.
A second issue is that some empty office buildings may be rebuilt as low or moderate income housing. In California especially, there's a dearth of low-income housing and a surplus of high end housing. Turning office space to residential space will take a lot of bureaucratic time, but it's more workable than building suburbs. Again, this won't solve the demand problem, but it may well help.
And all this comes from a workaround devised during a pandemic. We shouldn't necessarily knock behavioral changes. They make a huge and subtle difference.
a solar farm in Morocco and a cable to the UK would need no more than overnight storage capacity. That's feasible, where overwinter storage capacity isn't. There's no new technology needed, let alone unobtanium.
While this cable to the UK would likely involve the countries of Spain, France, and maybe Portugal, cabling to the Scandinavian and Baltic countries might involve countries with less rational governments. Would you want Hungary and/or Poland (in their current governments) to be in charge of a switch could turn off your nation's power system?
I can't help feeling that Germany has made multiple deals with the devil to get the natural gas they want just now.
Project Managers in particular - many of whom I wouldn't trust to chew gum and use a spreadsheet at the same time.
Hey. My wife just retired with that title.
Not that she didn't bang her head against the desk at time dealing with the politics of the position. She may have been unique in that she wanted to have subject mater expertise in the areas she managed.
H where Greg Tingey buys an electric vehicle to replace his Land Rover, and doesn't comment on it Except I cannot afford it, nor conversion of the L-R to electric ... I've been banging on about this for several threads / months / years. I would love to convert to 'leccy, but it's so damned expensive!
Unwanted beam lobes
Aiming EMF is not like shooting rifle bullets. It's more like pumpkin chunkin. Very accurate but still chunkin. There's a lot of beam spread over long distances.
https://www.punkinchunkin.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmSyrGsqmg8
Perhaps he just wants to build a muckle great rocket ship.
Never discount the desires of some guys to prove the biggest measurement on the ruler.
Kardashev @ 75:
Depends on how you want to use the language. The conventional way to break it down in decreasing order of difficulty, which I more or less endorse, is speaking, listening, writing and reading. If reading will do you for most purposes, like catching up on the news in the morning, that's a lot easier than carrying on a complicated conversation in real time. Most major languages now have news channels like Telemundo with text and video that you can watch over breakfast and get both reading and listening practice.
I wish I knew another language well enough to think in it so I don't have to translate it into English, think what I'm going to say and translate that back into that other language. You can do this if you start learning early enough. Our schools didn't offer it when I was that young.
I almost got it one time. The summer after I was in the 4th grade the Ford Foundation gave the Durham (NC) City Schools a grant to fund a summer enrichment school in math & science. For some reason, one of the math teachers selected was also a French teacher and she decided we'd double down and learn math in French (René Descartes & all that).
But it didn't last and there was no follow on once we got back to the regular schools in the fall. When I was 11 (5th grade) I could do Decimal to Binary to Octal to Duodecimal to Hexadecimal conversions in my head ... at least up to about 24 (decimal) or so. I learned them that well during that summer. But ... use it or lose it.
When the opportunity came to select a foreign language in the 9th grade (High School Freshman, but held in the Junior High School) I chose French. The school put me in the Latin class. The Latin teacher had taught my dad when he was in Junior High, and was determined she was going to be my teacher as well.
I had already had her for "Home room" in the 7th grade. We were the only class that DID NOT go to other classes (except for Gym) for various subjects. We were stuck in there with her ALL DAY LONG.
So you might imagine just how thrilled I was to be taking a DEAD LANGUAGE from her when I wanted to be in class for a language I might actually use.
Plus, she insisted on calling me Johnny, WHICH IS NOT MY NAME!!!
J'm'appelle Jean: or even maybe "Me llamo Juan", but I ain't no "Johnny".
whitroth @ 81: IIRC, microwaves go through clouds and the atmosphere more efficiently. Plus, you don't *want* a Death Ray.
True-dat!
But the "Death Ray" was a SciFi staple long before the LASER was invented. Death Rays in the SciFi I read as a boy were all a MASER of some sort.
David L @ 95: Sounds like you need a Halon system in your garage. You might die but the fire will likely be out.
I've been through a Halon system dump. It was UNREAL.
I installed a fire alarm system in a raised floor computer room for one of the Burglar Alarm Company's customers. For final approval, the local Fire Marshall came in for the verification test. But he wanted to know "real time" how long it would take our Central Station to respond and notify the local fire department. So he just walked over and yanked on a pull station.
That pull station was not part of the system I'd installed.
I looked on YouTube, but none of the Halon System discharge videos I saw included the Halon flow from under-floor nozzles blowing tiles out of the raised floor.
Lots of interesting ideas - but some concepts despite pretty detailed explanations just whiz over my head! So, apologies in advance in case some of my questions are redundant/were already answered/explained. (Feel free to explain again - in simpler terms. Thanks!)
Alternate applications/uses of Musk's solar collectors - someone already mentioned maybe a few scientific experiments might be done but that overall probably not a primary use. I'm wondering how much power is currently used to perform calculations/run computer programs. If the program is complex enough (needs a lot of power for longish times) then that might be a cost-effective/minimal energy loss application: (a) cost of sending up/transmitting the 'question' plus (b) cost of returning/transmitting the 'answer'. Examples: computing pi; modeling/testing and expanding AI computations; mining virtual currencies - more countries and banks are expressing interesting in virtual currencies - how are they going to do this?
Solar for homes - I keep wondering why the asphalt tile roofing industry hasn't linked up with the solar panel folks. Typical asphalt shingles last about 20 years - there'd probably be much more uptake/demand if a hybrid were available. I'm probably going to have to re-shingle this house in about 5 to 7 years. It seems that every part of the planet is experiencing some sort of catastrophic weather event that apart from loss of life also resulted in serious damage to buildings. IOW - Lots of rebuilding which provides various gov't levels (with a sharp elbow to the insurers) an opportunity to offer rebates/special financing for solar or locally suitable non-fossil fuel energy replacements. Wonder how many cars will have been written off in the US just in the past week.
Office towers converted to low cost housing - okay but I would also want some of these towers converted to food production facilities. No idea what the costs would be but would be an interesting experiment.
Second language - don't often get opportunities to practice my second language these days but have noticed that I'm a helluva lot more fluent after a 2-3 drinks. Some of that maybe because everyone feels more able after a couple but I think it's at least as likely that I'm less stressed therefore I allow my language center to go into autopilot rather than be and constantly over-ruled/micromanaged by the self-conscious (worried about making mistakes) part of my brain. Give it a try ...
Let's see: if you're only renting, you're not going to install the shed for power. If you're the renter, ditto. Now look at the surveys saying that $400 or $1000 surprise bill (like medical, in the US), and you're bankrupt. Nope, not going to install.
This is, of course, not considering the MAGAidiots, nor people who live in row homes. Oh, or semi-detached, because you need that alley on one side of the house.
As you wrote that, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.
Let's see, 75% of the population of Mexico lives in the Mexico City metro area. That means there's a lot of usable land for solar farms and windmills.
We could add Mexican power to the grid, but it might have to go through NM because I'm imagining Texans, and teh Texas grid that ain't part o' that there Yankee grid... buying power from Mexico.
Jaws: as I said, please tell me what you suggest doing. I've suggested we keep trying to persuade the 50% of emitters with the biggest history of emissions to cut their emissions right now immediately because they can afford to do it easily. But you seem to be arguing against that for reasons that aren't clear. Your suggestion is...?
Leszek Karlik @ 154: The problem with offshore wind is that sometimes you get weeks without wind on a continental scale. Yes, offshore wind is great because of higher capacity factors than onshore wind (and because it provides biodiversity havens as fishing vessels do not invade offshore wind farms), but you still need something to provide power to your constituents when the wind isn't blowing in the winter.
Does that period of no wind affect the ENTIRE coastal area at the same time? Just a SWAG, but I expect it might be more localized and while it would affect part of your production it's not a 100% outage, so such a system might just need to be over-built so that some part of it is always supplying electricity even when part of it is idle from lack of wind..
Which is why Shell and others are investing in renewables, with catchy slogans like: "natural gas, a great partner for renewables". Which is true, except for that pesky part where natural gas, despite the word "natural" in its name is still a fossil fuel, and that small problem that methane leaks make natural gas plants as bad for climate as coal if not worse, because methane has a GWP20 of 86 times the GWP of CO2, and the next two decades are going to be crucial for the future of the Earth system: we either trip enough tipping points to guarantee hellish Earth for hundreds of generations, or we manage to avoid that fate and it will merely take dozens of generations to clean up our mess.
There are other sources of methane besides "fossil fuels" and in dealing with those, why not capture them and use them instead of some of that "natural gas"? We're going to have to deal with the "leaks" anyway, so why not do it in such a way that it generates some benefit while doing so?
Heteromeles @ 162: I'll point out a third class of adaptations we're not considering sufficiently: behavioral change.
Yeah. We need that. But I think it's the place where we're least likely to succeed.
In Australia there are lots of amateur landlords who own one or two extra houses and quite a few of those have PV on the roof of the rental. Often because they've lived in the house themselves, or because a friend of a friend installs solar and it's nearly free, or similar. But sometimes just because they can.
The kiwis have a "healthy homes" law that's attempting to fix the most egregiously awful rental places, right now looking at heating and insulation, but that could easily be extended to environmental performance once the homes are habitable.
Likewise both countries have a "landlord can't say no" setup for stuff like internet connections. Technically landlords can say no, but they have to plead heritage designated building or something that makes the house harder to modify in the future.
It's all possible, it's just a matter of will.
Greg Tingey @ 165: H
where Greg Tingey buys an electric vehicle to replace his Land Rover, and doesn't comment on it
Except I cannot afford it, nor conversion of the L-R to electric ... I've been banging on about this for several threads / months / years.
I would love to convert to 'leccy, but it's so damned expensive!
Get yourself a copy of the Mother Earth News Archive DVD
https://www.motherearthnews.com/archives
... also now available as ePubs.
It might have a DIY idea in there that would work for you.
And even if it doesn't, they're relatively inexpensive. IIRC, something like $40 USD when I bought the set on CD-ROM, so it's not like it's a waste of money.
Plus they had a lot of other information on "Urban Homesteading", other forms of DIY energy, and a whole bunch of stories on Urban Gardening for food production. Based on things you've told about yourself here, it might be right up your ally.
OT, but Greg might be interested.
It looks like they were trying to use the linkspan as a headshunt, but without a vessel in place on the other end it couldn't hold the weight.
JHomes
SFReader @ 171: Second language - don't often get opportunities to practice my second language these days but have noticed that I'm a helluva lot more fluent after a 2-3 drinks. Some of that maybe because everyone feels more able after a couple but I think it's at least as likely that I'm less stressed therefore I allow my language center to go into autopilot rather than be and constantly over-ruled/micromanaged by the self-conscious (worried about making mistakes) part of my brain. Give it a try ...
I don't think my Latin would come back after a couple of drinks. Especially if I followed Roman tradition and drank leaded wine.
I think Musk was trying to do solar roof tiles. Don't know if he still is. The basic problem is that you've got to wire every single tile to the roof grid, which is annoying and prone to connection problems.
The older model of putting panels above roofs is a simpler design, with its good and bad issues. The good issue is that it's simpler, fewer connections, and shades the roof. The bad part is that the connections through the roof might leak, and/or blow off in a high wind. But given the simplicity, I suspect that separate panels and roofs will stay the norm. Tiling with solar panels so far is too complicated.
What I have seen happen is that solar installers get into the roofing game, since they're up there and replacing at least some of the tiles or shingles.
What are the effects on global warning from pumping all of that microwave energy into the atmosphere, with 70% being absorbed by said atmosphere?
What I have seen happen is that solar installers get into the roofing game, since they're up there and replacing at least some of the tiles or shingles.
I was a little surprised when we had out lighting circuits rewired* recently, that the electricians were, just as a matter of course, lifting roof tile to get into the exterior wall cavities. Turns out they have been doing solar installs as a main part of their business for over 20 years, so it figures. Been meaning to get them to quote, actually.
It exists. https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
I don't know all the reasons that it hasn't taken off. EM's ego might be tied up in it. There was a minor scandal about how the money to fund it moved around. His cousin or similar was the owner at one point.
As to traditional roofers I suspect around here there is a long memory of solar water heaters on roofs that never worked very well, cost way too much, and most of the companies involved vanished after a bit. This was 30 years ago. My land line for this house (gone for 10 years now) used to belong to one of these operations and for a year or so we'd get a call asking about how to repair some of it. Oops.
Anyway, here in NC the local power company will put solar on your roof for "free". You get the electricity it generates. They feed any extra back into the grid. Now I'd really want to read the contract in detail before I signed up for it to see the 1000 details that are not a part of the headline. And for most houses, like mine, it just would not work for a variety of reasons.
Maybe Elon can use his boring company combined with advanced drilling techniques from the fracking industry to give us deep geothermal (located anywhere not just Iceland)? Small footprint (unlike wind farms and solar arrays), continuous baseline like a traditional coal power plant, and cheaper that SPS because it is earth bound.
Does that period of no wind affect the ENTIRE coastal area at the same time?
Yes. Quite recently the British installed wind turbine fleet, onshore and offshore was producing under 1GW of electricity for days on end with the lowest instantaneous amount I noticed on the Gridwatch site under 200MW. That's from 25GW of generating capacity with little or no wind over most of the country. The rest of Europe wasn't much better either over the same period. We bought in about 3GW of French nuclear electricity and burned gas like a bandit to keep the lights on.
Britain is losing the Hunterston nuclear reactors at the end of this year. It looks like EdF has given up trying to work around the cracking of the moderator blocks in the cores that have bedevilled operations over the past few years, so wave goodbye to 800MW of non-fossil on-demand generating capacity Real Soon Now. I can't see it being replaced by anything other than more fossil gas generation although there's an undersea 1GW connector to hydropower-rich Norway that's supposed to be coming into service some time soon (the Gridwatch site has it on their webpage but it's still registering zero at the moment).
As for the orbital solar power station idea please note that space-rated solar panels are a lot more expensive than the sorts of panels you can order from Aliexpress and fit to your roof. The radiation environment in orbit is horrendous and they're exposed to 1100W per square metre of direct sunlight, a lot more than anything a terrestrial panel has to endure.
Maybe Elon can use his boring company combined with advanced drilling techniques from the fracking industry to give us deep geothermal
In my limited understanding of drilling, neither of those techniques goes very deep. And as you go deeper it gets harder in a non linear way. The oil companies know were there is likely vast amounts of oil but it is under 2 to 5 miles of rock and getting there is just flat out hard.
As to Iceland, the underground there seems to move around a lot.
Anyone want to contribute $1Tril or so for experimenting?
Savagery accepted and appreciated. :-)
I suppose I made it sound like I was saying that we should favor resilience at all times, in all things. I'd apologize, except the outcome was rather happy. You're quite right of course, on all points, and you beating the stuffing out of your strawman made for a fine illustration of the opposed principles, so thank you. You took an emphasis on resilience neatly to an absurd degree. That kind of thing really helps people grasp the mental territory of somewhat under-argued concepts.
I didn't do that. In fairly awkward fashion, I was trying to approach the idea that the discussion of solar power alternatives on this blog is lavishly supplied with deep understandings of efficiency as a cited principle; but that, contrariwise, a lot (not all) of the objections have been made to sound like special-case carping, to be dealt with as special cases, rather than acknowledging that resilience is a common principle for a lot of them.
Myself, I would have said that cars and trucks traveling on highways and streets are indisputably much more resilient than enormously more efficient steel wheels on steel rails. In this case, however, I come down firmly on the side of advocating for more railroads and fewer independent vehicles, because it's all about balancing these opposed forces for optimum benefit. In this case, I find the case for efficiency more compelling. (Not because, I admit, I detest automotive culture but I like trains as much as Greg Tingey does, to within an order of magnitude anyway).
Sometimes the balance between efficiency and resilience is hard to suss out. Sometimes, just thinking about Systems Theory turns my brain into a pretzel, and I've been chasing after it for years.
Also: No, I shall not return to lurking due to mere forthright critique. I treasure such things.
cars and trucks traveling on highways and streets are indisputably much more resilient than enormously more efficient steel wheels on steel rails
I reckon that's as good an allegory as any for (domestic) rooftop solar versus mass generation and grid distribution for renewables. It's abundantly clear that we need both, even in places where solar is a "no brainer" per comments above. There's something missing from our perception of scale, though, and it's mostly due to our familiarity with existing models for energy supply. To extend the allegory, we're not limited 4-5 seat single cars and trains. We also have minivans (some of which are taxis), busses and a whole spectrum of in-between options. And similarly there's the opportunity to pursue community and municipal level generation, especially outside the urban environment but also in cities where in-between tiers of organisation exist now or have reasonable ground to be created. It can't work for everything -- high-rise-residential is always going to need some sort of mass generation -- but the point is that it doesn't have to be all one thing (in fact it can't be all one thing).
I don't know all the reasons that it hasn't taken off.
It's the third largest manufacturer or assembler of solar in the USA according to "Solar Power World". They're installing about 1000 MW per year. (at 22 years to install 3200 MW, that's about 8 times faster than the UK nuclear fleet).
It's not dominating the rest of the industry the way SpaceX dominates the launch industry, or the way Tesla dominates the high end electric car industry, so by Musk standards it's underperforming, but by any other standard, it's pretty much taken off.
I wish I knew another language well enough to think in it so I don't have to translate it into English, think what I'm going to say and translate that back into that other language. You can do this if you start learning early enough. Our schools didn't offer it when I was that young.
I'm not sure how this works, really. I started learning my first foreign language when I was nine years old (German), then started English two years later, so those might be 'young enough'. I've learned languages after that, like Swedish from 13, French when I was 16-19 and the Finnish sign language at about thirty. (Also some others, most recently Japanese, again, but my fluency in that is bad, still.)
I can think in English and the Finnish sign language, or at least I don't feel I'm translating from Finnish when I speak them. German and French, and Swedish, well... I probably could get fluent enough in an environment where I'd use them, and I have enough stock phrases that I can function as a tourist. I still think I could learn them well enough not to translate from Finnish when speaking them.
I kind of think learning languages is also partly how much effort you put into them. In school I had maybe 3-4 hours of lessons each week for a language and then homework on top of that, for years. That's more time than I can put into them now, so I think that's a big reason why I don't learn languages as fast now as I did when younger. However, I'm better at learning, so I did manage to get some level of tourist Japanese just by myself building on lessons from twenty years back when we visited Japan.
I think I could learn languages well enough to use in normal life without thinking if I would be put in an environment when it's needed. I still don't think I'm a prodigy here, I just like languages and got taught on how to learn them early enough. I think that's what should be taught in schools - even with English I've learned most of it by just using it, not in classes.
I recommend you look at http://server-sky.com/ (from the inventor of the Lofstrom Launch Loop http://launchloop.com/ ) for a Musk-free solar-powered orbital computing solution.
JBS Thanks, I'll have a look
JHomes Oops! I think you are correct, it almost-certainly didn't have "another end" to the span - also STUPID.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Meanwhile ... "Why did the USA surrender to the Taliban so easily?" Because they are already in control in parts of the USA, like Texas:
“Sharia Law Anyone?” Are people concerned that Islamic/sharia law is legal/legislated in the USA? Well, here are some salient points:
Oddly, all of this is US-Republican Party policy So, if you want Sharia in the USA, vote Republican
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A more compact comparison between the Taliban and Texas Republicans I saw was:
They both like guns. They both like fundamentalist religion. They both like pick up trucks. Neither like women's rights.
Para 4 - Please, not the vertical farm fantasy again! One of the few regularly used food plants that can/will grow without good light is the mushroom. One local (to me) mushroom farm is an old brickworks (long, low building).
174 _ I'm just surprised that Trumpolini hasn't tried to blame Joe Biden for the flash flooding in New York (yet). 175 - Well, I'm not certain about a "continental scale", but the period of dead calm can affect multiple nations at ones. 179 - Greg's not the only one. I have interests in the railway, automation and ro-ro aspects of this, and would agree your analysis. 186 - Thanks mate. I strongly suspect at least that this also affected Ireland, Benelux, and at least part of France! 188 - Well, my analysis is that a single vehicle failure (or signalling failure) on the road network will directly disable a much lower tonnage and/or route mileage than one on the rail network. However, if we consider route mileage delayed rather than totally gridlocked, the effects can be similar. 191 - Mikko, I know intellectually that you're Finnish, and you may speak English and/or French and/or German with some sort of accent, but I wouldn't know any of that from your writing in English. Well done. 192 - Greg, you ignored (I suspect deliberately) some of the more positive aspects of sharia law, like divorce is easier for both sexes, charging interest on a loan is illegal...The end of Reamde by Neal Stephenson has a confrontation between some Islamist terrorists and a bunch of American fundamentalist sovereign citizen types. A Russian Spetsnaz soldier who spent some time in Afghanistan is also on the scene, and he mentally labels the fundamentalists "American Taliban".
(What was a Spetsnaz doing in America fighting Islamist terrorists? Its a long story. Of course its a long story; Neal Stephenson wrote it)
So if a power transmission antenna is such a big and obvious problem, how did NASA consider solving it when they looked at the idea back in the 70s?
I'm only a part-time radar technician, not a designer or a power systems engineer.
Daily reminder that the energy storage problem is not solved yet. Look at this plot of Germany's power generation by source over time. Note how the massive expansion of solar and wind didn't lead to any contraction in the usage of fossil fuels (in fact natural gas expanded to replace nuclear power). The reason is a lack of storage solution. Our civilization requires stable and constantly available power sources. It doesn't matter how much sunlight we can harvest if we can't have this power all the time.
Odd to accuse the Germans of stupidity, but they have made the same mistake, quickly, that we have done slowly ... getting rid of nuclear. We MUST have "nuke" for baseload .....
>Odd to accuse the Germans of stupidity
Well, they did fight on multiple fronts simultaneously in two consecutive world wars...
>We MUST have "nuke" for baseload
The easiest technological way to solve the climate crisis is to have "nuke" for everything. God damnit, France did it already. It's not even theoretically possible, it was shown to work.
Oh well, we probably will get there eventually, but after ruining the climate.
DIY engine work on cars is Strongly Discouraged in the UK - and that includes work as simple as taking an engine from one type of car and putting it in another. The cost of registering is high, and the delay and hassle almost unbelievable. I know people who have done it.
One thing that surprised me to discover was that about a quarter of German homes (and, I presume, many business premises and the like) still use oil/kerosene for heating. This may be a hangover from the reunion of East and West Germany.
https://www.iea.org/reports/germany-2020
The other thing is that Germany is nowhere near the point where it can produce enough intermittent renewable energy for storage to make much of a difference -- they don't have enough solar arrays to store "excess" energy for night-time use and not enough wind turbines to top up storage for the times when the wind isn't present. Storage costs money and doesn't add to the total generating capacity but that cost is never included on the balance sheet when statements like "cheaper than coal" are trotted out.
Well, if you discount what I, Pigeon, paws4thot, moz etc. have been banging on about for ages. Most of what I have said could be done in the UK to massively improve the situation (and the population health) has been behavioural! And none of it is technically difficult.
As a resident of one of the mentioned countries I can confirm that someone like Orban would definitely play ransom. The above conversation fails to account for politics and "if I cant control it I dont support/sabotage it" scenarios ignoring the right wing nationalism that ravages the world currently.
With the climate heating up right wing nationalism probably will get much worse to a level, where technology will race head to head with conflicts arising from the migration of entire countries worth of people towards the cooler geographies. Nationalism and right wing ideology probably will be on the rise for the next decades, and it will make global efforts and cooperation very very challenging. (not to mention the traditional anti science tropes)
So yeah, I think we got a few (?) things to work out in the are aof politics before all of the above can work.
As I have said before, the problem about nuclear power is its mismanagement by what it fondly believes is our government. Let's ignore the facts that safety takes second place to donations to a political party, the accumulation of long-lived wasted, and that the Official Secrets Act is used to hide gross negligence and incompetence.
I have seen claims that nuclear power (as currently perpetrated in the UK) is not a particularly low-carbon source, because of the amount of concrete used, the poor rate of fuel recycling, etc. etc. I don't trust them, but I don't trust the pro-nuclear claims, either.
Why do you trust climate science but not nuclear science?
Not for Scandinavia. Unless you include Italy, Switzerland or Denmark as unreliable - well, possibly the first :-)
It's a real problem, true - hence Nordstream 2. But the same solution could be used to bypass Poland and Ukraine for Finland and the Baltics.
And, if the 4 of us have even a partial consensus, I'd say we must be pretty much right.
It's not true that I don't trust the science - I don't trust the application of the science by our gummint and its outsourcees, which should be called nuclear engineering, anyway. One of the reasons that I don't trust the claims is that almost every concern people raise is met by a refusal to address the concern, and a claim that the questioner is unscientific.
Your question here doesn't scan: it's both a misrepresentation and a false dichotomy. Stop that.
Nuclear at the moment suffers from the fact that most big power stations are based around the earlier nuclear weapons manufacturing designs, whereas what is actually required is an intrinsically safe source of heat. What you do with the heat is up to you; I'd favour supercritical carbon dioxide driving a turbine, with the cold end of the heat engine provided by district heating systems.
This, BTW, is the other elephant in the room. Most of the power requirement at least in the UK isn't electricity per se, but just heat. A lot of UK housing stock is, to put it bluntly, old crap. My current abode is a case in point: it is Victorian, made of solid stone and designed around the premise that the Burnley coalfields would provide dirt-cheap coal indefinitely. Heating the place in winter is a struggle between how fast the gas central heating can warm the ground floor, and how fast heat can leak out (I use thermostatic radiator valves to limit how much heat goes upstairs).
The climate-friendly alternative currently being touted is air-source heat pumps, which are nowhere near as effective as the exaggerated claims make out. However, combine a heat pump with a source of heat such as nuke-powered district heating and suddenly heat pumps make a lot more sense.
Actually, almost every concern raised by people is a false concern raised in bad faith by anti-nuclear organisations which now also broadened the scope of their activities to fight climate change, but which will always choose their foundational goal of destroying nuclear power over saving Earth from climate crisis when the push comes to shove.
(For example, Green parties and movements have religiously opposed the construction of final repositories for slightly used nuclear fuel, also called "nuclear waste", and then they claim that "the issue has not been solved". It has been solved technically for a long time, it's just that their political opposition has prevented the construction of secure long-term storage facilities, not to mention the opposition to nuclear reprocessing and breeder reactor programmes to close the fuel cycle and recycle all that slightly used fuel again and again and again, turning nuclear power into a circular economy project)
Please review IPCC data for nuclear power - it is very low-carbon (only offshore wind is on the same level, solar power has higher emissions per unit of energy), because while you need a lot of concrete for nuclear power plants, they generate A LOT OF POWER FOR A REALLY LONG TIME (third generation reactors will operate for at least 60-80 years), and emissions are calculated for a unit of generated power.
There are plenty of nicely presented data on the issue here:
https://climategamble.net/category/graphs-and-pictures/
EC The French made it work - why can't we? Sorry, but if nuclear power ( Aside from the corrupt & incompetent politics ) is so bad, how come the French make it work so well? - - See also Leszek Karlik @ 213 ... Or: "Why I refuse to vote Green-Party"
Canada's DRDC had a similar idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite
The AMOSTECH conference website publishes its papers freely. The papers on NEOSSAT from about 2016-2018 make interesting reading - the DRDC guys are really on the ball.
I had a friend in college who was from Finland. Because I was interested (beginning with some Emil Petaja SF in childhood, then some Kalevala translations, and finally figuring out that the Valinorean was very similar to Finnish -- when I read Tolkien's confirmation of that I felt an unseemly smugness), she was teaching me some rudimentary Finnish. At one point she explained that most Europeans learn 2-3 languages, but the average Finn learns 3-4 because nobody else wants to learn Finnish. So you're an overachiever by her assessment.
I've forgotten most of what Finnish I ever learned by now, but I still like the language a lot.
Daily reminder that the energy storage problem is not solved yet.
A problem can be solved, but the solution not implemented. The engineering problem is long solved and there are multiple solutions. The political problem with implementation is not solved.
French nuclear power was designed solely to avoid dependence on unreliable countries, most definitely including the USA. Its safety is veiled in official secrecy, and low-carbon was never an objective. I answered why we can't do the same in #206.
213 is a damn good example of why I don't trust the pro-nuclear claims. Not merely is it offensive to a great many reasonable people, it contains claims that I know is, shall we say?, economical with the truth. I have tried tracking down actual estimates, and rapidly found that most of them ended in polemic and hand-waving. As you know, I invariably try to get back to hard data, rather than trusting possibly biassed claims (by ANYBODY). The IPCC had no choice but to trust the figures it could get, and so is not an authoritative source."and low-carbon was never an objective."
Well, it was in a way: France was very uncomfortable with the other super-powers dominance of the middle east and were afraid of becoming too dependent on oil imports.
So no, strictly speaking not "low-carbon" but absolutely "independent of carbon"
Not only that, but the French made nuclear work so well, 40-50 years ago. When the costs were a state secret, the safety was a state secret, and accidents were a state secret.
Now that isn't the case, it doesn't work so well at all. Flamanville is now 10 years over due (2022 est, up from 2012) and 5 times the original price. (€19.1, up from €3.3).
Firstly, thank you. Secondly, not explicitly mentioning resilience doesn't mean that we're not considering it...
You're very welcome.
And yes. You, and many of the people here, address concerns that are founded in resilience. I've noticed. :-)
However: An explicit acknowlegement of resilience as a named concept -- to the point of elevating it to a peer consideration with efficiency -- would improve our general ability to discuss these issues. When resilience-based counterarguments are treated as sui generis problems, to be solved in isolation, the general momentum of discussion lands rather heavily on the efficiency side of the scale.
"As you know, I invariably try to get back to hard data, rather than trusting possibly biassed claims (by ANYBODY)."
IPCC uses a median (not average) of all available peer-reviewed estimates in order to eliminate bias.
When you track down individual studies, it turns out that there are some that provide extremely high values (still lower than fossil fuels) and are put out by people with obvious anti-nuclear biases (Sovacool, who includes non-peer-reviewed data by Storm van Leeuwen in his "meta-analyses"), and when you track the details of the input data, you get things like "single uranium mine in Namibia uses more energy than the entire nation of Namibia".
When you look at estimates for state of the art third generation nuclear power plants with fuel enriched with modern gas centrifuges instead of the energy-intensive diffusion method, you get even lower figures than the IPCC median of available studies.
And as for destruction of nuclear power industry being the foundational goal of modern-day "environmental" movements, please look up why the founder of Friends of the Earth left Sierra Club and who gave him money to finance a new, anti-nuclear environmental organisation.
"It was only in retrospect that I realized that she was Little My, grown up and passing for human."
The costs of (French - AND everybody else's ) nuclear power, including accidents, spills & cover-ups .........Is a fuckton less than roasting to death in the hurricanes & rising sea levels of GW - isn't it?
Yes, maybe it's the "lesser of two evils", but I know which one I'd pick!
Why are you people even arguing about costs when the issue is climate crisis? It doesn't really matter how much nuclear reactors cost if you want to solve an emergency.
The right question to ask is this: is it possible for humanity to mobilize and build enough nuclear reactors to close most sources of carbon emissions?
To which the answer is yes, as exemplified, again, by France.
Unfortunately, it is not possible at the moment to build enough reactors to quickly decarbonise our economies, because of three decades of neglect of the nuclear industry in the global North (caused by the environmentalist anti-nuclear movement supported by fossil fuel companies).
There are bottlenecks in the ability to do a rapid buildout of the nuclear industry just like there are bottlenecks in the ability to do a rapid buildout of grid-scale storage.
It's way too late to "solve the emergency", but we still need to mitigate the climate catastrophe to a level where the quality of life will only be severely impacted for dozens of generation instead of a level where the quality of life will be hellish for hundreds of generations, so we need all available solutions to be implemented at the same time: renewables, nuclear, energy efficiency, targeted degrowth policies and so on.
But this is insanely difficult politically, so I'm not an optimist concerning the future trajectory of the Earth system in anthropocene.
(Even if nuclear power plants were "glow in the dark radioactive catastrophes-in-waiting" Greenpeace presents them to be, we should be building as many of them as humanly possible, because people simply cannot imagine the long-term consequences of a 4+ degrees of warming for our biosphere and our civilisation, and the warming won't stop at 2100 AD just because most graphs stop there)
"IPCC uses a median (not average) of all available peer-reviewed estimates in order to eliminate bias."
Decoding possibly political statistics 101: FAIL.
Yes, I was once a pretty good statistician. I shall leave finding the gross error in the above statement as an exercise for you.
It can't work for everything -- high-rise-residential is always going to need some sort of mass generation -- but the point is that it doesn't have to be all one thing (in fact it can't be all one thing).
I like the way you're looking at things. We really should try hard to avoid prescribing some one-size-fits-all solution. Distributed, diverse techniques, modes, and infrastructures seem likely to be the best way forward as our civilization downshifts.
174: My "suggestion", as it were, is to stop pretending that fixing one part of a complex system with kewl new toys is an actual solution. It is at best a tradeoff for a different set of problems... and more likely has some bad consequences and may well be bad on balance, creating a bigger and different set of problems that nobody has thought about yet.
Consider, for example, the French nuclear-power system lauded above. On some scale, it might be effective. However, one must wonder about inputs and outputs. Are there enough available fissionables to further expand fission-based nuclear power generation to a larger scale? At what cost? With what other consequences (ever considered the tailings from mining uranium?)? And at the output end, how 'bout them spent fuel rods? That's before considering distribution of the intended output, and the problems raised by running power lines up and down the north face of the Alps or across the expanse of western Russia (ever considered a liquid-cooled transformer in high-variance environmental conditions? or anchored on ground that turns to mud for three months every year?).
And all of that still runs into the logistics and infrastructure problems. Bluntly, power grids are not robust enough to take on the increased usage from replacing all mobile fossil fuels (cars, trucks, buses, etc.) with electrical consumption no matter how efficient the storage systems or how fabulous the generation system. Focusing efforts on that fabulous generation system when there's little or no chance that the generated power will actually end up where it's "supposed to be" is a fool's errand... or, more properly, an extension of mercantilist macroeconomics, which would have consequences. Methinks our host has written a few novels that touch on that.
We can't worry about just power-generation technology. We have to worry about systemic replacement for muscle power. There's a strong historical reason that "horsepower" is a fundamental consideration in transportation mechanisms... and it's not just that "watts" involved numbers too big for convenient calculation, building up the ego of a Scottish engineer, and nonstandardized units (although those are all relevant). Musk et al not only don't worry about the system — they actively subvert consideration of it, and suck all of the investment capital and developing expertise away to build their own egos, sort of like the "nuclear weapon capability" race trickled down to so-called "tactical" weapons in the 1950s and 1960s and sucked the life out of developing "conventional" asymmetrical capabilities and training (when the Balkans in the 1940s and "French Indochina"/North Africa slightly later demonstrated that was far from irrelevant).
but by any other standard, it's pretty much taken off.
As someone who hangs out around the edges of the small business / residential construction industry, I haven't seen it after the initial hype.
It may just be that their production is fully in demand so they don't/can't do any marketing.
Other than the ambiguity introduced by using the word "average" you mean?
Nope, nope, nope. Sorry, this gets the savaging without the politeness.
Quality of life is a stalking horse for, as they purportedly say in Texas, "I've got mine, fuck all y'all." It's going to change. Whether that matters is the key part. People going into massive debt to afford a home market-valued at a million dollars is a "quality of life" argument. People having a home that helps modulate the climate to reasonable levels of comfort is what everyone will settle for if they must. Don't mistake the two.
Anyway, if you want rapid roll-out, I give you solar, wind, and batteries. They're preferable because they're an order of magnitude faster than fossil fuels and multiple orders of magnitude faster than nuclear. Hell, battery backups are beating natural gas peaker plants because they come online in seconds, while natural gas plants come online in hours. AND the battery plants are cheaper to build.
Hydroelectric? In the high demand regions such as the US, we've dammed all the good rivers, and now we're removing all the stupid dams we installed in early 20th Century as political baksheesh, because we know they're doing more harm than good.
Nuclear? Where are we getting the cooling water? Big reservoirs are going dry even where they make some sense (western US), while other (eastern) reservoirs are getting flooded by hurricanes. But we could as easily get 3 meters of rain in northern California some January and have all the reservoirs and rivers flooded, and get Louisiana reamed by a drought. That's what makes climate change so bad: the extremes get more extreme. Any power plant that depends on a large, stable body of water is at risk of shutting down through flooding or drought. Solar and wind do not depend on cooling ponds.
Okay, use the ocean to cool off your nuke? Wanna hurricane-proof a nuke? Want to deal with managed retreat from the coast for sea level rise, while building nukes on the coast? Or if you want really annoying, how about jellyfish blooms clogging the cooling water intakes?. Actually, you'll need to deal with all three. And roll it out in 3-5 years, starting from the idea, right now.
So that's why silly people like little old environmental idiot me are kissing off nukes and going with wind, solar, and batteries. And adopting a less energetic lifestyle instead of screaming about quality of life. They all go together. And quite honestly, if we're all forced to do lights out at 9 pm every day, a lot of illnesses related to sleep deprivation will go away too. It's called making the best of it, and it's a natural human trait that we've tried to suppress when consumerism became the in thing.
If you want to have an interesting discussion, instead of nukes, get into whether we should be burning methanogenic garbage and using magically upscaling technology to capture the CO2, instead of composting it. Or even just releasing the CO2 in place of the methane and other GHGs. Trash incineration for energy generation is as nasty a hot-button topic as nukes, but there might conceivably be a better case for it. That case involves the tradeoff of what goes out the smokestack, versus where the hell we put all the compost if we really do want landfills to stop emitting GHGs. And what's in the compost. And keeping the composting system from becoming a crop killing superspreader system.
I keep wondering why the asphalt tile roofing industry hasn't linked up with the solar panel folks. Typical asphalt shingles last about 20 years - there'd probably be much more uptake/demand if a hybrid were available.
Habit. Inertia. Tradition.
If you want to do an asphalt shingle roof in the US you can round up a crew and supplies on short notice and just get it done. And, much to my dismay, people want housing that looks like other housing that looks like other housing that looks like the housing they grew up in that ....
Metal roofs are gradually showing up. And are rating at 100 years of life, give or take. And and and can have things mounted on top of them without dealing with the 20 year cycle and ....
For older housing stock like mine and many of my neighbors, 2x4 rafter systems and 2x4 load bearing walls are just going to handle the loads of a roof covering AND something else on top. Modern standards of 2x6 external walls plus engineered truss systems for roofs changes that. But there's a lot of us with the older stuff.
And quite honestly, if we're all forced to do lights out at 9 pm every day, a lot of illnesses related to sleep deprivation will go away too. If I have "lights out" at 21:00 local for the 8 months when it's actually about dark then, I will waken up between 04:00 and 05:00 - Proven fact.
"IPCC uses a median (not average) of all available peer-reviewed estimates in order to eliminate bias." Decoding possibly political statistics 101: FAIL.
And beside that, it's not the way the IPCC publicizes its work. Every statement they make, at least in the summaries, has a confidence interval associated with it. And incidentally, many of the critical statements are now at "virtually certain," which means they've gone past 0.9 and sometimes past 0.99, 0.999, and so forth.
how did NASA consider solving it when they looked at the idea back in the 70s?
NASA looks at all kinds of things that turn out to not be workable. Much to the consternation (real and made up) of Congress during hearings and budget planning.
I'm sure the US is not the only place were a non trivial number of people think that research means make it work and that there should be no dead ends if you're competent.
How many SD is that?
The easiest technological way to solve the climate crisis is to have "nuke" for everything.
Except the current way we do nuke requires vast amounts of cooling water which isn't always around. And the lack of such can shut down those plants in times of need.
I'm wanting SMR's to be a good thing. But so far they are not reality.
instead of the energy-intensive diffusion method, you get even lower figures than the IPCC median of available studies.
Just who is still using gaseous diffusion? The US and France have not since 2012/2013.
Except the current way we do nuke requires vast amounts of cooling water which isn't always around.
There's a reason most nuclear power plants around the world are based on coastlines which are adjacent to "vast amounts of cooling water". Even the UAE's new nuclear reactor park at Barakh is next to the coast, not stuck somewhere deep in the desert well away from any water sources.
As for SMRs they're basically PowerPoint confidence tricks designed to extract "development" cash from Green-obsessed governments. There are very very few shovel-ready SMRs out there and only a couple of actual working reactors which could be considered SMRs. Atomstroyexport will adapt the RITM-200 icebreaker marine reactor for land-based operation to generate 50MW if someone orders a few. No-one has though.
The CAP100 "modular" reactor the Chinese are actually building is a cut-down version of their CAP1000 full-sized reactor. It's still involves a lot of sitework and local construction, it's not a question of unloading it from a truck and plugging it in and it doesn't even have solar panels on the roof (a selling point for one of the SMR PowerPoint efforts looking for funding at the moment).
Getting back to why Musk wants to build a 100-250 ton launch system.
My first thought was: It's the Spruce Goose...in space!*
And that may still be what he's after. Maybe Mars, maybe metric buttloads of disposable satellites. But the thing to remember is that the Spruce Goose was actually the Hughes H-4 Hercules, designed for strategic airlift, and produced too late for WW2.
So is Musk building a strategic spacelift vehicle? He could well be. Or rather, it could be used as one. If the USSF wants to put
bootsGuardians** in the sky, how are they going to lift the rapid response space station, plus the squadron to run it? Pack them all into a Big Falcon Starship, and they're good to go. Call sign Pinata, most likely, so lots of thoughts and prayers get sent up with them.*Anyone remember the end of the novel Dream Park?
**The official designation of a USSF warfighter. I'm waiting to see whether USSF enlisteds will be required by custom to howl "I am Groot!" after winning a bar fight with any other soldier. And given how many USSF Guardians have been working from home, saving the free world with government laptops, I wonder how many official protocols now exist for keeping cats from reprogramming satellite orbits...
Just had roof redone this year. The asphalt (I assume) shingles are guaranteed for 35 years.
All this discussion including methane ignores one thing that I've seen people worried about for decades: all the methan in the clathrates that were frozen in the permafrost... that's now melting.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
God damnit, France did it already.
And France is backing away from it.
At peak, France was roughly 90% nuclear powered. They're currently down to 70%, with an ageing reactor fleet (mostly dating to the 1970s). There are questions over how much it really cost to build them -- the accounting/bookkeeping side was notoriously opaque -- and after the Fukushima disaster, there were some worrying smoke signals about systemic safety in event of natural disasters (i.e. what had previously been seen as reasonable safety standards were now no longer seen as safe enough -- judged against the Great Tohoku Earthquake and local conditions in France, the French reactors looked inadequately protected). In particular, they're mostly riverwater-cooled ... and French rivers are suffering as a result of climate change, causing problematic shutdowns in heat waves (when water entering the heat exchangers is too hot).
Their new EPRs are way behind schedule, as is ITER, so the way forward for French nuclear doesn't look terribly rosy.
Great Cthulhu, yes! That single sentence contains at least four gross errors (in the context of the data being discussed), two of which should be covered in a school statistics course.
"Quite recently the British installed wind turbine fleet, onshore and offshore was producing under 1GW of electricity for days on end with the lowest instantaneous amount I noticed on the Gridwatch site under 200MW."
That site can be persuaded to yield some interesting statistics. For the period June 1 through August 31 of this year, the wind and solar contributions to the British grid were:
Wind Wind + SolarMaximum 11.69 GW 16.35 GW Median 3.04 GW 4.86 GW 1st Quartile 1.36 GW 2.76 GW
Ack. The table formatting got mangled.
Note that they give two figures, indicating that there just isn't a reasonable compromise between the conflicting claims.
As far as the concrete goes, I trust the figures for building the plant, but not the estimates of how much REbuilding will be needed. Also, there's a lot in ancillary structures (like enhancement) and in the 'disposal' of radioactive waste; without tracking back to the original data, it's impossible to tell whether the assumptions are reasonable. I haven't looked recently, but I stated what I found when I did. The trouble is that it's a HELL of a lot of work to extract actual facts out of data in a situation that has become this politicised.
I have actually been a supporter of nuclear power for half a century - just not the way we are doing it, nor under the current mismanagement. Therefore I get classified by the pro-nuclear extremists as someone who is opposing action on climate change! Go figure.
We like the ionosphere ionised, for long distance shortwave communication. But is anyone doing much of that now, other than for fun?
EC I have actually been a supporter of nuclear power for half a century - just not the way we are doing it, nor under the current mismanagement. Can I join? I contend that we will still need that 20% Baseload power generation - yes? No matter how good "batteries" get ....
When you grow up a bit and are allowed to wear big boys trousers...
Patronising stuff aside , you need to become aware that organisations have multiple criteria for completing projects. I have been both a PM and and a Programme Manager and an SME (Subject Matter Expert) - sometimes all at the same time.
Often there are at least three competing set of needs - the developer/engineer or the team, the client and the big boss. A PM is not going to do what you want (the Dev/Eng); in any discussion you are almost irrelevant (possibly right, but of least weight) - the PM has NO choice in that.
All PMs (even the worst - and I agree many are little more than box tickers) have to use criteria that may be different to yours. Their job is to deliver against a schedule, a set of requirements (vague though these may be) and a budget.
N.B. I have been removed from projects for arguing that what the Client (not the actual end user!!!) wanted was "counter-productive" (as an SME). I also note that that one project was delivered more than three years late and failing to meet the real client's need and was the subject of UK parliamentary questions. All of my immediate PMs agreed with me and (not unreasonably) left me to get on with it - I could afford to be made redundant(and was).
"I contend that we will still need that 20% Baseload power generation - yes?"
Depends where in the world you are, it varies from below 10% to around 40%, mainly on the existence of specialized continuous high-energy industries such as paper, steel, refineries etc.
Yes, the reason there is a nuclear just south of New Orleans is to provide power for the many refineries, they use a LOT of electricity.
At peak, France was roughly 90% nuclear powered. They're currently down to 70%, with an ageing reactor fleet (mostly dating to the 1970s).
Right now, as I type this France is generating 44GW of nuclear electricity to meet a domestic demand of 46.3GW. They're also producing about 7GW of hydro-electric power. The extra electricity is being exported to Britain (3GW), Spain (2.6GW), Germany (1.3GW) and Switzerland (820MW).
The percentage of French nuclear electricity generation to demand varies somewhat between summer and winter. They shut down, inspect and refuel many of their stations in the summer when electricity demand is reduced to have as much capacity on-line as possible during the winter. As for ageing out, the basic engineering of the expensive parts of nuclear reactors means that with refurbishments the M910-series reactors could well run safely for 80 years -- there are some US PWRs which have already received operating licence renewals for a further 20 years after their upcoming 60-year birthdays. Rosatom's new VVER reactor vessels are designed and manufactured to operate for as much as a hundred years and it's possible the British EPRs under construction now could last that long as well.
Heteromeles @ 181: I think Musk was trying to do solar roof tiles. Don't know if he still is. The basic problem is that you've got to wire every single tile to the roof grid, which is annoying and prone to connection problems.
Tiles are usually nailed or screwed down over some kind of roll roofing felt (at least they were the summer I worked as a roofer). I bet you could design a roll material with the "grid" painted on and use the screws or nails to make the connection between the tiles & the grid. Or have some kind of "connector" pad on the back side of the tile where the nails/screws go through.
A lot of tiles come from the factory "pre-drilled" for the nail/screw holes so the roofers won't have as much waste from broken tiles. I think it could be designed so you wouldn't have to hand solder or crimp on connectors to wires at each individual tile.
Damian @ 183: I was a little surprised when we had out lighting circuits rewired* recently, that the electricians were, just as a matter of course, lifting roof tile to get into the exterior wall cavities.
Roof tiles or ceiling tiles? I can visualize how the latter might work, but I just don't get how that would work with roof tiles?
David L @ 184: Anyway, here in NC the local power company will put solar on your roof for "free". You get the electricity it generates. They feed any extra back into the grid. Now I'd really want to read the contract in detail before I signed up for it to see the 1000 details that are not a part of the headline. And for most houses, like mine, it just would not work for a variety of reasons.
I don't think it's the local power company. I haven't heard ANYTHING from Duke Energy about it.
OTOH, I get several calls a week from swindling Fly-By-Night contractors wanting to put solar on my roof and the government is going to pay for it so it's free. Ain't gonna' cost me nothin'!
The standard spiel is it's a government subsidized program that "pays for itself" with what you save on your electric bill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8ZPFOxJEc
Heinlein did get one thing right, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Nojay @ 186:
Yes. Quite recently the British installed wind turbine fleet, onshore and offshore was producing under 1GW of electricity for days on end with the lowest instantaneous amount I noticed on the Gridwatch site under 200MW.
And the "British installed wind turbine fleet" covers every inch of the British coast?
I don't think it's the local power company. I haven't heard ANYTHING from Duke Energy about it.
Yes. It is Duke. And they offer it. (This is distinct from phone scams we both get all the time.)
I know someone who put them on his new house/workshop. My daughter asked about it but the trees in her and her neighbors yard would have to be removed.
https://www.duke-energy.com/Home/Products/Renewable-Energy/NC-Solar-Rebates
And there ARE ways for middle men to sell and deal with this and make money. So it is hard to tell the scams from the legit.
Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 191:
I'm not sure how this works, really. I started learning my first foreign language when I was nine years old (German), then started English two years later, so those might be 'young enough'. I've learned languages after that, like Swedish from 13, French when I was 16-19 and the Finnish sign language at about thirty. (Also some others, most recently Japanese, again, but my fluency in that is bad, still.)
I can think in English and the Finnish sign language, or at least I don't feel I'm translating from Finnish when I speak them. German and French, and Swedish, well... I probably could get fluent enough in an environment where I'd use them, and I have enough stock phrases that I can function as a tourist. I still think I could learn them well enough not to translate from Finnish when speaking them.
I can think in English and the Finnish sign language, or at least I don't feel I'm translating from Finnish when I speak them. German and French, and Swedish, well... I probably could get fluent enough in an environment where I'd use them, and I have enough stock phrases that I can function as a tourist. I still think I could learn them well enough not to translate from Finnish when speaking them.
I kind of think learning languages is also partly how much effort you put into them. In school I had maybe 3-4 hours of lessons each week for a language and then homework on top of that, for years. That's more time than I can put into them now, so I think that's a big reason why I don't learn languages as fast now as I did when younger. However, I'm better at learning, so I did manage to get some level of tourist Japanese just by myself building on lessons from twenty years back when we visited Japan.
I think I could learn languages well enough to use in normal life without thinking if I would be put in an environment when it's needed. I still don't think I'm a prodigy here, I just like languages and got taught on how to learn them early enough. I think that's what should be taught in schools - even with English I've learned most of it by just using it, not in classes.
That's a fairly good description of what I wish I had had the opportunity to do. I favor second language education starting even earlier, maybe in Kindergarten.
Also some may say I can't know how successful I might be leaning another language after I got older without having tried to do so. I did try; starting in my sophomore year at University. Failed Spanish 1 three times (Spanish is supposed to be the easiest language for English speakers), failed French 1 and even failed Latin 3. I managed to finagle my way into that class at a local girls college under an inter-institutional program - could only get a "C" credit, it was pass/fail, but failing the class didn't count against my GPA.
And that doesn't include all the subsequent attempts to learn Spanish I've made on my own since dropping out of NC State (with all of the requirements for my degree completed EXCEPT for the foreign language).
Someone mentioned watching foreign language TV news on the internet. I've tried that too, but I don't have enough rudimentary language to keep up, even with subtitles turned on.
... and now I've depressed myself all over again.
As a side note. Duke Energy does NOT as a company install home solar. If you get it installed by a company (or maybe yourself) that meets the requirements then they will rebate you the costs (not sure of how much) and deal with you in a sell back your power to them arrangement.
So, in virtually every case you have to contract with a private solar installation company to actually install the solar panels and re-work your electrical system to use them.
And this is where the phone calls come from. Call centers who get a cut of a sale of the actual installation if you bite on the call.
paws4thot @ 195: #168 - I have to stop and think about the first 2 or 3 such calculations, but after than I can do decimal to binary to octal to hex to BCD (in any required order including not showing every step).
Suppose you'd had a semester's worth of education in the subject and then didn't get to use it again for 20+ years. Do you think you'd still have that mental ability?
It's going on 60+ years in my case now, but it was maybe 25 years after the fact when I first realized I'd lost something that I couldn't get back.
Certainly. The trouble is that it is now too late, because developing a cleaner and safer reactor design needed to start a long time back, and (in the UK) when we still had the relevant skills.
Right. I found my final examination papers by accident a short while ago, and threw them out because they depressed me. I couldn't even understand most of the questions :-(
Elderly Cynic @ 202: DIY engine work on cars is Strongly Discouraged in the UK - and that includes work as simple as taking an engine from one type of car and putting it in another. The cost of registering is high, and the delay and hassle almost unbelievable. I know people who have done it.
That's sad. If it had always been the case, there would never have been any LBCs (Little British Cars) 1.
1 I own 2 MGBs, neither currently road-worthy even under the U.S.A.'s lax rules. Another couple of items on my bucket list that will probably NEVER get checked off while I'm waiting to get a round toit.
There were no howling gales sneakily avoiding the becalmed offshore wind turbine arrays if that's what you're asking. There was a series of large settled high-pressure areas over the UK with very mild winds everywhere on land (where the 20-plus GW of installed wind turbines were generating very little electricity as well) and in the coastal areas. Deep-water Mid-atlantic or in the middle of the North Sea, I don't know about. The wind turbine installers look to place wind generating capacity in the best places, choosing prime locations with good records for wind in shallow water close to shore. It's just that sometimes the wind isn't there and no electricity is generated. Them's the breaks.
It wasn't a problem, we have lots of gas turbine generating plant that kept the lights on, along with about 5GW of reliable home-grown nuclear power plus 3GW of imported French nuclear power. The gas turbine plants dumped lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, the nukes not so much but gas is cheap and that's the main thing, isn't it?
Well, all I can say is that she would get my vote.
Mine generally rock up once a month for a meeting - that I am required to attend, tell me whether I'm ahead or behind on the spend (which I already know), worry that I am spending too fast or too slow, occasionally tell me I have no money because one of the other projects overspent, waste a day of my time - half day preparing slides and morning of meeting (ie 5% of month) and for that skim a good chunk off my budget.
I don't recall ever fielding a hard question on the work itself. Just the budget, risks (reputational and to life) and politics.
Yeah, they are the favouritist people in the whole world. That said, its not a job I would do. I did a 2 weeks training course the company sent me on and opted to not carry on and become one. I find the best are those who already understand the technical issues - the conversation becomes a lot more focused and useful.
Perhaps my bitterness is in part because they end up being paid more in our company that the scientists whose work they manage.
paws4thot @ 234:
If I have "lights out" at 21:00 local for the 8 months when it's actually about dark then, I will waken up between 04:00 and 05:00
- Proven fact.
Wouldn't be a problem for me I guess, because usually at 4:00am I'm still lying there in the dark staring at the ceiling.
There's one huge problem: Radio interference. A Space based solar power plant will interfere with microwave radio communication THOUSANDS OF KILOMETERS from the receiver. You read that right, THOUSANDS OF KILOMETERS.
The best wavelengths to beam power down are in the microwave range, as losses going through the clouds, storms, dust, and the atmosphere in general are minimal. Problem is, almost all of the microwave spectra is used for communication and you'd make a lot of people very, very angry if you interfered with it.
Pretty much the best wavelength to use for microwave power transmission is 2.45 GHz, but we can't use this anymore because that's the same wavelength WiFi and bluetooth use. Because electromagnetic radiation disperses as it moves through space, quite a bit of the 2.45 GHz we transmit ends up outside of the receiver. In fact for a power plant which provides 8.5 GW on the ground we have 0.79 GIGAWATTS(!!!) of stray radiation.
The following is a plot of power density of radiation with distance on the ground to the receiver for the same 2.45 GHz powersat compared with bluetooth and wifi minimum receive powers(higher means more sensitive to interfence)*: https://i.imgur.com/TrXL10i.png As can be seen, 1000 km from the receiver, incident radiation's stronger than bluetooth minimum receive power. >5000 km away it's stronger than 802.15's minimum receive power.
Wifi will be able to handle the interference to some degree, but bluetooth will have problems. You're going to make a lot people unhappy by interfering with their airpods and bluetooth speakers.
5.8 GHz, which disperses less, because higher frequencies mean less dispersion, interferes with other radio communications over similar distances: https://i.imgur.com/9BzOmdX.png
Because of this interference, space based solar power is effectively illegal by local and international law. The following paper below goes into regulatory issues into more detail.
One could use the millimeter waves, but conversion efficiency of mm-waves to electricity is worse and mm wave loss through storms, clouds, and even air itself is not significant. But we're also starting to use 5G with mm waves too...
*Source: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9318744 I highly recommend reading the paper here, it goes into all issues, technical and regulatory, on power beaming.
Her situation was transitioning to Dev Ops and Agile. Very few big meetings. Daily stand ups where people say they're ahead, behind, or on track and what they need for the next few days if anything. Then with a new set of buildings she wound up with 2 desks. One in the business area and one embedded with the developers. The devs could ask questions and she answer them many times in minutes with the only emai being "we all agreed and made this change". And many times direct release into production.
Then came March 2020.
I've been wearing long trousers for ages. Honest.
I recognise a lot of what you say and fully understand that they had no interest in the work and that management really like having lots of PMs, so the risk of overspend/cockup is reduced. As far as they were concerned, if that expensive tick box enterprise means the work is slowed down, then tough. It doesn't matter because their backs are protected.
It has just become rather galling being lectured by people who were born 10 years after I was already running large research projects. Its never helped by the fact that they get paid more than me - because they have spend authorisation and do not.
In case you are wondering, my last PM had a degree in drama.
For the record, my highest ever overspend on a budget was <1%. ie down in the noise.
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Auricoma and Greg,
Hetero pretty much have exactly what I was going to reply, but better phrased.
The only thing I'd add in reply, "something must be done, and nuclear is something" is not a reason to waste 350 trillion dollars and 40 years building "something".
My BOTE estimate is a quadrillion dollars and 25 years with the entire modern world going into war mode to build lots and lots of Big Fuckoff Reactors -- about 15,000 1GW units would be a good start. Building a million SMRs that each need replacing after 40 years isn't worth it, go big or go home.
We won't of course because saving the planet costs too much. In reality we'll spend a couple of hundred trillion dollars building a lot of renewables and storage over thirty years then spend another two hundred trillion replacing them then another two hundred trillion dollars thirty years later while at least half our energy consumption will come from cheap fossil gas to prevent blackouts and we'll be approaching 600ppm CO2 in the atmosphere by the end of the century.
Well, I do agree with your assessment, that is war footing: 25% of global GDP until 2045, just to deal with power supply. Not water or food,energy.
Given the radical changes we're going to have to make in just about everything, and likely the millions of people who will have to relocate? I don't think there will be that much invested in energy.
However, I'd disagree with where the fossil fuels may be spent, because my bet is rebuilding after disasters, not preventing blackouts.
Oh well, maybe someone can find a way to mix incinerator ash, average #1 post-consumer compost, and melted post-consumer shredded plastic into a reasonable simulacrum of a building material that sequesters 30% of its carbon by weight. Or something. That might be useful.
Did that actually happen or is it just a city foot? The version I heard years and years ago was about farmers living near big radio transmitters. It sounds like one of those attractive stories to me.
Larff @ the idea of nailable fluorescent tubes :)
"I did try; starting in my sophomore year at University. Failed Spanish 1 three times"
I'm curious about that, as I do think that a foreign language requirement is a good thing.
What was it about Spanish that was troublesome? Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, just the whole thing?
FWIW, I took a couple of years of Latin in freshman and sophomore high school in the US and then got interested in Russian because of Sputnik. What really helped about Latin was the realization that Indo-European languages do have a structure, noun declensions, verb conjugations, stems and roots and prefixes and suffixes and the like. That carried over into Russian and made it a lot easier to see what was going on.
Spanish and German and French kind of followed in the same way. I'd not claim to be fluent in any of those, but can generally read a newspaper without too much headscratching.
My BOTE estimate is a quadrillion dollars and 25 years with the entire modern world going into war mode to build lots and lots of Big Fuckoff Reactors -- about 15,000 1GW units would be a good start. Building a million SMRs that each need replacing after 40 years isn't worth it, go big or go home.
If you want a war mode to build nuclear, you want the million SMR's - one of the big point's of them is that you simply create a factory with an assembly line and churn them out like any other mass produced item. Think Liberty ships or other WW2 assembly lines. You can then simply deliver them complete to sites and connect a bunch together to create a power plant.
Creating 15,000 1GW units, each with the problems of on site fabrication and 15,000 complex planning procedures, simply isn't going to happen.
I mean, we can't even build a massive solar farm in Nevada - because it would interfere with off road driving and tourism, so there is no way we could build 15,000 large nuclear plants
https://electrek.co/2021/07/26/us-largest-solar-farm-is-scrapped-because-nevada-locals-dont-want-to-look-at-it/
"charging interest on a loan is illegal"
It's not just Islam that bans usury. The difference is that the Muslim world responds to the ban by cheating, whereas the Christian world started off cheating but then just stopped caring and switched to simply ignoring it.
Such a ban is of course an important internal memetic defence mechanism for any religion, because the determination to love money more than God/Allah/whatever you call him is so powerfully embedded in even the most genuinely pious and God-fearing people, as numerous examples attest.
It still makes sense from the kind of broad and not really religious perspective that replaces "God" with "everything that is good about the world", as an important internal existential defence mechanism for humanity.
That's not how it appears to me; I'd say the UK is unusually friendly to doing weird things to vehicles. Belgium and Germany spring to mind as examples which are far more hostile. Compare a Belgian car rally where regulatory terror has discouraged people from doing even such trivial under-the-bonnet modifications as replacing black rubber hoses with pretty blue ones with a British car rally of any but the most stringent originality-nerd type; or the tameness of a typical German rat bike with the weird and wonderful outrages which appear at a British rat bike rally, all arriving under their own power on public roads and next to none of them on Q plates.
It certainly gets unbelievably hostile if you go far enough to trigger the need for SVA. By all accounts you then have to meet requirements which may be much tougher than factory-built cars have to meet; you can be failed for things on the level of not having a hole in the driver's seat to let the farts out, never mind that normal cars don't have to have one, and you can't just cut a hole on the spot and pass, you have to do, and pay (through the nose) for, the whole thing over again. And it is virtually certain that they will make up some such stupid thing the first time you try it, so you can reckon on two goes at a minimum.
But it's pretty hard for an exchange of power unit to pass the Q-plate threshold; even putting a Merlin in didn't do it, although probably a Deltic would. As a mass example there are probably more Triumph Stags running around with Rover V8s or Ford V6es than still have their original Triumph V8s, without being shat on by regulations. And Greg has AIUI already said that he would be OK with simply replacing his existing engine with a more regulation-friendly one, but the regulations he fears don't allow that to count even though the emissions figures would then be compliant.
My own position is similar; I have always been happy with taking the engine from vehicle A and putting it in vehicle B when the result suits me better than either A or B in their original condition, and I take the same kind of view regarding taking the engine and fuel tank out of a car and replacing them with a motor and battery...
...only the BATTERY is SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE.
And since the same is true even of a half-dead one, by reason of it still being useful for static applications, it is not a problem I can overcome by simply waiting around until cheap ones do start showing up. That works for most things but it won't work with car traction batteries.
It's not the regulatory aspect that puts me off, it's the straightforward impracticality of the cost.
It wouldn't be a problem if The Introduction Of Electric Cars was a piece of actual planning based around the gas-fork-lift refuelling model rather than the petrol-car one - you don't refill the energy-holder with energy, instead you exchange it for a full energy-holder of the same standard size and the empty one is refilled by the owner, to whom you pay only a one-off small deposit rather than the full cost, plus the refill charge - with the infrastructure installed before instantiating the need to use it, but of course the whole thing is all about not bothering with any meaningful planning, and not getting the infrastructure ready before it's needed in the hope that by the time it's no longer possible to put it off any more it will have become possible to make someone else pay for it.
I'm curious about that, as I do think that a foreign language requirement is a good thing.
Not all minds work alike. :)
I tested off the charts in math. Very very high in reading comprehension.
And couldn't write an essay (or even a note in a yearbook) to save my life. If you read my comments here you can see how I have trouble with ONE language in terms of writing. The ability to edit on computers saved me. Well at least most of the time.
I also have some interesting pattern recognition problems. Those color dot tests? No way unless you tell me the color then I can trace it and tell you what the pattern or number is.
Anyway, I suspect that if I had tried a foreign language in school I would have done thee same as JBS. Or worse.
Oh, yeah. I love watching Shakespeare in a play or movie. But I can't read it to save my life. I just can't figure out the rhythms.
Interesting, you're both more optimistic and more pessimistic.
I figure we need 25 TW. Nuclear seems to cost about 7 dollars per W (on a good day) 25 TW x $7/W, the Ws cancel, so that's 175 T$. I figure that without global interconnects to allow the night/summer surplus in one region to supply the peak in another, you'd need about double that in actual generation capacity. (If you have interconnects the justification for nuclear goes away because there's no need for baseload generation, there is no baseload) So 2 x 175 T$ is 350 T$. 50 TW of generation provided by 1 GW units, is 50 000 nuclear reactors, so about 12 500 four reactor power plants. So you came up with about 3 times the dollars, but only 1/3 (roughly) the generating capacity.
Creating 15,000 1GW units, each with the problems of on site fabrication and 15,000 complex planning procedures, simply isn't going to happen.
And just how do you cool that many of them?
"while you need a lot of concrete for nuclear power plants, they generate A LOT OF POWER FOR A REALLY LONG TIME"
Exactly. It seems to me that the "lot of concrete" argument is simply a red herring.
You need a lot of concrete for lots of things. A motorway interchange, for example. (OK, so it's a lot more spidery than a power station, but it's also a whole lot bigger.) The chances are that the motorway interchange, as well as generating a lot of CO2 in its construction, will lead to an increase in other CO2 emissions in the long term, yet the construction CO2 is very rarely raised as an objection and the long term CO2 isn't much.
The power station generates a roughly similar amount of CO2 in its construction, but it then sits there for several decades preventing the generation of CO2 from what it replaces. And really that construction CO2 is fuck all compared to what you'd get from a fossil fuel power station producing the same output over the same time as the nuclear one does without producing any.
I certainly think we are far too fond of using vast amounts of concrete all over the place, and we should stop being so extravagant with it. But I don't see a problem with it being used in a comparatively small number of instances where it is not straightforward to simply use something else instead or to build a different kind of structure that can use something else instead, and where the amount of CO2 produced in making the concrete is piddlingly small compared to the amount that you avoid producing by shutting down the fossil fuelled power plant you're replacing.
...only the BATTERY is SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE.
US shopping on ebay.
6 MONTH WARRANTY 2004-2009 TOYOTA PRIUS HYBRID BATTERY PACK
$550 $950 installed.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/224322066946
"accidents were a state secret."
Nuclear power accidents are not state secrets. Let one happen and before too long every bugger in the world with a Geiger counter is going "'ello 'ello 'ello what's all this then?" Ask the Soviets. They used to love state secrets, and they know fine how compatible state secrecy is with a reactor puking its guts.
You can have lots of accidents at a large nuclear plant that are very serious but don't really release radiation. At least not outside of the containment dome.
"And at the output end, how 'bout them spent fuel rods?"
Oh, you eat those.
This also relates to your concern about how much fuel there actually is. The answer to that depends greatly on whether you make proper use of it, or whether you go "but that's too expensive" (italics indicate childish whiny voice effect) and use it in the most half-arsedly wasteful manner you can get away with; this makes something approaching a couple of orders of magnitude of difference.
As has been pointed out, the important thing is to fix the problem, not whine about the cost (which isn't really all that bad anyway in terms of government spunk-money-up-the-wall quantities; the problem is they won't spunk it on something useful instead).
Most nuclear power generation these days fissions less than the whole of the fissile material and throws everything else away, including all the nasties produced incidentally. But it is entirely possible, and not necessarily even that difficult, to fission all the fissile material, all the fissionable material, and all the fissile or fissionable nasties produced incidentally. Of the non-reactive nasties, most of them decay within a few months, and that leaves you with nothing much to worry about except 137Cs and 90Sr, in much smaller quantities than the waste from current practices.
Of course there is a lot more to it than this, but that is a summary of aspects relevant to your points.
I am not impressed by the common objections along the lines of it would take 10, 15, 20... years to do it and cost too much and anyway we have forgotten how and we haven't got enough nuclear-educated people, and I am particularly unimpressed by the common addendum to the effect that therefore the only possible way to do it is to buy one of a small handful of not particularly suitable existing designs by one US company and then it would take 20, 30... years to do it. It took Britain 3 years to build the first power-supplying reactor in the world, when the country was still fucked up and recovering from the war, when nobody knew how to do it and we had to work out how to make nuclear-educated people at the same time. Even if we shot all the formally-qualified nuclear engineers we do have, we would still have far more knowledge kicking about in nuclear content of general physics education, things interested people have taught themselves on top of that, and openly-published scientific literature, than we had at the time when most of that knowledge hadn't been discovered at all and what little had been was mostly buried in secrecy. Our capability now is far better than it was then; it's not a can't, it's just a can't be arsed.
Your arguments go against installing nuclear power in unfavourable parts of the North American continent, and other places with like conditions. But there are plenty of places with unlike conditions, and places where the main difficulty with building a nuclear plant is people going eurgh it's nuclear even though they don't mind the far greater amount of radioactivity emitted by the coal plant that's been there since before they were born.
"Trash incineration for energy generation is as nasty a hot-button topic as nukes"
I don't see why. If you've got a choice between letting the stuff emit CH4 vs. letting it emit the equivalent quantities of CO2 + H2O + energy, surely the answer is screamingly obvious. Even if you ignore the "+ energy" bit.
I'd want thicker conductors than you'd get from painting them on the felt, but otherwise that's pretty similar to the sort of thing I've been thinking of. The main problem I can see is that it's going to be a sod of a job to keep the connections from corroding, especially if you want to make them similarly easy to install as nails, and to make them replaceable every now and then without chewing up the bus bars to the point where you have to replace those too. You also have to take care to design the system so that it is not possible, even if misinstalled, for large fault currents to flow and create local hot spots which set fire to your roof. But I don't see any immediate reason to suspect there are no ways to manage it.
"I favor second language education starting even earlier, maybe in Kindergarten."
Oh, absolutely. The sooner the better. In the cradle, if you can manage it. My gran looked after me for a year or so when I was very tiny and I often regret that she didn't spend it speaking to me in Welsh.
You can have a hell of a lot of accidents that have nothing to do with radioactivity. Things like lifting the condenser into place and then dropping several thousand tonnes of expensive pressure welded pipe on the ground completely wrecking it. (this has happened) or discovering that you used the wrong welding rods and the billion dollar pressure vessel that you've installed under thousands of tonnes of concrete has to be dug out and replaced (this has also happened). These kind of things just never appeared in the press and no amount of gieger countering can detect them, but the French are still doing the same things today. There's no reason to think that these sort of mistakes would stop if we suddenly decided to build 50 000 reactors at once rather than the 6 that the French are currently trying and failing to build.
Update - now removed. https://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/news/300399401/kiwirail-retrieves-locomotive-from-bottom-of-picton-harbour
Yes, I've seen similar listings. They look enticing until you realise that it's a Prius battery, ie. not designed as a primary/sole power source but as a means of smoothing out humps and bumps in demand so that an accompanying internal combustion engine which does act as a primary source can either operate at maximum efficiency or not at all. It doesn't have the capacity to be very useful for operation without that onboard generator and its tank of hydrocarbon fuel as the primary energy store.
Range is of particularly acute importance for my desired application since I would either need to carry enough charge to go all the way to wherever I was going, do what I wanted to do there, and come all the way back, without recharging, or else stay there for long enough to recharge from whatever kind of demountable solar panel array I could manage to lug around in the car. I can't rely on being able to find somewhere abroad to recharge. The number of charging stations I have seen anywhere ever is still in single digits. Whereas petrol stations are large and conspicuous installations with great big brightly-coloured illuminated signs out the front so you can't miss them, charging stations are little dull-coloured things the size of rubbish bins and with a similar habit of lurking in inconspicuous corners, so you don't see them unless you happen to pass within a few metres of them, and random parked vehicles can easily obscure them. And all of the ones I have seen are in any case completely bloody useless because there is nowhere to put money in to make the sodding things work, which is something I do not expect to ever change because this shitty country is addicted to that practice and doesn't understand or care how thoroughly unhelpful it is.
The kind of electric car conversion I could achieve using a Prius battery as the power source would be too limited in range to be worth doing it; it would basically be a local-use urban transport device, that would not do a great deal more for me than my mobility scooter does already (and in some aspects does better). Its principal advantage would be in mucky weather, but it's still an awful lot of hassle and expense compared to simply wearing a coat.
"At least not outside of the containment dome."
Yes, quite. Containment is what makes the difference between a serious accident and a local pain in the arse. If your dog gets the runs, but you catch it all in a bucket, that's just a nuisance; it's if he runs away and sprays it like a hippo over the carpet all the way up the stairs that you have a big freak-out.
"Oh, yeah. I love watching Shakespeare in a play or movie. But I can't read it to save my life. I just can't figure out the rhythms."
IMO it needs to be acted, and acted well, so as to properly insert all the normal non-verbal information side-channels that a purely textual representation cannot include. The archaic forms of language, the altered meanings and connotations of many of the words, and the alien assumed cultural background of the audience require a lot of additional processing power to handle; it's not that I'm unable to understand it, it's that I can't figure it out and enjoy it at the same time. So it helps a lot for it to be acted by good, natural actors who can spread the information across multiple redundant channels, as people in normal conversation do, so I can use those to help bypass the language-processing bottleneck.
gasdive & H OK Where are you going to get that 20%-baseload power from, then, without burning Carbon? Come up with an answer to that & we have solved the problem, have we not?
mdive & others Does anyone know how the proposed R-R SMR's project is going?
Pigeon & others Very fortunately, L-R, for many years, had factory-fitted alternative power plants, one of which was the Rover V8, so swapping your diesel for a V8 was already homologated, provided you wired & piped it up more-or-less as per the original. As regards changing to LPG, that's easily accepted - my problem is that Khan's mob WILL NOT SAY how they view LPG conversions ... they've gone all anal about the power plant & ( I think ) ignore the fuel it's using, which is bonkers. Probably irrelevant, now, as those V8's are not quite as difficult to get as Rocking-Horse Shit. Oh yes: ..only the BATTERY is SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE. ... Which reminds me - I saw a 'leccy conversion for a 2CV .... £28k Forget it.
Our capability now is far better than it was then; it's not a can't, it's just a can't be arsed. AND we are pathetically scared of the Fake Greenies spouting on about "Nuclear Death" - these people are about as sane as the anti-vaxxers, certainly if you want Civilisation ( Don't laugh! ) to survive.
>The only thing I'd add in reply, "something must be done, and nuclear is something" is not a reason to waste 350 trillion dollars and 40 years building "something".
You know what?
Getting back to original topic of this thread...
Just contract reactor design to SpaceX. I bet they could develop a much cheaper one.
Has anyone tried the fast iteration approach to nuclear power? I don't think so.
PS. Before anyone complains about nuclear contamination - contract SpaceX to develop it on the Moon.
PM week 1 "You've charged too much of your time to my project; I've no budgeted time left for you for the rest of the month!" Me "Yes, but I've got the Safety Assessment read, and the Safety Plan written and checked, so I don't have to do anything else until 'client on site' the month after next." PM "waffle for 20 minutes about budget". Me GOTO statement above. PM GOTO waffle Me GOTO statement above ... Repeat until meeting_over.
293 - And a Toyota Pious (sic) isn't actually that economical over, say, 200 miles. I once did the same trip in a Skoda Octavia TDi110 as a Pious driver, at about the same time. On arrival we compared notes and discovered that I'd been driving faster, and used less fuel! 295 - Agreed, with the note that classic film versions, such as Laurence Olivier adaptions, tend to be better than modern "trendy" direction.Pigeon @ 285: Nuclear power accidents are not state secrets. Let one happen and before too long every bugger in the world with a Geiger counter is going "'ello 'ello 'ello what's all this then?"
Big meltdowns are not the problem.
The problem is that unless you have a strong corrective pressure from outside the attitude towards routine management of the nasties starts to erode. When a small accident involving a minor spill happens its easier to not mention it rather than fill in all the forms. People start dumping small quantities of not-really-very-radioactive-at-all down the storm drain that leads into the sea, because nobody will notice and dealing with it properly will take them over-budget. This becomes routine. Everybody knows that the safety documents are just for show. And a couple of decades later someone from Greenpeace is on international TV waving a Geiger counter over your beach, and Mrs Simpson is demanding to know if her husband Homer's rare form of cancer might have had something to do with his work. So then it all comes out and you have a major scandal.
I grew up in Guernsey, which is 30 miles from Cap de La Hague. Stuff like this was a steady drum-beat in the local press.
The number of charging stations I have seen anywhere ever is still in single digits. Whereas petrol stations are large and conspicuous installations...
You can't imagine my joy to hear from someone on the internet that their only way of finding one of the 43000 places to charge in the UK is to hunt around rubbish bins in parking lots. If only they were as easy to find as one of the 8300 petrol stations. I know! Maybe we could have like a list of them on a computer somewhere. That you could search somehow. But that would mean you'd need some way of connecting to a computer somewhere else in the world, and that's impossible.
Sadly.
/sarcasm
You can't be fucking serious.
I have a mate with a
Scalext"electric" car who's most continual complaint is about the half of these "charging points" that are broken, or can't be used by his Vauxhall, or are used as permanent parking...If only there was some way people could leave reviews on that computer with the date and time and a few words to say if the charger was ICEed or working or not. Maybe a map where chargers that aren't working are marked with a symbol. Like a spanner. And there was a rating for reliability of that charger. But that's just crazy talk.
Next thing you're going to say you want some way for the computer to filter results so that only chargers that fit your particular car show on the map. And we all know computers can't filter information.
But it's all moot because it would require some sort of communication between computers that aren't in the same room, and that's impossible.
/sarcasm
What the actual fuck?
I said 'engine work' and I meant engine work. Look up the damn regulations if you don't believe me, fer chrissake! Changing (at least the type of) the engine or even the type of fuel it uses needs reapproval - and, as I said, I know people who have done such work and been really made to jump through hoops to get reapproval. OTHER changes are largely ignored, subject to the roadworthiness rules.
No. My point wasn't that it is a show-stopper, but that all of the costings I have seen have largely ignored it - and most of the claims for 'safe' disposal also use massive amounts of concrete. If I saw real estimates rather than polemic (or even abuse), I would be more convinced.
All right - I take much of that back and stand corrected. While what I said is, sometimes, correct, it probably isn't in this case or yours. The exemptions might cover it - MIGHT. But I sure as hell wouldn't like to be in an accident and have the insurers claim that the vehicle wasn't approved, because the exemptions aren't as well-defined as they should be.
Someone mentioned watching foreign language TV news on the internet. I've tried that too, but I don't have enough rudimentary language to keep up, even with subtitles turned on.
Unless you really can keep up, that is awful advice! When you watch something to learn a language you should be able to understand what is going on and preferably at least 80% of the individual words.
If you are ever going into Spanish again, I recommend that you look up a YouTube channel called Dreaming Spanish. The videos are grouped after difficulty, the teacher speaks slowly and clearly, and uses drawings and gestures for the superbeginner and beginner videos.
The general guideline from the teacher of the channel is: "If it feels a bit too easy, it is the right difficulty for you."
I disagree, though I accept that only some people will be able to insert those things for themselves. But there are a fair number of people who can read Elizabethan English and know enough about the culture etc. to insert most of the other jokes, puns etc. For anyone who can't, you are correct.
Yes :-( The lack of such material is my problem with refreshing my French in a nutshell. Oh, yes, there's some verbal material, but it's an entirely written language for me. I can decode relatively simple novels, but not actually read them, though I once could.
The teacher uses a method called Comprehensible Input. I think similar channels exist for French, but I haven't checked them out, so I can't make any recommendation there.
I'll look it up, but am not optimistic. Virtually everything for all languages is verbal.
My satnav shows charging stations - unfortunately it doesn't distinguish between public and "private" (e.g. provided by hotels for their guests). Is there a safe way of interrogating a suitable(*) app while driving ?
(*) one that shows all such stations, excludes ones not working, shows busy status
I am reporting what he had told me; NOT what you think is possible.
I mean, maybe it's possible to force people to raise reports, and other people to act on them, and maybe it isn't. Maybe acting on a report consists of going, having a look, and realising that you need to order a part that can only come by ship from China?
As for filtering chargers by type, doing that would require the web developers to supply some usable filter tools on their site, and [sarcasm] that always happens [/sarcasm].
Has anyone tried the fast iteration approach to nuclear power? I don't think so.
... Hanford, Mayak, Sellafield, La Hague ...
All of those were absolutely built and operated under a "get us the bomb, and get it by yesterday" approach. And, lo and behold, we have four sites that will remain localised (or not so localised) disasters for decades to centuries.
"Fail fast, and fail often" can be, as demonstrated by SpaceX, an exceptionally effective way to take over the entire launch vehicle industry, but it intrinsically requires that each of those failures to be within well known, understood, and acceptable limits.
"Acceptable" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence: blowing up a single BE4 was not acceptable to Blue Origin, and they rapidly changed their approach (see also: languishing in obscurity). For each of the 4 sites noted above, activities that were acceptable in the 1940s (say, an air cooled graphite-cored nuclear reactor without containment), are very much no longer acceptable today, but the consequences of failure that was acceptable then will remain with us for decades to centuries.
A Falcon 9 exploding on the launch pad does a lot of very localised damage that can largely be repaired in months. Decontaminating a few square miles of nature reserve of spilled kerosene might be a bit more effort. By comparison, lake Karachy will be inimical to virtually all life for longer than human civilisation has existed.
PS. Before anyone complains about nuclear contamination - contract SpaceX to develop it on the Moon
My impression was that the technical side is largely sorted, and has been since the 70s, or even earlier (e.g. the Chernobyl failure mode of the RBMK was known, by a very small number of people, well in advance of the actual disaster)
What hasn't been sorted is the human and political interface, neither of which are topics at which SpaceX is known to excel. How to reliably and consistently run reactors safely, rather than optimising for political or economic gain at the cost of safety. Wrapping everything in thicker and thicker layers of bureaucracy is the currently favoured approach, which has a somewhat better sfaety record than the 40s and 50s, but by no means perfect.
On the OT, I may have spotted a doubter: "Mars already had a long and bewildering history of ambition, conquest and abject, harrowing failure. The Muskies, with their cultish, over-reaching aspirations were just one small chapter in that narrative."
from Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds.
Screw everything, let's resurrect my favorite fusion reactor, project PACER:
I don't know if there's a commercial satnav that does this. My newest satnav is a decade old. Teslas have it built in. In fact Teslas will start to precondition the pack to give you the fastest charge when you're the right distance from the charger you've selected. "A Better Route Planner" apparently does everything you could possibly want and more, but I've never used it.
I don't use a satnav on the fly, because I ride a motorcycle and it's too difficult.
Instead I click into the places that I might want to charge using plugshare. Sites restricted to guests etc show Brown. Public chargers Green. Private individuals willing to share power with passers by, Blue. I only see sites that have chargers I can physically use because I've set the plug type of my machine and the adaptors I own. If I had a car and no adaptors I could just set my vehicle type and it would know which charging places to show me. If it looks like somewhere I can charge (reliable, accessible, working recently,ect) I cut and paste the address into my navigation app on my phone as a way point and then it gives me turn by turn directions into my helmet sound system. It's much faster to do than to describe. I could go into the app for the network that the charger is on and see if its busy, but I've never seen another vehicle charging at any charger I've ever visited except for Tesla superchargers, but I can't charge on those anyway.
Ah, I misunderstood you, then. As you wrote, most is verbal, because you need to start with verbal input if you want to be able to speak a language well.
I suppose that you could enable the subtitles on the videos? But then again, reading is an entirely different beast than listening.
I might have been able to handle that once, but it's a no-go now (I am 73). However, thank you for the hint for 'Comprehensible Input' - that does pick up some sites with reading lists. I tried measuring my CEFR on LawlessFrench, and was not enchanted.
And quite honestly, if we're all forced to do lights out at 9 pm every day
Just noting that where I live, that'd be lights out at 4pm in midwinter, and lie in bed shivering in the dark until 10am.
We live on a spinning spheroid, and one-size-fits-all solutions just don't work everywhere.
Beat me to it, and did a better job. Thanks!
San Onofre got shut down because Mitsubishi didn't know what it was doing with a steam generator upgrade and repeated a 1950s error, leading to a reactor full of unusable generators that was cheaper to shut down than to repair.
The other part that might be novel to some is that a lot of prototype rockets blow up on the launch pad. That's why they prototype them and do a bunch of tests before strapping anything valuable to one of those semi-controlled explosions. It's a known and inevitable development methodology for rocketry, but I don't think it translates too well to nuclear reactor development.
Oh, and a third part? A lot of what commercial rocketry 3.0 is doing is building off about 70 years of experience by previous rocketry companies. There's a knowledge base, especially when one cross-pollinates military rockets with civilian ones and includes all the technologies (like sounding rockets) that we don't normally think about in terms of space launches.
A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously.
And quite honestly, if we're all forced to do lights out at 9 pm every day. Just noting that where I live, that'd be lights out at 4pm in midwinter, and lie in bed shivering in the dark until 10am.We live on a spinning spheroid, and one-size-fits-all solutions just don't work everywhere.
Your polar bias is showing. Here in San Diego, it's never light at 9 pm. This is actually true for most of the surface area of our planet.
9 pm lights out is what you get when you're limiting power usage, at most times in most places. To be perfectly fair, lights take very little energy, so it's a catchy example rather than a good one.
The difference is doing energy-intensive things after sundown, things like late-night laundry loads. In our fossil-fueled society, this makes some sort of sense: do paid work during daylight hours, unpaid work at night (or whatever) because energy supplies aren't linked to sunlight and electricity rates go down after 9 pm. When energy is linked to sunlight, it makes more sense to do energy intensive things (charging cars, laundry, etc.) during daylight hours.
When to do work with solar electricity is a big angsty problem for the OhmyGawdz people-have-to-work-in-offices crowd, as some have shown on this blog. But if you're working at home with home solar, it's quite feasible to do laundry and work simultaneously. Charge the car during the day, even. This is a minimal infrastructure solution brought about by changing people's habits rather than rebuilding society from the ground up. Obviously it's not perfect and far from universal, but it's something that's being done now. I do it, for example.
Lights out at 9 pm is just an extreme way of pointing out that not only can people adapt to power restrictions currently deemed intolerable, but sometimes those adaptations have their own benefits. This gets back to earlier arguments about how important "quality of life" is.
"When energy is linked to sunlight, it makes more sense to do energy intensive things (charging cars, laundry, etc.) during daylight hours."
I.e. during the summer?
Your deep south prejudices are showing. You clearly don't realise how dark it is on a midwinter day at 56 north, nor how little insolation there is during the day. There is less than a SEVENTH of the amount you get in December - AND the insolation is far less reliable. Even at a mere 52 north (and half as much insolation again), the light even at noon in midwinter is really dim.
Thinking on the problems with nuclear power, especially complacency and the desire for profit above all, I wonder if the operators could be separated from the power company? The western navies have AFIAK had a pretty good record with nuclear safety. Yes, the USN has lost two nuclear submarines (Thresher and Scorpion), but neither loss was attributed to a reactor leak. I don't believe the British or the French have lost any.
Given that record, I wonder if the US (or other country) could set up a Public Reactor Service to operate commercial reactors. It would be a non-military uniformed service like the USPHS or NOAA. They could use ex-navy reactor specialists and give them a second career after a term in the military. Their focus would be on operating the reactor safely with the power company's profits irrelevant.
A semi-precedent to this would be the custom of government-owned, contractor-operated defense manufacturing plants. Here it would be the other way around, contactor-owned and government-operated.
The advantage for the power company would be that the liability for operator error would rest with the government. This should reduce their insurance risk and thus the insurance costs.
They would just build the plants and sell the electricity, with the government taking part of the revenue to cover their payroll.
"Anyway, if you want rapid roll-out, I give you solar, wind, and batteries. They're preferable because they're an order of magnitude faster than fossil fuels and multiple orders of magnitude faster than nuclear."
No, they're not. Unfortunately. I've been reading renewable hype for, like, last two decades I've been worrying sick about climate change, and I even believed it for the first decade.
The issue is not "how rapidly can you build a single wind turbine" or "how rapidly can you install a single solar panel", it's "how rapidly can you replace multiple terawatts of fossil-fuel based dispatchable power with capacity factors above 60%" and the answer, surprisingly, turns out to be "not that fast, unless you have conditions for hydro".
When you look at large-scale rollouts of non-fossil energy sources, hydro takes the podium and nuclear gets the second place. Then you have wind, and then you get solar.
https://climategamble.net/2015/12/01/how-fast-can-nuclear-be-built-weekly-pic/
The post is from 2015 but the graph has been updated with 2019 data. And even though Olkiluoto is delayed again, it will still beat German Energiewende by quite a large margin and it will provide quite cheap power which will instantly decarbonise 10% of Finland's energy mix.
And you can make nuke plants with air cooling, it's just that it's expensive. And Our Overlords don't like things that are too expensive because they get lower return on investment.
Severe weather will be a constant problem in the Find Out century, but wind and solar is even more vulnerable to Heavy Weather than nuclear power, unfortunately, when you get a typhoon you don't get power from solar and you don't get power from wind, and you probably get quite a lot of your solar panels ripped away and wind turbines also may be damaged.
Nukes are generally hurricane proof because of the ridiculous overengineering that is required from gen3+ reactors: your containment vessel has to survive being hit by a passenger plane, hurricane won't dent it. Solar panels and wind turbines are much harder to hurricane-proof, unfortunately, and we still have to build shitloads of them.
But ideological opposition to nuclear power and insisting on closing perfectly operational nuclear power plants and replacing them with natural gas, just like Germans do and Belgians do and Vermont did and New York just did, well, that's just criminal.
And that's what "environmentalists" do, because environmental movements were founded in the 1960s and 1970s to oppose nuclear power (OK, Sierra Club was for nuclear power, which is why Friends of the Earth was founded with oil money), and nobody cared about climate then. And movements, just like corporations, are hive minds. I've met plenty of Greenpeace activists trying to convince me to give them money who said that privately they think nuclear power is just fine and it's stupid that their organisation opposes it. But it will oppose it until the Collapse (so, probably a few decades more).
239"Just who is still using gaseous diffusion? The US and France have not since 2012/2013."
Nobody. That's the point. Nuclear power is getting less carbon-intensive, just like renewables are. But you still get cherrypickers like Sovacool relying on data from anti-nuclear cranks like Storm van Leeuwen with their higher end estimates, and then they get included in IPPC estimates, because the IPCC reports are a review of available scientific research.
291
"There's no reason to think that these sort of mistakes would stop if we suddenly decided to build 50 000 reactors at once rather than the 6 that the French are currently trying and failing to build."
Yes, there is. It's called "learning curve" and is a standard occurrence in human industry.
When you start building hundreds of warplanes, costs drop and efficiency rises. When you start building thousands of wind turbines, costs drop and efficiency rises.
The same would apply to mass nuclear rollout. Instead, the nuclear industry in the Global North was throttled by activists on one side and neoliberal culture of short-term shareholder value increase on the other ("you can optimise human resources costs by firing the most experienced engineer and replacing him with two engineering graduates"), which is why only South Korea and China are now building NPPs on time and within budget. But it is certainly possible.
It's just that nobody can be arsed to take climate change seriously because people just don't get threats that exist at that scale. Even most environmentalists can't be arsed to take climate change seriously, I've read an interview with one Greenpeace activist from Germany who said that "it's preferable to heat the planet somewhat than to leave radioactive waste for thousands of generations".
If humans would understand the severity of climate crisis, we'd have ecoterrorism two decades ago, and by ecoterrorism I don't mean people chaining themselves to trees or trying to peacefully disrupt the construction of a pipeline, I mean blowing up board meetings of Big Fossil and other events like that.
We'll still get ecoterrorism when the first heatwaves start killing hundreds of thousands of people, it just will be five decades too late (because of the oceanic buffer delaying the causality between Killer Weather and CO2 emissions by approximately 40-50 years).
only South Korea and China are now building NPPs on time and within budget.
Russia is making a fair hand of building VVER-series PWRs, in part to replace the ageing RMBK-4 reactors they still have in operation. The Russians don't want to burn their abundant supplies of natural gas to generate electricity, they'd rather sell it to renewables-obssessed Western 'Green' nations like Germany. They're also selling their reactor technology around the world in turnkey deals, pay them and they'll build a reactor or four in countries like Pakistan and even China. They commission the reactors and then supply fuel and take away the spent fuel after it cools down for a decade or so. They also have the only working SMRs in existence (the two modified KLT-35S reactors on board the Akademic Lomonosov NPP barge) and boy does Greenpeace hate them. I blame the lack of solar panels.
As for the rest of your screed, yeah great but nuclear power is an engineering solution (i.e. it works) to a people problem (who are headless chickens en masse at the worst of times). Myself I lay the blame for the public aversion to nuclear power on Godzilla movies (for SMRs replace Godzilla with Godsuke).
SpaceX Space Sunshield when?
On languages, I'm doing German with Duolingo. It's slow going, but I am making steady progress at maybe half an hour each evening. In a few years I may try some German language TV.
The problems with nuclear reactors are not "opinion." Let me give you two scenarios in which you're in charge of clean-up: In the first scenario, flooding/winds do heavy damange to a solar-power generation facility. You have to clean up lots of steel, plastic and glass and possibly some lithium/nickel. In the second scenario, you have to clean up Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, San Onofre, etc., take your pick.
Nukes may be better/cost less when things go right, but when things go wrong? They cost one heck of a lot more.
That said, I would definitely admit the possibility of building a nuke which fails safely and can be mass-produced in a factory, while not producing the kinds of fissile materials which could be packed into a gun-type nuclear weapon, and I'm on record as encouraging such research including deliberate attempts to make such a nuke plant fail so it's safety characteristics can be studied before we install hundreds of thousands of such devices. But if anyone has such a device up their sleeves they haven't revealed it.
Until you have a nuke plant which fails gracefully and inexpensively you don't have anything I want installed within a thousand miles of my house.
A semi-precedent to this would be the custom of government-owned, contractor-operated defense manufacturing plants. Here it would be the other way around, contactor-owned and government-operated.
Intersting concept.
Not so sure it would work.
I bring a few biases to the table. My father worked for around 30 years in a government owned / contractor run nuclear diffusion plant. Started as an control room operator and retired as a production manager. (1 1/2 steps below plant manager.) I got to hear about the way things worked and didn't. Especially a lot of things that would bump into your liability issues. And my various conversations over the years with retired military officers also build in a bit of doubt. Plus the stories from my wife's family. Her father (who I never met) was at one point the youngest Lt. Col. in the US Army.
Assuming I did not make a bone headed math mistake, for the cost of about 6 months of the war in Afghanistan we could have planted enough trees to sequester all of our excess carbon emissions:
Amount of CO2 sent into the atmosphere by human activities = 32,000,000,000 tons / year Fraction retained in the atmosphere (not absorbed by existing carbon sinks) = 43% Annual accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere =
13,760,000,000 tons / year
Amount CO2 sequestered by typical mature tree annually (varies with species, climate, etc.) = 50 lbs / year Number of trees required =
550,400,000,000 each
Minimum number of trees per acres for reforestation or wild life enhancement (USFS) = 300 each Average number of trees per acre =
513 each Maximum number of trees per acre required for reforestation (USFS) = 726 each
Maximum area required = 1,834,666,667 acres 2,866,667 sq miles Average area required = 1,072,904,483 acres 1,676,413 sq miles Minimum area required = 758,126,722 acres 1,184,573 sq miles
Cost per acre (Ohio State University reforestation, conservative) = $200 per acre Total cost (by acre) =
$214,580,896,686
Cost per seedling (Ohio State University reforestation, conservative) $0.45 per tree Total cost (by tree) =
$247,680,000,000
Cost of the war in Afghanistan (over 20 years)
$2,313,000,000,000
Average cost of the war in Afghanistan per year $115,650,000,000
What a waste....
I wonder if the US (or other country) could set up a Public Reactor Service to operate commercial reactors. It would be a non-military uniformed service like the USPHS or NOAA. They could use ex-navy reactor specialists and give them a second career after a term in the military. Their focus would be on operating the reactor safely with the power company's profits irrelevant.
I had exact same idea back in mid-80's
What happens when the planted trees catch fire? Or die and rot? Does the sequestered CO2 stay sequestered? Magic 8-ball say, 'fuck no'.
Time was plant material sequestered CO2 quite successfully, millions of years ago (it helped that the bacteria that decompose lignite hadn't eveolved back then). We've been digging up and drilling and pumping fossil carbon and desequestering millions of years of collected solar energy and it's fucking us up. Before remediation we, the global we, need to stop desequestering all that carbon. After that we can talk about planting trees and biochar and all the other hippy-dippy ideas out there to actively reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere but making the problem worse has to stop before remediation is worth considering.
Oh, and if you're arguing from the dollar cost perspective all that does is make cheap coal and gas look like a good option and the world will burn.
Minor nit: Lake Karachay is not a result of an accident, but of a deliberate policy which prioritized nuclear parity with US over literally everything else (and future generations were not even considered).
SpaceX Space Sunshield when? Briefly discussed upthread, using term "Space sunshade", 98 & 111. (That's the term wikipedia uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade ) I haven't done the calc and perhaps E. Musk's current tech couldn't do it, but future tech could, perhaps with some temporary SO2 upper atmosphere injection while it's being constructed.
Insane though. We need to focus on decarbonization, now. E.g. whatever one's opinions about the virtue of construction of new nuclear power stations vs renewables/storage/transmission (the later are probably faster to deploy, but a race would be motivating for all involved), shutdown of existing nuclear power plants is essentially (future) mass homicide(and ecocide) in service of defective ideology. And construction of new coal plants should similarly be treated as mass homicide.
See this recent Mortality Cost of Carbon paper, which is probably underestimating the mortality cost of carbon by a factor of 5 (could be more) because it just covers heat-related deaths. (It acknowledges this, though the 5x is my estimate to be clear.) The mortality cost of carbon (29 July 2021, R. Daniel Bressler, open access.) "This implies that adding 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020—equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 average Americans—causes one excess death globally in expectation between 2020-2100."
(Also Bjørn Lomborg, who opines on such things, will be responsible for millions, (perhaps 10s of millions) of deaths, in the fullness of time. In my opinion.)
In relation to the drawbacks of renewables (especially solar) in some locations, no mention has been made of using green hydrogen/ammonia as a way to move energy from the high insolation locations to those that are sunlight poor.
This has been getting serious airplay here in Australia, thanks to some billionaires.
Is the idea of huge solar farms in the outback generating no emission fuel for the rest of the world real?
The advantage for the power company would be that the liability for operator error would rest with the government. This should reduce their insurance risk and thus the insurance costs.
No nuclear operator pays insurance. I think in the USA there's a figleaf amount paid into a fund, but it wouldn't come close to paying for the permanent abandonment of a city. The public picks up the risk. Another subsidy to the nuclear industry that utterly dwarfs any renewable subsidy anywhere.
When you look at large-scale rollouts of non-fossil energy sources, hydro takes the podium and nuclear gets the second place. Then you have wind, and then you get solar.
Australia currently rolls out 3 GW of rooftop solar per year. That's growing by about 30% per year, so probably 4 GW this year. So about the equivalent of 3 nuclear reactors a year. That's from basically a standing start 10 years ago. That's in a country 1/3 the population of the UK. In comparison, 10 years after the go ahead for Hinkley Point C, the car park and some of the sea wall was nearly complete. That's the actual runs on the board.
Yes, there is. It's called "learning curve" and is a standard occurrence in human industry.
When you start building hundreds of warplanes, costs drop and efficiency rises.
You don't get a learning curve when you start all the builds simultaneously. You get a learning curve when you build them consecutively. If we build them consecutively, even if we could cut the build time to 1 month, well down from the current 25 years, that's still 4000 years.
Even if we built in batches of 1000, and each batch took half the time of the previous batch with no limit, that's 50 batches, and 50 years. Which is 42 years too late.
However, the reality is that (like warplanes) nuclear reactors get more expensive and take longer to build, not less and quicker, as experience is gained. (as has been pointed out several times by several people in this discussion, with the general theme of, "why can't we just throw them up any old how like we did in the 50's").
Something went wrong with my formatting in my previous post. All of the following should have been quote italics;
Yes, there is. It's called "learning curve" and is a standard occurrence in human industry.
When you start building hundreds of warplanes, costs drop and efficiency rises.
I meant roof tiles. Cast concrete, which I guess is cheaper than terracotta and it's certainly stronger. They interlock and provide their own water channels. They are usually fixed directly to battens. Sometimes there's a fabric sarking underneath, but there's pretty much never a solid substrate, like plywood or something. Roofs made of anything other than metal or tiles are pretty unusual here. We probably have deeper eaves than you'd be used to, as well.
Anyhow, you use specialised tools to "lift" a row of tiles so you can get to where the next row down is fixed to its batten, and then you can remove tiles from that row down. The space in the ceiling near an external wall, even with deep eaves, can be cramped and if the wall cavity is a bit tight too, it can be unpleasant work running wiring into it. Same applies double for stuff mounted on the fascia, I guess. So getting in from above is a neat trick if you can do it.
I'd also like to point out that the graph you pointed to that gives per capita increase over 15 years is intentionally misleading. Labeled "how fast can nuclear be built" it doesn't show how fast it can be built, but rather, how much can come on line together, if you start building several at once.
Sweden for example, gives increase in generation capacity over 15 years, from 1976 to 1986, implying that they were all built in that 15 year period. That's actually a 16 year period and 2 of the power plants began construction in the previous decade. If you consider the program as a whole, (which they do in terms of capacity per capita) then construction began in 1965 at Oskarshamn, and was completed in 1985 at Forsmark.
Until you have a nuke plant which fails gracefully and inexpensively you don't have anything I want installed within a thousand miles of my house.
I, along with 6 million other people in the GTA (Toronto) live far closer than that to 3 nuclear plants (for me, 58km from Pickering[6 reactors operating] / 85km from Darlington [4 reactors] / 163 km from Bruce [8 reactors]).
No concerns whatsoever about them or their safety.
On the other hand, in 1979 I along with 200k other people had to be evacuated due to a train derailing...
The problems with nuclear reactors are not "opinion." Let me give you two scenarios in which you're in charge of clean-up: In the first scenario, flooding/winds do heavy damange to a solar-power generation facility. You have to clean up lots of steel, plastic and glass and possibly some lithium/nickel. In the second scenario, you have to clean up Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, San Onofre, etc., take your pick.
I choose your solar plant - because cleanup will likely be $0 given it never gets built (see cancelled solar plant in Nevada due to public objections).
Nukes may be better/cost less when things go right, but when things go wrong? They cost one heck of a lot more.
Really?
Alberta - estimates of C$260b to clean up the mess the oil companies have created.
Or how about the US Superfund sites - the GAO found 950 Superfund sites at risk from climate change damage like hurricane surges. Billions have been spent so far, with a long list of sites remaining.
Nuclear isn't unique in having expensive clean up costs - the difference is that we focus on nuclear and ignore all the others (and their health effects).
That said, I would definitely admit the possibility of building a nuke which fails safely and can be mass-produced in a factory,
https://www.science.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet
Given that record, I wonder if the US (or other country) could set up a Public Reactor Service to operate commercial reactors. It would be a non-military uniformed service like the USPHS or NOAA. They could use ex-navy reactor specialists and give them a second career after a term in the military. Their focus would be on operating the reactor safely with the power company's profits irrelevant.
The military has the advantage of no political interference in their nuclear operations.
Any government operated nuclear power generator would be full of political interference.
Australia currently rolls out 3 GW of rooftop solar per year. That's growing by about 30% per year, so probably 4 GW this year. So about the equivalent of 3 nuclear reactors a year.
Great for Australia, with their abundant sunshine.
But how relevant for someplace like the UK?
That's from basically a standing start 10 years ago. That's in a country 1/3 the population of the UK. In comparison, 10 years after the go ahead for Hinkley Point C, the car park and some of the sea wall was nearly complete. That's the actual runs on the board.
Which is why anyone serious about nuclear isn't suggesting to keep repeating the mistakes of the last 50 years.
When you start building hundreds of warplanes, costs drop and efficiency rises.
You don't get a learning curve when you start all the builds simultaneously. You get a learning curve when you build them consecutively. If we build them consecutively, even if we could cut the build time to 1 month, well down from the current 25 years, that's still 4000 years.
Which is why the serious money is on SMR, where the reactors are small enough that you literally are planning on an assembly line just like a plane.
So instead of a bunch of unique large plants, you end up with many identical simpler units.
Now it may well be that SMR has issues that mean it's promise can't be followed through.
But all of our options at this point have problems.
Trees work in what's called a successional planting, which basically means you plant trees faster than they die off.
To unpack this a bit: --Yes I agree that fires are a real nuisance. So is drought. These two make it hard to use some of our favorite forested areas. --We need to keep carbon out of the air for minimum a century. The worse it gets, the longer the carbon has to be sequestered, but right now it's around a century.
--While big trees (redwoods, doug firs, etc) are probably the best, there are some other really good sequestration possibilities, primarily wetlands, and specifically willow wetlands, salt marshes, kelp forests, and seagrass beds. Yes, these are all in trouble to, but the nice thing is that inundated soils hold onto a lot of carbon pretty darn well. The problem is that moving soil releases carbon due to oxidation (surfaces get exposed and oxidized), so if you create a marsh, it reportedly takes on order 10-20 years for it to sequester the carbon needed to make it, then to start doing additional drawdown.
This also gets into why some people get really excited about beavers. They're natural marsh makers, their ponds are pretty decent groundwater recharge basins (make up for evaporation loss from dams, and the ponds also water and shelter a lot of animals. While beavers are a nuisance, so is running out of water, so more people are finding they can live with them around.
But yes, if I wanted to pick a hippy-dippy technology, I'd try seaweed farming for food, finance, and carbon sequestration. And I also recommend planting a lot of trees regardless. If the trees are giving you millions of acorns that would otherwise die, why not plant a bunch of them? Ditto doug fir and other tree seeds, for that matter.
By "3GW" do you mean 26,200 GWh of electricity generated each year? That's 7680 hours a year multiplied by 3GW. Australia generates and uses about 265,000GWh of electricity each year at the moment (a little over a kilowatt per person, not untypical of a first-world country). So one year's addition to the total solar generating capacity can supply the entire electrical needs of about 2.5 million Australians. Impressive. That means Australia going to stop digging up coal and burning it in a few years time, yes? Right now the per-capita consumption of coal in Australia is about 4 tonnes per person, that's actually more than China which is quite an achievement.
Of course that 3GW figure of new solar capacity you quote might be 'dataplate' i.e. what all the newly commissioned panels could produce for a few seconds at the Equator at noon under a cloudless sky, a bit like the '10MW' wind turbines that stand idle and don't generate any electricity when the wind doesn't blow. I don't know where you got your figures from and what they really mean in terms to total electricity generated. I suspect it was from an industry puff-piece which elided the actual capacity numbers but I could be wrong.
Nuclear power plants run at dataplate output all the time they're operating, wind and sun don't get a say in whether electricity is being generated or not. I saw an interesting claim a few days ago, of an American two-reactor plant that had been delivering more than a gigawatt of electricity into the local grid for 5000 days straight (well over 13 years day and night). Basically while one reactor was down for refurbishment, refuelling or inspection the other was chugging along nicely. Of course a lot of the time both reactors were running producing over 2GW of non-carbon electricity.
Of course that 3GW figure of new solar capacity you quote might be 'dataplate'
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/news-releases/2021/australia-installs-record-breaking-number-of-rooftop-solar-panels
The key point, which makes the stats look less impressive, is this statement:
"Australia is one of the sunniest places on the planet"
Easy to go solar with that advantage...
Your answers are a perfect demonstration of why nuclear advocates aren't trusted.
"I, along with 6 million other people in the GTA (Toronto) live far closer than that to 3 nuclear plants (for me, 58km from Pickering[6 reactors operating] / 85km from Darlington [4 reactors] / 163 km from Bruce [8 reactors]).
No concerns whatsoever about them or their safety.
On the other hand, in 1979 I along with 200k other people had to be evacuated due to a train derailing..."
So the alternative to nuke plants is trains derailing? Not solar, wind, or maybe something else? You do know that you never came close to addressing the issue, right?
"I choose your solar plant - because cleanup will likely be $0 given it never gets built (see cancelled solar plant in Nevada due to public objections)."
Funny, but according to the US Government, "From just 0.34 GW in 2008, U.S. solar power capacity has grown to an estimated 97.2 gigawatts (GW) today. This is enough to power the equivalent of 18 million average American homes."
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-energy-united-states
How does that fit your one-off example about this one solar plant that never got built, which you used to make a nasty point that never came anywhere close to addressing the question I asked?
"Alberta - estimates of C$260b to clean up the mess the oil companies have created.
Or how about the US Superfund sites - the GAO found 950 Superfund sites at risk from climate change damage like hurricane surges. Billions have been spent so far, with a long list of sites remaining.
Nuclear isn't unique in having expensive clean up costs - the difference is that we focus on nuclear and ignore all the others (and their health effects)."
Funny, all that verbiage and you never once mentioned the cost of solar clean-up, nor did you compare it to the cost of cleaning up a serious nuclear accident. (250-500 billion is the current estimate for Fukushima.) "Captain, I sense the nuclear advocate is avoiding the issue."
Oh, and you've got a positive article about a start-up from 2019, and no working technology. Your method of answering concerns reminds me of Screwtape. In short, it's more pro-nuke bullshit - the world is about to overheat and instead of answering some very basic questions you tell me about trains derailing. Your answers are literally the perfect example of why nuke advocates aren't trusted; if you had real answers, you'd give them, wouldn't you?
~Walks off, muttering to self.~
In response to gasdive on September 4, 2021 06:29 You can have a hell of a lot of accidents that have nothing to do with radioactivity.
Experience reduces stupid errors significantly. The more we build, the fewer stupid mistakes occur because builders learn what they're doing. That's the advantage of SMRs.
.. Hanford, Mayak, Sellafield, La Hague ... All of those were absolutely built and operated under a "get us the bomb, and get it by yesterday" approach. And, lo and behold, we have four sites that will remain localised (or not so localised) disasters for decades to centuries.
La Hague wasn't commissioned until 1966, six years after la bombe atomique debuted.
SMRs as of now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
The table is interesting. The only ones operating or under construction are in China, Russia, and Argentina.
In the process of cleaning up for today - we have a BBQ, about dozen or 15 vaccinated fen showed up -I threw away all of my college papers, notes, and tests. (From the late seventies....)
Daily stand ups. Right. That run how long - 15 min? More? As opposed to all of us standing up reporting every damn morning, when I worked for Ameritech ("all of us" being the "senior tech resources on each team" that we joked about fast, if it lasted less than an hour.
Now, add up the time for each team.
Count me utterly unimpressed with "agile", which I take to translate, 90% of the time, to be "change requirements without having to account for additional time for the new ones, and fixing the old ones dropped."
In 5th and 6th grade, I had Spanish. In high school, figured it would be easier.
Nope. Conversational v. grammar. Gag.
Gas fork-lift refueling. So, like when I take an empty O2 cylinder in, and pay about $10 for a full one, and the supplier tests the tanks every 5? 7? forget what it is, for safety as a cost of doing business.
This, of course, means government regulation as to size, shape, and connections.
And if you disagree, I suggest you consider the history of cell phone chargers.
I see - a very small switching engine.
Electric car conversion - I've mentioned before I have a friend in the northwet (or used to be wet) who used to (still?) brags he has the world's first all-electric Ford F-150 pickup. He did it himself.
FUCK NO. Government owned, government run. Anything else is a way for scum to make money out of tax dollars. And in many cases, to underpay the people doing the work.
End of discussion.
Moderators, please note 360 and 361. (You can erase this too, if you'd like.)
Great for Australia, with their abundant sunshine.
It's worth occasionally repeating a small but important fact of geometry as it applies to the earth. Since it is an obvious point to make, I rather avoid harping on about it since I assume most people have this in their heads too. I should also caution that it doesn't mean I think that there is something wrong with being an outlier, just that there's another perspective that, while not taking away the problem as it appears from the perspective of the UK, nonetheless suggest that the global problem is a different one.
Anyhow here goes: the proportion of the surface of the earth that is between a pair of same-value parallels increases in proportion to the sine of the degree of latitude at those parallels, rather than in a linear proportion. Half earth's surface is between the two 30th parallels and around 70% is between the 45th parallels. 78% of the earth's surface is at a lower latitude than London, 83% is lower than Edinburgh and 87% lower than Shetlands. Of the remainders, only half is in the northern hemisphere, and the only landmasses in the south above those sorts of latitudes are Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego.
The half of the earth that is lower than 30º latitude includes nearly all of Africa, most of South America, all of Central America and Mexico, and even some major population centres in the USA (including San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans and almost all of Florida... almost but not quite San Diego). It includes all of the Arabian Peninsula and the Subcontinent (and the Himalayas), all of South East Asia, some of the most densely populated regions of China, and the northern half of Australia (including where I live, which is at around 27ºS). If you push that out to the 70% below 45º, which still gets pretty good insolation, that includes almost all the USA and China, all of Australia, and a selection of Southern Europe (the boundary is between Milan [out] and Bologna[in]; Barcelona and Marseille are in).
So anyhow, climate change is a global problem, not a specifically national one. Things like energy independence and being an energy exporter come down to good old competitive advantage and while the goto expert for international trade economics is probably Paul Krugman (that's his actual field, notwithstanding the comments he makes about macro, some of which are really worth paying attention to) those come across as a bit luxurious for places like the UK. So it's not just a question as to whether nuclear is viable as an alternative to fossil fuels, it's whether it's competitive with imported solar energy. The absence of grids that include both North Africa and the UK now is not a great indicator for the future and all that. And the difference in watts per square meter of solar panel based on latitude is close enough to linear, even modest scaling really does overcome it. And the downstream is simply that if you need nuclear to make the UK habitable, maybe its habitability is a bit overstated? Anyhow, it's nothing that high voltage cables across the channel and the Straits of Gibraltar can't fix. Again: global problem; solutions that cater to national level requirements are maybe best addressed at a higher-than-national level... pity the UK is not connected with an organisation whose purpose is to do that anymore, I guess :(.
mdive & gasdive Never mind the lower time we get insolation in the UK, the real, insurmountable problem is the incident angle of said sunlight, when we get it. Sydney is at approx 33°S ... London is at 51°N ... Charlie & Paws & Martin & others are at approx 56°N You cannot get round this one ... [ As Damian has noted, whilst I was typing this up ... ]
David L & others I ASKED about how the R-R SMR scheme/proposal was going ... anyone got an answer to that, please?
Troutwaxer Oh dear, yes ... We appear to have a White-Wing Drive-by - deeply unpleasant
Damian pity the UK is not connected with an organisation whose purpose is to do that anymore Change will come ... I'm expecting food riots before the end of October, certainly before the end of November, given BoZo's Clown-Crew & their competence & grip on events, or lack of it ....
Administrative note
"gukutuxi" (aka gukutuxi@inboxbear.com): you are banned, your comments have been deleted, and if you turn up again using another handle you'll be banned on sight.
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This might be off-topic, but for people wanting to learn Spanish, I can't recommend Language Transfer audio course by Mihalis Eleftheriou enough. It's been invaluable in start-jumping my Spanish, and it's completely free.
Did I just wrote "start-jumping" instead of jump-starting?
infinite facepalm
Charlie @ 365: your comments have been deleted
Can I just point out that the comments in question are still visible. I don't know about the mechanics of deletion here, but if it isn't supposed to take a while to be effective then perhaps it needs another coat of looking at.
"And the downstream is simply that if you need nuclear to make the UK habitable, maybe its habitability is a bit overstated?"
Speaking as someone born and initial brought up in the tropics, it most definitely is :-)
Fixed now.
As you say in your last paragraph, with the addendum that the limitation on scaling up existing nuclear designs is not money, but the lack of skilled workers and competent suppliers for the very specialist requirements. What's more, they are NOT simply trainable. It's probably a bit outdated but, when the UK had problems with defective welds, I saw an article explaining that a pressure-vessel welder needed 10 years experience welding thick steel and only about 1% of people were even trainable. That's because they needed a surgeon's steadiness of hand.
If we tried scaling up in a hurry without redesigning reactors suitable for scaling up, all that would happen is that their building would be outsourced to every cowboy company with a slick salesman (definitely including the usual culprits - see the UK's PPE scandal), it would use half-skilled workers and inadequate components, it would bribe the governments to reduce inspections and standards, and so on. Half the reactors would never come on-line, the up-time would be dire, and there would be a succession of whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie.
Unfortunately, what I said in the last paragraph of #249 and #263 is correct :-(
My working assumption for this century is that our current political system is not going to get ahead of climate change.
We need either a green global political revolution (and greens are rather less inclined to revolutionary violence than neo-nazis, the other candidates right now), or technological breakthroughs, or we're going to get 2-5 degrees of global warming.
My money, were I a betting man, would be on the latter.
This means that -- I'm sorry -- most of the world's currently inhabited land area is going to be uninhabitable by 2100. Australia? A baking hot desert. China, India, most of Africa, most of the midwest and south United States, Central America, and most of Brazil, also uninhabitable.
The inhabitable land available by that point will be: northern Canada, northern Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, and Antarctica (which will be pretty temperate by then).
So the "how to provide power during a 3 month period of darkness, without much in the way of prevailing wind" problem will be a pressing one. Along with "how will the survivors grow enough food", never mind "how many will perish during the great migrations".
Time for you all to take a bite of a reality sandwich.
The only realistic option is to frack and pump natural gas until it is coming out of our ears. Thanks to fracking technology natgas is basically free energy (which means no other energy source can hope to compete with it economically - fracking is why coal plants are being closed, they can't compete economically), and it produces half the greenhouse gas emissions than coal does per kWh generated thanks to combined cycle turbine technology.
You will not have an economy based on zero carbon sources of energy like nuclear or renewables. Ever. That is a fantasy. It won't happen.
Nuclear won't be built because of safety perceptions (doesn't matter if the perceptions are correct or not - perceptions ARE reality), excessive cost and politics. Personally, I would prefer nukes and it breaks my hear that it will never happen.
Wind/solar won't be built at large enough scale outside of niche applications due to excessively large land footprints and the additional energy storage costs (which nobody ever talks about) necessary to store intermittent energy production for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Renewable energy is available when it is produced, not when it is needed and that is a serious problem which can't be overcome without expensive storage facilities.
If you are not getting your electricity from zero carbon sources, then electrical cars don't so squat except push the problem back another step. An EV that gets recharges from a coal burning plant makes no sense economically or environmentally. And even the best li-ion battery wears out over time and will no longer take a charge. That leaves us with a massive hazardous waste disposal problem or an even more expensive battery recycling effort.
And living like medieval peasants (homesteaders growing your own food organically while living in a yurt or an earthship) won't work either - billions of people will starve after billions more die in violence. Organic farming, BTW, will kill the planet as it requires twice as many acres to produce the same amount of calories as current chemically intense factory farming does. Go organic and you can kiss the last of our wilderness areas goodbye as we farm every last marginal acre of land.
So what will save us?
Educating girls.
Educated women have fewer babies. Thankfully, declining birth rates and crashing populations will happen much faster than people are anticipating.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/world-population-in-2100-could-be-2-billion-below-un-forecasts-study-suggests https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/world/americas/global-population-trends.html https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/the-best-news-of-2020-humanity-may-never-hit-the-10-billion-mark/ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext
Think of it as negative exponential growth, slow at first and rapidly accelerating to everyone's surprise. It's been said that for everyone to have an American standard of living we will need 8 Earths. Or conversely, we will need 1/8th as many people - and that now seems likely.
Declining/aging populations also wreck capitalism, but that is a reality sandwich that those on the Right will have to bite into.
I fully agree, and wish I didn't. My one niggle is that I would have put "miracles" where you put "breakthroughs" :-(
. And referencing Nojay at #240:
As for SMRs they're basically PowerPoint confidence tricks designed to extract "development" cash from Green-obsessed governments.
That wikipedia article does look awfully press-releasey.
Australia currently rolls out 3 GW of rooftop solar per year. That's growing by about 30% per year, so probably 4 GW this year. So about the equivalent of 3 nuclear reactors a year.
People who don't know the concept of "capacity factor" and compare nameplate power of solar with nameplate power of nuclear shouldn't really be discussing energy policy. No, 4 GW of solar isn't the equivalent of 3 nuclear reactors a year.
But natural gas companies would really like you to believe they are.
And, again, looking at the nuclear industry in countries dominated by anti-nuclear environmentalism and fossil-fuel interests, like the EU and US gives you a skewed image of cost curves. Chinese and South Koreans are capable of building nuclear which is not getting more expensive with time.
Although I would like to make clear that I do agree that nuclear is not something that will save us.
However, ideological anti-nuclearism of "environmentalists" that leads to the closure of perfectly operational nuclear plants and replacing them with natural gas is something that will definitively fuck us over and kill millions of people in the long run. (In the short run, it already killed thousands of people in Germany, because it doesn't take any accident for a coal plant to kill people, it does so routinely every year, and Energiewende was all about prematurely decommissioning working nuclear and replacing it with brown coal and some renewables)
372Natural gas doesn't produce half the greenhouse emissions than coal dos per kWh.
Natural gas produces half the GHG emissions AT THE POWER PLANT.
The total climate impact of natural gas is similar to the impact of coal, or even greater at the "next 20 years" scale, it is simply generated at different points than final combustion (by methane leaking from the extraction and transport infrastructure). But hey, it's not on our Excel spreadsheets for the natgas plant, so it's OK, right?
(Wrong, the Earth is heated by atmospheric physics, not by Excel spreadsheets)
And human population growth is driven by life extension, not by births. So no, "educating girls" won't save us. We're pretty much fucked.
And the humans of 22nd century (and 23rd, and 24th, and 25th and so on), living in nuclear-powered weather bunkers and eating synthetic bacteria derived-protein will consider "capitalism" with its fairy-tales of perpetual growth to be a curse word similar to "fascism".
(Now, it is still physically possible to avoid that fate by doing EVERYTHING THAT'S POSSIBLE at the same time, that is: mass buildout of renewables, mass buildout of nuclear, massive life extension projects for existing nuclear, transforming to high-density cities, abandoning meat and individual car transit and going a general degrowth route. But since the interests of the global 0.1% wield weaponised unreality in the media to prevent this path we seem to be well and truly fucked.)
Very interesting take here. But...
I thought we're at or nearing the point where the big astronomy stuff will soon be discovered, as it were, and studied by what one can call the children of Hubble, that is, space-based telescopes. And given Charlie's projections here, that would be a real thing within a generation or two at mist. And if ground-based astronomers want to spit blood, they can bemoan the loss of Arecibo and the (apparent?) lack of interest in replacing it, maybe more so since I would think the satellite pollution would be less of a problem -- maybe none -- for a radio scope. Just saying. Even if civilization regresses, technology -- tools -- move on.
"how many will perish during the great migrations"
Combining your comment with mine on 372, we have a future scenario.
The 21st century is a race between declining populations and a horror show with vast areas of the Earth becoming uninhabitable (the human body, no matter how acclimated to hot climates, cannot survive in wet bulb temperatures higher than 95 deg F). Billions die from heat, starvation, migration and violence as half the planet descends into anarchy.
Your scenario wins but is mitigated by declining consumption in the developed world resulting from declining and aging populations. Old people don't buy things. They like their old sweaters and old loafers, and have no need for a new car or flat screen tv.
World population stabilizes around 1 billion at the end of the century. The planet survives, and the 22st century is a period of restoring and healing the world. We will plant a lot of trees then. But better late than never.
P.S. Anybody else notice that its will be 3rd World people (who did not cause global warming) who will suffer the most, not 1st world people (and certainly not the uber-rich) who actually are at fault? Add the obvious racial component to this observation and you have a pretty obvious - if unspoken - reason why many in the developed world (and those who rule the developed world) don't care about climate change.
I wish I'd said that.
If the UK wants to build 300 one GW reactors, I say "knock yourselves out". If you can vote for brexit, you can vote for anything no matter what it does to you. Even if you are so terrified of being held to ransom by the dozen administrations at the other end of 30 different power cables, that you'll make yourselves dependent on Russian gas instead... Who cares? What 60 million out of 8 billion do doesn't matter.
The inhabitable land available by that point will be: northern Canada, northern Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, and Antarctica (which will be pretty temperate by then).
Habitable, but not arable. When permafrost and glaciers melt you don't get farmland, you get rocks and marshland.
Even the currently arable land in southern Canada is already suffering crop failures due to heat.
Off Topic but yes - my post was just an update to the original post at #179 showing the followup removal of the shunting engine from the harbour - in case anyone had followed the original #179 post and wanted to know the next update.
In post #179 it was reported that a small shunter (~50 tonnes) - aka a switcher is USA termonology (in this case unmanned and operating under remote control) plus flat deck container wagon went off the end of a link span (where it shouldn't have been) at Picton and "fell in the water".
The linkspan is used by Kiwirail's rail enabled ferrys (which run between North and Sounth Islands in NZ). It will be keen to see the eventual final report as to why that shunter fell in the water in the first place - I expect Kiwirail are still investigating.
"So how long before you run out of new rooftops?"
Currently about 1/4 of buildings have solar. A lot have small systems, 1.5 kW used to be popular. The systems being installed now are much larger, and the average rooftop install is currently about 9 kW. So there's a lot of scope for larger ones to replace older smaller ones, and new ones on the 3/4 of buildings that don't have one yet. So probably about 6 years at the current rate of growth. There's currently about 20 GW of rooftop, so that means about 100 GW nameplate, which in Australia equals about 25 GW equivalent. Doubtless it will Scurve at some point before 6 years, but it's still growing steeply.
Don't forget the Himalayas: a kilometre of elevations good for around 6ºC, and given the relatively high insolation we're talking about a potential bread basket there. But otherwise, yes, and I suspect we're talking realistically about a few thousand people. Maybe a million all over at best, but that would be assuming quite a few things being ideal.
>>>The 21st century is a race between declining populations and a horror show with vast areas of the Earth becoming uninhabitable (the human body, no matter how acclimated to hot climates, cannot survive in wet bulb temperatures higher than 95 deg F).
Do you have a reference for this?
https://www.livescience.com/hottest-temperature-people-can-tolerate.html
What's the hottest temperature the human body can endure?
With climate change causing temperatures to rise across the globe, extreme heat is becoming more and more of a health threat. The human body is resilient, but it can only handle so much. So what is the highest temperature people can endure?
The answer is straightforward: a wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius), according to a 2020 study in the journal Science Advances. Wet-bulb temperature is not the same as the air temperature you might see reported by your local forecaster or favorite weather app. Rather, a wet-bulb temperature is measured by a thermometer covered in a water-soaked cloth, and it takes into account both heat and humidity. The latter is important because with more water in the air, it's harder for sweat to evaporate off the body and cool a person down.
Charlie @ 371 you mean a REAL green political revolution .... And emphatically NOT the current Green Party, who are a load of arseholes almost as bad as the BoZo, because of their opposition to Carbon-free nuclear power. Um.
Duffy "Educating Girls" USELESS, unless you can hang all the Texas & other US rethuglicans trying to turn women into subservient breeders & reverting to Gilead
When you oppress women you get higher birth rates so that your sect/tribe does no go the way of the Shakers.
The oppressor's of women understand this.
In fact they are very Darwinian in their world view.
Which is really ironic when you think about it.
Habitable, but not arable. When permafrost and glaciers melt you don't get farmland, you get rocks and marshland.
Noted.
The tech base our descendants (not mine: I have no children) will need to survive in the 22nd century will look a lot like the tools needed for colonizing Mars. Intensive indoor farming in climate-controlled conditions with robot pest prevention, for example.
No nuclear operator pays insurance. I think in the USA there's a figleaf amount paid into a fund, but it wouldn't come close to paying for the permanent abandonment of a city. The public picks up the risk. Another subsidy to the nuclear industry that utterly dwarfs any renewable subsidy anywhere.
And this really is at the heart of our problem, isn't it? Not just for nuclear, but for any industry out there. When we pay for some item, we pay the price of production, possibly with some taxation added. Any cleanup after production is paid for by governments, if cleanup is addressed at all. This goes for everything from environmental damage to rundown workers.
May not necessarily be high tech.
The State of Indiana (mostly flat as a pancake with a high water table) was mostly swampy until the settlers arrives and laid down drainage tiles for their farms.
I wonder if Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" (which reviewers are calling a masterpiece) will be a blatant or subtle metaphor for global warming, environmentalism, green revolution and resource extraction that makes only an elite few rich.
I have a red line when it comes to press reports of new nuclear reactor projects -- if there isn't concrete being poured and rebar bent then it's not a real new reactor project. There are actually some new-tech reactors being built out there like the Russian BN-series fast spectrum reactors and their new BREST-300 design and China's home-grown HTR pebble-bed reactors, real concrete and bent rebar projects but they're far and few between among the handful of works-fine PWRs and BWRs and an occasional heavy-water reactor being constructed around the world. The rest is PowerPoint and computer graphics and some Ph. D. computer modelling of the nucleonics and engineering involved in SMRs and thorium, padded out with grip-and-grin pictures in front of national flags when Memorandums of Understanding are signed. There are lots and lots of grip-and-grin pictures out there, by the way.
"Habitable, but not arable. When permafrost and glaciers melt you don't get farmland, you get rocks and marshland."
Fortunately, I understand in this scenario there will be a lot of topsoil sitting around unused just a bit south, just waiting to be blown away as dust. Might as well move it to where it will be useful.
Re: ther new Dune movie.
From the trailers (I know, I know...) I'd guess it's a "What this situation needs is a Nietzchean Superman" thematic bludgeon interspersed with episodes of Explodey-Vision to prevent the exposition scenes from sticking together. I could be wrong.
Lynch's "Dune" was pretty but incoherent and the special effects haven't aged well. I don't hold out much hope for this one.
and the special effects haven't aged well.
They didn't have a good youth either.
Your answers are a perfect demonstration of why nuclear advocates aren't trusted.
Your first mistake is assuming I'm a nuclear advocate.
I merely think we should at least be looking into modern nuclear given the realities surrounding certain parts of the world and the limitations of renewables.
But I freely admit nuclear may not be the best option.
So the alternative to nuke plants is trains derailing? Not solar, wind, or maybe something else? You do know that you never came close to addressing the issue, right?
Actually, I did.
The big issue is that people demonize nuclear, and conveniently ignore all the other dangers and risks and even yearly deaths that surround them every day because "nuclear".
You said you didn't want to live within 1000 miles of a nuclear plant despite the reality that you are far more likely to die or suffer health consequences from things you are quite happy to have surround you.
Because numbers are easy to find, lets look at the US.
Fatalities from nuclear plant accidents - 0 (that I can find quickly, Three Mile Island had none and research shows no statistical change in the surrounding area)
Bicycle deaths - around 700 a year Car deaths - 38,000 (4.4 million injured requiring medical treatment) yearly Air pollution - estimated 60,000 (down from 100,000 30 years ago) Pedestrians killed by trains - 500 year Deaths by food poisoning - 3,000
So yes, lets demonize nuclear as being "dangerous to live near".
Funny, but according to the US Government, "From just 0.34 GW in 2008, U.S. solar power capacity has grown to an estimated 97.2 gigawatts (GW) today. This is enough to power the equivalent of 18 million average American homes."
US power generation by source
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
Solar is a measley 2.3% of US power in 2020.
Can it grow? yes.
Should it grow? absolutely.
Will it dominate? Unlikely.
How does that fit your one-off example about this one solar plant that never got built, which you used to make a nasty point that never came anywhere close to addressing the question I asked?
Because it's not a one off.
Objections to wind turbines happen all the time.
Native Americans are objecting to and trying to stop a Lithium mine
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1031726626/these-tribal-activists-want-biden-to-stop-a-planned-lithium-mine-on-their-sacred
Many, particularly those who don't live near the consequences, like to portray solar and other renewables as having no negatives when the truth is the exact opposite.
Note that I'm not saying renewables and electric cars aren't the solution - just that they still have costs, environmental or otherwise.
It is likely that they will be the least damaging, but that's not the same as saying no damage - and somebody will have to live with the damage in their backyard.
Funny, all that verbiage and you never once mentioned the cost of solar clean-up, nor did you compare it to the cost of cleaning up a serious nuclear accident. (250-500 billion is the current estimate for Fukushima.)
Again, merely pointing out nuclear isn't unique in being expensive to clean up, so treating it as such distorts things.
While solar won't be that expensive, solar will have costs - solar panels don't last forever and they do contain toxic elements that (sadly) are likely to end up in the environment as we fail to fully recycle them.
My Dune bar has been set so low by the previous movies (including the SYFY atrocity) that if the guns have even iron sights on them and the ornithopters actually flap their wings, I'll label it the best attempt yet.
Anyway, if you want snark, instead of forcing actors to suffer in the desert wearing black plastic suits that trap all their sweat,* they wore appropriate couture to minimize heat gain: high reflectance robes over light clothing, platform boots to limit conductance with the ground, and a big ol' silver umbrella to keep the sun off. And wrap-around shades. It would be fabulous.
*You can tell Herbert knew more about the dunes on the coast of Oregon than he did about hot deserts when he designed those stillsuits. Maximizing heat gain in a human body to minimize water loss is not a winning strategy in a desert, unless said desert is very cold indeed.
It was a different time, the goshwow of the visual effects back then was REAL goshwow, none of the fake digital goshwow we get these days. Today it's all ho-hum, you can't see the outlines in green-screen shots and nobody does real glass mattes and optical printer overlays any more. Bo-ring.
To expand on Duffy's answer, this is a well-known concern, e.g. enough so that the US Marine Corp (also Army/Navy, and some other countries) uses WBGT (wet bulb globe temperature), which is a simple weighted formula[1] including dry bulb temperature, wet bulb temperature, and temperature inside a black body (the "globe"). Basically, if you're a healthy US Marine, and a weather flag is flying, worry, and if a black flag is flying, prepare to die if AC fails. (And if not able to shed heat as well a young military person, prepare to die sooner.) Flag Conditions (US Marine Corps) (pdf) The various wikipedia articles involved are well-maintained. Also, KSR's "Ministry for the Future" starts out with a large, long high wet bulb temperature heat wave combined with long-lasting power outages, killing 20M in India. (The attractors here are in the novel in force. (It is also making me laugh, e.g. the Janus Athena character))
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_globe_temperature
"People who don't know the concept of "capacity factor" and compare nameplate power of solar with nameplate power of nuclear shouldn't really be discussing energy policy."
Capacity factor is a way of getting at average output. That's an important start, but the actual situation requires going beyond that. Median output is also important as is the longest period of low output. In the case of UK wind power as reported in Gridwatch, in the period June-July-August 2021 output remained at less than 50% maximum (which I take to be close to nameplate) for a couple of periods of two weeks or more.
didn't want to live within 1000 miles of a nuclear plant
There's one about 10 bird flight miles from me. And many in the area live closer.
Been in operation since 1987.
There is a local group who has been trying continuously to shut it down. Basically they complain about things normal (but that need to be addressed) to any major industrial plant but prefix it with "nuclear" and try and get the courts to shut it down.
So far they haven't succeeded.
There were supposed to be 4 generating units. We only got one due to the typical cost overruns. 4 would sure make it easier to manage power. Not that I'm a fan of the Duke Energy (mis) information system.
If SMRs turn out to be real, it would be a great place to put some of them.
And probably the Canadian/US Rockies as well, not to mention other mountain ranges. The Andes will probably do just fine, for example.
Hi,
I've been a lurker on this board for quite some time, but when I see disinformation distributed by the pro-nuclear crowd, it is hard to stay quiet.
The reason nuclear won't be built out because it is more expensive than solar or wind, and takes more than a decade, optimistically, from planning to flipping the on switch (compared to wind and solar, which takes days, weeks or months). This, ironically, is the reason why nuclear is so widely discussed. It makes good fodder for fossil fuel industry trolls, because it distracts from the real issue.
The discussion about nuclear safety is also irrelevant because these plants will never be built, and therefore will not be in a position to present a danger to the public. Nuclear also does not help with "base load": this is not a real thing, just something that someone made up to promote nuclear and coal. ("Dispatchable power" on the other hand is a real thing and a problem for renewables, and nuclear is not good for that, although, regrettably, natural gas is)
The real issue is that renewables are broadly speaking competitive with fossil fuels in most places. Wind and solar have declined in cost in a massive and game changing way in the past decade, and costs are still in rapid decline. Many new technologies are on the horizon. This means that the trillions of euros of oil and gas reserves owned by oil companies are essentially worthless (more than ideology, this is what has driven disinvestment in fossil fuels, and is why there is talk of "stranded assets"). Despite their zombie status, these companies own our politicians, and our media. Renewables challenge the fundamental power structures of our global political economy, and it is inevitable that those will fight back.
Elon Musk has actually discussed the idea of solar power satellites in interviews, and rejected them as unfeasible. Of course, that could change as technologies do, but given developments in ground based renewables this won't happen any time soon.
So we have the technologies to produce the energy right now. However, as some have pointed out, it is not always available when needed, and some places get more power than others. This is a real issue but not as big a problem as might be supposed. The solutions are 1) multiple types of energy generation: if one type is down, the other might be up; what the alternatives are depend on local circumstances. Wind and solar will be mainstays in most places, but there are always others. 2) storage: not all storage is utility scale batteries, but there are a lot of different forms and solutions, too many to go into here. Often it depends on how long you want to store it and how you want to use it, so it is circumstantial. 3) larger scale grids: on a continental scale, the sun will always be shine somewhere, and the wind will always blow. This means overbuilding capacity and transmission losses, but capacity is actually cheap. 4) regulating usage in terms of times of day by price incentives and similar methods.
While the tech to do all these things exists, these all require political and regulatory battles to be fought and won. Utilities are a highly regulated industry and things like feed in tariffs laws matter a lot for solar roll out, so regulators and their political masters make the decisions. Wind power is fought on basis of local land use regulations. These political fights have useful idiots as their public face, but it is the fossil fuel media complex that keeps the wind in their sails.
Furthermore, fossil fuel and nuclear energy exploit contacts to politicians to get backing for projects that should never be built, and probably never will be. It is important to remember that on the kinds of projects, governments generally guarantee the profits of investors, so that ultimately it is the taxpayers or ratepayers who end up paying for nuclear and fossil fuel installation that get built but never produce any electricity. Similar arrangements exist for oil and gas exploration. So if we want cheap solar and wind, we will have to pay for it, plus also for the fossil fuels that we are not burning. This has always been the problem with Green New Deal thinking: you can try to compensate the coal working who loses his job, but what about the oil baron: who will give him his billions back? And he is the one who really makes the decisions about how energy is produced and distributed, what politicians will do and what the media will say. So perhaps the detractors are right: renewables are too expensive, unless the power of the oil companies can somehow be broken. This, not new tech, is the real factor that will determine if and when we solve the global warming crisis.
And before someone says, as many already have, that at NcMurdo station in the dead of winter, there is no sun and and therefore solar does not work, so therefore renewables are BS and therefore we all have to go nuclear or die from global warming, let me point out that the solution is not that you need to fully supply your own electricity need from rooftop solar starting tomorrow. Rather, policy makers, utilities and regulators should use an intelligent and multi-faceted approach to build out new renewable systems, taking into account the specific characteristics of the technologies they are using and the needs of the customers they are supplying. Try for moment assuming that proponents of renewables will try to make it work, and not just leave you shivering in the dark.
Median output is also important as is the longest period of low output.
That is true. Again, as pointed multiple times here, up North (where it will still be habitable when Africa becomes an area where heat waves kill all unprotected mammals) the existence of so-called "seasons" is a problem.
Solar power will be great when we develop cheap, mass produced energy storage that does not require expensive and/or rare materials (iron oxide batteries seem promising, but again, I've been seeing "promising energy storage technologies" for the last 15 years, none of them so far have scaled to the TWh capacities required for the 100% renewables future envisioned by natgas sponsored think tanks).
As long as you live near the equator, where there are not significant differences in insolation between seasons. Africa has excellent conditions for solar, because you only need day-night storage.
In Europe, we would require summer-winter storage and that just isn't happening fast enough to help us avoid complete breakdown of our biosphere.
Yes, long range HVDC is an astounding technology, but it still has transmission losses and there are significant geopolitical issues with getting your electricity from outside of your area of political control, which is why Desertec isn't happening.
And the next thing trotted out by people seeking to push "100% renewables in Europe soon" fairy tale is "synthetic hydrogen/ammonia/methane/whatever" also won't work because the round trip efficiency is less than 40%, so it is tremendously lossy (for comparison, pumped hydro storage has round trip efficiency above 90%).
Not to mention the fact that we need synthetic hydrogen/ammonia/whatever to decarbonise heavy industry and agriculture (you can have a battery powered car, you can even have a battery powered truck, but a battery powered combine harvester is a tall order indeed).
Here's what I would say: Keep researching safe nuclear power. What we want is something which fails very, very gracefully and doesn't result in the production of things like Plutonium-239. For bonus points it should be transportable on a single rail-car and not require more cement work than a simple pad with some anchor bolts.
Meanwhile, however, build wind and solar and batteries. We're obviously 3-5 years, even with a WWII-level effort (which we're even close to) from having a factory-buildable nuke plant.
We don't have 3-5 years at this point.
A note on the subject of batteries, cloudy days, and no wind. The subject of this note is very simple: "Nice planet. It would be a shame if something happened to it." In short, running out of power at night is an easy price to pay for "The dirt I live on is still habitable." Eventually enough batteries (of some kind or another) will eventually be built, and we can start moving forward again, but for now we must accept the "reality debt" the 1 percent have saddled us with, or we all die.
"Here's what I would say:"
That's pretty cheap talk, because the laws of nature pretty much rule out getting a relevant amount of power from the envelope you draw.
The kind of "research-reactors" you can build inside your envelope can not even produce the power for their own support systems.
Once a reactor produces usable amounts of power, Pu239 happens, and shielding is required, and materials will activate and costs will rise.
There are places where nuclear may be the least bad choice, in particular cold locales which can also use the low-grade heat they produce.
By and large, nuclear as we know it only ever happened for political reasons, and that will be even more the case in the future.
One aspect which is often overlooked in that political game, is that if you want sailors to man your nuclear powered vessels of war, you need to provide a career for them afterwards.
OK, you don't like the term "base load", but I bet you do like how your computer, cooker, lights etc "just work" when you press the relevant switch! That is what base load means in practice!.
Oh and no-one mentioned McMurdo Base, for the good and sufficient reason that we were talking about places like Alaska and northern Scandinavia where actual people really do get born, live their lives and die rather than just visit for a few months to "do research"!
This will be an unpopular comment, but an unfortunate part of solving climate change will be compensating the oil companies for their losses and allowing the oil-billionaires to invest in solar/wind/safe nuclear despite the fact that all of these people should be executed after heavy torture, with statues built of oil executives being ripped in two on the rack to educate our grandchildren in how scum like this should be treated.
Regardless, we're going to have act nice and treat them kindly in order to buy them off, and that is one of the unpleasant realities of climate change. The flip side of this is that they will need to agree to be bought off, or a few years later big oil employees who get discovered in crowds of refugees will be tortured, and eaten.
What we want is something which fails very, very gracefully and doesn't result in the production of things like Plutonium-239. For bonus points it should be transportable on a single rail-car and not require more cement work than a simple pad with some anchor bolts.
We had that decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_Laboratory
Not a commercial success.
In short, running out of power at night is an easy price to pay for "The dirt I live on is still habitable."
How did that "running out of power" thing work out for Texas during their short-lived electricity blackout in February? Oh, death toll estimated at 200. Changing "dirt I live on" to "dirt I'm buried under" is not a winning solution to the problem of generating enough electricity for a modern life.
Lack of energy kills in many ways, affecting hygiene, clean water, hospitals, food production and many other factors. A lot of hair-shirt types in the Western world think the leopard won't eat THEIR face.
Eventually enough batteries (of some kind or another) will eventually be built,
Who is paying for these batteries? Who is paying for the extra wind turbines and solar panels to charge these batteries up for the no-wind night-times? Nobody, that's who and since nobody is paying for them they won't be built. What will happen in reality is we'll burn cheap gas and pretend it's Green and the world will burn. When the gas runs out there's going to be plenty of cheap coal left and after that's all gone, well sperm whales have made a big comeback since last century's hunting moratorium...
"How did that "running out of power" thing work out for Texas during their short-lived electricity blackout in February? Oh, death toll estimated at 200"
You do remember that the current estimate is around 100 million people will die because of global warming.
Those 200 texans only noteworthy because they beat rush-hour.
More people die on a daily basis at EU's and USA's southern borders, because of climate change.
It was a different time, the goshwow of the visual effects back then was REAL goshwow,
Sorry. IMO many of the effects in that movie were about of the level of that 60s TV show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea".
The worse were those 50s radiation suits the shock troops were wearing.
Skilled workers/welders: that, there is a simple answer to, and it's one we can do now, if we want to. Most of the welding on cars, for example, is not done by humans, but purpose-built machines: robots. We use backhoes, etc, instead of a team of ditch diggers.
Interestingly enough, at least to me, is that back around the eighties, I looked around a little, and figured, based on what we knew then of the proto- and early human bands, and if half the land surface of the Earth was habitable (which it isn't, it's a lot less), the proper human population should be 1B, which we hit around 1810.
And educating girls, absolutely. And the people trying to keep them from being educated - note that the Taliban is saying they can be educated, but not in co-ed classes.
One thing that everyone seems to be ignoring is this: as the equatorial latitudes become uninhabitable... this gives us a large amount of land that can be used for solar and wind.
Why we need amateur astronomers: until we have automatic scanners in orbit, we need them to find the asteroids headed our way.
Yeah.... And I'm now remembering "You will believe a man can fly", part of the ads for the Real Superman movie, with Chris Reeve, of course.
The one I recall was someone shoehorning a Ford Fiesta engine into an invalid carriage. They were neighbours of ours and routinely terrorised drivers on a nearby motorway as said invalid carriage was thereby licensed to drive on a motorway...
I would add the neighbours were not the same gentleman of family acquaintance who was banned for being drunk in charge of an invalid carriage...
The Texas running-out-of-power was 150% pure, grade AA bullshit. They refused to weatherize over the years (ROI, you know), they refused to be part of the national grid, they did everything they could to prepare it to fail, except of ROI.
Just like the Great Northeast Blackout in 2003, where it came out, afterwards, that the electric companies had invested zip in their capital plant in 20 years.
My late wife and I bought our Dearly Beloved Departed Toyota Tercel wagon - an '86 - in '88. The only thing really wrong with it was it was seriously underpowered (as in, 2% or 4% grade, from a red light, 0-60 mph is a blazing 22 sec (the co-pilot having cut the a/c while the driver floored it). The engine compartment was too small for anything at all larger.
She'd planned, when it needed an engine rebuild, on taking it to a performance shop, and after everyone there picked themselves up off the floor and caught their breath from laughing so hard, to have them grind out the cylinder walls as much as was safe, to get more power.
Handled like a sports car, though (sports, not muscle).
Exactly.
One thing that everyone seems to be ignoring is this: as the equatorial latitudes become uninhabitable... this gives us a large amount of land that can be used for solar and wind.
Yeah, the reason we're ignoring it is that it's not true. The tropics will warm, but the poles take most of the warming. I don't know of a scenario where the tropics become a barren wasteland.
Where we get into trouble is more in the subtropics and parts of the temperate zones, where intermittent hot spells get too hot and humid for humans to be without air conditioning. That's happening around the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere, not in the Amazon or Congo.
Still, you're pointing at a big problem: cooling. It's hard to cool with warm air, because you have a smaller thermal gradient and therefore need more coolant. If you can't get enough, the power plant won't work. This is an especial problem for air-cooled plants in dry, hot regions.
Duffy The original Novel was such a metaphor ( With the Spice Guild standing-in for OPEC, IIRC ) Plus of course the usual, unfortunately-but-boring USA-ian obsession with giant conspiracies .... See also "Hellstrom's Hive" by the same author.
monsterx Sorry, but "Base Load" really is an actual, real thing ... sad, but true. renewables are broadly speaking competitive with fossil fuels in most places. True, but... BUT: STORAGE, for when the sun don't shine & the wind ain't blowing ... see previous discussions re "blocking High" over Norway in Britain in January ..... And your proposed solutions appear to contain very large amounts of the magic Handwavuim component?
You might be interested in a mate of mine, who took a Morris 1000 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor ), uprated the brakes and suspension (easily done using Morris Marina discs and monotube telescopic dampers), then fitted a "Rover" (ex-Buick) 3528cc V8 engine, tripling the installed power but in a car still capable of over 30 miles per imperial gallon.
"And your proposed solutions appear to contain very large amounts of the magic Handwavuim component?"
That's true of everyone's solutions. My guess would be that if we did everything right, starting Monday morning, we'd lose a billion people to climate change, maybe even more. At this point there are no good scenarios, just the best possible idea to minimize the damage.
In the US from the 50s into the 70s this was a very common thing. After the 70s it died off a lot as cars w/electronics and smog controls got too finicky for all but the dedicated. A fav thing was finding a hulk of a 20s/30s car and putting a "modern" engine, seats, suspenssion, etc... Most with no roof. But any replacement engine in an older car would do. This was all centered on southern California where you could expect weeks without much rain except for "rain" season. Go watch the movie "American Graffiti" to see them in action.
Then there were all the dune buggy shells to put onto the early VW bugs.
Now the big thing is alternate firmware for the engine control systems. Vast performance improvements with all kinds of emissions violations. Totally illegal but hey why not?
Sorry, but "Base Load" really is an actual, real thing ... sad, but true. It even has a wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
I assume monsterx was being sloppy with language. Certainly, there are many mixes of power sources that can be combined to meet baseload (minimum demand), and certainly in countries close to a pole (mostly northern) fixed power stations slower to respond to demand changes would be more attractive as part of a full decarbonization agenda. (Nuclear, hydro, geothermal (e.g. Iceland)). Natural gas (as fuel) cannot reasonably be part of a full decarbonzation agenda; it would need to be coupled with equivalent carbon capture (from the atmosphere), so the price would be in no way competitive, plus giving the already-necessary carbon capture efforts extra work will not amuse the rest of the world.
I'm distressed at the fundamental pessimism here (shorting civilization?) some are showing. As Troutwaxer says, we might be able keep the human kill numbers down to a billion or two with prompt and concerted action, and decisions made now may/will involve shifts in kill numbers in the hundreds of millions/billion-plus range. Some countries (including some democracies) are ruled by psychopaths, and will resist change, sure. They (and their leadership and backers)s will become pariahs, at best, and maybe targets for directed actions.
Yes, just like you changing your O2 cylinder.
"This, of course, means government regulation as to size, shape, and connections.
And if you disagree, I suggest you consider the history of cell phone chargers."
I don't disagree at all, but I don't understand why you seem to be viewing it as a major disadvantage (at least that's how your post comes over to me). After all, your O2 cylinders already have standardised connections; and C3H8 cylinders for fork lifts have standardised connections, etc. etc.; not to mention innumerable examples in other fields, like hard drives or light bulbs. (Cue someone posting a list of exceptions but not actually such as to refute the point.)
I didn't specifically mention it because it seems to me to be a very obviously necessary but also comparatively minor aspect of the process of planning and installing the infrastructure before trying to introduce the things that will depend on it which I did advocate. That process would naturally have to be a government initiative, because it's one of that very large class of things that if you leave it in the hands of profit-making entities it won't be done at all (apart from maybe one or two minor and localised instances deliberately designed to be too shit for people to want to use them in order to discredit the idea).
Allowing the infrastructure to "grow naturally" following the spread of the things that need it was OK as a method of establishing petrol stations when cars first came about, when they were merely rich people's toys and it didn't really matter if they were difficult to use (see Kipling). It's completely shit when they have become a mass necessity and there is a stated need to switch that mass use over to a method of energy storage that is not inherently based around the heat of combustion of carbon. Either the switching over has to take forever or the people who are most of the "mass" in "mass necessity" have to get fucked.
Unfortunately we are afflicted with governments who don't understand that using resources to sort out stuff that profit-making entities won't do or will be shit at is one of the things governments are supposed to be bloody for, or that shovelling the resources into the pockets of those profit-making entities instead is one of the things they are not supposed to be for. So the "policy" we actually get for the infrastructure is merely to depend on allowing random people to install charging-by-plug stations here and there without regard to how the juice actually gets to them, which factor they will ignore until the grid starts to actually fall over and then do nothing effective about but only thrash around with a succession of stupid ideas for trying to get out of paying for it; and as far as any "standardisation" goes, they can't even be arsed to make the trivial step of legislating that all chargers and all cars must use the same standard plug with the same standard juice in it.
(Aside re grid stability: with the grid supply and the battery-pack-replacement stations operated as an integrated system under government rather than capitalist control, you get at least two advantages: the charging load can happen when the grid can best cope with it rather than when people need it done, and the stacks of batteries undergoing charging can additionally be used to help cover peaks and dips in generation and load. Oh, and the amount of beefing up of local distribution required is also a lot less.)
Often in discussions like this one I tend to consider it a precondition too necessary to be worth stating that our current crop and type of politicians and their ilk have all been garotted, and concepts like profitability as the sole valid criterion of quality, or the idea of fictional numbers "traded" in a manner which makes nanosecond latencies significant being of critical importance for anything other than masturbation, have been reclassified to the "shagging the hippos in the zoo" category of respectability. The position that the politicians won't be arsed with it, and the made-up-numbers wankers won't think of making up nice numbers for it instead of nasty ones, therefore it won't work and we have to find a different it that they will go along with (where "it" is, for example, most of the suggestions in threads like this) doesn't really hold water, since we've been doing that already for more than long enough to see that the only results it produces are shit.
The old blue Invacar things? Love it. There was someone round here who had about 20 of those mouldering away in the garden and I wanted to buy one and put a motorbike engine in it, but they don't seem to be there any more...
"Kill?"
Death without replacement, please. The most ideal form is to allow polities to drop the birthrates of their current populations below 1, and to replace the aging with immigrants. Do this a few cycles as part of dealing with climate migration, and numbers go down. The trick is to figure out how to get to low GHG lifetime emissions and low birth rate simultaneously.
I mean, yes, you're right, but what you're talking about is the Four Horsemen level mess, some combination of disease, famine, and violent unrest, typically killing up to a quarter of those in the area affected. As we've seen even in the US, when there is one (like covid19), there are coupled pushes into shortages (hoarding, runs, supply chain fiascos) and upticks in people attempting to act out violently. When things utterly break down, the three miseries feed off each other, and a lot of people die.
If you want humane population decreases, don't encourage child-birth, make end-of-life easier without family, welcome in immigrants, give them a place caring for the elderly, and make it possible for them to be happy with one or no children. This always sounds weird to the more conservative types, but immigrants to America at least tend to espouse American values less hypocritically than do a lot of people who've been here longer. They know what their alternative is.
As Bill says, I was being sloppy with the language. What I mean is that "base load" is not a useful concept in formulating renewable energy policy. It is not necessary to to have a "base load" supplied by nuclear or coal or anything else. You are still stuck with the same problems of oversupply / undersupply due to intermittency even if you have a high base load. Of course, certain renewables might produce a base load regardless - like Icelandic geothermal. If you have a constant power supply, you still need to deal with demand shifts - so you are either wasting power, or don't have enough as demand goes up and down. So the real issue is dispatchable power.
It might be necessary, or at least useful, to have dispatchable power, which is the argument used for continued deployment of gas. Natural gas is good for this, and nuclear is not because it provides a constant level of power rather than be easily to shift up or down. So in this respect there is some validity to the argument for gas, unlike nuclear. However, it is very important to get rid of natural gas entirely as soon as possible because 1) it is a major greenhouse gas contributor 2) because central to stopping global warming is taking down the power of fossil fuel companies, and they are really depending on gas for their future prospects; kill natural gas development and you kill them.
Yes, storage is part of solving the problem of balancing the grid, but as I wrote before, there are other strategies as well - if you can do more of one strategy, you need less of the other. Furthermore, storage does exist already, and its amount is growing, and the types are diversifying. My point is that you do not need to build 6 months worth of battery storage. And you don't need to build all kinds of storage before deploying renewables: you only need to start to build some storage once the renewables percentage gets very high - how high depends on the specific situation.
If I am a little vague, it is because solutions are at once very local and diverse - if you have significant hydro, for example, the storage problem disappears. If the country is large with interconnected grids, they can balance each other. If you have lots of sun year round, overnight battery storage works fine for most of the time. But there is not a one size fits all solution. This makes it easy for disinformation artists to attack renewables: they can cherry pick solutions and show they don't work in other circumstances than the special one they were designed for. This doesn't change the fact that renewables are viable to power the world, and the only reason that isn't already happening is that oil companies need their money.
You misread me. No, I don't have a problem, just see that it's going to be difficult for "oh, but that's my battery*" types, who have no idea. And it's going to be rough on the batteries, unless it's some kind of automated thing... which brings back full service repowering stations.
Natural gas is good for this, and nuclear is not because it provides a constant level of power rather than be easily to shift up or down.
Yeah, again, not true. It was true. In the 1960s. It isn't now. Nuclear power plants have been working in load-following mode in Europe for decades.
They don't do it in the US for regulatory reasons, but modern gen3+ reactors are capable of very fast ramp-down and ramp-up. For example, EPR (a gen3+ reactor) is capable of power changes up to ±80 MW per minute. For comparison, most modern CCGT units are capable of changing their output by ±38 MW per minute.
Now, open cycle gas turbines are very, very fast at power changes, but they are mightily inefficient compared to combined-cycle gas-steam units.
But generally, there's quite a lot of research showing that hybrid nuclear-renewables grid can work quite well and be quite cheaper than trying to achieve the mythical "100% renewables" solution. Germans knows how the 100% renewables model pans out, which is why they're so hell-bent on building Nord Stream 2 despite the potential for sanctions by the US.
(Now, if you have dispatchable renewables like hydro and/or geothermal, you can have a 100% renewables powered grid. But that's a privilege of small and well located grids)
"And a couple of decades later someone from Greenpeace is on international TV waving a Geiger counter over your beach..."
That's really part of the point: that you can do that. Any bugger can detect radioactive contamination - and get a reasonably useful idea of how bad it is - just by waving a magic wand at things. It's a piece of piss (and you can knock up the magic wand from ten quid's worth of bits if you haven't got one).
The kind of thing you describe happens in every industry but there are very few cases where it is so readily apparent that it is happening before the serious shit actually hits the fan. Contamination with chemical toxins is likely to need some half-decent lab facilities to test for the relevant levels of concentration and get a meaningful result, so the number of people who can detect it is very small, but the toxins are of comparable nastiness to radioactive ones (if not worse, since some of them, unlike radioactive ones, do not decay but stay there for ever). And there are many more possible sites where it might happen.
Or in a totally different kind of industry, while anyone can see if the nuts and bolts are missing out of a set of points, only a handful of railway people can ever get close enough to actually look. And if they don't, the first people to know something's wrong include those squashed by a derailed train going along the platform sideways. (Which could easily involve a higher confirmed death toll than many a nuclear spill, but you don't get international TV coverage of people throwing an eppy about it.)
"...doesn't result in the production of things like Plutonium-239."
Uh? 239Pu is super stuff: it's what you want to turn all the non-fissile 238U into to make it useful. You want to produce as much as possible, so you can fission it, and thereby get a couple of orders of magnitude more energy out of the same amount of mined uranium.
Why don't you want it to produce 239Pu? Because they make bombs with it? It's better from that point of view than not producing it. Pu out of a power reactor fuel cycle is crappy for making bombs because it is contaminated with 240Pu and higher isotopes which are next to impossible to separate, and the more of it you're making the more higher-isotope contamination you get. The only way to make a reactor run on mined uranium and not produce 239Pu is to fuel it with 100% 235U, which is really super top-notch bomb fuel, the real proper clap-two-lumps-together-and-lose-a-city stuff. If instead you're mining thorium you're actually fissioning 233U, which again is a better bomb fuel source than power-cycle Pu as long as you've got enough slaves to process it.
Any bugger can detect radioactive contamination - and get a reasonably useful idea of how bad it is - just by waving a magic wand at things. It's a piece of piss (and you can knock up the magic wand from ten quid's worth of bits if you haven't got one).
True. After the releases of radioactivity at Fukushima there were a whole load of citizen scientists wandering around with Geiger counters to track the fallout from this cataclysmic event. One person searching the streets of Tokyo found a radioactivity hotspot a couple of months after the blowup. It turned out to be a box of old radium-dial paints from before WWII in someone's basement adjacent to the street. This had been killing passers-by by the thousands over the decades because Radiation! Or not. Conspiracy theorists of course claimed this was a coverup by the Japanese government to hide the radiation fallout that was going to kill us all, just you wait. Any day now. Really.
Other citizen scientists found Fukushima fallout on California beaches with similar Geiger counters -- well, they found natural radioactivity and ascribed it to Fukushima because Radiation! Simple ten-quid Geiger counters won't return the gamma-ray intensity information that characterises particular fallout isotopes, indeed they will go crazy in Home Depot over by the packs of nice safe potassium chloride.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghu0jTuzO8Q
There is a poster on DailyKos who goes under the name of MarineChemist who did real Science! on contamination from the Fukushima disaster, tracking Cs-134 in ocean currents as it spread across the Pacific. He did NOT use a ten-quid Geiger counter, rather a shielded gamma ray spectrometer, ion-exchange resins and lots of time to get accurate information.
Ah, yes, I quite agree. One might point out that since batteries would be transferred from car use to the grid-backup department as they aged, most of the time they would end up using a battery that was in better condition than if it was "their battery", but I already seem to be able to remember watching that argument fail to get through...
Certainly it would need to be automated, for reasons of accessibility if nothing else, but the problems that arise with doing so don't seem to be ones that haven't been straightforwardly solved already in this or that existing application.
""Kill?"
Death without replacement, please."
OK, but you do first have to ensure the death without replacement of the economists and similar who screech about "but you can't have a declining populatiooonnnn!!!!! Because of... (insert "reason" which is in fact just another part of the overall problem)."
"Eat the rich?" "Let the Boomers die of Covid?" We've got a whole collection of the damn things.
Too bad climate monasticism isn't a thing yet. It'd be nice to have intentional living groups that are trying to solve the problem live together and pass on in due course. Perhaps we can call them sequestering communities, whose mission is to "put it back into the Earth" rather than consuming and growing. Maybe they'll do it by growing mass quantities of hemp for carbon sequestration, and entombing the biomass in abandoned mines with "nonleaky" claw stoppers. Yeah.
Yes, agreed, which is why I didn't claim any more than that you can get a reasonable idea of how bad it is. You can measure the count rate and compare it with the background count and place it appropriately on the scale from "nothing to see here" through "'ello 'ello 'ello" to "holy fuck"; and you can plot variations in count rate over an area on a map; but you do need to take the trouble to establish a reasonable baseline for what range the natural background count is likely to be in, check the local geology, and so on. The magic wand may be cheap and easy to use, but like all magic things, you have to be very careful to understand exactly what it's saying to you if you don't want demons to fly out of your nose.
I'm distressed at the fundamental pessimism here (shorting civilization?) some are showing.
I guess my response, given the last decade, would be why anyone would be more optimistic?
As Troutwaxer says, we might be able keep the human kill numbers down to a billion or two with prompt and concerted action,
What indications are there that any sort of action, let alone prompt and concerted, that will have any meaningful impact is even being considered?
I have to agree with our host, things are not looking good and anybody wise with any sort of remaining life expectancy should be looking to prepare for things to go bad (ie. leave Florida as one example).
Looking at what has happened since 2000:
1) the IPCC has continuously failed - each subsequent report has found that their predictions were woefully inadequate with the actual climate changes being worse than the headline predictions.
2) the Democrats failure to win more Senate seats last year means Biden is effectively at this point a lame duck - note the struggles to get the current priorities passed - with no apparent way forward for any serious climate action (and history indicates that the Republicans will regain the Senate next year, and perhaps the House, ensuring things grind to a halt)
3) COP26 is in a couple of months in Scotland. Except previous summits have achieved nothing significant, and the host of COP26 (Boris) has no credibility with the worldwide community and thus there is no potential for the host to broker any meaningful deal. As already noted Biden is powerless, and the big EU leader in Merkel is similarly no longer in any position of authority.
It's possible another leader will step up and show the skills to get a significant deal, but unlikely given what is really required and the inability of most governments to follow through.
4) Canada is in the middle of an election - called because the current minority government thought the polls indicated they could win a majority - and the beholden to Alberta oil Conservative Party has taken the lead in the polls with a 5% gain (though with 2 weeks to go it is looking like another minority government). Not the actions of voters concerned about climate change action.
5) no government has done significant climate change related improvements over that 20 years.
6) the rich have made it clear they intend to flee to "safer" locations when things get bad, yet the voters still swallow in more than enough numbers the fairy tales that climate change isn't a concern.
etc.
There is zero indication that any government, concerned with not annoying voters, is taking climate change seriously (as in we need to change now!!! and not over the next 20 years).
Even the gains that are being made (solar increases, wind increases) are generally still small enough numbers that they aren't having a significant impact and they won't for another decade - which is far too long.
Take cars - 280 million cars on the road in the US, with 17 million sold a year - so 16 years to replace all those oil powered cars. Far too long.
Or how about all the oil and natural gas heated homes - they aren't converting to electricity anytime soon.
We simply (as a worldwide society) are sleepwalking into disaster because nobody wants to accept that we can't continue to live the same lifestyle that we do now.
In response to the esteemed whitroth comment #412:
And educating girls, absolutely. And the people trying to keep them from being educated - note that the Taliban is saying they can be educated, but not in co-ed classes. Having grown up in the 50s and 60s south of the Mason-Dixon Line, please allow me to be skeptical of separate but equal.
If I am a little vague, it is because solutions are at once very local and diverse - if you have significant hydro, for example, the storage problem disappears. If the country is large with interconnected grids, they can balance each other.
The diversity is key, as is avoiding dependence on megaprojects. Diversity and localism means each country (or smaller!) builds what suits it, including whatever megaprojects they feel like, without demanding that each child be given 50kWh of NiCd batteries at birth or the permit to have it is withdrawn (ie, much risk of mandating inappropriate solutions).
Megaprojects invariably cost 2-10x the actual technical side of things in political overhead, and you need to price that in. It ends up being better thought of as a hidden discount for smaller projects - people can build a couple of wind turbines on King Island to supplement the diesel generators and politicians just turn up to the opening. But do the same for Western Australia and suddenly every dog and his man has to be given a contract for some part of it and 300 different politicians need their cut of the funding and media coverage.
One thing that seems to be happening with hydro specifically is that when people actually look for pumped hydro sites they find more than they expected because the existing hydro surveys were done only for generation, so places where you can pump water up and store it were not even considered. Back in the day Australia had a couple of little pumped hydro schemes to pad out the coal generators, but when the coal people discovered that gas peaking plants were way more profitable sadly the hydro things were no longer economically viable.
Yes? And I grew up the same time, and girls didn't get shop class, either, in Philly.
Even so... they learn more than not having school. And we're seeing the birth rate worldwide dropping.
Or course, some of that may also be an effect of overpopulation. What we're seeing is a lot like the studies they did with rats in the seventies and eighties, eating the infant, attacking each other....
Given the rapidity over the course of the pandemic with which various populations of crystal nutters and whole food hippies have radicalised into crunchy-granola equivalents of neonazis, I am awaiting, to borrow a phrase from S.E. Mulholland (used in discussion around his excellent novel 'Solar Federation') of the arrival of 'Khmer Vert' type climate revolutionaries. They won't be effective at solving the problem, but they will through violent explosive spanners into everything.
Gah. 444: throw, not through.
We've been waiting for 50 years for radicalised hippies to start being violent but all we've got is the occasional violent loner. The Unabomber is possibly the most notorious example, although I suppose you could count eh Australian tourist since he was not just a far white extremist, he specifically wanted to reduce the non-white population for "environmental reasons"...
Can one of the pro-nuke people link to something about how SMRs are defended against explosions? Both the traditional threat bomb type ones, and the philosophically distinct "oops someone crashed a plane right here" ones.
Ye olde worlde big fucking reactors use metres of steel and concrete as well as big fences at a distance from the steel and concrete, but the whole point of an SMR is that it doesn't have those things.
So I wonder what happens when a naughty person fires an anti-tank rocket at an SMR? I assume that the SMR manufacturers are all over that sort of threat but a quick search online didn't turn up anything (reassuring or otherwise). A nice page listing the 10 different designs the US military has built and discarded, while talking about their desire for a new one.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/camp-century-portable-nuclear-reactor
Well, there was Earth First! and the Environmental Liberation Front. And the Symbionese Liberation Army and the bombing at UW-Madison. Thing is, no one mounted a winning campaign, so what was the point in copying them? If you were into hippie violence, growing pot up in northern California was at least profitable.
We'll see what the new generation of enviros does, though. I think they'd just as soon be shut of the elders, for rather better reason than the boomers had. I've been told off several times by young, newly hired planners who are out to save the world and don't want to listen to the olds about anything. This is a bit of a mistake on their part, since a) they therefore have no clue what the olds did, that didn't save the world, and b) they've been badly taught, so they're earnestly starting with Gandhi and King, just as the olds did, and assuming, just as the olds did, that it would work a second time. None of them has even heard of Gene Sharp, and he published his seminal work in the 1970s, fer cryin out loud.
Military officers fighting the last war have nothing on new activists when it comes to resurrecting obsolete practices.
I think this one is mean to be buried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
US GHG emissions have remained lower than their 2008 levels for over a decade.
The clean energy payment plan and other provisions in the reconciliation bill are projected to cut US emissions by another 40%.
Large parts of Europe and the US have proposed a phase out of new ICE cars by 2035.
A number of US states and other jurisdictions have proposals to cut emissions to net zero by 2050.
Obviously, there are a lot of issues with all of this. And it isn't by itself enough, but it is significant progress relative to where we were a few years ago.
While I agree that national governments are not doing enough, the change is happening, just driven by state & local governments and corporates. Even here is Australia that has suffered under a Cola loving Federal government for more than a decade (PM takes coal to parliament https://theconversation.com/that-lump-of-coal-73046).
We now have two states that are effectively 100% renewables (Tasmania https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/changing-generation-mix/tasmania and South Australia https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/changing-generation-mix/south-australia), two biggest states committed to massive Renewable Energy Development Zones and a huge take up of roof top solar.
A recent poll had 70% of the electorate (including a majority for both left and right wing parties) wanting more done.
It seems like similar is happening elsewhere such as California.
So I am more positive, and expect that the national governments will eventually be dragged kicking and screaming to the party.
*Coal, not Cola.
BTW, I spent 13 years working for a Hydro generator and have kept in touch with what is happening in the industry in the 3 years since leaving. The mood in the renewables space is very upbeat even though the Feds are trying everything they can to stymie renewables
The diversity is key, as is avoiding dependence on megaprojects. Diversity and localism means each country (or smaller!) builds what suits it
This is another case of the resilience versus efficiency tradeoff, except that the efficiency end of the continuum often fails too. You might be able to project a budget where you can afford 100 small projects that each deliver 5 McMuffins worth of outcome, but for the same money you can do 3 bigger projects that each deliver 200 McGuffins. The problem with the bigger projects is that if one fails, you only get the same number of McMuffins as you would if 20 of the smaller projects failed. Then there might be a mega project for the same cost that delivers 750 on its own... at that stage everyone sees it as too big to fail and the costs go up, and it ends up costing way more than 150 small projects. Of course we something equivalent to the mega project all the time and maybe even most of the time it's a success. But it doesn't mean that efficiencies of scale always emerge, and you think adding the word "enterprise" to anything means adding a zero to the cost, whereas it almost always ends up being two zeros.
The tropics will warm, but the poles take most of the warming. I don't know of a scenario where the tropics become a barren wasteland.
I think of the scenario where we've already caused 5-ishºC of warming, and along the way triggered some extra release of GHG from (say) melting permafrost that takes us to the 1200ppm trigger for stopping cloud formation, and that in turn kicks off the 8-9ºC of additional warming. And you know maybe even with 14ºC it doesn't mean the tropics are uninhabitable, and I know it's incorrect to assume uniform temperature rise. But it's just hard to imagine what 14ºC actually means in human terms.
I totally agree that with the likely 5ºC scenario we're unlikely to see so much loss of habitat for humans (I'm sort of counting on it, I'm not planning on leaving Brisbane at least for the time being).
Given the rapidity over the course of the pandemic with which various populations of crystal nutters and whole food hippies have radicalised into crunchy-granola equivalents of neonazis...
Or did you just type 'equivalents of' where you meant 'punchers of?' Because that one happened in 2020, yeah...
Nope, I meant things like this: Down here in Oceania, our hippies have been going of the deep end and going full Q-nazi. I've been blocked by/had to block multiple of my crystal/hippie/fluffy relatives on social media because they're beyond recovery. Similar to the effect of right wing confirmation bias enforcing media on boomers without critical faculties. Having the ChCh mosque shooting, followed in quick succession by the pandemic, with a lot of necessary government intervention, has made people who aren't oppressed/in denial about who's oppressing them, think they are oppressed by the government that's floundering (fairly effectively, but we're a small country) to protect them from the pandemic, and go right off the amygdala stroking deep end into conspiracy.
"I think of the scenario where we've already caused 5-ishºC of warming"
The good news is that is very unlikely to happen, because we will loose the infrastructure which allows us to burn fossil fuels on a massive scale already around 3°C.
resilience versus efficiency tradeoff
That too, but I was thinking more of the "after three times the expected duration and ten times the projected expenditure we have... decided to abandon the effort" outcome that is very likely these days. Nothing like planning 20 years to build a nuclear power complex only to discover in year 25 that the site has become tidal and the new revised updated improved completion date in year 40 can't be met.
One advantage of HVDC interconnects is that they isolate AC (sub)grids while still transferring power, so you can have interdependence without dependence. Worst case the UK decides to run at 49.9Hz for some reason but they can still buy power from the Algerian 50Hz grid because the transfer is done at 500kV DC.
Which would be handy if someone decided that building a GBSP* in Algeria was a handy way to transition the UK to solar.
(*Great Big/British Solar Plant)
Re: 'We now have two states that are effectively 100% renewables'
That's great! Alas ... when it comes to sci/tech and public policy if it wasn't developed as per the US version of capitalism, it ain't really real and won't work here. [See universal healthcare for reference.]
Not sure if anyone's mentioned this already but Saudi Arabia is pouring lots of money into solar. Yes - I know that they're geographically optimally situated therefore exploring energy source makes sense - but that's not the point. The point is that not enough stress is being placed on the fact that they're a major oil producer/exporter AND are actively investing in other energy sources.
Interesting parallel, in that Australia is one of the largest exporters of coal and gas, but we also have massive solar and wind resources.
The current push is that we use the solar and wind to create green hydrogen/ammonia and export those instead of the fossil fuels.
Domestically the move away from fossil fueled energy is accelerating, especially for coal as in addition to the Climate Change aspect, no one wants to live near a coal fired plant and they are too expensive to maintain
We also have mining billionaires pushing the move https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/08/18/twiggy-forrests-green-hydrogen-ambitions-will-require-renewables-at-3x-australias-total-energy-consumption/
Yes, but in countries with a bit of geography and a low population density (or who are aiming for that... like the UK seems to be) it's often simple enough to find the low reservoir. There are a couple of crazy Australian teams working on using the infinite reservoir as the bottom one and I'm sure they're not the only ones. That causes issue with salt water intrusion from the high end, but I expect those will be manageable. At least in Australia, where salt water intrusion is our national sport.
Which gives me an idea, based on the Ben Cruachan pump storage scheme ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station ); where in Scotland do we have a granite mountain with a good size corrie on it above a sea loch? Research is required here, but the granite will reduce the effects of the salt water intrusion.
Pumped hydro (and hydro in general) has one problem that's mostly unheard of: it can be quite emissions-intensive.
If you have a rocky mountain valley with no plants to flood with water, then hydro is low-emissions, indeed. But if you flood a forested valley, all the biomass starts decomposing and releasing methane, and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.
There was a study for a dam in Brasil that calculated that methane emissions were worse than if they'd use Diesel generators to generate the same amount of electricity.
So siting hydro is even more important (and even more restricted) than we previously thought.
The same way as chemical plants and storage etc. Yes, they are all vulnerable, but are on a comparable level of danger. This is not sui generis. Blocking most RPGs fired by amateurs (especially home-made ones) isn't that hard, using high walls a few metres away from the plant, strong wire netting etc.
It's not that simple to detect alpha emitters. While those are harmless to most vertebrates as long as they stay external, they are not good news if breathed in or ingested. Yes, detectors exist, but making them at home isn't really feasible.
While I agree with promoting girls' education, there is a large amount of people assuming that association is causation, here. No, it is NOT simply that girls' education per se that causes a reduction in birthrate - nor what the loonie lefties said half a century back (i.e. that it is the elimination of poverty). It is mainly the associated social, political and economic changes.
464, "where in Scotland do we have..."
Here. https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/worlds-biggest-ever-pumped-storage-hydro-scheme-for-scotland/
Nearly 300 GW days.
465, "all the biomass starts decomposing and releasing methane"
True, if you let it go anaerobic. A seawater pumped hydro won't go anaerobic if you use it. I've dived in pumped seawater well above sea level and it's fine. In fact it was luxuriously verdent growth. Freshwater dams that aren't used much are barren places, completely different (I've dived in them too).
Yes, and then as a rather smaller factor there is also a vast amount of concrete for the dam. But you only build the dam once, and you only rot the vegetation once. Whereas the clean electricity generation (or storage) just keeps going on and on.
The one-off burst may or may not be a worry to be considered at the time you build it, but in the long term it can't avoid being a win overall.
Of course you do need to abandon the currently popular practice of considering everything to be disposable and building even very large structures with the expectation that they will nevertheless die decades before their designers do, thereby making sure of someone having to cough up loads of money all over again for the replacement. But that's one of those abandonments that I regard as a necessary precondition for any realistic hope for sustainability in general.
It's also a problem that should be less likely to arise at high latitudes than in somewhere like Brazil, certainly so for things like pumped storage in Scotland, because it's more likely that anywhere with the potential to be a site at all will have only thrown off the glaciers yesterday in geological terms, so there's nothing on top of the rock yet but a hand's-depth of soil and some scrubby grass rather than a whole forest.
And of course if there is a forest you don't have to just leave it there to rot; you could cut it down first and cart it off to build stuff with, or even just burn it on the grounds that it's still better than letting it turn to methane. Build the dam using steam powered machinery and use the forest to fuel it, perhaps, then even your fuel use for construction becomes an overall reduction in emissions rather than another increment...
Hmm. With careful design, you should be able to produce quite a lot of seafood, too. It's similar in many respect to tidal waters.
paws & others AIUI there's a second big pumped scheme underway for Loch Ness ... & a v. quick study of the map suggests two more potential sites with the same bottom reservoir ... ( I hadn't spotted "Strahdearn", either - thanks to gasdive for that one )
I'm not really into eating fish, but the other divers took the opportunity to herd a fish or three into the hessian bag that we were using to collect the growth that would otherwise clog the cooling system of the power plant. There were so many fish that doing that was easy.
Or did you just type 'equivalents of' where you meant 'punchers of?' Because that one happened in 2020, yeah...
Nope.
If you've spent your life saying that you can't trust the establishment, that the mainstream doesn't get it, and that big pharma is the epitome of evil - then you have a real cognitive challenge dealing with a competent and reasonable govt running a sensible and popular public health campaign of lockdown and vaccination in a pandemic.
So it's easy for an anti-establishment anti-vaxxer to become anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vax. And then when they're feeling oppressed by the strength of public opinion against them, it's easy to retreat and find like-minded people on-line... and drift into full-on Q-nuttery.
It's not like they all have. I don't expect the next folk musical festival I attend here in New Zealand to suddenly be full of tye-died swastikas. But people get a bit lost in the anti-establishment internet.
Fortunately that doesn't really matter much, because there are very few isotopes that (a) emit exclusively alphas and nothing else, (b) have a decay chain that includes only further exclusive alpha emitters before it gets to a stable isotope, (c) have a long enough half life to hang around being troublesome instead of disappearing before you get to them, and (d) do not occur in situations that do not involve the presence of other species that do emit gammas/betas in the same goop. I can think of things that pass some of these tests easily enough, but I can't off the top of my head think of anything that passes all of them, so it's still the case that if there is a leak it will be readily detectable. (Even a certain famous case of deliberately bypassing those points which do apply to an otherwise suitable isotope in order to wreak evil was only "undetectable" while they didn't think to look for it.)
(Making an alpha detector is easy enough - you just have to hunt down an alpha-sensitive geiger tube - but it's expensive, delicate, and so limited by the short range of alphas in air that it's pretty much useless outside particular laboratory conditions, certainly for the purpose in question.)
"Here. https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/worlds-biggest-ever-pumped-storage-hydro-scheme-for-scotland/"
Thanks for that. I see that there's another paper at the same site,
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/scientific-computer-modelling-of-wind-pumped-storage-hydro/
that at least makes a start at using real-world data to model what combination of primary source (wind only in the model) and storage would be needed to meet demand. It's restricted to a notional Scottish case and the inputs and conclusions would undoubtedly differ a good deal for other places, but it does, IMO, show the kind of study needed.
It concludes,
"With the recommended
store[d] energy capacity = 1.5 days x peak demand power annual maximum wind power = 7 x peak demand powerthe system has enough wind power and energy storage to cope with the very low wind conditions of September 2014".
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/06/more-than-200-health-journals-call-for-urgent-action-on-climate-crisis
"More than 200 health journals worldwide are publishing an editorial calling on leaders to take emergency action on climate change and to protect health.
"The British Medical Journal said it is the first time so many publications have come together to make the same statement, reflecting the severity of the situation."
Your scenario sounds like Asimov's Foundation.
BTW, the trailer for the Apple+ mini-series looks awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCtQ70knyeo
So should we establish a real life "Foundation" preserving knowledge like the seed bank on the island of Svalbard? I'd suggest actual physical location(s) since collapse may make data storage on an internet cloud problematical.
What knowledge should we preserve?
It's 2100, global warming, pandemics, habitat destruction, over fishing the oceans, mass migration, forever chemical affecting fertility, etc. have rendered large areas of the planet uninhabitable and world population has crashed to about 1 billion.
The developed world's population has gone over the demographic cliff with rapidly shrinking and aging population's. The population of the undeveloped world has been decimated by global warming.
The demographic cliff, aging populations, social tribalism created by social media algorithms, neo-feudal economic inequality, criminal hacking, cyber currency scams, etc. have basically destroyed capitalism.
What does the Foundation do?
How do we rebuild?
There has always been a tendency towards mysticism, conspiracy theory, and new age twaddle among Nazis. (Just look into the history of the Ahnenerbe SS if you are in any doubt.)
And for what it's worth I've been expecting the neo-Nazis to discover climate change as an excuse for genocide since at least early 2017. (Some of the details in that essay have aged poorly, but others ... 5 years on, I stand by what I wrote.)
Meanwhile, please don't confuse Greens (like me) with Nazis.
"There has always been a tendency towards mysticism, conspiracy theory, and new age twaddle among Nazis."
Ever read "Morning of the Magicians" by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier?
MANY, MANY, Many, many .....writers particularly in the SF/SFF fields have profitably mined-&-burrowed into the Nazis' looney-mysticism ... the best-known, probably being "Raiders of the Lost Ark", but there are heaps more - including the Scottish connections via the Sinclairs & Roslin Chapel, of course ... and ( sigh ) the Templars &, &, & ....
If I am reading the runes correctly ... the 1st October deadline for incoming EU goods & the NI impasses. Have been kicked down the road, AGAIN - for another 3 months or so. Yes/No?
should we preserve?"
A few suggestions:
Factual details of previous environmental fuckups, what caused them, what the real damage was as opposed to the newspaper version (by which I mean stuff very broadly of the same nature as saying things like "50,000 deaths" without distinguishing whether you mean "50,000 people incinerated when Yorkshire caught fire" or "50,000 people out of 50,000,000 globally who were dying of protular goberitis anyway probably pegged out a couple of days sooner than they would have done if they hadn't been downwind of the 2051 nitroberrone leak, but we can't actually point to any one of them and say for definite "they died of nitroberrone poisoning from the 2051 leak", we just reckon it probably sped about that many people's demise up a tad").
Medical knowledge, at least covering the range between the basics like "don't drink the water you've been shitting in" up to everything you can achieve without computers; and including scientific knowledge that would have been applicable in the days of "primitive" medicine if people had known it, for instance things like proper data on which "folk remedy" procedures really work and which don't and which make you worse more than they make you better, and proper pharmacological details of naturally-occurring medicinal substances along with how to identify and assay sources of them.
Agricultural knowledge concerning all plants known to be edible, whether they are currently popular as crops or not, how best to cultivate them without fucking everything else up, how to reliably separate the poisonous parts from the good parts for plants where that's relevant. If we're storing chemically-encoded data, seed banks too. (I'm assuming that the default method of data storage will be some form of writing because that's where we've got the proven longevity.)
As much literature, music, historical knowledge and so on as you can scarf up.
I just made a boo-boo with some copypasta and lost my original response.
Anyway, various people, notably gasdive, have made some constructive suggestions regarding additional pump storage hydro in Scotland. The one thing I definitely didn't lose was that Loch Cluanie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Cluanie ) is sterile, or at least its water edge when it's not full full is barren.
Re: '... because it's more likely that anywhere with the potential to be a site at all will have only thrown off the glaciers yesterday in geological terms,'
Greenland might be ideal for such a project -- largish one-way transmission loss and all. Anyone here from Denmark that could provide a 'local' perspective on such a possibility?
But if you flood a forested valley, all the biomass starts decomposing and releasing methane... A couple of other twists: (1) methane is short-lived in the atmosphere (9 years) so while bad and possibly contributing to a going over of a tipping point, it doesn't go on the ledger of excess CO2 that should be removed from the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it. (2) Methanotroph Methanotrophs (sometimes called methanophiles) are prokaryotes that metabolize methane as their source of carbon and energy. They can be either bacteria or archaea and can grow aerobically or anaerobically, and require single-carbon compounds to survive. With rapidly increasing human competence at genetically engineering biology, that (or perhaps a combination of biologically-based tweeks) may be a solution to the methane pulse from flooding. (Note: There's some recent research in this area. And submerged Arctic permafrost melting is a related concern, much larger in scale and with no single entity responsible. With dams, the planners could be forced to account for methane.)
It's only seawater life that is adapted to tidal flow. A seawater reservoir would be very different.
@409 Nojay, Poul-Henning Kamp :
"Those 200 texans only noteworthy because they beat rush-hour.
More people die on a daily basis at EU's and USA's southern borders, because of climate change."
French journalists have an horrible expression for this : "loi du mort-kilomètre".
As in : "one dead at one kilometer away is worth 1000 dead at 1000 km."
Most people are perfectly happy to let millions die to keep their comfort, as long as it is far away.
methane is short-lived in the atmosphere (9 years) so while bad and possibly contributing to a going over of a tipping point, it doesn't go on the ledger of excess CO2 that should be removed from the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it.
That is almost true. But it isn't.
Methane does decay in the atmosphere. CH4 turns into CO2 and H2O. The problem is, CO2 is still a greenhouse gas. And no, methane isn't "9 years short lived and can be safely ignored".
GWP is abbreviation for Global Warming Potential: how much more a single molecule of a given gas heats the planet compared CO2. In other words, CO2 has a GWP of 1.
Methane has a GPW20 of 84 (so, within a 20 years timeframe emitting megatonne of methane is equivalent to emitting 84 megatonnes of CO2) and a GWP100 of 28 (so, within a 100 years timeframe, emitting megatonne of methane is equivalent to emitting 28 megatonnes of CO2).
This is why natural gas power plants are as bad for the climate as coal plants: because while burning CH4 generates less CO2 per unit of energy generated, the "drill the earth and get out CH4 and store CH4 and transport CH4 to the power plant" infrastructure is leaking all over the place and emitting a GPW20=84/GWP100=28 greenhouse gas.
But hey, in the Excel spreadsheet it's not the power plant that's responsible for the warming, and Russia isn't really diligent about tracking methane leaks. Nor is the US with its fracking boom, as it turns out.
Also, problem with pumped storage hydro is that when you don't use it all the time, plants start growing where water used to be but now isn't, because that's what plants do: grow where water and soil is available. Which is, again, why siting pumped storage hydro plants is very, very important. Scotland can probably find some sites that will be pretty barren, indeed. :-)
DavidL@394 wrote "the special effects haven't aged well"
Not everything Lynch filmed is coherent, but much of it's memorable, occasionally unforgettable. My mental highlights of the '80s Dune movie include the spice guild rep threatening the emperor with "do you want to spend the rest of your life in a pain amplifier" spoken into what looks like an oversized carbon diaphragm microphone from 'Big Broadcast of 1933.' Also the huge grub-like organism that warped spacetime with its mind, making for a handy spaceship propellant device. It resembled the creature from Eraserhead or an overweight E.T. drifting through blurry surroundings, like a weightless sea lion floating in a murky dirigible. And actor Gordon Sumner a.k.a. Sting sneering and leering as he promised to dispatch Paul Atreides the same way, when Baron Harkonnen pulled the heart-plug out from some hapless attendant. Scenes largely unsuitable for, say, Disney animation, but if we ever get a brain scanner that generates imagery out of recorded impulses taken from dreaming sleepers, critics will say the results look like a David Lynch film.
Re: your note in the Inappropriate Response thread about the Iron Sky movie, that one caught my attention too when it showed up at a local Redbox dvd kiosk. The title was close to Iron Sunrise, and the Moon Nazis theme reminded me of the first Laundry story, but those were the only Strossian elements I noticed. Too bad their crowd funding resources didn't permit another sequel featuring a Soviet outpost on Mars, looked like that was hinted at while the end credits rolled, with a big old hammer and sickle carved on the "Red" planet and a stolid Red Army chorus number for underscore. Pretty much entirely a Finland media product, they seem to have distinctive views of both Nazis and Soviets there from historical memory. Mikko likely has informed impressions if he's watched any of it.
Pigeon Several copies of the latest edition of the "Rubber Bible" would be a good idea. And similar publications from the CRC, that cover a variety of fields
But people get a bit lost in the anti-establishment internet.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little conspiracy theories, all different.
On things to preserve in the Foundation:
A copy of Richard Feynman's Red Books would be high on my list. That will take a new civilisation back to pretty much everything that was known about physics up to 1963, which is really all you need for most modern technology. It doesn't itself give you the recipe for, say, blue LEDs, but it does give you the background needed to understand the recipe.
Of course the biggest problem for a civilisation trying to haul itself out of the post-collapse dark age will be the lack of fossil fuels. We've burned all the ones that are easy to get at, which is going to make any kind of large-scale metalwork a big practical problem.
Add a copy of Bell System Technical Journal for me.
And the next thing trotted out by people seeking to push "100% renewables in Europe soon" fairy tale is "synthetic hydrogen/ammonia/methane/whatever" also won't work because the round trip efficiency is less than 40%, so it is tremendously lossy (for comparison, pumped hydro storage has round trip efficiency above 90%).
If "less than 40%" means on the order of 30-40%, my reaction is "That high?". If large scale storage of electricity can give a round trip efficiency at that level and it is stable enough for long term storage, the last piece of the puzzle just fell into place.
In practice we would probably be able to do better in Northern Europe because a significant amount of our need for power is heating, but heat can be stored and work in concert with District Heating. It would probably involve significant infrastructure costs in countries not using District Heating, but we are discussing a project to replace all power generation in a decade or two.
Hearsay account - You also have the issue of people putting their heating on full "because it's free" and then also opening all the windows "because it's so hot in this house".
If I had a billion dollars I'd take a three-pronged approach:
1.) Build long-lasting knowledge stores of the type discussed above. Designed to be discovered in whatever the right amount of time might be. The first step with one of those is to teach them to read English. The second step is probably to figure out a way to overcome any religious objections to using the knowledge.
2.) Set up some communities which were designed to be in out-of-the-way of places without floodplains or heavy earthquake risk. They exist to re-seed civilization in a couple-hundred years.
3.) Work on carbon-remediation and develop the science necessary to justify or reject any given approach to fixing the carbon-content of the air.
Can we discuss the apocalyptism (is this a word?) in Western media? I think the Cold War (possibly aided by Jesus) did someone to your collective brains, you just can't get enough of the visions of doom.
And don't get me wrong, I like a good end of the world as much as the next science fiction fan, but aren't you all taking it a little bit too serious? Like, despite the heavy left lean of the people here, you are doing a full horseshoe theory thing here and converging with the fuckin' preppers.
...
May I suggest recording the knowledge of humanity of gold tablets?
May I suggest recording the knowledge of humanity of gold tablets?
The next Trump would melt them down and sell off the lumps after asking someone to take a few pictures.
Hearsay account - You also have the issue of people putting their heating on full "because it's free" and then also opening all the windows "because it's so hot in this house".
In my 1961 house with single pane windows and no insulation in most of the outside walls (I put it into 2 bedrooms) or under the floors (what is left in the attic is more than R0 but how much more is open to question), with a 50+ year old 75% gas furance and 3 window AC units....
And I work from home and have way too many computers / networking things / servers going 24/7.
My gas water heater is pushing 15 or more years but I bought high end efficient and insulated when I put it in and it can go 1/2 day without relighting to keep the water hot. So it basically generated heat for use and not for sitting. Plus I turn it down to negligible when out of the house for more than a day.
My monthly power bill is always under the neighborhood average and at times down with the "most efficient" houses. And my gas bill below most of my neighbors.
I just try. Unlike I guess most everyone else.
Not if you bury them. Then the next Joseph Smith might use them as a basic for a new Bible fanfic.
My neighbours on both sides must have horrific gas bills because they keep windows wide open even in the middle of winter no matter how cold it is. This is because they have dogs and it is necessary to let the smell out. I don't know if there's something funny about the houses round here but the houses of people who have dogs and don't open the windows all the time fucking reek. There's still some of it in mine after at least 12 years of no dogs in the house ever.
Hearsay account - You also have the issue of people putting their heating on full "because it's free" and then also opening all the windows "because it's so hot in this house"
During my time as an assistant superintendent t we went to one of the apartments one hot summer afternoon at the request of the daughter of the older couple who lived in it.
The complaint was that the A/C wasn't working.
We walked into the apartment with her to find the oven on, all 4 stove elements in use cooking food, every light in the place on, the TV on, etc - and both windows and the balcony door wide open for fresh air.
They couldn't understand/accept why under those circumstances they couldn't keep the place ice cold...
Hearsay account - You also have the issue of people putting their heating on full "because it's free" and then also opening all the windows "because it's so hot in this house".
Just to clear up a possible misconception: District heating can be metered. It certainly is where I live. The price point can be adjusted to keep users from the worst excesses.
I think of the scenario where we've already caused 5-ishºC of warming, and along the way triggered some extra release of GHG from (say) melting permafrost that takes us to the 1200ppm trigger for stopping cloud formation, and that in turn kicks off the 8-9ºC of additional warming. And you know maybe even with 14ºC it doesn't mean the tropics are uninhabitable, and I know it's incorrect to assume uniform temperature rise. But it's just hard to imagine what 14ºC actually means in human terms. I totally agree that with the likely 5ºC scenario we're unlikely to see so much loss of habitat for humans (I'm sort of counting on it, I'm not planning on leaving Brisbane at least for the time being).
Oh goody, YOU get to do some math.
Here's the deal: there's this thing called the latitudinal variation in temperature: it's hot in the tropics, cold at the poles. Currently, (It's around 1oC per 150 km."
Well, it turns out that once you dope Earth's air with enough CO2, many of the clouds go away. Where do we find clouds (prompting EC and OGH)? High latitudes, although, yes, there are clouds on the solar equator too. So what happens when you get rid of the clouds? Well, we've got enough of a fossil record to have a pretty good guess, using anatomical details of fossil leaves that correlate reasonably well with temperature in living leaves. Those fossils have allowed various and sundry researchers to model paleoclimate latitudinal thermal gradients for past hothouses.
(Here's another random but reasonable-looking result I pulled off Google). It's reasonable because I'm not sending you to the books I got this out of originally. In this paper, "Compared to a pre-industrial reference simulation (PR), low latitudes are 5 to 8 K warmer, while high latitudes are up to 40 K warmer."
That's the part you're missing: you're assuming that the Earth's existing thermal gradient continues into the hothouse, and it does not. Currently, the Earth's mean annual thermal gradient is somewhere around 67 K between the equator and the poles. I'll let you calculate what the gradient becomes if we're unlucky enough to get over 1000 ppm [CO2]atm.
And to clear up another misconception, I used the description "hearsay" because I've never heard this account from anyone who has ever lived on the estate in question, only from people who've visited it.
I don't know if there's something funny about the houses round here but the houses of people who have dogs and don't open the windows all the time fucking reek
Sounds like they let them pee and poo in the basement. Or maybe on upper floors. We dog sit our kids dogs a lot. (Just started a 10 day session with 2 of them.) They weigh 60-70 pounds each. And all bodily relief takes place outside in the yard. And always has except for a less than hand full of accidents at my kids house when they were very young pups.
Now my next door neighbor had 3 or 4 smaller dogs that would at times pee in the house. It reeked at times. The people who bought 10 years ago it tore it down and built new. I was interested in buying the hardwood 5/4 oak floors until we both realized the smell was into the wood.
After watching my mother and others refused to understand how thermostats and HVAC units work together I can understand and believe it totally.
My mother, her entire life, believed that setting a thermostat further away from the current temp would cool or heat the house faster. And refused to believe her husband or engineering oriented sons that she just might be wrong. So where ever she lived was always too hot or too cold with constant thermostat adjustments.
Thnks. I will look at that paper. Given that the average Brit starts to melt at 30 Celsius and almost all do at 40, we are in for some interesting times. In low latitudes, it's far more what it does to rainfall than temperature that matters. A 5-8 Celsius increase is just about survivable in most of central Africa, but a lack of rain isn't, and too much isn't great.
people get a bit lost in the anti-establishment internet
Our mutual friend Lyric is married to one of those, and is refusing vaccination because he doesn't want untested chinese big pharma poisons in his body. It's a tricky discussion to have.
Meanwhile my 70's-ish aunt is apparently saying "I'm sorry we can't be friends any more, I'm going through chemo and can only see fully vaccinated people" because she doesn't have the energy to run through the arguments again. Albeit she's in Aotearoa so she's somewhat safer for now, we hope.
Sydney, on the other hand, has come out of "please stay home" and things are rapidly
returning to normalbecoming like the father country. Morning traffic is nearly back to normal, lots of people out and about, although I have to say there's a surprisingly large proportion wearing masks given that it's optional. (I describe the de facto situation, the legal system in theory has a different set of rules but seems to have no interest in enforcing them).Thanks, I hadn't seen that second one.
Note that it finds that 160 GWh of storage is sufficient to ride out the calm of June 2014, but the first paper is a proposal for pumped storage of over 6000 GWh. Which is a world of difference.
The Loch Ness pumped storage project is still at the pretty-pictures and environmental-damage evaluation stage, last time I saw it going past my Window of Interest. Right now we've got as much bulk storage as we really need with Dinorwig and Cruachan which were planned and built when the future was nuclear and we were going to store several GWh of surplus nuclear power generated overnight when the demand was low. We're nowhere near having enough wind and solar generating capacity to overprovision the grid with our current consumption profiles, never mind the upcoming EV Carmageddon so extra bulk storage isn't going to be much use.
In other news we in the UK just fired up one of our two remaining coal-fired power stations since gas prices have gone up recently, we've maxed out our European supply feeds and the wind hasn't been blowing. Coal is cheaper than gas, it turns out. Who'd have guessed?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58469238
I had noticed a big uptick on coal generation on the Gridwatch site earlier today and wondered why. Now I know.
Scottish Scientist is a nutter, they get pointed and laughed at a lot on some other fora I've seen their ravings posted on.
Could well be nutters, it's my first contact with that site.
However there's nothing I could find in the proposal that violated any physics or engineering. Obviously it will never be built, for all the same reasons that nothing that can get us out of this mess will ever be built, so neither of us will ever get to say "I told you so" when it does or doesn't work.
No, it's not the excremental type of dog smell, it's just the general odour of dogulousness that they exude from other parts of their bodies. The smell that pervades the old blanket in their basket and they think is lovely but you think is gross.
Re: 'Currently, the Earth's mean annual thermal gradient is somewhere around 67 K between the equator and the poles.'
I'm guessing animals/fauna will be even harder to move/relocate than humans therefore even greater and faster die-off of fauna probably resulting in greater environmental destabilization. Not sure how temperature and humidity sensitive food animals (cows, pigs, sheep, chickens) are.
Then there's our furry pets -- which according to a local news article I recently saw -- have a much narrower heat comfort zone than humans, so it's goodbye to pet cats, dogs, ferrets, hamsters, etc.
Oh, and for clarity, I'm not suggesting pumped hydro is the right solution. As you know, I'm an UHVDC fan from way back. The Scottish Scientist proposal depends on vast UHVDC interconnects to work, and to me, that seems like the thing you need to make it work is the thing that means you don't need it (rather like microwave power transmission is needed to make solar power satellites work, and if you have that, you don't need solar power satellites). I was simply addressing the question, "are there sufficient pumped hydro sites in Scotland, and do we need some research to find them", to which the answer is, "more than we can possibly use"
Y’know, given the general tenor of current UK attitudes to Yurp, and remembering my father’s fantasy on the subject (yes, he was so far into the Farrago that he actually helped run things) surely it is time to unmoor the British isles, float them further into the Atlantic and use it as a giant weight for a truly colossal gravitational energy storage unit? It’s probably the only thing left that it could be useful for.
Cut the whole UK loose along with a kilometre thickness of rock underneath; tow it out and park it on the equator somewhere; mount it on ruddy great springs or magnets or something which exactly counterbalance its average weight, and give it a natural period of about twelve and a half hours; and allow the tidal variations in its instantaneous weight to couple energy into the resonant system. If I haven't cocked this up doing it in my head at this time of night, you could get it boinging up and down with an amplitude of a kilometre or so and needing to have energy coupled out again at an average rate of something over 100GW to keep the amplitude from increasing.
Then you really would be a bunch of yoyos.
Kardashev @ 276:
I'm curious about that, as I do think that a foreign language requirement is a good thing.
I do to. Some people just need to start at a much younger age to succeed at learning a new language. I'm one of them. If I could have continued with French in the school year after that enrichment summer school, I think I would have done better. By the time I was able to start over again in college it was too late.
What was it about Spanish that was troublesome? Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, just the whole thing?
The whole thing. FWIW, it wasn't Spanish per se that was the problem, it was any second language. Even if you have the mental facility for a foreign language it still requires time to study & practice USING the new language. I had neither.
The French "lessons" I remember from the summer school was close to full immersion as you might get without spending the summer in France. I chose Spanish in college because people told me it was the easiest language to learn for people who didn't have a second language. I needed credit for 4 semesters of language (actually I only need credit for 2 semesters, but they had to be semesters three & four).
For most things, I didn't need a lot of study. I could get most of my homework done while I was in class. I'm a pretty good reader and I used to be able to retain what I read. When I was trying to take Spanish in college, the University had a "language lab" with tapes you could use to practice using the language, but it closed for the day before I got off work in the evenings.
I started working while I was still in Junior High school, age 13. That was my first J-O-B job, but I started working (ostensibly to save money for college) at age 11, the summer after the enrichment Science & Math Summer School 1.
My senior year in high school I was working 20-25 hours a week for the advertising department of the local newspaper. And working a part time job on the weekends at a local movie theater.
During the summer break from high school and college, I worked full time as a laborer. My freshman year in college I worked full time at nights in the University laundry. Sophomore, Junior and Senior years (and summer school) I worked as a cook for the Student Union - before and after classes.
FWIW, I took a couple of years of Latin in freshman and sophomore high school in the US and then got interested in Russian because of Sputnik. What really helped about Latin was the realization that Indo-European languages do have a structure, noun declensions, verb conjugations, stems and roots and prefixes and suffixes and the like. That carried over into Russian and made it a lot easier to see what was going on.
Spanish and German and French kind of followed in the same way. I'd not claim to be fluent in any of those, but can generally read a newspaper without too much headscratching.
I didn't want to take Latin, I wanted to take French. I think maybe French could have been useful. I signed up to take French when I got to the 9th grade. As I explained before, I was over-ruled. I hated Latin. I did only the minimum I had to do to get by.
I have heard that after you learn a second language, the third one and any additional ones after that become easier to learn.
1 Hustling to mow grass in the neighborhood - nominally 1/4 acre lots at $1.50 each, using my daddy's reel type lawn mower. By the end of that summer I owned a power lawn-mower - $89 from a local hardware store. IIRC, it had a 1-1/2 horsepower engine. Gasoline was 25¢ a gallon. A gallon of gas was enough fuel to cut four or five yards.
Not sure who wrote that & I'm too lazy to go back and find it ... and it doesn't really matter, but ...
Reading that just now I had a memory.
When I was working as an iron worker (rodbuster) on the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant back around 1980 or so, I was told one of our concrete pours was the largest (most cubic feet) and longest (most continuous hours) concrete pour ever attempted in the U.S.
A previous pour had ended with an Oops! and the entire section had to be chipped out & the rebar replaced. CP&L, Daniels Construction and the NRC got together and came up with a plan to pour the replacement section PLUS the next section at the same time to get back on schedule.
I worked second shift. The pour started first shift of day 1, continued through second and third shifts, first shift on day 2, second shift on day 2 and finished up on third shift ... about 48 hours all told.
Even as an apprentice iron worker I made big bucks in overtime that week. I was making approximately $7/hour, which was BIG BUCKS for blue collar work in North Carolina at the time. Journeyman pay was about $9.50 an hour when I finally made journeyman later that year.
Then the layoffs came when the stagflation recession hit in late 1980. If I had kept on being a rodbuster I would have probably moved out of state, but all the other big jobs were also shutting down as well.
And then right at the end of 1981 I got hired by the Burglar Alarm Company. Pay wasn't as good as being a rodbuster, but it was salaried (when I was hired) and there were substantial benefits that made up for the lower pay; company van & generous travel expenses - mainly meals whenever I had to stay out over night with hotels & prompt reimbursement (mail in an expense report on Friday along with my week's service reports and receive a check the following Friday).
For example, the trans-Minch cable to Lewis and Harris was out of action recently for 6 months whilst a new one was made and laid, and the lights were kept on by the use of diesel-electric generating stations.
516 - You mean like "wet dog" only more so then? 518 - And all I was actually saying was that there are good numbers of sites in Scotland once we've identified them; Due to the fairly sterile nature of my suggested sites, methane outgassing from submerged vegetation isn't much of an issue. 522 - The other thing that's really useful when it comes to learning additional languages is having actually learned grammar, so you don't say "huh!? Wassat?" when the teacher starts talking about, say "perfect tense".The whole thing. FWIW, it wasn't Spanish per se that was the problem, it was any second language.
Me too.
I'm monolingual, which I consider to be a Bad Thing, but various attempts to teach me French and Hebrew (starting after age 9) ran into the problem that I just can't absorb the stuff. Even recent attempts to master a couple of necessary phrases for navigating public transport in Germany ran into a brick wall in my head: I know I need this but I just can't drag the stuff kicking and screaming into my brain.
I suspect the time to start was before I was three, which simply didn't happen.
gasdive @ 303: If only there was some way people could leave reviews on that computer with the date and time and a few words to say if the charger was ICEed or working or not. Maybe a map where chargers that aren't working are marked with a symbol. Like a spanner. And there was a rating for reliability of that charger. But that's just crazy talk.
Next thing you're going to say you want some way for the computer to filter results so that only chargers that fit your particular car show on the map. And we all know computers can't filter information.
But it's all moot because it would require some sort of communication between computers that aren't in the same room, and that's impossible.
/sarcasm
What the actual fuck?
Something like the GasBuddy gas price heat map, the ap I use to find cheap gas when I travel (will use IF I ever get to travel again).
https://www.plugshare.com/h
They may have iPhone or Android aps.
Doesn't look like y'all have GasBuddy for the U.K. or the old Empire (other than Canada), but plugshare includes the U.K. and E.U. (I looked).
Only shows a single charging station in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan or at McMurdo Station.
zumbs @ 307:
Unless you really can keep up, that is awful advice! When you watch something to learn a language you should be able to understand what is going on and preferably at least 80% of the individual words.
If you are ever going into Spanish again, I recommend that you look up a YouTube channel called Dreaming Spanish. The videos are grouped after difficulty, the teacher speaks slowly and clearly, and uses drawings and gestures for the superbeginner and beginner videos.
The general guideline from the teacher of the channel is: "If it feels a bit too easy, it is the right difficulty for you."
Found it & bookmarked it. Watched a little bit of the first lesson with Spanish subtitles turned on.
I hope they have some videos at the sub-beginner level as well.
Nojay @ 334: What happens when the planted trees catch fire? Or die and rot? Does the sequestered CO2 stay sequestered? Magic 8-ball say, 'fuck no'.
Time was plant material sequestered CO2 quite successfully, millions of years ago (it helped that the bacteria that decompose lignite hadn't eveolved back then). We've been digging up and drilling and pumping fossil carbon and desequestering millions of years of collected solar energy and it's fucking us up. Before remediation we, the global we, need to stop desequestering all that carbon. After that we can talk about planting trees and biochar and all the other hippy-dippy ideas out there to actively reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere but making the problem worse has to stop before remediation is worth considering.
Oh, and if you're arguing from the dollar cost perspective all that does is make cheap coal and gas look like a good option and the world will burn.
I wonder if you could take the trees when they grew to a certain size, cut them down, cut them up and stuff them into the bottom of closed down coal mines (not open pit or mountain top removal mines). Some of the carbon would probably escape, but maybe most of it would rot in place. I guess it might generate methane & you'd have to have some way to capture that and decompose it into less greenhouse gasses. Then, I don't know what you might do with them, but it's something to think about.
Might even work for open pit mines if you filled them with a layer of trees and then put a layer of dirt on top of them (sort of the way landfills work for handling garbage.
Plant more trees to replace the ones you cut down & buried and run through the cycle again and again.
Not really - that's mainly the overbred ones. Wolves are pretty heat-adaptable, and dogs vary a lot in heat tolerance and adaptability. Other domestic animals are similar - e.g. we would move more to using (say) African traditional cattle varieties and ones like Afrikander than the high-productivity European ones.
https://www.farm4trade.com/african-cattle-unique-species/
The better agriculturalists have been going on about this for years, pointing out that the plants and animals we have been breeding are highly productive, easy to harvest and market, at the cost of robustness and resilience against challenges. Some have even been trying to change that.
#513 - Aside from anything else, we now need to be looking at "something capable of replacing wind in a month long calm" and probably at international interconnectors (which means submarine cables, and they have their own issues).
This partial "solution" presumes that wherever is on the other end of the interconnector has a vast amount of surplus power they can sell to the becalmed area. They'd really need to pay for and build twice as much wind and solar generating capacity as they themselves need to be able to do this. The "wind is cheaper than coal" argument falls down when the wind doesn't blow enough in a lot of places and we burn fossil gas and coal to stop the lights going out. Storage is talked about a lot but absent a few pumped-storage systems charged up from coal and gas generators it's not happening at scale because there's no surplus of renewable electricity to store nearly all of the time. The super-interconnectors cost money and don't in themselves create electricity, only distribute it (same for storage, of course and there are round-trip losses there too even if the storage can be localised).
There are a few, a very few places with "surplus" renewable power, nations like Iceland and Norway. They have convenient geography and a small population and they've found ways to export their surplus energy even if it's not in the form of electricity per se. Everyone else is talking up a great game for renewables but they're nowhere near sufficiency never mind the vast surpluses of installed wind and solar to provide reliable lights-on operation using local and trans-national grids. We, they, all of us need to be building and deploying wind and solar at ten times the rate we're achieving right now to even come close to sufficiency. Another factor is that the small amount of existing wind and solar installed over the past fifteen years is wearing out and will need to be replaced soon making it a Red Queen's Race. Nuclear plants last longer, 60 years and more with new-builds having a possible operational lifespan of a century and more but the MBAs and get-rich-quick renewables boosters aren't looking that far ahead.
Sean Turner @ 337: In relation to the drawbacks of renewables (especially solar) in some locations, no mention has been made of using green hydrogen/ammonia as a way to move energy from the high insolation locations to those that are sunlight poor.
This has been getting serious airplay here in Australia, thanks to some billionaires.
Is the idea of huge solar farms in the outback generating no emission fuel for the rest of the world real?
Got a link to something that explains how it's supposed to work as a "no emission fuel"?
I understand how hydrogen would burn with "no emissions", but ammonia? How do you avoid emissions of Nitric Oxides or even Nitric Acid?
Hydrogen was discussed as a fuel up thread. As I understand it, the problem with Hydrogen is how to store a sufficient quantity to make it usable for powering a vehicle. I understood it's also difficult to transport.
Would hydrogen as a fuel be more or less efficient for transferring the output of solar farms to locations with less insolation using electrical transmission by wires?
I can see that being a problem if you burn ammonia. A bit of searching suggests that ammonia fuel cells are an active research area, and might avoid the problem.
This review article seems like a reasonable summary: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/ta/d0ta08810b
We've done this before, at least twice for humans, and multiple times for the biosphere in general, but you're somewhat underestimating the scale we need to do it at. The last time we did it was the conquest of the Americas, but the method (pandemics and bloody conquest leading to massive regrowth of vegetation cleared for farming across two continents) leaves somewhat to be desired. But that only took us from 280 to 275 ppm. Some people are pushing for a small drop a few centuries earlier being the result of the conquests of Ghengis Khan, but I'm not sure that one's supportable.
We need better than either of those, though, because we need to take a minimum of 50 ppm carbon out of the atmosphere, maybe a hundred and fifty, and stop putting any more in, so we need to recreate a low budget reenactment of the Azolla Event, utilising whichever large body of stratified anoxic water is available, which at the moment isn't the Arctic Ocean, but is the Black Sea. As to how one convinces the world to grow biomass, and sink in in the bottom of the Black sea, is an exercise left to the reader.
Damian @ 341: I meant roof tiles. Cast concrete, which I guess is cheaper than terracotta and it's certainly stronger. They interlock and provide their own water channels. They are usually fixed directly to battens. Sometimes there's a fabric sarking underneath, but there's pretty much never a solid substrate, like plywood or something. Roofs made of anything other than metal or tiles are pretty unusual here. We probably have deeper eaves than you'd be used to, as well.
Anyhow, you use specialised tools to "lift" a row of tiles so you can get to where the next row down is fixed to its batten, and then you can remove tiles from that row down. The space in the ceiling near an external wall, even with deep eaves, can be cramped and if the wall cavity is a bit tight too, it can be unpleasant work running wiring into it. Same applies double for stuff mounted on the fascia, I guess. So getting in from above is a neat trick if you can do it.
I'm sort of familiar with the concept. Sounds similar to the way metal roofing is applied to barns; usually just stringers (battens) run across rafters or trusses. But also usually there's no "cavity wall" as such to run wiring down inside.
But if you could find a link to photographs (or even a YouTube video) that might help.
More to the point, "where does the hydrogen come from?" The only sources of manufactured hydrogen I know are electrolysis of water and of short chain hydrocarbons. Now it's fairly obvious that H2O splits to H2 + O1, but how do you ensure that the electricity used is carbon free? Electrolysis of hydrocarbons produces carbon at the plant, and again how do you...is carbon free?
That is partly covered in the review I posted. TL;DR version is: A process exists, nobody has really tried scaling it up.
So, Nojay claims, we can't build storage because there are no renewables, and we can't build renewables because there is no storage. I am sure most readers can spot the flaw in this thinking for themselves, but I just thought I'd point it out in case anyone missed it.
Furthermore, the claim is that renewables haven't been built up, therefore they aren't keeping the lights on, and therefore we can't build them because they aren't keeping the lights on. Of course, they HAVE been and ARE being built up considerably - just not as quickly as they need to be and should be.
The third claim Nojay makes is the wind and solar are "wearing out". Well, everything wears out, so this is sort of true. But wind and solar tend to have 20-30 life spans planned in, and for solar, panels actually tend to operate much longer - typical residential panels are warrantied for 20 to 25 years, meaning they will reman at 80% or more of their rated capacity up to that time. Obsolesce has been a problem - the old panels might not be worth the roof space because the new ones are so much more efficient. But wearing out?; I suppose technically this is not an outright erm, less than truthful statement. I would not be surprised if Nojay can find an example of a system somewhere that wore out and broke. Could happen.
I suspect the time to start was before I was three, which simply didn't happen.
I'm in your place when it comes to other languages. But while starting early is likely a good thing for most people, for some of us it is not the issue.
My daughter started her second language at age 15. German. In 3 years she was fluent enough to finish her schooling in an upper level German high school for a year.
While visiting some of my wife's cousins in Germany a few years ago one in her 60s mentioned she was learning Italian. On her own. Her 5th language I think.
Some of us just don't have the brain wiring to think in other languages. And some do. I'm in the first group.
Other domestic animals are similar - e.g. we would move more to using (say) African traditional cattle varieties and ones like Afrikander than the high-productivity European ones.
We are less than 100 years from when most cattle spent 99% of their life on the open range in the US West. And many still do. Winter to summer out there is a fairly wide range when it comes to temperature.
StephenNZ @ 380: Off Topic but yes - my post was just an update to the original post at #179 showing the followup removal of the shunting engine from the harbour - in case anyone had followed the original #179 post and wanted to know the next update.
In post #179 it was reported that a small shunter (~50 tonnes) - aka a switcher is USA termonology (in this case unmanned and operating under remote control) plus flat deck container wagon went off the end of a link span (where it shouldn't have been) at Picton and "fell in the water"."
The linkspan is used by Kiwirail's rail enabled ferrys (which run between North and Sounth Islands in NZ). It will be keen to see the eventual final report as to why that shunter fell in the water in the first place - I expect Kiwirail are still investigating.
I'll bet dollars to donuts the remote operator can't see the rail lines at the port from where he's operating the engine from and doesn't have a video camera on the engine so he can see where it's going.
Someone left the switch leading to link span in the wrong position and instead of going straight ahead in the switch yard the engine and the car it was pushing made a right turn onto the line that leads to the link span. And I'll bet the end of the line it was supposed to be on in the yard is farther from the switch than the end of the link span.
Right now there isn't enough electricity being generated by renewables to justify building out lots of storage because there's no surplus to store. There's nothing stopping renewables being built, indeed there are lots of renewables projects in place but the installations aren't being carried out fast enough to keep up with the ageing out of wind and solar and also reach sufficiency so we can stop burning gas and coal to keep the lights on.
A rough guesstimate says that just to meet Britain's electricity demands in winter we need about 150GW dataplate of installed wind turbines (ca. 50GW consumption, wind power factor is about 30% on average). Solar might get us another 10GW during the day in midwinter if we install maybe 200GW dataplate of solar panels. We'll ignore the winter heating energy demand for now and low-ball the extra electricity needed to charge up a mostly-EV fleet of cars, trucks, trains etc. that's in the future. There's also a lot of storage needed too but that can wait.
After about fifteen years of fervent pro-renewables investment and subsidies the UK has 25GW dataplate of installed wind and maybe 25GW dataplate of installed home and grid solar. If we double this rate of installations then fifteen years from now in 2035 we'll have about 60GW dataplate of installed wind turbines and maybe 70GW dataplate of solar. By that time all of the oldest wind turbines are dead metal, the sites can be repurposed and the old turbines recycled but their current generating capacity is gone, like decommissioned coal or nuclear power stations. That's why I said "Red Queen's Race", either we burn a lot of gas and add to the CO2 load in the atmosphere or we spend a lot more time and effort and money on renewables right now. Realistically everyone needs to be installing renewables at about ten times as fast as we're currently managing to roll them out, now and into the indefinite future because it will wear out about as fast as we can replace it.
On the other hand the French went on a war footing back in the 1970s, building a shitload of nuclear reactors which are still meeting nearly all of their electricity requirements forty years later and it's likely these reactors will be producing CO2-free energy for another twenty years and maybe more (there's no real engineering limits that preclude an 80-year lifespan for most PWRs and BWRs if nothing expensive breaks).
(I am assuming the word "year" needs to be inserted at the appropriate point.)
"Well, everything wears out, so this is sort of true. But wind and solar tend to have 20-30 life spans planned in..."
...Which is shit. Because you end up running around like a headless chicken trying to replace these failing disposable installations just to stay where you are, instead of that production going to actually increase installed capacity. And this is already starting to kick in before we've even got anywhere.
This addiction to deliberately making things badly so they fall to bits after a few years and have to be replaced is bad enough when it's applied to kettles and vacuum cleaners. It's a fucking appalling way to carry on when it's applied to massive and vital civil engineering projects. A wind energy harvester is the kind of simple mechanical device that with occasional relubrication, and replacement of wearing parts like bearings and gear teeth which are a tiny part of the whole, should last basically for ever, not fall to bits after 30 years and make you need to replace the whole bloody thing.
A nurdle flibnicator is a device whose primary function is to flibnicate nurdles and it should be designed and built as such. But what we actually do these days is build a device whose primary function is to catalyse the emission of money from other people, whose secondary function is to debilitate them sufficiently that they lose the capacity to undertake the short-term hassle of abandoning it in favour of something better, and which might then happen to occasionally flibnicate the odd nurdle (it was nurdles, wasn't it?) if you can manage to gaffer-tape it so it stops wobbling for long enough. And we urgently need to terminate this hideously perverted approach with extreme prejudice, because not only does it place innumerable stupid obstacles in the way of sorting things out, it's a very large part of the reason we're in a mess in the first place.
One of the references linked from the wikipedia article about Dinorwig is an article in The Engineer which goes on about how you "can't" build storage because it inevitably degenerates into an unresolvable circular argument between three different people all saying "I'm not paying for it, that's his job (points to guy on right)". That may be true under a particular highly artificial set of circumstances which have been devised so that people will pervert the requirement for an electricity supply into an opportunity to bleed as much money as possible out of individual aspects of the operation without regard to the functionality of the system as a whole for supplying electricity, but it's not true if you don't allow some bunch of utter fucking morons to impose such amazingly inappropriate circumstances on the system in the first place.
Yet the article totally fails to understand this very obvious point, and bases its viewpoint around an unchallengeable axiom that no electricity supply system can possibly exist that is not weighted with so moronic a millstone - they seem to think it's even more inherent in and fundamental to electricity supply than conservation of energy. This is not engineering; this is bullshit.
Well, everything wears out, so this is sort of true. But wind and solar tend to have 20-30 life spans planned in,
Wind appears to have 20 years built in - that the turbine structures are designed for 20 years at which point they need to be replaced as the start to become unsafe.
and for solar, panels actually tend to operate much longer - typical residential panels are warrantied for 20 to 25 years, meaning they will reman at 80% or more of their rated capacity up to that time.
No, it means we hope they will - because as we keep changing how we make them we really have no idea how long they will remain efficient.
(which doesn't mean I think they won't last that long, just that those warranties are worthless because if the panels fail early the company won't be around to honour the warranty).
Obsolesce has been a problem - the old panels might not be worth the roof space because the new ones are so much more efficient. But wearing out?; I suppose technically this is not an outright erm, less than truthful statement.
It's truthful to the extent that we end up, as noted, spending resources replacing renewable sources instead of building new ones - which in turn means we don't progress as fast as we should in getting off of carbon fuels.
For example there are stories about the problems with dealing with wind turbine blades - because they are practically indestructible yet wind farm operators are replacing them after 10 years for newer more efficient designs.
Why? Because much like what will happen with solar farms, it is "cheaper" to upgrade what is already in place than to build new.
Somewhat OT, but OGH's next book Invisible Sun is entering the first phase of its countdown to publication.
Charlie, do you get a discount if the scents are released on the same planes that leave chemtrails?
"A rough guesstimate says that just to meet Britain's electricity demands in winter we need about 150GW dataplate of installed wind turbines (ca. 50GW consumption, wind power factor is about 30% on average)."
150 GW is probably low, as wind power factor tells only part of the availability story -- longest period of very low output is at least as important, IMO more. In the UK-wind-only model mentioned in #476, a factor of 7 over maximum demand was found, giving a dataplate requirement of 350 GW. Adding in UK solar and imported wind and solar would probably decrease that some, but it would need some reasonably careful modeling, supported by real-world data, to determine that. Please note the "real-world data" part -- would there were more of that around.
Can one pre-order signed Invisible Sun copies from Transreal?
For example there are stories about the problems with dealing with wind turbine blades - because they are practically indestructible yet wind farm operators are replacing them after 10 years for newer more efficient designs.
Wind turbine blades and especially the larger ones suffer from a problem, at the rate they spin the outer sections of each blade are moving though the air at substantial speeds, 200 or 300km/hour. They're also operating in "dirty" air with lots of particulates, dust, wind-blown seeds, insects etc. plus the occasional bird, bat and wayward drone. The impacts and sand-blast abrasion adds up over a period of years, damaging the blade's skin along the leading edges and on occasion causing spalling and fracturing of the underlying blade structure. You'll find plenty of images of such damage on the internets if you want to look for them.
Back in school we got modern poems for English occasionally and a phrase from one of them stuck in my mind:
"Build, build the ramparts of your giant town; Yet they shall crumble to the dust before The battering thistle-down."
Twenty years of exposure to machine-gun crud, it's surprising the wind turbine blades last that long on average. A nuclear reactor's containment building, on the other hand...
Somewhat OT, but OGH's next book Invisible Sun is entering the first phase of its countdown to publication.
Forget countdown!
My UK (trade paperback) author copies arrived today.
There's no hardcover in the UK, but the US hardcovers are probably in a shipping container clogging up an import port right now because fuck Brexit.
Yes: I need to go talk to Mike and then set up a link. And update the "buy my books" pages (in the right column), which I've been shirking because I've got a crapton more stuff coming in the next few months.
Great discussion on renewables, nuclear, transmission line efficiency and politics, and electric vehicles.
I have comments and questions about EVs. Full disclosure, I own a Tesla in the USA so my experience on use and infrastructure is based on that one vehicle and manufacturer.
On the charging network, the comment on reliability was dead on for every network except the Tesla Supercharger network. I've never found a site completely down and have only found one charger at a site down two times. The car lets you know before you arrive how many chargers are currently available and in use. It will route around chargers that are temporarily down.
My experience with other charging providers has been much worse. On average, about 40% have been inoperative when I arrived. The point about interoperability of charging sites is well taken. Tesla has announced that they will open their Supercharger network to other cars by year's end and provide adapters at the charging sites. I hope this improves the travel charging situation for all EVs.
And it is only an issue when traveling. I have the luxury of living in a single family home. I installed a charger in my driveway and that takes care of all my charging needs around town. In effect, I have a full tank every morning when I get into the car. That makes the car very convenient for me. Many others who live in apartments or condominiums have different experiences. At least here in the southeast US, a significant number of apartment complexes are beginning to build out charging stations for their tenants. In town, chargers and urban Superchargers are being installed for office workers (should they ever return.)
On automagic battery replacement as a substitute for charging stations, Tesla actually planned on doing this for their first cars. The cars were engineered for it and one battery swap location was opened, but seldom if ever used. This, along with reduced charging times at Superchargers caused them to drop the program.
Lastly, about the ecological benefits of EVs, or lack thereof, I'm going to link a video that tries to compare the full cost and emissions from well to pump for gas and from generation to car for EVs. This is mostly what prompted me to post. The case made by this sound reasonable to me but I value the various viewpoints of this group. In particular, I'd like to hear arguments against the points made in the video.
About this link. The original, despite being open source, constantly disappears from Youtube. When it is available, it always seems to be prefixed or suffixed by someone's self-promotion. For this reason, the link I'm providing is to my own link shortener and points to a copy of the video (minus self-promotions) on a server of mine. You don't know me, so I understand anyone that considers it a risky link.
Here you go: http://rwm.cc/ev
sigh Here you are, complaining that they don't want to talk to the elders, and bring up the bombing at UW-Madison. The Weatherpeople made it a point of not hurting people, but destroying symbolic property. The idiot who was killed was told to get out of the building, along with everyone else, but avoided being shepherded out.
I read a few years ago the Middle Eastern nations that had oil were working hard on reusables, knowing there was an end to the fuel, and they wanted power when the oil was gone.
I disagree. Part of it is that women with some education have fewer kids, partly because the ones they have live, and don't die early... because of what the mothers learn.
Leave a forest to rot, where you're putting in a dam? That would be not only stupid, but a money-loser. Roll the phrase "clear cut" around in your mind.
No. None of the hippies/ex-hippies I know have gone right wing.
But then, the inestimable Tom Smith (filkertom) has a song about Captain America ("now you want us to believe he's a Nazi, when he was created to fight the Nazis....")
Perhaps we should genengineer a bacteria that a) metabolized methane, and b) would live in the stomachs of livestock.
Y'know, all these derogatory references to hippies... here. Most of you are too young to actually know us, and what I see being bandied about is the bs. put out by the right, or the mainstream media who were busy trying to make us into a profitable product.
Why is it that you still really want to hate us?
To add to the question, what'd we do? To use Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's phrase, did we pre-oppose authoritarianism, corporatism, and the petrochemical industry?
"But wind and solar tend to have 20-30 life spans planned in [...]"
I think it is important to point out here, that we are severely limited on the lifespan estimation because we only started building this stuff very recently.
Denmark was ground zero for windmills, and in the official register, current as of july 2021:
Year Count kW 1977 2 52 1978 13 813 1979 23 1090 1980 68 2666 1981 166 6307 [...] 2020 5659 4558655The first decommissioning happens in 1987, as I recall because of a fire.
Decommissioning starts seriously around year 2000, in response to public policy changes which made it a really good deal to upgrade to larger kit, even if the old stuff was still running OK.
In other words, the data we have so far clearly points to 50 or more years of productive lifetime.
With that said, there is no doubt that modern designs are optimized much harder and therefore have less margin in the long run.
As was mentioned, the principal design limitation for the technology is that the wing tips must stay below Mach-1 at all times, and at speeds just shy of speed of sound anything hits hard, with rain being the primary cause of erosion.
It is possible to recycle the wings, but it is not economical to do so.
You pyrolyse them, burn the offgas for heating and end up with a lot of fibreglass, which can be recycled as thermal insulation.
Will it be in the actual shops soon then?
2000 - 1977 = 23. That's less than half of 50.
Meanwhile ... shudder ... Real, actual, live, poisonous BrexSHIT I'm not sure to believe this, but ... given the lies spouted already ... yes - another Brexit bonus: RAW SEWAGE ....
It was so fucked up I couldn't even read the whole thing. Just as depressing as hell.
"(conserative)politics made manifest"?
I suspect that if a point is reached where bigger, better blades aren't available, refurbishment will make sense.
Denmark was ground zero for windmills, and in the official register, current as of july 2021:
In other words, the data we have so far clearly points to 50 or more years of productive lifetime.
This website says otherwise
https://turbines.dk/statistics/
Average age of decommissioned turbine - 17.9 years
"The figure blow shows a histogram of the ages. Most turbines are in service for 15-20 years with a few lasting as long as 40 years! Note that these numbers represent decommissioned turbines and thus are not representative for the expected lifetime of currently active turbines."
Lastly, about the ecological benefits of EVs, or lack thereof, I'm going to link a video that tries to compare the full cost and emissions from well to pump for gas and from generation to car for EVs.
Are EVs better than a traditional car? Probably.
The issue really is the hidden costs of the automobile that aren't accounted for in the lifetime of the vehicle itself.
The damage of sprawling (public transit and walking/cycling hostile) housing developments, all those roads with the CO2 heavy concrete, etc.
Moving to EVs only really solves half the problem.
Moving to EVs at least really solves half the problem.
On decommissioning wind power turbines.
A while back people who where gung ho for coal in the US were pointing to all the "abandoned" wind turbines. Especially those on the road from LA to Palm Springs. Most of these were smaller Gen 0 or 1 units where the maintenance didn't make sense anymore. So while the count was high, the total power wasn't all that big.
When I pointed out all the abandoned or nearly so small coal plants built in the 40s - 60s that the power companies were just turning off as the maintenance no longer made sense based on the power generated they either went quiet or moved to another topic. Or the best one (riffing on Covid-19 tales) saying it just wasn't true.
I found it a lot easier to read after I'd updated my unfucking script for the Independent website to shunt all the "recommended" guff to the bottom of the article instead of having great lumps of it interrupting the text in multiple places, and to get rid of the bastarding "position: fixed" CSS rule on the bars across the top and bottom of the screen so I'm not scrolling in a letterbox. I'm sure I've done this at least once already but the stupid buggers went and made it unreadable again.
I find modern or modernish housing developments mostly less hostile if you're not in a road-only vehicle.
The roads are usually laid out in a piss annoying pattern that broadly resembles a plate of spaghetti but has the topology of a tree, so getting around the place is maximally circuitous and looking for a particular bit of it involves far too much tail-chasing and backtracking to walk the tree bit by bit. But if you are not constrained to keep to the roads, you can use the cut-throughs and alleyways that connect the leaves to whatever's on the other side of the houses around them, and get where you're going in a far more direct and less confusing manner.
Probably true, but I found it impossible to read because of the sheer, horrific stupidity of what the story itself described.
An interesting and relevant article from Reuters: Why Hurricane Ida crippled the New Orleans power grid. Should have been "How", not "Why," but journalists...
Anyway, the key takeaway is that Louisiana is busily rebuilding its power grid to something that can more-or-less withstand 150 mph winds. But it's in process, and a lot of the upgrading last year went into areas that were hammered by Hurricane Laura last year, not into the critical interties between New Orleans, the local nuclear power plant, and the rest of the US grid.
This is a big problem worldwide, and not just with nukes and dams: the grid's only as strong as its weakest link. Worse, badly designed power lines (of which there are many) can also cause horribly expensive fires.
This is one reason I'm a fan of rooftop solar and batteries. If the grid's unstable in the face of climate change, this is a way to start ameliorating the instability. It's obviously not a panacea, as built design choices have already foreclosed rooftop solar on a large chunk of already-built properties in the sun belt. Bluntly, they're designed to be cheap to build and easy to sell using standard formulas, not designed to be livable in a changing climate.
Anyway, there's a structural problem that a few big power plants, whatever they're running on, are only as good as the grid that connects them to their end users. The same is true for pipes. The best solution, to be brutally frank, is to get people to use less power and to concentrate on the renewable forms. This will undoubtedly evoke commplaints (I have to get new pots for my stove. NO! WAY! GAS FOREVERZ!). But when the choice is between no power and less power, I have a small guess which option you'll pick.*
*C. Force someone poorer than you to do without and/or die trying. Did that sting?
We need better than either of those, though, because we need to take a minimum of 50 ppm carbon out of the atmosphere, maybe a hundred and fifty, and stop putting any more in, so we need to recreate a low budget reenactment of the Azolla Event, utilising whichever large body of stratified anoxic water is available, which at the moment isn't the Arctic Ocean, but is the Black Sea. As to how one convinces the world to grow biomass, and sink in in the bottom of the Black sea, is an exercise left to the reader.
Hmmm, that's an interesting idea. The Azolla event, for those who don't know, is a hypothesized explanation for some peculiar fossils. Azolla's a floating freshwater fern that fixes nitrogen, although the last is irrelevant here. Anyway, Arctic fossils from around 49 mya have meters' thick layers that are absolutely packed with Azolla. The apparent explanation is that at this time, the Arctic got landlocked, became a big-ass freshwater lake, and that lake got covered with carpets of Azolla. This went back and forth (marine-lake-marine-lake) but during the most extreme Azolla episode (perhaps 800,000 years or so), the ferns may have knocked global [CO2]atm from 3500 ppm down to 650 ppm. It was transient in geologic terms, but spectacular. Yes, the Arctic was a lot warmer back then, sort of like southern UK or US Great Lakes. Don't worry about temperature or light. There were alligators, okay?
The complexities: Right now the Arctic Ocean is about four times the size of the Mediterranean, but I don't know how big it was back then. The Black Sea is about one-sixth the size of the Mediterranean. So area-wise...can we do it?
What we want is a rapid drawdown of [CO2]atm to save civilization, in decades, maybe centuries. 800,000 years to pull 2900 ppm out of the atmosphere's spectacular, but maybe too slow. Especially since we're unlikely to emit 3500 ppm. I agree with Zane that we need to pull maybe 400-500 ppm out of the air pretty quickly.*
So here's my modest proposal:
Dam the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal (hell, put rail links over the dams for the shipping).
Then, pipe carbon-rich sludge into the bottom of the Mediterranean. There it will get entombed in salt as the Mediterranean dries, and lack of stirring will help keep it stratified. There will have to be other measures taken to keep from having methane eruptions and the like, so this is a huge undertaking.
Drying out the Mediterranean will take a thousand years (per the Messinian Salinity Crisis) and it's difficult to keep a dam functional that long. But it's possible. Of course damming the Mediterranean will kill civilization where it was born, and that's lamentable. But (tongue fully in cheek) we can get our carbon encased in salt and sediment at the bottom of the Mediterranean, we can carefully let water back into the basin, and then have the ocean bury our sins where there's little or no chance that they'll be turned into oil before Africa finishes plowing into Europe.**
But heck, there are already plans to have hydropower dams in the Mediterranean basin. Why not geoengineer on a stupid-big scale and save civilization away from the Mediterranean in the process? And the wealthy can build new generations of Barsoom-inspired cities around the retreating flanks of the Mediterranean. Heck, there are plans for those already. Maybe we can persuade Elon to drop Mars and colonize the Bottomlands instead? Heh heh.
*Thing to remember is that the ocean is pulling in about 55% of the CO2 we emit. So when we start taking CO2 out of the air, it's going to start coming out of the ocean. This is a good thing for mass extinction and coral reefs, but it means that we'll have to draw down a lot more CO2 that we'd initially expect. I'm handwaving this as double what we'd initially planned for.
**Well the sins will be buried, until some volcano or other starts providing a way out for the CO2 captured this way. Mere complexities. Nothing to worry about.
Some people don’t have to be young to learn languages. My father who, like me, was intelligent but no genius decided to learn German at the age of 25. He succeeded and was able to converse in German, with an appalling accent. He later learned French and Spanish. When I was young he used to read me stories that none of my friends had heard like Jacob the Crow and Klaus Stöterbaker the pirate. When I started to learn German at grammar school I realised that he had been reading these from the same German text book I used at school and translating them as he read.
Interesting video.
Is there a document or few behind it showing how and where the numbers come from?
sigh Here you are, complaining that they don't want to talk to the elders, and bring up the bombing at UW-Madison. The Weatherpeople made it a point of not hurting people, but destroying symbolic property. The idiot who was killed was told to get out of the building, along with everyone else, but avoided being shepherded out.
Well, I'm a UW alumnus, and in my variegated career there, I had the dubious pleasure of chasing grad students and post-docs out of the building during a genuine fire. They thought it was a drill and kept on working. And I (a grad student) was going door to door, not the staff or fire department. I'm unsurprised that grad students and postdocs would blow off a warning like that. Sad but true.
Incidentally, the bombing was at 3:42 am, so what happened says a lot about the Weathermen and the mentality of UW researchers.
if you are not constrained to keep to the roads, you can use the cut-throughs and alleyways that connect the leaves to whatever's on the other side of the houses around them, and get where you're going in a far more direct and less confusing manner.
That is often by design. Canberra was specifically laid out to make walking and cycling easy and direct, but driving a PITA. Then of course the PTB looked at all the tram lines on the plans and said "I don't expect to take the tram, therefore no-one should be permitted to" and built extra lanes in the stroads instead. It saved money up front and cost a fortune in lost time for everyone who wasn't killed by stroad-users.
It seems to be a general pattern in a lot of the curvy-wurvy suburbs that they have cut-throughs and linear parks (often on old creek-ways, but of course they concrete over the creek because creeks are dangerous and have unsightly 'nature' crap in them). What's been fun for me is watching "in fill housing" being built around the place on those old creeks. I think it's funny, but I pity the victims, because the real reason for those parks/"unused land" is that during heavy rain they fill up with water, and obviously they're the first to flood if there's a flood. And Sydney does get localised torrential downpours, always has and likely always will, because it's a big basin between the mountains and the sea, so gets adiabatic rainfall from sea breezes. The local thing is that one suburb can get 50mm of rain in an hour, while the suburbs each side get 5mm.
I have ridden my recumbent trike in Newtown during such a storm, and gone down a hill with ~10cm of water over the whole ~8m wide roadway, only to get to the intersection at the bottom where there was 30-50cm of water and come to an abrupt halt. Water was moving, but not in the direction I wanted to go. Fortunately it was at least 30°C and the rain was only ~25°C so it was quite a pleasant experience. Wading upstream carrying my trike...
Auricoma, #499 as I write this:
Can we discuss the apocalyptism (is this a word?) in Western media? I think the Cold War (possibly aided by Jesus) did someone to your collective brains, you just can't get enough of the visions of doom.
This is a very good question! I agree that this discussion is worthwhile.
I'd suggest, though, that we broaden it. By, like, 100%... Apocalyptic thinking is only half of the issue. There are a lot of people who insist, just as adamantly, that we are destined for the kind of high-tech future showcased in SF exemplified by Star Trek, or Iain Banks, or, um, Singularity Sky.
It has become common, in our society, to treat this opposed pair of visions as a rigid dichotomy. We must, apparently, all swear emotional allegiance to one or the other. It's boolean reasoning: people adopt vehement stances that cluster very closely around either
"OhMyGodOhMyGod We're all gonna die!"
or
"Haha! No worries! Technology (discovered, designed, and paid for by Someone Else, so it's all good) will overcome these problems and we will scale the heights of universal starfaring existence!"
This boolean psychosocial construct sucks. It predisposes us to choose between despair and lofty overconfidence. The problem, of course, is that both despair and overconfidence dissuade us from getting meaningful shit done.
But wait! It gets worse!
Even for those of us who don't embrace a simplistic boolean conceptual model, the fact of the model's preponderance is itself a problem. Despair, and overconfidence, BOTH introduce useless oversimplifications into the terms of discourse. These oversimplifications, like old crappy bent split 2x4s in a lumber pile, just lie around until someone looks at them and thinks, "Oh. Here's a thing. Works for me!" But really, these artifacts of simplistic dualism increase the cognitive load of reasoning about these issues. This is not cool. We can do better.
(Note that I say "we"; I myself am subject to this kind of conceptual distortion, and it's one of the things I try to police in my comments. It's not easy to identify, and adjust for, these unconscious predispositions.)
Here's an example of those crappy 2x4s being used to construct a scaffolding of argument. I'm not arguing for or against the particular standpoint in the example, OK? Not trying to start a fight. I just think it's easy to identify as an illustration of what I'm saying.
Some -- not all -- of the opinion pieces here that favor nuclear power do a specific thing. They take something from each side of the dichotomy.
From the tech utopia mindset, they tend to latch on to the concept that "Big technology is our only true hope."
But then, drawing on the apocalyptic side, they turn around and invoke the precautionary principle, arguing that The Stakes Are Just Too High: "If you reject nuclear power, you are advocating mass extinction!"
Neither statement is altogether without merit; but both, I'd argue, are applied way out of context here. They have the effect of short-circuiting consideration of the issue.
Primary evidence of this short-circuit effect is provided by those writers themselves. Read comments of this particular sort, and there is usually some remark pushing disdain for renewables -- and it's sneering disdain. Knee-jerk disdain. The kind of disdain that, for example, a libertarian would display towards New Taxes.
But really, and c'mon: the presence of renewable energy in the overall resource mix does not affect the physical ability of a nuclear plant to get its fission on. Preemptive, gratuitous swipes at renewables as an alternative make no useful sense. (By contrast, a zero-sum argument against expending civilization's resources on renewables -- reasoning that those resources must necessarily be denied to nuclear programs -- would at least be logically respectable. I don't think that it would hold up, but it would deserve serious consideration in case it did. This isn't ordinarily how the objections are framed though.)
In other words, the writers have apparently short-circuited their own thinking.
Again, many advocates of nuclear power on this site do not do this! But enough do that this seems to make a pretty good example: that we are not well served by either of the extremes of the doom/overconfidence dipole.
So yes, thanks Auricoma.
"The figure blow shows a histogram of the ages. Most turbines are in service for 15-20 years with a few lasting as long as 40 years! Note that these numbers represent decommissioned turbines and thus are not representative for the expected lifetime of currently active turbines."
The figures show that Denmark has decommissioned 1/3 of their turbines (they currently have around 6,000 turbines, and have decommissioned around 3,400).
The fact that 1/3 of their lifetime turbines only have an average lifespan of 18 years appears to be reasonably applicable to the rest of them at this point - if anything modern turbines are likely being designed down to a 20 year period than engineered (over-engineered?) for a 50 year lifespan.
But that's fine. We are in an era where things can become obsolete in 5 years and, while it can be potentially wasteful, replacing something in 20 years with something that performs better will likely be the best thing to do - why double the number of turbines (and hence their associated visual and audible impact and costs of running infrastructure) if you can get the same doubling of power by replacing the existing turbines - with less political/public pushback.
Moving to EVs at least really solves half the problem.
Yes, perhaps a better way of stating it - eventually given the timeframe to fully replace gas/diesel cars with electric.
My points (for both EV's and wind turbines) isn't that they are bad, but rather that they are simply too slow to make a measurable difference in our need to cut CO2 output.
I find modern or modernish housing developments mostly less hostile if you're not in a road-only vehicle.
While pedestrian alleyways can help, that all assumes that there is something within walking distance to get to.
The big problem with most housing developments these days (at least in this area) is that there is nothing within a convenient walking distance these days - that the separation of housing from industrial/commercial/retail is so complete that you frequently need a car to move between them - or walk to the bus stop that may not having a particularly convenient service pattern because the population density is so low.
My points (for both EV's and wind turbines) isn't that they are bad, but rather that they are simply too slow to make a measurable difference in our need to cut CO2 output.
The problem with nuclear is that if you start today, you're building for 2030, 2040, or beyond. That's when it starts kicking in as a solution. So it's not a great deal better than pouring on solar, wind, and battery, and cultural changes.
The other problem with great big power plants is, as I pointed out in 575, that the grid is only as good as its weakest link, especially for storms and fires. Granted, this is a problem for any electrical system. But the more dispersed the power generators are, the easier it is to get some power to a lot of people by rerouting around outages. Cut the line to the nuke (as just happened outside New Orleans) and the plant can be just fine, but it's incapable of shipping power anywhere.
"why double the number of turbines (and hence their associated visual and audible impact and costs of running infrastructure) if you can get the same doubling of power by replacing the existing turbines"
This is one of those technologies where, to my surprise, things are bumping up against physical limits.
From https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet
"The theoretical maximum efficiency of a turbine is ~59%, also known as the Betz Limit. Most turbines extract ~50% of the energy from the wind that passes through the rotor area."
So making an existing turbine tower installation more productive will not so much depend on increasing efficiency of the machinery as increasing rotor diameter and/or tower height.
The Med is too big to engineer, I think. But the black sea is already stratified, and already a carbon sink (Much as I don't want to bury carbon sludge over the bronze age shipwrecks down there with all their woodwork still in perfect order, but this is an existential threat to deal with...), and able to take probably a petatonne worth of waterlogged biochar. I do think we could solve this by pretty much everyone in western central asia being subsidised to raise spare biomass, biochar it, and ship to and sink them in the black sea, and everyone else subsidizing them, and also any spare biomass we currently allow to rot or compost, instead being biocharred and turned into terra preta. Bonus points if we do the biochar by crispr'ing C4 or similar more efficent CO2 fixing into the relevant source plants being used. Oh, and convincing the richest 10% that we all have to live on the carbon budget of a middle class second world family, if that.
The big problem with most housing developments these days (at least in this area) is that there is nothing within a convenient walking distance these days - that the separation of housing from industrial/commercial/retail is so complete that you frequently need a car to move between them
And people get pissed when you want to fix the issue. I've been in my house for 30 years. Big suburban development of 400 home with basically only 3 streets that go "through". The rest are no more than 2 to 4 blocks before they end or turn sharply. And the through streets are obviously through. And it mostly works.
Now a 10-15 minute walk from my house was/is a mall just off the interchange from the limited access loop around the city. It WAS a traditional 2 story mall with a few outbuilding stores. In very sharp decline soon after we moved here. Most people keep lamenting and engaging in wishful thinking wanting it to "come back". But a developer bought the site and made it into an outdoor mall. With 4 to 8 story apartments around it. Plus a hotel. Plus did the same on the other side of the BIG street that was the exit off the main highway loop. Plus more apartments and offices and more on the way. So now a large number of people could walk to the grocery or a nice restaurant or a "Target" or one of 3 banks etc... And those of us in the surrounding suburbs could walk to drive to it. Parking is not in sprawling lots but below or in the first few floors of the various builds. Oh, yeah, there's a nice small part/amphitheater that has beach music once a week in the summer.
Middle school kids from around me (and mine back when) could walk to the movies theater on a Saturday and eat a burger, BBQ, or similar on a Saturday afternoon. And us adults hang out at the sport bar at times. (Nothing like a British pub but what is?)
Most of my contemporaries hate it. They want things to go back to where they were 30 years ago. And have been fighting it all the way. And getting ugly at times with those of us who disagree with them.
Big sigh here.
Oh, yeah, many of the surrounding areas are building sprawling subdivisions of cookie cutter houses of 50 to 500 1500sf or 3000sf houses/townhomes where you can't get to ANYTHING without a car.
The straits of Gibraltar are 13 km wide, and there's an idiotic proposal (Alantropa) from a 1920s German to do exactly what I suggested: dam the straits, turn it into a hydroelectric dam (water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean 200 meters below), and do similar to the Bosporus. Since it turns out that this arrangement naturally happened during the Messinian Salinity Crisis and produced a kilometer or two of salt deposits on the bottom... yeah, it's not technically impossible.
What makes this proposal, erm, chiroptero-fecal psychotic, is that multiple nuclear powers (Russia, Israel, France) are involved and are being asked to give up their access to the ocean. Rather worse, even a country like, oh, Albania could field a group of dam busters to make the system go away if they didn't want it. And the system would have to last for centuries against such politics. So yes, it's totally infeasible.
Your proposal for doping the Black Sea with carbon is probably more feasible, although I'm not sure it wouldn't belch methane inconveniently, and I'm not sure it has enough anoxic volume to hold the carbon. Since I'm not sure how well C4 grasses grow on the steppe (They're adapted to hot weather, not cold), I'd suggest more simply dumping a lot of post-consumer composted garbage into as a slurry. It's hard to find a place for the stuff, and at least in California, there's a push on to get all of it out of landfills. And that's a fair amount of carbon right there.
Hell, yes. I loathe the way they build them. I dislike where I am - the nearest stores are six or more blocks away (calling it 8 blocks to the mile). And THEY DIDN'T BUILD SIDEWALKS in a lot of streets.
Hell, one street that would be a good through street... is closed and a pointless grass area, not big enough for a park, but with a car barrier. So the through streets are busy, and when they do work on them....
That's the lovely thing about the black sea - it's already got the methanotrophic stuff down there forming reefs and mats to eat the methane and fix it, and it seems effective at buffering new inputs, and the anoxic environment means that it's a deep, slow carbon cycle that takes a while to turn biomass sunk there into anything. That's why bronze age wooden ships are still sitting there in anoxic mostly lifeless water with all their organics just sitting about (but enough reduced sulphide species to have eaten all the metals). Geologically this, and the slower process of silicate weathering, is how the planet returns from carbon excursions - the influx of carbon into the system causes large chunks of bottom water in restricted basins to go anoxic, because there's enough food for stuff to use up all the oxygen, but then you get stratified anoxic bottom waters, so any further biomass falling into it is no longer food for aerobes, but rather slow food for anaerobes, or not food at all until it's buried and ends up as lipids from sediment bacteria eating it over millenia, not decades. Has the bonus of being your next fossil fuel resource for whatever intelligent cockroaches turn up in 30 million years. Every time we get a big ocean anoxia event, you get a big belt of blackshales and other carbon rich sediment laid down by this process. It's rather unpleasant to live in times when the oceans start generating anoxic basins, though. We're about to find out, if we don't start doing it early. Also, don't compost, char, because char is much, much slower to be eaten and returned to the biosphere, wherever you put it (soil, or bottom of an ocean.)
Agreed. Anoxic bottom waters are in part where a lot of this ends up. The mouth of the Mississippi might do as well, for that matter. They've got a decent-sized dead zone in place as well.
As for 30 million? My understanding was that it was more like 50-60 million, based on the youngest age of the North Sea oils. But I could be wrong. The general problem is that most organic stuff sunk into shale ends up as kerogen, not oil. So the upshot is it's possible that the fossil fuels we burn today basically won't ever be available again in the quantity we've already burned through.
That said, I'm already published on record as claiming it's entirely possible that humans will be around in 30 million years. We've got this ecologically novel thing that we can produce fire through friction. In this way, we're as novel as ants, termites (which are eusocial cockroaches, incidentally) and also groups like sauropods. Being ecologically novel is not a gold ticket to infinity (cf sauropods) but it generally gets the bearers through a mass extinction event or two. Living on a planet that's coevolved with our shenanigans for a few million years, without us having the benefit of cheap petrochemicals, will be kind of itchy, but I suppose it beats going extinct.
Oh, and before you trot out the evolution argument, humans have two modes of inheritance, not one: we evolve through genes, and we evolve through culture. Human culture evolves really, really fast, and that adaptive speed buffers a lot of the selection pressure on our genes. So if I were to bet that humans were to adapt and evolve for 30 million years, it might well be that our cultures do most of the evolving, and most of our biological evolution has to do with coping with diet* and disease.
*A persistent diet of rats and kudzu post-apocalypse might have strong selective pressure on those who rarely eat anything else. Just a reminder that biodiversity is nutritious if preserved properly.
New poster, so I imagine sticking links here will flag a spam filter. But a quick web search for "UK space based solar" will show the UK government is paying Frazer Nash to sell the idea to them. I'm waiting for the report to be published, but a FN bod working on it publicly mentioned a 2000 ton solar power satellite concept in a YouTube talk recently.
It varies - Some of the South China sea fields are pumping oil from source rocks that date to the Oligocene, I think, and there's stuff in the California gulf that's so young that it's young enough to date by C-14 age - five to fifteen thousand years! Basically it depends on geothermal gradient as to how fast your kerogens get cooked, and in areas of high geothermal gradient, you can stew up oil way faster than one would expect if you've trained yourself to think on a passive margin geological system, as pretty much all North American and many European schools of thought have. It's a conveyer belt, not a one time thing, although there are periods of more intense oil formation (Strangely, during and after massive carbon excursions!) that make it a lumpy conveyor belt. There's stuff that isn't prospective for oil now, but will be in a million years, and so forth.
With regard to the wind turbines I can only conclude you didn't read the whole thing:
"Note that these numbers represent decommissioned turbines and thus are not representative for the expected lifetime of currently active turbines."
So they've taken down turbines they don't want anymore. But they've got no data on breakage and wearing, which is the relevant data they take care to tell you not to derive from the data they do provide. I don't know how it could get any simpler.
With regard to renewables, dealing with carbon is a two-part problem. One part is "get rid of existing carbon." The other part is "don't add more carbon." Renewables handle the "don't add more carbon" part.
Good to know. I'm not a geologist, just got my hands on something from the North Sea when I was reading up on the PETM and didn't think about it too hard.
I am, however, a Californian, so I've got to ask: by "Gulf of California" do you mean the Sea of Cortes that separates Baja from mainland Mexico, or do you mean the area between Point Conception (west of Santa Barbara) and the Mexican Border where I am in San Diego? The former is properly the "Gulf of California" (Baja California, that is), while latter is "The California Bight."
To be honest, I'm dubious about 5000-15000 for that area, but I'm willing to be convinced. The reason I'm dubious is that I got dragged into the study of a rare plant that lives only on Cenozoic clam beds ringing the LA Basin. So I know just a bit about Southern California geology.
Baja California. It made a few people swallow their rusk - I remember our petroleum crew discussing it back when I was an undergrad. Basically, you need the pressure, the temperature, and the precursor materials, and you can cheat one of those if you've got an active spreading ridge in your basin.
Being a geologist is a bit of a curse, at the moment. We all train in multiple fields (professional jack of all trades is somewhat of a requirement in a field that straddles multiple sciences), and so can see the writing on the wall. I've moved from mildly skeptical back in the '80s, to skeptical but worried in the late 90's/early '00s, to professionally terrified now. We're cruising for a low budget reenactment of the Eemian interglacial at the very least, and that's my most hopeful estimate. My worst estimate is we do a quick and nasty chop shop version of the PETM on a lower carbon budget, but that's still not going to be nice.
Go read the comment you're replying to again. What you'll note is that I'm dividing my money against three different possible outcomes. The first outcome is some variety of the U.S. Government or the UN asking "how do we get rid of carbon/excess heat" (with an eye to fixing the problems before anything apocalyptic happens.) I think the failure mode of "let's get rid of carbon/excess heat" is the fact that the issues simply have not been studied in sufficient detail for a good plan to be possible. The portion of my fortune (if I had one) which I'd donate to the cause could be fairly large.
The second outcome is also not entirely apocalyptic. It's the problem of "large-scale refugee movements" plus "not-enough food" plus "the government can't keep order." In other words, something like the Fall of Rome - also not an apocalypse - and what I'm proposing is essentially to plant some monasteries so that three or four-hundred years from now civilization can recover.
The third outcome is indeed apocalyptic. This is the "everything goes wrong scenario." What happens if we keep adding carbon to the air and the methane cuts loose, and we're back to 3500 PPM for several thousand years and almost everyone dies. This is the "Motie Museum" option.
If I've got a billion dollars I might as well cover all the bases...
"2000 - 1977 = 23. That's less than half of 50."
Yes, but they did not get taken down because they did not work any longer, the got replaced with newer and (much) bigger models, because the Danish Parliament made that economically very attractive.
The /technical/ lifetime seems to be (at least) 50 years.
The /political/ lifetime is anyone's guess.
I will say in defense of the politicians, that compared to doing it any other way, it was a cheap way grow the production from windmills by an order of magnitude.
"The figures show that Denmark has decommissioned 1/3 of their turbines (they currently have around 6,000 turbines, and have decommissioned around 3,400).
The fact that 1/3 of their lifetime turbines only have an average lifespan of 18 years appears to be reasonably applicable to the rest of them at this point - if anything modern turbines are likely being designed down to a 20 year period than engineered (over-engineered?) for a 50 year lifespan."
No, and no.
Please read what I wrote: The 18 years lifespan was a consequence of political decisions, it had absolutely nothing to do with the technical lifetime of the installed windmills.
The 1/3 which got replaced was small 1st gen machines typically no larger than 100kW, and the were replaced with 2nd gen, typically around 1.4-2MW, because it was possible, in almost all cases, to reuse the grid connection and foundations unchanged.
Technically they those 1st gen mills were in fine shape when they were decommissioned.
There is absolutely no risk of that political decision happening again.
Primarily because the new machines would be much larger than the current ones, 2nd gen was only ~15% taller than 1st gen, modern ones are twice the height of 2nd gen, and plastering the landscape with such giants would really get the NIMBY going.
(For reference: I can easily spot more than 100 windmills from my 13km bike-ride to the beach)
Secondarily because precisely that size differential means that the siting and infrastructure cannot be reused as is: They are typically sited in clusters of three, but too close for modern sizes, and much of the cabling, and indeed the grid behind it, would have to be upgraded to cope with 3x10MW instead of 3x2MW.
But as I wrote: Modern designs are optimized harder and runs closer to Mach 1 tip speed, and that is bound to have a negative effect in the technical lifetime.
But we have no data that tells us how much yet.
Curiously, I can't ( at the moment) find any other references or information to the "extra sewage / Brexit" piece I linked to, back @ 562 Has anybody found any other references, please? I really think we want confirmation of this from other sources, if only to make sure that those responsible for this are properly shamed.
All this talk of "renewables only last..." while "nuclear lasts 80 with only a simple refurbishment at 40 years". It completely misses the reality to the point of being dishonest.
I've pointed this out before, but here goes again. The CANDU reactors are held up as the best of the best. There's two in Ontario that are due for their refurbishment right now. They're estimated to cost 13 billion Canadian dollars each and take 4 years (if everything goes well). To produce 3.2 GW nameplate each. So the time and money needed to "refurbish" a nuclear reactor is more than the time and cost to "replace" a wind turbine or a solar panel. Its just semantics. If you used the term "refurbish" a wind farm, or a solar farm instead, then you could correctly claim that the life of the farm (solar or wind) is unlimited, with a simple refurbish every 30 years or so. Given that the grid connection, roads, land use agreements and electronics make up such a big percentage of the cost, you wouldn't even be stretching the truth to make that claim.
The problem with nuclear is that if you start today, you're building for 2030, 2040, or beyond.
Well, yes. That's the point, nuclear power plants are a long-term solution to a problem that's going to be with us for centuries to come. Band-aid renewables are touted as a replacement, not a supplement for nuclear power since they're fluffy-bunny and Green and there's no icky radiation involved. We will burn gas (and coal if we have to) to cover the energy shortages and tell our descendants "It's up to you to fix our fuckups, oh and all those wind turbines we built to save the planet are wearing out and need replaced. Bye."
No. Except possibly in a few places like most opf the USA and Australia, moving to EVs solves AT MOST half the problem. In the UK, it's much less.
Firstly, we have to convert our generation to renewables, TRIPLE our electric distribution capacity, and make the associated changes to housing and public parking infrastructure.
Secondly, our dependence on cheap and easy personal and long-distance goods transport causes truly massive harm, both in CO2 emissions and otherwise. We need to reverse that.
That might well work for me. I'd like to know more about the range of stores (no need to answer that beyond could I buy clothes, get a haircut, maybe some hobby supplies and a book store? type questions).
Yes, yes, yes, maybe. Target is a popular mid range department store which might have the hobby things. Amazon has wiped out most of the stand alone hobby stores in the US.
The best (by most any measure) mall within 200 miles is about 1 bird mile away. So that puts a damper on what new stores we get. But it's a car drive due to terrain so it seems like 3 miles through some of the longest lights in the city.
When it's not stinky hot or too cold my wife and I walk up for a quick meal and the exercise. When it is 95+F and humid there's no point is showing up to eat in clothes full of water. If our house was a bit closer we'd do it more often.
Here's the developer's web site. visitnorthhills.com
A bit overhyped but you can get an idea.
"#598 and #599 - In other words, no-one has yet demonstrated what the actual lifetime of a turbine is, and we're supposed to believe that it will be 50 years because the bearings and generator of a first gen turbine were in good order after 18."
Uhm, I'll cut it out from even thicker cardboard for you then:
Look at the table I showed an extract from again: The oldest, currently in production windmills in Denmark are now 44 years old, and still going strong.
Bearings are wear-units in al mechanical machinery, and just like in any other mechanical machinery, they can and will eventually be replaced in windmills. You do not decommission a windmill just because of that.
Generators do not wear out. They may fail catastrophically, but they do not wear out.
The only significant wear-mechanism in modern windmills is blade-erosion/-pitting, primarily due to the near-Mach-1 speed at the tips.
I am sorry, but that's not really true. If the turbine is well designed for a very long life, it is very close to true, but the devil is in the details, and a lot of them will NOT be so designed.
E.g. there are often places where replaceable bearings aren't used because those places "essentially don't wear" - and even the locations the bearings fit into. Well, they all do, and that can mean a system lifetime of anything from a couple of bearing replacements to one of many hundreds.
Also, generators do expire from age, though it's not wearing-out unless the electrical connections are misdesigned (see the previous paragraph). Insulation breaks down or evaporates and conductors corrode. Again, it can be anything from a relatively short period to a huge one.
Is that the Bruce nuclear plant? Heavy-water CANDUs are held up as the epitome of nuclear reactors by the Canadians and no-one else, pretty much. Heavy-water reactors solve a non-existent problem since they can be fuelled with natural uranium but most CANDU operators use enriched fuel because it's cheap and more efficient among other things. CANDUs are tempting for some countries to own and operate since they offer a breakout nuclear weapons capability because they can be refuelled "on the run", like the old British Magnox reactors.
The Bruce reactors are all about 40 years old, give or take and with the refurbishment programme rolling though the plant they'll be good for at least another 30 years, maybe more. Several of the Bruce reactors were actually shut down for a while back in the 1990s since coal was cheaper than nuclear back then but with the increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere the Canadian government decided it was time to do something about that, hence their restart.
A quick check online suggests that the CAD 13 billion pricetag you mentioned is to cover the cost of refurbishing six reactors, not one. The two oldest reactors at Bruce were refurbished before returning to service back in 2012.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Bruce-6-refurbishment-good-for-January-2020-start
Typical uptime for these reactors, like most second-generation designs of the time is about 85% including refurbishment cycles, inspections etc. so the entire Bruce plant (two sets of four rectors) will produce about 5GW of predictable non-CO2-emitting electricity over a year on average from about 6.2GW dataplate.
Yes it's 6 reactors. Doesn't make any difference. (though I did say 3.2 GW, when it's 3.5 GW).
The PLANT cost 14 billion to build, and now it's 13 billion to "refurbish". Yes, that 14 billion would be 23 billion today. So in constant dollars, it would cost over half the original build price to "refurbish". There isn't a projection on earth that thinks renewables will fall in price less than 50% over the next 40 years.
"I am sorry, but that's not really true. If the turbine is well designed for a very long life, it is very close to true, but the devil is in the details, and a lot of them will NOT be so designed."
It is the nature of capitalism that any boom-market will cause a lot of deliberately made crap to be sold.
Discussing the technical lifetime of deliberately made crap makes little or no sense, so that is not what we are doing here.
We /are/ talking about windmills designed competently, and I think there is sufficient evidence to count the "Modern Danish Windmill" in that category.
And so far the evidence on the ground, literally bolted to the ground, is that these windmills have a /technical/ lifetime of (at least) 50 years.
It is an entirely different discussion if we /should/ have that: If we can get more than twice the same energy for the same price by designing them for 25 years technical lifetime, that is certainly something we should look at.
However, it is the nature of large-scale constructions, and modern windmills are that, that in almost any calculus, designing for longer lifetime comes out economically on top.
The reason I jumped in here, is that many fossilists have taken to include windmills which were decommissioned for political or economical reasons in the estimate of technical lifetime, and that is simply Lomborgism.
The problem with "refurbishing" a 20-year-old wind turbine (dismantling it, taking it apart, replacing the worn parts, rewinding the rotor and stator, replacing the control gear etc., reassembly, reinstallation on the tower) is about the cost of a new wind turbine fresh from the factory. The towers too are age-limited of course, built cheap for a predicted 20-year lifespan...
The problem with wind turbine blades isn't the "near-Mach-1" tip speed since they hardly ever turn fast enough for this to be a problem, perhaps 1% of their operational life. The cumulative damage from airborne particles, insects, dust, raindrops, hailstones, sea spray etc. hitting the blades, especially along the leading edges, at 300km/h for years of operation knackers them comprehensively and that's why they need replacing. There are mitigations being trialled, things like armouring the leading edges but that adds cost and complexity and weight to the blades and eats into the wind turbine's overall efficiency.
It will be interesting to see what effect particles from the West Coast brushfires in the US are having on wind farm turbine blades downwind from the conflagrations.
About the turbine bearings, if you ever pass by a wind farm and see some of the turbines turning veeeery slowly, maybe one or two rpm, that's because the wind isn't strong enough to provide any power but if the main shaft stops turning the static vertical load on the bearing race will cause a flat spot to develop so they consume power to turn the blades to prevent these flat spots developing.
You are making the converse error to the people you are rightly criticising. I agree with YOUR correction of THEIR misleading and even false statements.
The realistic comparison should not use either deliberately made crap or price-little-object optimal designs - let alone purely theoretical ones, as is far too common by fanatics following the current dogma (currently, solar is the worst offender). It should use what is actually realistic, which I accept will probably be better in Denmark than the UK :-(
I stand by what I said. Several of your remarks in #606 WERE overstated, to put it mildly. I agree that the statements that wind turbines meed complete replacement after only 20 years is even worse, because it applies only to ones that are not designed for simple refurbishment.
If you have to do all that, especially rewinding the generator and replacing the control gear, it is NOT designed for refurbishment. There is no reason that one of their generators should not last as long as any other comparable generator, many of which have run for half a century, and the same applies to most of the control gear.
Now, it IS plausible that marine wind turbines should be essentially impossible to refurbish, because of the problems caused by seawater. That also applies to tidal and seawater hydroelectric schemes.
Exactly comparably, SOME parts of nuclear and hydroelectric plants have very long lifetimes, some need regular refurbishment, and some need regular replacement. There IS no simple figure for lifetime, in terms of their costs or benefits.
The result is that there is no point in bandying about these lifetime comparisons. The only realistic ones involve the details of the design criteria, and detailed costings.
"typically a UK wind turbine has a downtime of 33%"
Why is it so much? Perhaps I misunderstand what is meant by downtime -- maintenance and repair and such??
Generators can last a very long time - I remember visiting our oldest large hydro station here in NZ in the eighties - it was built in 1911, and commissioned in 1914, and then was still operating on the original 4 turbine generators, one of which had blacksmith'd repair plates rivetted onto it's case, and the additional 5 larger turbines added in the 1920's and 30's. It gave 34.5MW with that upgrade in the '30s. They've finally decommissioned the four 1500 kW pre-war turbines (although I think they're still there as museum pieces, as it's a historic place) but the other five turbines are still going, although now with the refurbishment and computational fluid dynamics control system installed in 2008, the station now outputs from the five remaining turbines 75 gigWatt hours more than it could with more turbines in 1930.
Wind turbines have an output of about 30% of their rated maximum, averaged over their lifespan. A big wind turbine, 10MW dataplate will produce on average 3MW. Some days it will produce 5MW, some days nothing. Getting it to produce over 9MW would take very special wind conditions that might only occur for a few hours over a 20-year period.
Offshore wind turbines manage a little better, at about 35% or so since there's more wind for various reasons but they have the same cyclical problem, days of no wind versus productive periods. They are more prone to storm damage and have other problems (corrosion, sea spray etc.) but the upsides mean they're being touted as the solution to getting around issues building wind turbines on land.
The pumped-storage system at Dinorwig in Wales was completed in the 1970s. It uses combined pump/turbines to move the water to the upper reservoir and then generate electricity when it flows back down. This is cheaper than separate pump and turbine units for a slight loss in round-trip efficiency.
The pump/turbines were replaced a while ago after about forty years of operation, wear and tear and erosion (the feed water is basically river water, full of stone particles that get past the filters that keep out the shopping trolleys and other larger debris). The expensive parts, the concrete and tunnelling etc. it still going strong and will probably last another century or so, or another two pump/turbine replacements.
But Charlie, I thought Tony Stark wasn't your idea of a hero!
Seriously, if Elon Musk pulls this off he will be a hero.
"The problem with "refurbishing" a 20-year-old wind turbine (dismantling it, taking it apart, replacing the worn parts, rewinding the rotor and stator, replacing the control gear etc., reassembly, reinstallation on the tower) is about the cost of a new wind turbine fresh from the factory."
The problem with fabricating convincing straw-man arguments, is that you really need to know what you are talking about to sound convincing.
I have /never/ heard of any windturbine going through what you describe, and I would have if it had happened.
Why is it so much? I have no idea, but this is the figure reported by UK turbine operators.
"Wind turbines have an output of about 30% of their rated maximum, averaged over their lifespan. A big wind turbine, 10MW dataplate will produce on average 3MW. Some days it will produce 5MW, some days nothing. Getting it to produce over 9MW would take very special wind conditions that might only occur for a few hours over a 20-year period."
Again: This has nothing to do with reality, and sounds convincingly like something a fossil-fuel shill would come up with.
Modern wind turbines, or rather their control algorithms, are designed and tuned to the wind at their location, and optimized for maximum production in that wind.
Modern wind-turbines kick in at 3m/s, and most hit their 100% nameplate power well below 15m/s.
The Vestas 6.2MW produces 24 GWh/y at average windspeed of just 8m/s.
Don't they use constant speed heads, which feather the blades to keep the rotational speed constant across a range of wind speeds? I can't find it now, but I've seen a picture of a big (100m or so mast) turbine that had a gearbox failure in a gale and ran so fast the turbine caught fire.
The problem with nuclear is that if you start today, you're building for 2030, 2040, or beyond. Well, yes. That's the point, nuclear power plants are a long-term solution to a problem that's going to be with us for centuries to come. Band-aid renewables are touted as a replacement, not a supplement for nuclear power since they're fluffy-bunny and Green and there's no icky radiation involved. We will burn gas (and coal if we have to) to cover the energy shortages and tell our descendants "It's up to you to fix our fuckups, oh and all those wind turbines we built to save the planet are wearing out and need replaced. Bye."
You missed the turn. If you believe the IPCC, which is the conservative arm of the climatology, we've got 9 years to get our current GHG levels down, or we've locked in significant climate change and probably guaranteed a classical-level mass extinction where we lose the coral reefs through the rest of the century.
So fixes that start rolling out in the 2030s or 2040s are useless by themselves. It doesn't matter how long-term they are, because the critical, avoidable damage will not have been avoided.
The very precise analogy is that you have aggressive lung cancer. Your doctor tells you that you can start with a treatment now. It's not guaranteed, and it's going to require a long haul with frequent infusions and permanent lifestyle changes. Or you can wait two years for a cure that's in the planning stages now, but it will be great. If it gets made and passes all the required tests.
Which do you take?
Well, if you want to die, you wait two years. If you want to live, you go through the five stages of grief and tie your hopes for life to the long haul treatment which may not work and will be unpleasant. The long haul treatment in this case is solar, wind, batteries, and massive lifestyle changes. If the only way you get the magic nuclear medicine is by forgoing wind, solar, and batteries, it's not worth dying for.
Speed does in fact matter, in both lung cancer and climate change. If you wanted nuclear power, the time to start building it was 2006, when An Inconvenient Truth was in theaters. We knew we were sick then, and did almost nothing. Now we have nine years to make the changes.
I looked again trying to find the original source for this video with no luck. I found one new copy on Youtube that has a grab-bag of links in the description claiming to be source material (along with all of the self-promotion that seems to adhere to this video.)
Despite that, I'm going to link to the video so you can get to the links. I'm afraid if I posted them all directly I'd wake up the spam filter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oVrIHcdxjA
I live in probably the stupidest country in the world. I don't find it particularly remarkable that the government should say "hey, we've fucked everything up so much that we can't make toilets work any more, so now you can just shit wherever you feel like it. Isn't this super?" It's not all that long ago that it was dripping on their heads as they sat because they couldn't even make their own toilets work, after all.
Give it a couple of years and you'll have to check your audience before you try suggesting that treating sewage might be a good idea, because if that audience is simply an uncurated random sample of the population you'll be howled down by hordes of people going "don't be stupid, this is the 21st century now, we can't possibly treat sewage, never mind if the Victorians did it, they were old and ignorant and no good at things, you can't do that sort of thing now."
It's actually quite complicated, they tweak not only the wings orientations, the gear-ratio, but also the generators magnetization and the switchmode power-converters operating point.
And yes, brake-failures are quite spectacular, because the first thing you do is disconnect from the grid, and then you suddenly have some MW to get rid of
In the first generation of wind-mills, the wing-tips were emergency brakes, the centrifugal force would pull them out of a socket which then allows a spring to rotate them 90 degrees, which is a really efficient aero-brake.
This only work for small designs, and these days it's all up to the control system to DTRT.
IMHO it will be a true miracle if we scrape through with merely Eemian. Heck, it will be miraculous if we scrape through with merely late Miocene. Geologically, mass extinction events are defined as loss of coral reefs from the fossil record, and we're lining up for that by 2050 or earlier.
Thanks for the link on the Guaymas Basin. That makes sense. Not knowing you're a petroleum geologist, I was wondering if you'd misinterpreted the dates on the fossils in the La Brea Tar Pits as the dates for the oil they're in, or something.
I can't recall where I found the data but Britain generated 57.1TWh of wind power in 2018, that's an average of about 6.5GW. At that time Britain had about 22GW of dataplate wind capacity on-grid (Hornsea 1 offshore array didn't fully commission until 2020). That's about 30% output compared to dataplate installs if my numbers are right. Your numbers for the Vestas wind turbine are from a manufacturer's website, yes?
Siting is key, the best 35%-plus sites for land-based wind are gobbled up the quickest but, going down the renewables road we're going to need five or even ten times the number of wind turbine installations we've already got. That means more 25% and worse sites will be put to use.
Offshore wind is more efficient, maybe 35% but it's a lot more expensive -- Hornsea 1 has a Contract for Difference strike price of £164.96/MWh which is extortionate compared on on-land wind farm installs which are running around the £96/MWh mark. The Hinkley Point C EPR reactors strike price is £106.12/MWh at the moment (it may go up again in the future).
Er, no. The average wind speed in the UK varies between about 2.5 and 8 m/s, depending on the location, and is not at all uniform. I have heard the figure of 30% many times, mainly from wind farm proponents, and am surprised it is that high. It's a real issue - live with it.
To paws4thot (#621): I assume that includes times of inadequate wind, in which case 33% is plausible.
Wind Turbine Life Cycles
Interesting article from a Palm Springs (USA) newspaper about the local wind tunnel and some of the history of the last 35 years or so. Article is from 2018.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2018/10/24/palm-springs-iconic-wind-farms-could-change-dramatically/1578515002/
Warning. This site apparently is very script heavy. It trips up Firefox's warnings about scripts slowing things down.
"Speed does in fact matter, in both lung cancer and climate change. If you wanted nuclear power, the time to start building it was 2006, when An Inconvenient Truth was in theaters. We knew we were sick then, and did almost nothing. Now we have nine years to make the changes."
Exactly. Nuclear will not be here in time. We need a WWII-level effort now.
That's why I posited going on a world-wide war footing, committing about 20%-plus of GDP to an all-out build of thousands of GW-sized nuclear reactors in 25 years. After that we don't need to burn gas to backstop renewables at all. We don't need to build petawatt-hours of storage, we don't need supergrids blanketing the planet, we don't have rolling blackouts when the wind doesn't blow, we don't have to replace 90% of renewables infrastructure every twenty years, everyone on the planet has access to First-world level of energy on tap and doesn't need to dig up coal and pump oil and gas just to run a water purification plant or a washing machine.
Your alternative is to roll out renewables on a war footing but we've got lots of gas so there's no hurry and besides we're only going to have to replace it all in a couple of decades anyway.
Your comparison with lung cancer may be apposite -- as you say the IPCC predictions are from unicorns and rainbows land. Our situation is more like the folks I used to see when I worked at a hospital, parked outside the entrance in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle racked behind them, puffing away at their cigarettes and trying not to leak too much oxygen from their nose cannulas since it made the cigarette burst into flames sometimes. Getting them to cut down on their filthy habit for the sake of their health is kinda pointless, don't you think?
"...stupidest country in the world..."
And the U.S. said, "Hold my beer."
...but we've got LOTS OF GAS so there's no hurry and besides we're only going to have to replace it all in a couple of decades anyway.
"So what if I only smoke half as much?" said the guy with emphysema and lung cancer.
Hobby stuff I can't/won't buy from Large River includes solvent products which it can be difficult to get shipped.
If you ever move here (grin) I can point you to the local retail art supply house. About 2 miles from where I live. Plus I know a lot of architects and an industrial level sculptor. They have sources for building models and all kinds of things for projects. NCSU has a school of design architectural program which churns our such people. Plus 2 of the 3 major local universities have all kinds of industrial / engineering programs. Someone local has/can source most any such material.
The next step (after building out renewables) will be AI-driven cars which are not owned by individuals. The important thing about the AI will not be the driving, but the routing, which will be designed to put multiple individuals in the same car and take them to similar places. The idea will be to increase people-in-car per mile.
And yes, hub-and-spoke stuff will also be used for longer trips. But it will be flexible and designed intelligently, not a matter of "here's the route we drive every day, over and over again." Instead you'll put your destination and the time you'd like to arrive into an app, and it will plan your travel - home pickup by car to routing point involving vans, to further routing point involving buses/trains/planes, with premium charges for things like unaccompanied travel. But it will be fast, flexible, and useful, not static and clunky.
It is the nature of capitalism that any boom-market will cause a lot of deliberately made crap to be sold.
Discussing the technical lifetime of deliberately made crap makes little or no sense, so that is not what we are doing here.
So, you start out saying a boom market will make a lot of crap - and wind turbines are a boom market - and then turn around and say despite that reality it is irrelevant?
We /are/ talking about windmills designed competently, and I think there is sufficient evidence to count the "Modern Danish Windmill" in that category.
Great, I'm happy Danish wind turbines are the exception to the normal - but that isn't what the rest of us in the rest of the world have to deal with.
"Offshore wind is more efficient, maybe 35% but it's a lot more expensive -- Hornsea 1 has a Contract for Difference strike price of £164.96/MWh which is extortionate [...]"
Place that one squarely at the feet of your government, who practically invited extortoinate offers with the Hinkley Point C kWh price...
Please try harder to keep politics and technology apart.
Also you seem very fixated on the "they only produce ⅓ of the time" talking point.
That is actually far from the case, they produce power pretty much all the time, but it is at varying power levels, and therefore you do not get 100% * boilerplate out of them.
But you do not budget for 100% * boilerplate, just like you do not plan on running your car at top speed all the time.
You budget for with the output of some very detailed modelling for that specific location, that is the number you should use as 100% for that particular wind generator.
In the case of the 6.2MW model I mentioned, depending on the exact location, it might produce anything from 15 to 30 GWh per year, but you know that number going in, and if that is not going to profitable, it does not happen.
If you talk about production relative to expectation, most wind generators are solidly in 95-105% territory, and that is important, because despite "as the wind blows" folklore, wind power is highly predictable power: We know how much any particular wind generator will be able to produce days, and in case of offshore, often weeks ahead of time.
I am horribly afraid that it may be - and it is a move that is almost exactly in the wrong direction :-(
We need to get away from the car culture, not enhance it.
The fastest grid transformations on record were the Messmer plan, and the decision of Sweden get off oil for their non-hydro power.
Nations have tried really hard to accomplish similar things without resorting to reactors, and well, not only has it been slower, it shows no signs of ever working at all.
This makes the apparently universal conviction of huge parts of the world that "Nuclear is too slow" is an actual argument really mind bending.
Sure, nuclear is slow if you insist on private capital, parceling out all the work in the smallest chunks possible, giving it all to the lowest (IE: Most dishonest) bidder, and let people halt construction mid-stream by lawsuit. So Do Not Do That.
Learned helplessness is going to kill us all.
However, it is the nature of large-scale constructions, and modern windmills are that, that in almost any calculus, designing for longer lifetime comes out economically on top.
Oh, this must also be a uniquely Danish position to take.
Because for many of us elsewhere the ability to shave costs for immediate savings seems to be a far higher priority than building something to last a long time.
The Guardian and Forbes both have articles, and the Guardian provides this government page as a link
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-and-sewerage-company-effluent-discharges-supply-chain-failure-rps-b2
Safe to say given human/company nature the number of supply chain failures is likely to conveniently increase in the near term future
"Great, I'm happy Danish wind turbines are the exception to the normal - but that isn't what the rest of us in the rest of the world have to deal with."
Actually, since both Vestas and Siemens grew out of the danish wind generator industry, and since between them, they have a very large market share, chances are pretty good that is exactly what you have to deal with.
And I think we can also take it for granted, that neither GE, Hitachi or any other well-renowned major industrial concern is going to put their name on the line by shipping seconda goods.
So that covers something like 60% of the market.
So yes, the data from Denmark is relevant, and you can pretty much expect the things to stand there for 50 years, no matter who made them.
Did you notice I used the word "calculus" rather than "spreadsheet" ?
I'm trying to make the point here that the technology is much better than the politics which envelopes it.
Oh, come off it! That last sentence is unmitigated crap. Medium-term weather forecasting is still very iffy, even short-term isn't that reliable in many places (like much or north-western Europe), and that is due to fundamental limitations; yes, it's more predictable in Denmark than the UK, but I simply do NOT believe it is THAT much more reliable, even there. The same is not necessarily true for places with continental climates, but Denmark is still much more maritime than continental.
Hey Charlie, did you see this? It ties in rather directly to your ideas about "Libertarian paradises in space."
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading
The problem with nuclear is that if you start today, you're building for 2030, 2040, or beyond. That's when it starts kicking in as a solution. So it's not a great deal better than pouring on solar, wind, and battery, and cultural changes.
I don't disagree, nuclear (unless the authorities are being questionable and shutting down an existing plant for ideological/fear reasons) is longer term - but then again so are the renewables unfortunately.
They may be faster than new nuclear, but that still isn't fast enough.
The other problem with great big power plants is, as I pointed out in 575
I can't speak for others, but I'm not advocating for building new nuclear the same as we did 50 years ago, anymore than we would build EVs, solar, or wind using 50 year old design/technology.
My view (and this is a long term view) is that we need to look into the SMR idea far more seriously - that nuclear will only be viable if we standardize and let a version of mass production in a factory solve the essentially one off nature of current nuclear designs.
And to be clear, I acknowledge/accept that SMR or other methods of making nuclear construction more cost effective may well fail.
But we are in a situation where we won't build renewables in time to eliminate natural gas for power generation - there is simply too much opposition in the general public, and too much uncertainty in the world politically to allow for the co-operation that could help.
So the real question (to me) isn't how we avoid the upcoming disaster but how we deal with it once we have arrived.
Yes and no. On one hand, yay for fast, innovative design, on the other hand, meltdowns are expensive and messy. On the gripping hand, this late in the game, if you can't mass-produce them they're not going to help.
And I think we can also take it for granted, that neither GE, Hitachi or any other well-renowned major industrial concern is going to put their name on the line by shipping seconda goods.
GE, in the North American diesel locomotive market, was (they eventually sold off the division 2 years ago) known for building locos that catch fire.
But the price and financing is/was attractive, so they dominated the market.
Because for many of us elsewhere the ability to shave costs for immediate savings seems to be a far higher priority than building something to last a long time.
Now this is interesting as it relates to the Real Estate development market in the US. Not sure about other places.
Most low rise (2 to 5 stories) apartment complexes in the US are built by development groups. This is where a lead who knows how to get construction of stuff done assembles a group of investors and they build a complex. But they are short term so they expect to get their money out in 3 or 4 years. So once completed and people are moving in they then sell it to people with longer term outlooks. REITs or similar. And these may be working on a 4 to 10 year plan. So very few 20 to 30 year things get put into such projects. HVAC systems or roofs with 15 year life times are a common thing.
And to be honest it is more complicated but in general this is how it works.
So basically these arguments come down to is the builder going to be the long term owner. And by builder I mean the group supplying the money for the build.
"This makes the apparently universal conviction of huge parts of the world that "Nuclear is too slow" is an actual argument really mind bending."
The primary reason why nuclear is slow, is that the industry repeatedly, almost from day one, has proven itself incredibly untrustworthy, not only with time-schedules but also cost estimates and even the nitty gritty Quality Assurance.
I need not remind you, that confidence in the industry was so low, that Finland got a fixed-price turnkey contract with penalties for any and all delays and they got state guarantees behind the two major partners in that contract.
Or, do I need to remind you, that if not for those state subsidies, would it have bankrupted two major European industrial conglomerates ?
A significant part of the problem is the gargantuan size of contemporary reactors and consequently of the total projects.
The only realistic path to a nuclear revival, if there ever is to be one, is to repeatedly build very reliable and secure 200-500 MWe reactors, on time, on budget.
But getting from A to B is not easy.
The first such reactor will have to be built under the current very sceptical regulatory environment and only after maybe five or ten successful deliveries, can one expect the onerous paper-mill to back down.
So yeah, even in such a dream scenario, nuclear power will not be able to ramp up in the next 20 years, and that is, as several have already pointed out above, simply too late to matter.
Nuclear may have a role in the long run, but it is not going to keep us under 1.5°C.
"Medium-term weather forecasting is still very iffy,"
For windmills you do not need a weather forecast, you only need wind forecast, and that is a much simpler task, in particular offshore.
"If the only way you get the magic nuclear medicine is by forgoing wind, solar, and batteries, it's not worth dying for."
I consider that to be a false dichotomy: there's no reason not to build both, in whatever proportions are appropriate to the area you're trying to supply.
The thing is that those proportions are not the same in the UK and much of the northern European continent as they are in lower latitudes. We have regular long periods when there basically isn't any useful sun, and frequent long periods where a single weather system renders the entire inventory of wind generation sites, both actual and potential, more or less useless. At the same time demand is at a maximum, for heating (and replacing gas-fired heating with electric makes the difficulty two or three times greater). And if we fail to maintain the supply during these multi-week absences of input, the result is mass deaths from hypothermia.
At present we deal with that by large scale use of fossil fuels. The alternatives are outrageously sodding huge battery packs, and nuclear power.
But the thing about nuclear power is that if you make enough of it to handle these periods of maximum demand and minimum input, you then have more than enough to handle the less extreme situations as well without any of the other stuff, so there's not a great deal of point in building the other stuff too.
So it's not an inherently binary choice. It's just that under certain conditions, once you get to the point of needing a mixture with a high enough percentage of one choice, it makes things easier to just cut the cackle and bump that percentage up to 100. So someone arguing from a viewpoint where those conditions are the matter of greatest immediate concern tends to come over as making a binary argument, whether they really are or not.
"If you wanted nuclear power, the time to start building it was..."
1946, when we could first stop concentrating exclusively on the burst-release version and give some attention to continuous operation instead.
"Now we have nine years to make the changes."
We have a government which doesn't give a fuck about mass deaths, even when they are in the segment of population that gives them the most votes.
We have a population so supine that the government's principal adviser can be reported in a strongly pro-government newspaper as seriously advocating the course of action "there's a plague coming? Fuck it, let them all die, it's cheaper", and nobody even fucking notices, let alone rips them limb from limb.
We have a younger segment of this population whose bullshit detectors are so atrophied (as a deliberate result of government policy) that they are happy to believe the mass deaths are all just made up anyway (since it's not their actual mates dying) and do their best to sabotage any anti-plague measures we do manage to get. Nor are they able to see that the swine promoting such bullshit are just better-dressed but equally morally bankrupt versions of the swine who hang around in dirty old macs asking the kiddies if they want a sweetie.
We have a memetic plague as well, causing people to think that not just the best, but the only possible way to organise a system with three principal interdependent components is to set them up as three separate independent groups of actors, all of whom have as their true principal objective something utterly irrelevant to their system function, and encourage them to fight each other to serve their own individual aims regarding that irrelevant objective while the actual system function can get fucked. This does not just afflict the government; it has now attacked the engineering community as well and caused large numbers of them to advocate the idiocy just as uncritically and enthusiastically as the government do.
In nine years' time we will be wanking to the world about how great we are for building another 10GW wind farm this year (we built one last year too!!!) that produces maybe 3GW average if you're lucky, swearing at the French for not letting us use as much as we want of what they're generating so we don't have to bother (how dare they want it for their own use?), and plugging the gap by scarfing up a shitload of Russian gas and not talking about it.
Of course we're fucked. But all the parasites the government have invited to siphon money out of all the different bits involved in energy supply will be happy, so it doesn't matter who else isn't.
"and frequent long periods where a single weather system renders the entire inventory of wind generation sites, both actual and potential, more or less useless."
This claim is simply not true, period, and there is no better refutation that to point at the bogus "Only 35% efficiency" spin which was repeated multiple times above: If it was so horrible as you claim here, there would be no way to reach 35% of boiler-plate production.
Dolldrums simply are neither frequent nor long duration at UK's latitude, that is not physically possible, what with the Earth rotating and hot humid air being lighter than colder air and all that.
In the 40+ years we have had significant wind energy production in Denmark, there have been one instance, I think in 1983, where for a part of a single summer afternoon, no wind production at all took place, and since then we have built a lot of off-shore which is much less prone to that particular weather situation.
But yes, wind production is variable, so it cannot stand alone, unless you overbuild on a ridiculous scale.
Capitalism/boom market crap.
Except that for major ticket items - let's say, a railroad locomotive, they are built for many decades, and for refurbishment. I assure you no railroad is going to put up with crap, once they find out it's crap... and not all railroads go out and buy the same thing at once. Several buy a few to try them out for a few years, then make a major purchase.
Given wind turbines, we're in that case, not the boom crap.
Shouldn't that be Pigs In Spaaaaace...?
In 2019 the UK had about 24GW dataplate installations of wind turbines. In 2019 those turbines produced about 32% of that dataplate figure in terms of electricity generation (64.1TWh). A few weeks ago the same fleet of wind turbines spent a month or so becalmed with the wind output swinging from 200MW to about a gigawatt. Now sure 200MW is not 'zero' wind output but at 1% of dataplate it's so close to zero the UK fired up a fucking coal-fired power station to keep the lights on (gas prices went up and no-wind is a lot more expensive than coal).
You can see a table of of the installed-base of wind turbines and total electricity generated each year since 2008 in the UK at this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
It might be that Denmark gets better results than this but that's what the UK gets, measured at the grid interconnectors. What the wind turbine manufacturers put on their webpages is another matter.
The mind boggles. Where DID you get that delusion from? In places like north-western Europe, forecasting is largely (often entirely) about predicting the movement and other behaviour of pressure systems, and it is primarily those that cause our winds.
"Where DID you get that delusion from?"
From 40 years of production in the danish grid ?
"Piggy people in space," maybe
From the Wikipedia pages regarding wind power production in Denmark, from 2015 through 2019, the capacity factor (installed wind turbine dataplate figure divided by electricity generated) was:
2015 - 31.8% 2016 - 27.9% 2017 - 30.8% 2018 - 25.9% 2019 - 30.1%
That's appears low considering the extensive offshore wind turbine installations Denmark boasts. Then again the UK gets the full brunt of Atlantic weather systems and cold fronts bringing strong winds in season. Has anyone in Denmark considered building their next wind turbine array off the Faroes?
Duffy @ 384: https://www.livescience.com/hottest-temperature-people-can-tolerate.html
What's the hottest temperature the human body can endure?
With climate change causing temperatures to rise across the globe, extreme heat is becoming more and more of a health threat. The human body is resilient, but it can only handle so much. So what is the highest temperature people can endure?
The answer is straightforward: a wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius), according to a 2020 study in the journal Science Advances. Wet-bulb temperature is not the same as the air temperature you might see reported by your local forecaster or favorite weather app. Rather, a wet-bulb temperature is measured by a thermometer covered in a water-soaked cloth, and it takes into account both heat and humidity. The latter is important because with more water in the air, it's harder for sweat to evaporate off the body and cool a person down.
When I was in Iraq we had several days near the end of August where the temperature in downtown Baghdad was reported at 140°F (60°C). I know someone is going to say "that was a dry heat".
It can still kill you. You sweat and the sweat evaporates so fast you hardly notice you're sweating. You can dehydrate and lose all your electrolytes in the blink of an eye. You could go an hour without drinking sufficient liquids that you'd pass out. That's why the Army pushed Gatorade so hard. Water alone couldn't replace the electrolytes.
Before they sent us over, a whole bunch of us went through Combat Lifesaver training with a strong emphasis on how to start an IV. It was the only treatment for extreme dehydration, especially if a soldier had gone far enough to pass out. Anywhere you went in country where you were supposed to carry your weapon, you carried your Combat Lifesaver bag (with 2 IV sets).
Denmark has one of the very best wind resources on the planet.
We are still net importers to the tune of twenty percent of our total electricity consumption, and transient importers to much, much higher percentages than that.
I have seen north of sixty on electricitymap, and its not like I have alerts set.
The net is as low as it is only because during high wind, Denmark is an exporter of power.
Note. Not because we are wholly covered by wind during those times, but because we cannot turn most of our thermal plant of, due to it being tied into co-gen district heating, and our cities would freeze if we did.
And what do we fire those plants with? Imported biomass. Not very responsibly sourced.
It pisses me of to quite a considerable degree when people hold us up as an example to emulate.
Sure, our windmills are marvels of mechanical engineering. I have worked in the production chain for them, and assembling a wing for one of the big ocean mills is like nothing else, gargantuan assembly of carbonfiber that it is. Its probably the best way to produce hydrogen or other energy intensive goods without much of a time component.
That does not help much at all with the grid.
Has anyone in Denmark considered building their next wind turbine array off the Faroes?
I think that the Next Big Thing is building on Dogger Bank. The Faroe Islands may be a good resource for wind power, but that would probably be for the UK grid?
David L # 400:
There's one about 10 bird flight miles from me. And many in the area live closer.
Been in operation since 1987.
It's 21.59 mi (34.74 km) from my front door to the center of the containment dome (according to "measure distance" using Google Maps.
There is a local group who has been trying continuously to shut it down. Basically they complain about things normal (but that need to be addressed) to any major industrial plant but prefix it with "nuclear" and try and get the courts to shut it down.
So far they haven't succeeded.
There were supposed to be 4 generating units. We only got one due to the typical cost overruns. 4 would sure make it easier to manage power. Not that I'm a fan of the Duke Energy (mis) information system.
The environmental groups managed to delay construction for 10 years. The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and a bunch of other stuff that happened during that decade meant that people were being more energy conservation minded by the time CP&L was allowed to go forward with construction.
By the time construction started on Unit 1, CP&L had determined the growth in demand they had projected wasn't going to happen, and they shelved plans for the other three units. In fact, work had begun on all four units when I was working there. Units 3 & 4 were still in the excavation stage. Unit 3 had a partial mud slab at the bottom of the hole & Unit 4 was just a hole in the ground.
Units 3 & 4 were cancelled first, but we continued to work on Unit 2 for almost a year before it too was cancelled.
The lower growth in demand was essentially the same reason was why Duke Power Company (predecessor to today's Duke Energy) canceled the half-built Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant in South Carolina along with the other two planned units that were never started.
It wasn't cost overruns. They cancelled the plans because they didn't think the plants were going to pay off. Neither Duke nor CP&L wanted to build power plants that no one was going to buy the electricity from.
If SMRs turn out to be real, it would be a great place to put some of them.
There has been some talk recently (last 10 years or so) about resurrecting the plan to build Unit 2, albeit with a different, more powerful reactor design inside the Unit 2 containment. Duke Energy has a (suspended) Combined Construction and Operating License application currently docketed with the NRC, so they could restart the NRC review at any time.
"So what I've learned today; the Danish grid is somehow different from any of the German, Netherlands and UK grids."
Nope.
They all use meteorological forecasting to predict solar and wind production, as does the UK grid.
You dont get to run a grid very long, if you are not really good a predicting its future conditions.
Well, the Faroe Islands are nearer to the Shetlands than anywhere else, and literally twice as close to the Great Britain mainland as they are to Denmark (just measured it).
"(installed wind turbine dataplate figure divided by electricity generated)"
Sorry, but that number is /still/ totally without relevance, because the owners knew what the expected production would be, for every single one of those wind-mills before they bought them.
What matters is "actual vs. expected production" and unless it breaks down, most windmills hit the 95-105% window year after year.
"Denmark has one of the very best wind resources on the planet."
Not even close.
There are many locales that have far more, far more steady and more constant winds than we do.
But yes, a lot of nearby coastline and lack of mountains is a good lab for developing wind-power.
"The Faroe Islands may be a good resource for wind power, but that would probably be for the UK grid?"
Actually what you want to do at Faroe Islands is stick a turbine into the ridiculous tide-currents between the islands.
Various schemes have been proposed, but so far nobody has risked their own money on any of them.
paws4thot @ 422: You might be interested in a mate of mine, who took a Morris 1000 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor ), uprated the brakes and suspension (easily done using Morris Marina discs and monotube telescopic dampers), then fitted a "Rover" (ex-Buick) 3528cc V8 engine, tripling the installed power but in a car still capable of over 30 miles per imperial gallon.
Buick or Rover V8 engine conversions were pretty much a "standard" hot-rod conversion for the MGB. So much so that British Motor Corporation designed the engine compartment of the rubber bumper version so the V8 conversion could be done without having to cut the firewall to accommodate the modified bell housing.
And later still they introduced a FACTORY V8 model.
I know a guy who wanted to do the V8 conversion, but he could not find a Buick/Rover V8, so he used a Ford 351ci V8 instead (Windsor, not Cleveland).
Off-topic: I watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-KKGmBdDDQ
It's basically a debunking of right-wing talking points regarding Margaret Thatcher and her legacy. There are some things mentioned that sound reasonable but yet I'm struggling to find more sources about the claims (paraphrasing):
I'd like to find more information, and I'm thinking there's knowledgeable people here who can point me in the right direction, for which I would be grateful.
But, somehow, the Danes managed to predict the weather weeks ahead 40 years ago, when the ECMWF can do so only unreliably today. My information comes from both them and the UK Met. Office, as well as working with people on the programs they use for prediction.
Perhaps Bozo's Cunning Plan for Brexit and his green revolution was to annex the Faeroes - you know that it makes sense (*) :-)
(*) Well, at least as much as anything else he does. He may have been misreading the history of the Orkneys. Who can tell?
AH, the "Grauniad" has picked up on BREXSHIT LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage You really could not make this up .....
When I was in Iraq we had several days near the end of August where the temperature in downtown Baghdad was reported at 140°F (60°C). I know someone is going to say "that was a dry heat".
Since you ask :-) Yes - a wet heat in that temperature would kill everybody within an hour or few. I have never been above 49 Celsius (in the sun, true), but that was 'interesting', and I was definitely heat-adapted at the time. Metal in the shade was too hot to hold.
I think what you're missing is that the Danes didn't need to specifics. They needed to know what the wind would be like, as a total amount, in the first week of May (or whenever.) Averaging their existing records on a daily/weekly/monthly basis is probably fine for the purpose.
And that is precisely what is NOT possible more than a very short distance ahead in a maritime climate, such as that of north-western Europe. It is common that the predictions are for anticyclones (wind) moving in from the Atlantic, but a blocking high-pressure area (no wind) develops and diverts them - and vice versa.
As I said, continental climates are very different.
Correct, but with a sanity-check that this year is falling somewhere near the climate normal.
However, as time progressed, and in particular when the installed wind power grew a lot because of "the big replacement", higher precision became necessary, but the regular weather forecasts have so far been good enough for these purposes.
Solar have been much harder to predict, summer cloud cover is a very local phenomena, but again, averaging over an entire grid(-section) helps a lot.
"I think what you're missing is that the Danes didn't need to specifics. They needed to know what the wind would be like, as a total amount, in the first week of May (or whenever.) Averaging their existing records on a daily/weekly/monthly basis is probably fine for the purpose."
It would be interesting indeed to have access to such existing records to see if they have sufficient predictive value for future wind.
That's the nice thing about Gridwatch: it does provide a fine-grained record of a large fraction of UK wind and other power going back over several years. Where would one find similar data for Denmark and other countries?
Bill Arnold @ 425: Sorry, but "Base Load" really is an actual, real thing ... sad, but true.
It even has a wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
I'm not sure I understand why this would sad. There's no mystery about base load. Every power company, public utility has a minimum demand. It may change over time, but it doesn't change much in a short time. Power companies want to use their least costly generating method, running at a steady state to meet this base demand. They will need more capacity to meet peak demand, but they bring it on line incrementally as demand rises.
Energy conservation efforts should have two aims
1. Level out the peaks. Bring them down and spread them out so they don't spike up.Mbr>2. Reduce base demand - that's where home insulation, energy efficiency & energy audits come in.
Whether the source is steam plants or solar farms or wind generator fields, I'm pretty sure some big brain at the power company will figure out to adapt to meet base demand & peak demand at the least cost so they can make a profit. What we want to look out for is corporate greed OVER or UNDER building capacity and then price gouging.
If I understand you correctly, the Danes are looking to answer questions like, "Should we be planning to run our coal plant between May 1st and 7th?" or "What is our expected output between December 14th and December 21st?"
"And that is precisely what is NOT possible more than a very short distance ahead in a maritime climate, "
There are three different horizons in this.
Grid stability operates on timescales of minutes to hours, this is about balancing the instantaneous production to the instantaneous consumption, with due care to a large host of secondary variables such as policy, frequency, load on individual distribution lines etc. etc.
This is where the forecasts really matter: If you get it wrong and a passing front robs you of a GW of wind-power, or does so earlier than you expected, you had better be able to find that GW somewhere else and pronto.
Contemporary weather reports have been sufficient for this purpose for more than 30 years here in Denmark before that wind penetration was not big enough to make it an issue.
High uncertainty situations, typically once or twice a year, are handled by reducing the windproduction well ahead of the weather event, which invariably leads silly people to complain about "windmills standing still in storm" etc.
Today all grid operators with any amount of wind penetration does this, including UK.
Price operates on timescales from hours to years, with new nuclear pushing into decades.
I'm sure the owners would love better forecasts in this regime, because the forecast uncertainty costs them money, either because they have to purchase promised production elsewhere, or when they could have bid in more production than they did.
But that is all that happens in case of forecast uncertainty: Somebody makes less money.
Finally there is planning.
When somebody plans to build a windfarm, onshore or offshore, they will either get a 3rd party or the selected vendor to model the production potential of that site at a very high level of detail, down to the precise placement of each individual wind generator.
Vestas has a 16k-core supercomputer for that, it even managed to sneak into the bottom of the TOP500 list for a couple of years.
These models take a number of different approaches, but it goes without saying that ERA-40 is incredibly popular with these people.
So, yeah, it's hard to tell what the precise wind will be two weeks from now, but fortunately we do not need to know that very precisely, because that is simply the nature of the game for the players in the energy market.
We can tell pretty conclusively what the wind will be minutes and hours from now, and that is what really matters.
paws4thot @ 430: #424 - I am aware of "American Graffiti", and recommend it to anyone who likes 1960s music.
That's 41 songs. My "playlist" is over 3,000 - that's edited songs leveled to -6dB so they all play at a consistent level in my car. Takes up about 10GB on a 32GB stick.
I've got maybe another still to 10GB to edit and add before I have to go searching for more music. I've got more than 100 CDs I haven't even started to rip.
It's not all 60s music. There was a lot of good stuff before the 60s and I'm still finding NEW good stuff today.
Auricoma @ 499: May I suggest recording the knowledge of humanity of gold tablets?
Microfiche would probably be a better choice. Less likely some asshole will steal it and melt it down for the shiny. Also you'd be able to scatter a lot more copies around.
... more baskets to keep your eggs in so to speak.
dpb @ 532: I can see that being a problem if you burn ammonia. A bit of searching suggests that ammonia fuel cells are an active research area, and might avoid the problem.
This review article seems like a reasonable summary: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/ta/d0ta08810b
That might be a little too technical for me, but thanks. I'll give it my best shot.
I was thinking something like stainless steel.
paws4thot @ 535: More to the point, "where does the hydrogen come from?" The only sources of manufactured hydrogen I know are electrolysis of water and of short chain hydrocarbons. Now it's fairly obvious that H2O splits to H2 + O1, but how do you ensure that the electricity used is carbon free? Electrolysis of hydrocarbons produces carbon at the plant, and again how do you...is carbon free?
If I understood the original suggestion the source of electricity for electrolysis would be vast solar electric fields located in Australia. Those fields would produce hydrogen/ammonia as a storage/transfer medium. I don't know where they proposed to get the water from. That was kind of going to be my next question after I found out how they were going to use the ammonia without producing nitric acid or nitrous oxides.
Only just saw the review article link that was provided and haven't had time to read it yet, so I'm not ready yet to go on to that next question.
This project chose nickel: https://rosettaproject.org
The Long Now Foundation is already on it, 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel disks for wide distribution.
The reasoning for nickel and/or nickel alloy: --It's tougher than gold --It's more abundant than gold --The metals they're choosing are pretty gosh darn inert too. --The nickel alloy chosen isn't valuable, except for the information on it. The only reason to melt it down is spite.
The general problem with graven-image brain dumps is that languages change. The general estimate is that with the exception of words like um, er, ha, hee, ma, pa, mama, and dada, languages change continuously. Linguists have guessed that, after 10,000 years any language will have changed so much that even its core grammar and vocabulary will be randomized with respect to its ancestors. This is probably an under-estimate. Using these kinds of stats, the Tok Pisin from Papua New Guinea looks like it's English after 2000 years of separation, whereas it only started developing in the 1920s and has stayed in touch with English the entire time.
Going either forward or back, this is critical. While it can be possible to translate an utterly foreign language with enough referents, you can't expect continuity across millennia, especially after apocalyptic climate change. Do we expect people 5,000 years from now to know what gasoline and the internet are, if they have neither and haven't had either of them for over 4,900 years? Sure they're important to us know, but why should they even care?
The other thing is our human past. The oldest modern human skull is around 300,000 years old. Do we know what they spoke? Oh hell no. If you believe the 10,000 year randomization rate, human languages have been randomized at least 30 times over since the first modern human language(s). Whatever the cosmologists think, that first language is completely lost, with the exception of baby talk. 300,000 years from now, whoever's around will think English is gibberish. That's just the limits of being human.
I'd suggest, instead of saving our knowledge, invent the stuff they'll need, and forward it anonymously. After all, you've got the time and resources to figure out how to optimize a whole set of field-expedient rocket stoves, or to figure out how to melt trash in a campfire and make stuff out of it, or how to train cats to be good little lap psychologists who help with depression and anxiety? Why not create and promulgate such skills? Do something so that they have a better life, rather than to have them remember you? This may sound pointlessly altruistic, but if you're going to be forgotten anyway, why not leave the place a little better off, instead of lashing out?
Charlie Stross @ 548:
Forget countdown!
My UK (trade paperback) author copies arrived today.
There's no hardcover in the UK, but the US hardcovers are probably in a shipping container clogging up an import port right now because fuck Brexit.
Clogging up an import port in the U.K.? or here in the U.S.?
I was going to ask when I could order the U.K. trade paperback from the U.K., but I realized I have the previous Merchant Princes books in hardcover and I try to be consistent, acquiring later books in a series in the same format - Laundry Files (& Tales of the New Management) in paperback; Merchant Princes in hardcover, because that's the format for the first book I bought in each of those serieses.
Actually, I think Merchant Princes came first for me, and Laundry Files came along because "That was fun. I wonder what else he's written?"
whitroth @ 555: No. None of the hippies/ex-hippies I know have gone right wing.
Probably didn't have a wide enough circle of acquaintences then. I've known a few, although they were already selfish assholes even then.
I even knew a couple of hippies (self proclaimed hippies, but who am I to judge right?) ... I even knew some who voted FOR Nixon.
I've known more who adopted Libertarianism as a political philosophy and eventually became full blown Randians.
Hell, I was a hippie before I joined the National Guard & remained one throughout (eschewing drugs so I wouldn't flunk a drug test & get kicked out losing my benefits), and I still consider myself a hippie to this day.
You'd definitely have to include language lessons. Hopefully someone at Rosetta project has done that.
zephvark @ 566: Welp, on languages, I might note that my first language is English, and my second was Latin. I didn't find Latin unduly difficult but, I was into the magic of Computer Science [...]
Latin was made unnecessarily difficult for me because I did not want to take Latin. I did not choose Latin. It was imposed upon me against my will.
There were no computers available at the time. The schools I attended did not even have terminals for remote main-frames (although I think the central office had a contract with a data processing service). The closest I ever got to a computer before I started taking Latin in the 9th grade was the summer school in 1960. As a treat at the end of the school they took us over to the University of North Carolina where we were allowed to go through an upstairs gallery and look through the window at the Math Department's new UNIVAC.
Later, when I was in High School, the insurance company where my father was a Vice President had an IBM System 360 and I was allowed to sit in the computer room & do any homework I hadn't gotten done during class. If I didn't have homework, I got to talk to the computer operators, but I still wasn't allowed to touch anything.
Sorry. Meant the Long Now project.
Mike Collins @ 577: Some people don’t have to be young to learn languages. My father who, like me, was intelligent but no genius decided to learn German at the age of 25. He succeeded and was able to converse in German, with an appalling accent. He later learned French and Spanish. When I was young he used to read me stories that none of my friends had heard like Jacob the Crow and Klaus Stöterbaker the pirate. When I started to learn German at grammar school I realised that he had been reading these from the same German text book I used at school and translating them as he read.
Yes, I understand that some people do not have the problems I have. I wish I was like them instead of like me.
Troutwaxer @ 689: I was thinking something like stainless steel.
Still got the problem with some asshole stealing it because it's shiny, although it would probably last a couple weeks longer than gold.
Out of curiosity, have you tried (my language at Uni) ASL?: https://www.signlanguage101.com/ and https://www.gallaudet.edu/asl-connect/asl-for-free/
Mentioned because there may be a verbal barrier which an entirely visual language would bypass.
"Still got the problem with some asshole stealing it..."
Every bridge or storm water drain around here used to have a brass plaque with raised lettering that said something like "Opened by the Rt. Hon. Joe Blogs esq Member for Nowheresville. For the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board of NSW 1st of April 1936".
I haven't seen one for years, just holes in the concrete where they used to be. They were all stolen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/pk8c41/we_leaked_the_upcoming_ipcc_report/hc2886f/?context=3
Someone on reddit has a wee rant about climate change. Towards the end talking about consequences:
The IPCC tells us how to get there: a 91% reduction in indirect emissions, and an 80% reduction in point-of-use emissions, period. That means, per capita, every human being must give up four-fifths of every manufactured good, provided service, and energy expenditure they own or use. Oh, and the Global South doesn't much count. This is the Western upper classes losing everything, and the middle classes reverting to a much lower-class lifestyle along with everyone else
I kind of disagree, talking about averages is misleading when there's an exponential scale involved. The bottom half barely register, and emit less combined than the top 1%. So we very much need the top 1% to slash their emissions by 99%, and it would be nice if the bottom 50% could reduce theirs somewhat. Or at least stop increasing them.
Vestas 6.2MW produces 24 GWh/y at average windspeed of just 8m/s.
For those who struggle to multiply 8765 hours a year* by 6.2MW in their heads, the answer is 56GWh/year, so that turbine is running at about 43% of nameplate capacity.
"I don't wanna. Make me!" Seems to be the underlying reasoning behind so very, very, very much of what's wrong with our response to climate change. I'd suggest this as a baseline test. If someone is making an argument for why responding to climate change is unneeded, impossible, or whatever, see if it boils down to this. If it does, don't spend any more time on it.
"I wanna. Work with me" is a much more interesting response, don't you think.
You know, there were once these really cool systems called Plains Indian Sign Language and Plateau Sign Language. They dused sign language as a way to translate among multiple languages. In 1890, a Kiowa family even figured out how to use Plains Sign Language symbols to send a letter to one of their children at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, and the son was able to read it. Whether it was a formal graphical system, or an ad hoc bit of improvisation, is hard to determine.
Problem is, both systems are nearly extinct now. It's a really cool path not taken, both for translation and for an origin of writing. I don't know of another region of the world where people turned to interlingual signing, rather than one verbal language becoming the lingua franca.
I agree that it's worth trying ASL. But in the absence of someone to communicate with using ASL, how far can you get? That's one thing that's stopped me from getting anywhere learning another language as an adult: I don't have much of a use for it. Guess I'll be stuck with English, music, and a bit of mathematics.
Now if you're a programmer, you can always try learning lincos.
Very much so.
I'm right now not doing a lot of activism because I'm in lockdown, and I suspect less is to come when my granny flat construction project gets underways because I will be basically eating, sleeping, cycling, working, building (not necessarily in that order). Right now it's just writing submissions on anything that comes up that looks interesting.
But the home budget is looking very much like 15kWh of battery is affordable with a possibility of 30kWh, and very likely cheaper to never put it on the grid just because AusGrid are being difficult. The easy option is down one edge of a stormwater easement, and council who own the easement are fine with that, but AusGrid are demanding that someone install a conduit 1m below ground under my house instead. I think they're trying to say "no" but bureaucratically. Looks like I will be running a mains charger into the battery pack from the house when things get desperate instead. Using an extension cord chucked over the fence - it's cheaper for me to buy a couple of megawatt hours off the tenants or neighbours at 50c/kWh than get grid service to the granny flat. Green electricity is ~30c/kWh right now... $5000 to connect it to the grid is looking silly if you assume I'm going to have a battery setup anyway.
It's moderately scary how much battery prices have come down, and how fast they continue to fall. I am struggling with the temptation to buy now just in case they go back up... but that just seems wildly unlikely. So I resist.
Language change ( See also Troutwaxer ) ... H Beam Piper nailed that one, with the discovery of an dead alien civilisation, which they hadn't a hope of translating the written records ... until they found a copy of The Periodic Table. Omnilingual Oh yes: Gutenberg Project version
gasdive Yeah. Some unspeakable crawling thieving shit stole the bronze plaques from a significant local War Memorial about 3-4 years back ...
H Not so much I have, more than once, been put off / deterred / prevented from making a small contribution, by changing to a more "eco-friendly" alternative by the exorbitant costs - like, even if I live to be 105 ( As I hope to ), I still won't get a return on the investment, even in terms of saving money over time. Agree with "I wanna, work with/help me" is much better. Yet to see it though. ... and - moz just because AusGrid are being difficult. Exactly - we have the same problem ... the little people are not allowed to benefit, because the big boys might lose 2p, so everyone is worse off, right?
While it's great apocalyptic fun looking at similarities of the PETM (Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) and now, it is important to note the differences: Although we're kicking out the carbon ~17 times faster than then, there's a dramatically different ocean/continent system in place:
Greenland and Antarctica are glaciated, not seasonal tundra with 50 metres of permafrost full of carbon. During the PETM, both were tundra/boreal forest carbon stores. The difference is quite large - the PETM had around five to six peta-tonnes of carbon to play with, we have around 1.5 to 2. That's important.
What's the compressive strength of ice? This is very, very, very important, because the West Antarctic is not on rock, it's on a 2 km deep Ocean basin, with bunch of shallow island ridges and the antarctic peninsula holding it back. Ice can handle about one to two megapascals before it breaks, depending on temperature conditions. Thus there's a maximum feasible height of icecliff a floating ice shelf can support if it's not sitting on the ground. Hint: The Thwaites/Pine Island glacier front is about at that maximum grounded icecliff height, on the last bit of shallow water grounding line, before it drops off into the deep basin behind it, and the Ronne ice shelf is close to that too. Don't worry about East Antarctica - it's not going anywhere fast for millennia, although it may wibble around the edges. West Antarctica, though, has collapsed at least 20 times in the past couple of million years. It's stable at atmospheres below 300ppm CO2, starts collapse between 400-500ppm and half a degree of antarctic ocean surface water warming, and is generally completely collapsed by 900-1000ppm. That's ~six metres of sea level rise, and it's achieved mostly mechanically, not by melting - it takes millennia to melt an icecap in one place, but only decades to centuries to collapse and melt a water grounded one.
Basically we've achieved an Eemian to Pliocene atmosphere. That was the F@ck Around stage of the past 200 years. Now we're in the beginning of the Find Out stage, as the hydrosphere and the cryosphere put the pedal down to catch up with where we've put the atmosphere. Disturbed equilibrium and all that.
Re: geology - I'm not a petroleum geologist, I just hang out with some. In my time I've been an igneous petrologist, budget geochronologist, exploration geologist(iron, uranium, diamonds, base metals), and now I'm an ersatz engineering geologist and laboratory monster. But wearing many hats gives me a rapid ability to do lit reviews of the 'center of mass and double tap' variety quickly. Also semi photographic memory, so brain full of odd science bits.
Omnilingual always pissed me off, because its premise was so stupid. There are several other approaches to classifying the elements graphically, there is absolutely NO reason that a department name should match anything we have words for and, most seriously, knowing a few specific words is of virtually no help unpicking the structure of the language.
The reason that such things are feasible on earth is that our brains are 'wired' to use language in very similar ways. A while back, I looked up Australian aboriginal languages, and they use very similar concepts to English.
A long time ago, I thought of a language that did not use any form of noun or verb, where the constructs were 'attributes' and 'relations', but rapidly realised that I was neither smart enough nor determined enough to design such a thing properly.
Re climate: yes, Denmark has a maritime temperate climate, largely because there are no hills (let alone mountains) or even much distance between it and the sea, and most of the weather blows in from the west. Yes, of course, the British Isles are more extreme in that respect.
What Denmark actually has that the UK does not is "Norway and Sweden".
There is no Danish grid as such, there is only Nordpool.
1.7 gigawatts of interconnect into Norway, over two to Sweden. This would not be that much in a UK context, but in Denmark it means the interconnects can supply the bulk of all consumption, and do so with great flexibility, because of the enormous amounts of hydro Sweden and Norway has.
Today happens to be a very illustrative example of the point.
https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DK-DK1
The only reason Danish electricity is only moderately disastrously dirty right now is that 40+ percent of it is imports from countries with actually sane grid setups.
OK. I am happy to agree with that. My objection was and is to the last sentence of #639, where I stand by what I said.
Combined population maybe 18 million, which is just under a third of the UK's 63 million (census data).
Preemptive, gratuitous swipes at renewables as an alternative make no useful sense.
This is true. And the same is true of preemptive, gratuitous swipes at nuclear, not to mention the efforts of some "environmentalists" to close down nuclear power plants and replace them with fossil fuels.
We need both renewables and nuclear.
The problem is that some conservatives and climate deniers use "you oppose nuclear" as a bludgeon to attack climate activists, and some climate activists are really anti-nuclear activists who also took up climate as a secondary cause.
584But the more dispersed the power generators are, the easier it is to get some power to a lot of people by rerouting around outages.
This seems like something that is obviously true, but really the situation is much more complicated. Basically, having a supergrid that's reliant on very distributed power generation is very resource-intensive, because bidirectional long range transmission of electricity requires at least doubling the number switching stations (a step-down transformer is not a step-up transformer), and also grids based on solar (and to a lesser extent wind) have to be terribly overbuilt, because you have to size the grid for maximum output, but it's only used to the level of the given source's capacity factor (so 10% for solar and 25-35% for wind).
This doesn't mean that local clusters of renewables aren't needed, they are, especially in rural areas they improve the grid reliability, but they are not a silver bullet, and most of power demand is going to come from megacities anyway (urbanisation is one of effective ways to reduce carbon emissions, because walkable and bikeable cities are low-carbon, but you need your water and sewage pumping stations and your trams and subways and heating/cooling to have power 24h a day, 7 days a week).
624You missed the turn. If you believe the IPCC, which is the conservative arm of the climatology, we've got 9 years to get our current GHG levels down.
That is not what the IPCC says exactly and is a very popular misunderstanding of the science. We really don't have any years to start getting our current GHG levels down, but it's not a binary: "you either get GHG emissions down in 9 years or noting you did ever will matter, and if you do get GHG emissions somewhat during these 9 years then it is irrelevant whether we get down to zero by 2040 or 2050 or 2080".
We will not get to zero emissions within 9 years.
And if we do reduce our GHG emissions within 9 years to, say, 50% of current emissions this does not mean that we do not have to get rid of the remaining 50% of our emissions as fast as possible, but to actual zero, not "zero most of the time, but sometimes we burn fossil fuels to keep the grid on".
We have to get down to zero. And while renewables are great for quickly reducing our emissions a bit, they're not so great for reducing our emissions to zero. No country has reduced their emissions to zero using wind & solar only, the only renewable technology that is capable of getting to 100% of the energy mix is hydro or geothermal, and most countries simply don't have geographical resources to go 100% hydro/geothermal.
This is why we need a massive roll-out of both renewables (to quickly reduce our emissions by 30% or 40% or even 50% if we're very lucky and ingenious) and nuclear (to then reduce our emissions by 100% before 2040 or 2050).
And then we will need shitloads of carbon-free electricity to do carbon drawdown until 2150 or 2200 or 2300, depending on how much we messed up now, and nuclear plants we build now are going to work until the next century, giving our kids and grandkids zero-carbon electricity they can use to fix the mess we left them.
This suggests another space-based energy possibility, would also need to microwave energy to the surface: http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/wtether.htm
I may have missed it (I arrived late and haven't read all of every comment) but I've seen no mention of tidal power as part of the renewables mix.
The engineering challenges are large and investment costs at any scale will be massive (but less than solar farms in space, I'd venture). But it eliminates a large part of the storage need because the tide is always on the move somewhere. And it's utterly predictable to a high degree of accuracy, effectively forever.
Given the waters around the UK we could become a significant net exporter and not be reliant on African solar or Scandinavian wind as posited upthread.
It all relies on Musk not blowing up the moon with his space lasers of course.
"Basically, having a supergrid that's reliant on very distributed power generation is very resource-intensive, because bidirectional long range transmission of electricity requires at least doubling the number switching stations (a step-down transformer is not a step-up transformer), and also grids based on solar (and to a lesser extent wind) have to be terribly overbuilt, because you have to size the grid for maximum output, but it's only used to the level of the given source's capacity factor (so 10% for solar and 25-35% for wind)."
Only if you're careful to avoid taking into account reality. Links don't need to be symmetrical. 12 GW one way, 1 GW the other. Or nothing the other way. Build a 10 TW solar installation in Australia, but Australia doesn't use 10 TW at night. More like 10 GW. No one in their right mind would build a symmetrical link.
Equally, no one would build a link that ensured every last generated electron would be transported. As per the discussion earlier about the over emphasis on efficiency. The reality is that panels are cheap. Inverters, UHVDC stations and world spanning links aren't. So you'd over build panels by a chunk. Everyone does that. At every level. For instance, most Australian states won't allow more than 5 kW from a single phase household. Yet the most popular install now is 9.9 kW. Which means that dawn, dusk, raining or whatever, you still export the full 5 kW. Add to that the size we're talking about. Thousands of km across. Different wind conditions, different time zones. Continental size generation, linked by intercontinental interconnects. Summer in Australia, supplying winter in Europe, there's about 16 hours between sunrise on the eastern side to sunset in the west. Really you're looking at over 50% utilisation not 10%. That's before you add storage.
"Given the waters around the UK we could become a significant net exporter and not be reliant on African solar or Scandinavian wind as posited upthread."
Unfortunately this is not true. The UK is indeed unusually well off for possible tidal power sites, but it still doesn't have enough to supply more than a small fraction of the country's consumption. It's a lot closer to being true for Scotland considered in isolation - it might even be true, I can't remember the exact figures off the top of my head - since Scotland has most of the good sites but only a tenth of the population, but it's way short of being true for the whole of the UK.
Doesn't really work as a useful energy exporter. It's generating the energy by moving the conductor through a magnetic field which produces drag. Orbit gets lower and lower until it re-enters. It has been investigated for use as propulsion, used as a generator it will lower an orbit, put power in and it will raise it.
8 metres/second average windspeed is 28km/h. According to online sources the average windpseed in Scotland over the past 20 years was 16km/h. I suspect the Vestas website is, ahem, being somewhat disingenuous but those wind turbines won't sell themselves you know.
It's a bit breezier here today in Scotland than it has been generally this summer. Wind turbine generation UK-wide including offshore is 1.43GW as I type this. We are generating 16GW of CCGT, 5GW-plus nuclear, 750MW of filthy coal and for some reason there's some open-cycle gas turbines running too (maybe a maintenance process or operational test run, I don't know).
The real news is that the Norwegian interconnector is reporting input, 700MW to add to the other imports from the Continent (2.5GW French, 1GW Dutch, 1GW Belgian). I don't know if the Norwegian interconnector has actually carried electricity before, this is just the first time I've seen it reported on the Gridwatch site.
Summer in Australia, supplying winter in Europe, there's about 16 hours between sunrise on the eastern side to sunset in the west.
Yeah, really, no.
Intercontinental HVDC is completely unfeasible both technically and geopolitically.
HVDC lines are good, but they are not that good, and they're getting cheaper, but not that cheaper.
Europe to Australia is 14 megametres on a great circle route, but you won't lay cable on a great circle route, so more like 15 to 20 megametres, with transmission losses on the level of 3% per megametre with UHVDC, so you're losing 45% to 60% of generated electricity just to transmission losses. Not to mention the costs (about 1 to 5 billion USD per megametre) and the tiny issue of having enough expeditionary armies to subdue, I mean, to bring democracy to all countries on the route of your cable in case the current government decides to hold Europe and Australia hostage by a few carefully placed explosives on your precious intercontinental cable.
It's been 35-40 years1 since I read "Omnilingual", but ISTR that the Martians' periodic table wasn't shaped like ours is, but was a simple 10x10 grid, with the last 8 spaces blank.
Once your scientists discover Uranium (and X-rays), how long would it take dedicated researchers to discover trans-uranic elements like Plutonium etc?
~~~
1How can this be possible? I'm just a young lad. Really2.
2At least in my own estimation. All I have to do is ignore the mirror and the calendar year.
This is why we need a massive roll-out of both renewables (to quickly reduce our emissions by 30% or 40% or even 50% if we're very lucky and ingenious) and nuclear (to then reduce our emissions by 100% before 2040 or 2050).
Exactly. That massive roll-out of renewables gives us the time to get the nuclear science/engineering right. It also allows us to close coal plants ASAP. Add some carefully-considered tree-planting and we might just pull through this.
The important thing is to make sure gas is not legally considered to be a "renewable" or "green." It needs to start going as soon as we're done getting rid of coal.
sigh Here you are, complaining that they don't want to talk to the elders, and bring up the bombing at UW-Madison. The Weatherpeople made it a point of not hurting people, but destroying symbolic property. The idiot who was killed was told to get out of the building, along with everyone else, but avoided being shepherded out.
Wow. Talk about blaming the victim. ("Remember kids, when people die from a terrorist bomb, it's their own fault!")
And, just, to be clear, your description of what happened is bullshit. The bombers called in their warning a mere five minutes before the explosion, so there was no time for anyone to be evacuated (one of the bombers later recalled that they could see that were lit windows in the building, but they went ahead anyway); the first police car on the scene arrived after the explosion. There were multiple people in the building, none of whom were warned or "shepherded"; three of them were injured in addition to the "idiot" (Robert Fassnacht) whose death you so contemptuously dismiss.
As several of us have said, that will be inadequate unless we (in the 'developed' world) reduce our demands by a healthy factor - which is feasible, and would start to show benefits almost immediately.
So maybe attach a bunch of solar panels? It generates/beams electricity until it gets too low in altitude, then it turns off the tether and sucks down some sunlight, raising it's orbit?
"Bombs have no personal philosophy" (from memory, I can't recall where I read it). Set off bombs, people WILL get hurt, some will die, others will be crippled for life. The bombs don't care why they were put where people can suffer. Those who set the bombs do have philosophies, they may not be rational or live in the real world or have more than a passing acquaintance with cause and effect but they have agency.
Definitely agreed. We did go all-LED in our light-bulbs, as best we could in a rental house. Now if I could just get the missus to turn down the thermostat...
Okay, might need to wait until we can build a beanstalk.
I threw away all of my college papers, notes, and tests
I made that mistake decades ago. After years of hauling around heavy boxes of crap I never used I seriously decluttered as I transitioned to a new career. Didn't realize just how resource-starved teaching was, and those missing notes would have been useful two decades later when I ended up teaching physics.
Just after getting married and we merged houses my wife was flabbergasted that I still had almost all my college text books. Why on earth hadn't I sold them once I finished a class?
About a year into the marriage I came home from work one evening and pulled out one of my math books to get the formulas to let me estimate collisions and reads required to get to a specific record in a hashed key data base.
She stopped bringing it up after that.
This was in the later 80s.
Of course more and more people get the books electronically for college now. And does anyone still buy a reference book of log tables?
Tidal power has problems. In theory it's great. In practice, the prototypes don't seem to work as well as promised. I'm not sure that's a good reason to ignore it, but it doesn't even have the record of success that nuclear's built up to support ramping it up.
Now if you really want something to think and pray about, here's what the US Congress is reportedly working on as our solution for climate change: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/democrat-climate-cepp-reconciliation-infrastructure
In that case why not just use the solar panels directly? Physics says you'll not get any extra benefit using them to boost the orbit. Note this thing has to be in LEO so you've got collision hazard from the tether as well as needing beam aiming to swap ground stations.
Beanstalk doesn't work for power generation, the power comes from moving a conductor through a magnetic field and a beanstalk doesn't.
Oh goody, we can argue.
I actually agree with most of it, with a few non-trivial caveats:
--Antarctica has a lot of areas below sea level on both East and West Antarctica. Fortunately for us, there's less of an ice cap over the East. Still, the West isn't just free-floating ice of course, it's more like a cross between New Zealand and Patagonia, a long ridge of mountains. I agree that it would take a few thousand years for East Antarctica to fully melt if it get engaged. Problem is, that damned Eastern ice cap keeps bouncing up against 0oC fairly regularly. While I don't think that a day or two above freezing will thaw three kilometers of ice, positive feedbacks can be annoying.
--The part that didn't get to the bleachers out here is that continental configuration plays a pivotal role in determining whether we're in a hothouse Earth configuration (about 80% of the last 400 million years IIRC) or an Icehouse configuration (Carboniferous, early Permian, and Pliocene on). The PETM's a problematic analogy because it started and ended on a hothouse EArth. We, of course, are starting in an icehouse, then pouring GHGs in fast enough to very temporarily go into hothouse mode (hopefully not, but maybe), then drop back a bit more slowly into icehouse (slow in human time, not geologic time). That's sort of like taking a screaming tour through the entire Miocene climate in 100,000 years, which in my book goes down as "not particularly fun," not that I'll be alive for it.
Now about that PETM carbon budget: where is the carbon that was moving around in the PETM and isn't around now? You're claiming there's around 4 peta-tonnes missing from the current surface carbon pools, and that sounds kind of weird. Where did it go? Limestone and marble? Deep mantle carbon? Happy shale beds?
The sea is an absolute technology motherfucker. Salinity and moisture causes electrolytic corrosion, encrustation from living organisms eats away at structural members, fouls propulsion systems and reduces efficiency. There's a reason drydocks and maritime repair yards will never want for customers.
Tidal energy harvesting is possible but the ongoing maintenance bills are going to make hamsters in wheels look like a viable alternative for energy generation in the long run (try stopping hamsters from breeding, I dare you). The few 'tidal'[1] energy projects I've seen getting promoted in the Press tend to vanish from the public consciousness after a few years. We do get them popping up occasionally here because of places like Cape Wrath off the north coast of Scotland. When and if they fail, get decommissioned or otherwise stop working, that's not usually regarded as newsworthy. The PowerPoint presentations look nice though.
[1] Tidal energy can include sea currents which are not driven tidally but by ocean circulation systems. We've got a lot of that here in Scotland too.
A question regarding nuclear. While the US hasn't built a commercial reactor in quite some time, it has built over a hundred naval nuclear reactors since the first Los Angeles class submarines in 1976. Granted, the naval reactors are smaller and expensive, but they are proven designs that are either in current series production (S9G - 210 MW) or have been built in large numbers (S6G - 165 MW, 62 built).
They are both more expensive than proper commercial reactor designs and more compact. They are probably also operator intensive. That said, they are being built now and have a pretty good safety record.
They could either be installed in conventional nuclear plant structures on shore, or they could build them into large ship hulls. If they built them into super tanker hulls, they could moor them offshore for easy access to seawater cooling and move them for safety reasons (avoid storms). It would also mitigate earthquake concerns because tsunamis require shallow water to build to damaging heights.
Again, this isn't a long term, most cost effective nuclear concept. It is a suggestion for how more nuclear reactors could be built in less than two decades since the US is already building 1-2 of these per year for the existing Viriginia class SSNs and Columbia class SSBN programs.
The basic issue is that these reactors use highly enriched fuel. Which means the politics keep them from being used outside of the US, Europe, etc...
And while the reactor operations have been very well done safely, the spent fuel, and such details are sketchy at best.
"Tidal energy can include sea currents which are not driven tidally but by ocean circulation systems."
Speaking of extracting energy from the ocean, did anything ever come of the surface-to-depth thermal gradient systems that were discussed in the past? I seem to remember that ACC had a story based on such.
Wasn't this a plot point in book 6 of the Merchant Princes? Nobody had published any such things in 20+ years (back in 2003), so getting their hands on some was a hard problem.
All references I see online are recent. I remember the stories, including in the underground newspapers (where the Weatherpeople would send communiques to) as reporting warnings.
And I wave off his death? This occurred not long after Kent State, where four innocent students were murdered - and from what I've read, the ROTC Nat'l Guard should not have loaded live ammunition, but no one was punished for that.
Do you wave that off?
I didn't throw away the textbooks, though I have grave doubts anyone has interest in COBOL, BAL (IBM mainframe assembler 370), or the pseudo-assembly language from my first class. Or my stat homework. Or my math homework. Or a 1979 or 80 systems analysis text.
"Wind turbine generation UK-wide including offshore is 1.43GW"
To Be Scrupulously Fair(TM), if that's coming from the Gridwatch site, I think it captures about 60% of UK wind generation, the part that actually is reported as going into the grid. The remaining 40%, as I understand it, is for local use and not reported. Nonetheless, Gridwatch is by far the best source of such data that I know of, represents some 14 GW nameplate coming from an estimated ~7,000 turbines and I wish more like it were available.
With regard to the 1.43 GW you quote, yes, I think that's about 10% of the reportable nameplate capacity. Not very windy.
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is still available in hardback, new. It has tables....
Speaking of extracting energy from the ocean, did anything ever come of the surface-to-depth thermal gradient systems that were discussed in the past? Interesting question. (I hadn't been tracking either.) Looks like a bunch of little pilot projects over the years, but with vast potential if scaled up, and high capacity factor (base load suitable). (And especially suitable for islands.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydropower/ocean-thermal-energy-conversion.php The acronym (for search) is OTEC
Re: Nautical reactors. The US designs are entirely useless for any civilian purpose, because what the US does is take a large amount of weapons grade fissile, then alloy it with burnable neutron poisons, then use that as reactor fuel.
The added poisons disappear on the same schedule as the fissile turns into fission products that poison the reaction, keeping the neutron-poison content the same, which permits the reactor to run for multiple decades with no refueling.
It is a neat stunt, but it is expensive, wantonly wasteful of natural uranium (there is zero breeding in a us nautical core.) and worse, you could fairly trivially extract the neutron poisons from the fuel load. This does not matter on an air-craft carrier or sub, since, well, not going to be able to nick it, are you, but for civilian uses, it is a show-stopper.
The reactor you actually want for civilian use, is the French improved k150. It runs on civilian fuel grades, and manages to get a decade out of each refueling. It also has vastly better power density than any US naval reactor, and is apparently cheap enough that trying to replace it with conventional propulsion makes the short-fin Barracuda cost more than the not-crippled version. A lot more.
What more could you want for propelling freight across the ocean blue?
Wait, for power? Uhm. I am pretty sure the required man power is going to kill the economics of that stone dead. 40 mw electric, and it really needs an engine crew...
If you use the K-15 reactor in a cogeneration plant, you can use it to provide district heating and/or cooling, in which case you'll use significantly more of its 150 MW thermal power.
(Helsinki are considering getting an SMR for district heating, which is hindered by the distinct lack of actual SMRs on the market)
But yes, we really need a lot of large reactors to decarbonise the grid, SMRs have their uses but are not a great universal solution to all problems of nuclear power.
No, as far as I know the 25GW of installed wind turbines reported are grid-connected. I've not done a trawl through online documents, construction permits etc. to add up the totals but independent wind is not a big thing. I remember one factory near where I used to live had a 1.5MW wind turbine in their facility's car park but it was decommissioned a few years ago. There are, I am sure, tens of thousands of small home wind turbines in the 1-3kW range, battery chargers on boats etc. but all of them together wouldn't add up to 100MW dataplate capacity and their capacity factor is a lot worse than properly sited Big Wind installs.
Solar is trickier, there's a lot of non-grid solar out there. I think the Gridwatch site uses a University's reported figure for that based on the estimated national installation of panels on roofs, buildings, grid solar arrays etc. and the amount of sunlight based on cloud cover, the time of day, latitude and seasonal insolation angle. Good summer days that solar output peaks at about 8GW, in the winter peak solar is usually about 0.5GW (often less if it's cloudy) and the period of generation is a lot shorter.
The Akademik Lomonosov NPP barge is configured to provide district heating hot water as well as electricity from its two marine reactors and I'm sure Atomstroyexport would be happy to sell Finland one of them, two even?
The Chinese have vague plans for specialised district-heating nuclear reactors based on simple swimming-pool research reactor designs. They wouldn't need a power-reactor-scale containment structure and they wouldn't generate electricity, just provide 20MW or so of very hot water. AFAIK they're not building anything like that at the moment though.
Off-topic, but I've made it to Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast for a couple of weeks. Rocketpjs, if you feel like catching up in real life you can reach me at first name dot last name at gmail dot com.
I quite like the hopped cider from Bricker Cider, but I'll treat you to your fermented beverage of choice if that's not to your taste.
so getting their hands on some was a hard problem.
They could ask me.
Helsinki are considering getting an SMR for district heating, which is hindered by the distinct lack of actual SMRs on the market
I'll have to bring this up with the Germans I know. They would go insane with the thought.
Ditto a way too large number of people in the US. We have large numbers of people who want to outlaw 5G cell service. Without having any idea of what 5G is. But they've seen a uTube video.
"No, as far as I know the 25GW of installed wind turbines reported are grid-connected."
I got the 60% number from combining the Wikipedia statement,
"By the beginning of December 2020, [UK] wind power production consisted of 10,930 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of over 24.1 gigawatts..."
with my observation that the Gridwatch wind maxima over the past 2 + years have topped out several times at slightly more than 14 GW, never more than that.
In addition, I think that the Gridwatch site itself says something about off-grid turbines, but supper calls and I'll have to look into that later.
Heteromeles @ 692: The Long Now Foundation is already on it, 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel disks for wide distribution.
The reasoning for nickel and/or nickel alloy:
--It's tougher than gold
--It's more abundant than gold
--The metals they're choosing are pretty gosh darn inert too.
--The nickel alloy chosen isn't valuable, except for the information on it. The only reason to melt it down is spite.
Do you think the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max future is going to have any shortage of spiteful assholes?
kiloseven @ 700: Out of curiosity, have you tried (my language at Uni) ASL?: https://www.signlanguage101.com/ and https://www.gallaudet.edu/asl-connect/asl-for-free/
Mentioned because there may be a verbal barrier which an entirely visual language would bypass.
Funny you should mention that. I have, without notable success, been trying to learn ASL.
I have a sister-in-law who has been profoundly deaf since infancy, and I know it would just light up her life if someday I could "speak" to her directly instead of having my brother translate for us. I don't think it would help me with the language requirement for my degree (and is probably too late anyway), but I sure could use it if I could learn it.
gasdive @ 701:
Every bridge or storm water drain around here used to have a brass plaque with raised lettering that said something like "Opened by the Rt. Hon. Joe Blogs esq Member for Nowheresville. For the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board of NSW 1st of April 1936".
I haven't seen one for years, just holes in the concrete where they used to be. They were all stolen.
For a while around here they were stealing the cast-iron manhole covers right out of the streets.
Haven't seen that in a while & it hasn't been in the news recently (that I've seen).
Most of the bridges & such I remember had it engraved into a granite block that was set in & the concrete was poured around it holding it in place ... plus it's not so easy to melt granite.
It takes a lot of wind for a turbine to reach its dataplate maximum output, something like 50km/hour or so depending on design and manufacturer. It's very rare that the UK's entire fleet of wind turbines, onshore and offshore will be exposed to that amount of wind or higher at the same time. If the wind exceeds a certain speed or gusts badly the turbine will likely be shut down and parked to prevent damage but it will not generate electricity then. Actually getting 14GW out of a dispersed 25GW fleet of turbines is quite a rare event.
The Gridwatch site allows downloading of wind-only data, and some spreadsheet wizard could probably torture the data to tell us how many hours over the past five years, say, we got 60% dataplate of electricity from wind and how many hours we got less than 5% (corrected for the number of turbines in any given year of course).
paws4thot @ 708: #673 - I am aware, and indeed familiar. The early factory MGB V8 GTs were actually chrome bumper models. Then there are also the Costello cars (technically conversions but using all new (no more than delivery miles) factory parts with the possible exceptions of the engine mounts).
I'm pretty sure they had to cut & weld each of those early V8 GTs individually to fit the engine/transmission combination. The later rubber bumper cars had the modification designed in to the steel stamping so they wouldn't have to do hand work if it was going to be a V8 model.
The other neat thing about the MGB is they designed it from the very beginning to be exported to the U.S. as their primary market. So every fastener, every nut & bolt is SAE standard (except for one 8mm bolt between the SU carburetors for synchronizing them).
They could have sold A LOT of the MGB V8 models in the U.S., but chose to go with the Triumph TR8 instead. Which ultimately proved to be a very bad decision.
#686 - Not even near my point; I was saying that you can appreciate American Graffiti without even a vague interest in 1960s California teen and/or car culture.
Ok, but the film is all about the car culture. The music complements it, but doesn't replace it.
Omnilingual always pissed me off, because its premise was so stupid.
In retrospect, that could describe most of 1950's science fiction. Especially the stories which dealt with aliens.
For a while around here they were stealing the cast-iron manhole covers right out of the streets.
Heck. For a while here, (I live in the same city) they were taking the curb drain covers which had to weigh 80 to 150 pounds.
I think the city started spot welding such items down when they were near some and doing other work.
Tack welding.
JReynolds @ 725: 1How can this be possible? I'm just a young lad. Really2.
2At least in my own estimation. All I have to do is ignore the mirror and the calendar year.
There's something really wrong about mirrors. Every time I look in one there's this old guy staring back at me and I can't see myself 'cause he won't move out of the way, no matter how much I yell at him.
whitroth @ 744: All references I see online are *recent*. I remember the stories, including in the underground newspapers (where the Weatherpeople would send communiques to) as reporting warnings.
And I wave off his death? This occurred not long after Kent State, where four innocent students were murdered - and from what I've read, the ROTC Nat'l Guard should not have loaded live ammunition, but no one was punished for that.
Do you wave that off?
Don't go there.
You know fuck all about what happened then or what happened afterwards to the Guardsmen involved.
David L @ 764:
Heck. For a while here, (I live in the same city) they were taking the curb drain covers which had to weigh 80 to 150 pounds.
I think the city started spot welding such items down when they were near some and doing other work.
I believe the Wake County Sheriff's Department & the Raleigh Police Department also had some very frank discussions with the scrap metal dealers here & in the surrounding counties which sort of dried up the market.
Melting down cast iron for the metal is probably a bit beyond the capabilities of your average drug addict and a hundred pound manhole cover isn't the sort of thing that fits easily in your back pocket, so you can't just wander around with it looking for someone who wants to buy one.
Cordless angle grinders.
Re: 'The Chinese have vague plans for specialised district-heating nuclear reactors'
Do you mean this? Sounds like it's in early development but if it works, it'd be lots cheaper and safer than current nuclear reactors.
'China prepares to test thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor'
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w
Ok, it's a new month. ObPlug: try reading my novel, 11,000 Years. The aliens there are human-sized... tardigrades.
The novel I'm working on has intelligent plants that form clusters (like computer clusters).
The novel I'm working on has intelligent plants that form clusters (like computer clusters).
Have you read "Turquoise Days" by Alastair Reynolds? It is part of his Inhibitors series, and it features Pattern Jugglers, which are just that kind of plant. Pattern Jugglers are briefly mentioned in some other stories in the series, but "Turquoise Days" goes into them by far the deepest.
"Intercontinental HVDC is completely unfeasible both technically and geopolitically. [snip] so you're losing 45% to 60% of generated electricity just to transmission losses."
Again with the efficiency...
Nuclear loses about 60-70% of the energy before it leaves the plant. Coal about the same. Biomass loses about 99%. That's before you consider that biomass, coal and nuclear like to run flat out, so their efficiency drops even further if you ask them to load follow.
Efficiency doesn't matter. Just add more solar panels at one end. They halve in price every few years anyway. It's currently under 20c/W.
As for the geopolitical...
That's just Bullshit. The UK is running on Russian gas that they can cut off by literally closing a valve. Cables that are vital to modern life carry the Internet all over the world, and there's no armed guards standing over every mile of fibre protecting it from evil villains. The UK is nuclear armed. You really think that someone is going to try to take down 100 interconnects just to piss them off (and make them restart a bunch of old coal plants?).
I'm between and frustration and amusement watching this story circulate, and now some folks have managed to get a piece about it into Nature of all journals...
A while back some Chinese Ph. D. students and their supervisor published a paper on the nucleonics and thermal modelling of a theoretical thorium-breeding molten-salt reactor, using a seemingly standard computer simulation of a simple 2MW-thermal reactor.
For some reason this purely theoretical study was noticed by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and they published a story saying "China is working on a thorium molten-salt reactor". From there it spread to various tech journals, Slashdot and elsewhere and now Nature. Deary deary me.
If you read the article in Nature it's got pictures of Indian thorium pellets, very generic diagrams of what a thorium-based reactor might look like, quotes from people in MIT, the UK and elsewhere and nothing from any Chinese nuclear researchers. My belief is that there is no real hardware or thorium-fuelled reactor ready to run or even a non-thorium molten-salt fuel transport reactor being built, just a lot of confusion and people jumping to conclusions.
The Indians had been working on modifying some of their existing heavy-water reactors to use thorium in the fuel mix but the work seems to have stalled out and not much has been heard of their projects for a few years now. From memory only 10% of the fuel mix in the HWPWRs would be thorium, the rest being MEU and plutonium.
More interesting is that the Chinese have seemingly finished building their helium-cooled pebble-bed reactor(s), the HTR-PM which, if it works, should be good for 210MW of electricity from a pair of reactors. They claim to have hot-tested at least the first reactor of the pair and if the pictures they've released are real they're loading it with fuel pellets ready for first fission.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fuel-loading-under-way-at-China-s-HTR-PM
The HTR-PM is based on a much smaller experimental prototype pebble-bed reactor, the HTR-10 which can generate 10MW of electricity when it is operating so the commercial sort-of-SMR HTR-PM is not a leap in the dark. Saying that it has taken nine years to go from beginning construction in 2012 to, hopefully, first fission in a few weeks time.
Plants are pretty intelligent, if you count intelligence as data processing rather than having a unitary consciousness.
So far as I know as a one-time practicing botanist, plant cells process a lot of signals and respond appropriately: the apical meristems in the stem and root tips signal out what they need and sense, the leaves signal what they need and sense, and the cells throughout the plant respond to all the signals they get, both demands for water, sugar and nutrients, warnings to induce defenses, and requests to help something grow towards light or sensed nutrients, and so forth.
Remember, plants don't move, so if they want to get somewhere, they have to grow to it.
Also, the signals are mostly not electrical signals, they're slow chemical signals, cells dumping sugar and encouraging other cells to pipe them nitrogen to make more photosynthesizing sugar makers, for example. A bunch of plant signals are gases like ethylene, which can be picked up by other plants. Similarly, cell-to-cell chemical signals likely can pass to other organisms that are hooked into the network, such as mycorrhizal and other fungi, and aphids.
I prefer to think of plants as corporations with lots of subcontractors and (ahem!) branches. Shedding an unproductive branch is normal, even necessary, for plants, but rather harder for humans.
So if you want to think like a plant, think like a corporation, and make the boundaries between corporation culture and the outside rather porous. As they often are, in the working world. But think of it as a worker-owned co-op with no managerial system that is also not unionized, if that makes sense.
"'China prepares to test thorium-fueled nuclear reactor'"
Which reminds me of a very interesting discussion here ten years ago that seems to have started at #140 in https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/03/question.html .
It continued through #162, #173 et seq.
Comment #6 in that thread is amusing, too...
My initial response to this was "Christ, I've been posting here for more than a decade!" (I stopped using my real name about the time Trump got elected.)
" --The nickel alloy chosen isn't valuable, except for the information on it. The only reason to melt it down is spite."
I had written a rant about how valuable nickel actually is, but doing more research to figure out what this worthless alloy actually was reveals that it isn't a nickel disk, but a titanium disk with a thin layer of nickel plated on it, with the nickel engraved, according to the guys who actually built a few of things.
I guess my real issue is that in my experience, which includes occasionally buying "scrap," people just don't give a crap about what's in a bit of metal, and will toss it into a larger load of whatever they think they can pass it off as to maximize their payout. It seems unlikely to happen with such a pretty design and fancy stainless steel and glass holder, but over centuries it may well end up marred beyond recognition, separated from its protected shell, and thrown away as a bit of bent tinsel.
For my money, the neatest thing about the B is that other than the carburettor balance and tappet lock nuts, every nut and bolt is a 5/8 head.
Part 2 - Agreed as far as it goes. That said I do know people who watch/listen to the film purely for the music (personally I enjoy both angles).
I can go one step farther than manholes. My house in Leeds had a York stone drive. We came back from a holiday and there was a small pile of dirt in the centre of the drive. My neighbour, a fireman, had looked out of his window and seen a small lorry parked outside with the stones from my drive stacked ready to load. He opened the window and shouted “What are you doing?” They drive off and he came out and relaid the stones. The stones were worth about £3,000 at the time. After this I started no notice all the missing paving stones in the Hyde Terrace area where I parked my car. The council had used asphalt to fill in the areas where stones had been stolen. Over the years after this more stones disappeared regularly.
If we are going to play at being Humpty Dumpty, can I stand up for the intelligence of granite?
Actually, a lot of even mammalian signalling is chemical, and it's a higher proportion in lower animals. Where the corporate model is misleading is in some of the more subtle behaviour, such as the ability of the meristem to produce virus-free cells when the whole of the rest of the plant is infected.
There was a news story on the BBC a little while back, about a set of granite steps in a park in Aberdeen that had been taken up and stored while the park was redeveloped. When it came time to rebuild the steps the granite stones were nowhere to be found. Eventually they were tracked down to someone's front garden. Oops.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-57483131
The Chinese salt reactor was supposed to go online in 2020, but Covid. - the plans have been public for years, and China has been publishing a fair bit of interesting stuff in the fields of molten salt corrosion control and "How to proof pipe seals against leakage at 600 C" - They are genuinely building and testing things, this is not a paper exercise.
The nature article references a press release from the provincial government, which is flowery as heck once google translate got done with it, but yhea. Physical prototype.
The Wuwei "press release" mentions something about a molten-salt reactor, it mentions something about a local facility that mines and produces zirconium metal (used in fuel rods as jacketing) and then it goes on to talk about the new automatic cow-milking machine at the local agricultural institute. There's actually a picture of the cow milking machine on the website, no pictures of the world's first thorium-fuelled molten-salt reactor. Funny that.
I've got the idea that the original technical paper that kicked off this "Chinese whispers" debacle was published from a local university and this may be what the local government's website is referring to. I am sceptical about thorium and molten-salt reactors generally, I've said it before -- show me a hole in the ground, concrete being poured and metal being bent and I'll regard it as being a real reactor project. Until then it's a paper exercise or at worst a give-me-money long con like Thor Power.
Are there any other places on the Web you can point me to about this Chinese molten-salt reactor that was supposed to go online in 2020? There's the HTR-PM which isn't molten-salt (it can use some thorium in the pebbles though) but it was delayed to the point I thought the project had been cancelled -- it was supposed to start up in 2017 IIRC. However the HTR-PM now seems to be getting to the stage of first fission and there is specific information about it, licences and permissions, hot-tests and a picture of workers inspecting the fuel elements and so on (the picture on the world-nuclear-news website is of a plywood crate holding the fuel pebbles, it's not part of the reactor fuel store).
For molten-salt reactors there's no visible hardware, no official announcements, no licence for construction, no operating permissions, no evidence anything molten-salt really exists other than theoretical studies, Ph. D. papers and hope.
Cordless angle grinders.
3 guys in a pickup can nearly silently grab a cover in 15 or 30 seconds if not tacked down.
The grinder adds noise and time. And reequires a level of expertise not shown by many of the folks in this line of work.
If you saw three guys (or gals) wearing hi-viz and helmets working on a manhole cover, maybe with some traffic cones scattered around the area where their pickup truck is parked, would you give it any thought as the cordless angle grinder is sparking away other than "my tax dollars at work"?
As I said:
And reequires a level of expertise not shown by many of the folks in this line of work.
Most of the folks caught were much more Larry, Darryl, and Darryl than folks with a game plan past "how much beer can we buy tonight?".
An electricity substation near a convention hotel I used to frequent had a little tard-shrine wired to the boundary fence, wilted flowers and a weather-beaten "Luv U" message card. It commemorated the achievements of a couple of entrepreneurs from the Traveller community who had decided one night to convert some high-voltage cabling into cash money at the scrap yard. When the lights went out over half a suburb the power maintenance team who attended the trip-out found the two crispy critters inside the fence hand-in-hand alongside hacksaws and other tools. The investigation later decided one of them auto-Darwinated while cutting through the insulation of a 110kV line and the other grabbed him in an attempt to pull him away when the BBQ smell got too mouth-watering.
http://samofar.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-TMSR-SAMOFAR%E2%80%94%E2%80%94Yang-ZOU-PDF-version-1.pdf overview of the plan, and pictures of the electricially heated test setup completed at the time. http://www.sinap.cas.cn/xwzx/kydt/202012/t20201223_5837422.html Newest news from SINAP as regards the project. ... I think this is saying they are loading the reactor with non-nuclear salts for a non-critical test run? Google translate mangles technical Chinese pretty badly.
But it does include a photo of the reactor core vessel for the two megawatt actually-fission prototype before it got shipped off to Gobi.
"The pattern juggler lifts his hand The orchestra begin As slowly turns the grinding wheel In the court of the crimson king"
From reading the first PowerPoint presentation dated 2019 the SINAP team have built a full-scale mockup of what a 2MWth reactor would look like along with some of the components like the graphite core moderator. Their timeline, subject to funding says they might be able to build and operate an actual reactor by 2030.
Interestingly it seems their plan is to use TRISO-style solid fuel pellets carried in a molten-salt stream rather than having the fuel dissolved in the molten-salt itself. This may benefit from real-world data from the HTR and upcoming HTR-PM pebble-bed reactors which have actually been built.
The second link from SINAP you gave is dated December 2020. Badly-translated references to "off-line" suggest that reactor vessel in the background is an engineering mockup part rather than a qualified nuclear reactor component. I'm still not copacetic that there's going to be fission happening in a molten-salt reactor in China any time soon, never mind 2020 as some people have claimed.
Two projects. China has two molten salt projects. One is solid fuel, salt cooling, the other is full-bore molten salt.
They also has a sodium cooled reactor project, which is basically a license build BN-series. Basically, their gen-4 reactor project is to try every remotely viable design at once.
It seems like Laundryverse is diverging from ours. Instead of UK, USA is overtaken the Mandate.
Again with the efficiency...
Efficiency doesn't matter.
Agree, efficiency can take the role of it doesn't matter in this case.
As for the geopolitical...
That's just Bullshit. The UK is running on Russian gas that they can cut off by literally closing a valve.
Yes/no.
Yes, Russia could cut it off - a point certain US politicians are making.
But one of the many reasons the world went with carbon fuels is their flexibility.
They are (relatively) easy to store - just ask a certain former powerful UK union.
They are able to be moved in multiple manners, so while it wouldn't be disruption free alternate sources could be arranged - considering among other things that there would be alternative sources to buy from as opposed to your large foreign solar array being rather stuck in one place.
Cables that are vital to modern life carry the Internet all over the world,
Um, you cut a data cable and the Internet doesn't collapse.
A country cuts itself off from the Internet doesn't end the Internet.
But most importantly the Internet isn't a massive power cable with no alternate routes.
The UK is nuclear armed. You really think that someone is going to try to take down 100 interconnects just to piss them off (and make them restart a bunch of old coal plants?).
You really think the UK would nuke a country for deciding to cut the power?
But here's the thing.
In the past I would have entirely agreed with you. I would have said it makes perfect sense for Canada to arrange for large solar farms in the southern US/Mexico and simply run the lines to import that clean power into Canada. Because Canada and the US had decades of friendship and co-operation and a good stable relationship.
But that all changed 5 years ago.
Canada can (sadly) no longer trust the US on something so important and critical as electricity supply.
A country that bans our products on "National Security" is not a friendly, reliable neighbour.
A country that throws out a trade agreement because "it's unfair" is not a friendly, reliable partner.
And this is merely the geopolitical problems of 2 neighbouring democracies (well, at least for now)
Now add in multiple other countries, some of which are not / may not be democracies, and running a power cable(s) through multiple potentially hostile (if not now then in the future) jurisdictions is asking for trouble.
(and remember - the UK is, like the US, no longer a reliable trustworthy neighbour. It is the UK threatening to ignore International law, it is the UK threatening to tear up agreements only signed months previously, etc. - so why should any other country not feel entitled to behave the same way towards the UK).
I agree.
A lot of the "just run ..." schemes proposed by nerds totally overlook how many fingers that would put on literal buttons all over the place.
Energy-trading across national borders automatically becomes politics.
Even in the very cozy NordPool energy-market there are political strains about countries having insufficient national capacity to effect the trades neighboring countries would like.
After harping about lacking Swedish and German infrastructure for some time, Sweden and Germany ganged up on Denmark and said: "let's talk about that when you have linked across the Great Belt". (The DK parliament finally did that, overriding objections from it's own grid operator and most energy-trading companies in Denmark.)
To imagine that EU would get anywhere close to 10GW from North Africa is delusional, simply because of how expensive it would be to keep a 1:1 backup for it all times.
For a stellar example of precisely /how/ political it can get, look at the EuroAsia connector, which links Greece, Cyprus and Israel with the worlds longest HVDC sea-cable.
Or take VikingLink, which from the Danish end is gamble on incompetent UK energy policy following Brexit, the almost certain Scottish independence, and because everybody expects Hinkley Point C to do the usual thing. From the British end VikingLink is a sound and sane insurance for the exact same reasons.
Nobody expects to see a low price on that connection, the only question is how much power it gets to move.
The Chinese are building functional sodium-cooled BN-derived reactors, plural - the first CFR-600 is well along in construction and they started pouring concrete and bending metal on their second CFR-600 in December last year. They already have the 65MWt CEFR, a small research fast-spectrum reactor built by the Russians about ten years ago. It runs in experimental campaigns, not continuously and is not intended to be a power-grid reactor although it can generate 20MW of electricity when it is running at full power.
The Chinese molten-salt reactor projects are still in the engineering models stage of development and a long way from construction beginning on a real reactor, never mind first fission after startup. A lot of these sorts of projects eventually get abandoned or rescheduled further and further into the future -- see the CAREM-25 reactor project in Argentina for a horrible example.
Actually, a lot of even mammalian signalling is chemical, and it's a higher proportion in lower animals. Where the corporate model is misleading is in some of the more subtle behaviour, such as the ability of the meristem to produce virus-free cells when the whole of the rest of the plant is infected.
Meristems, for what it's worth, seem to do a disproportionate share of directing processes through signals. At least, that was what I learned in school. For those who aren't following, meristems, aka the centers of buds, are those little clumps of what we'd call embryonic stem cells that produce new stem, leaf, and root tissue (also flowers, but they're modified stems). This is one major way that plants differ from animals, the ubiquity of stem and embryonic cells at all phases of most plants' lifecycles.
I use the corporate model because it's one most people are familiar with. It eases conversations that get gummed up in the "where's the tree's brain?" level of discourse. A somewhat better analogy for plants are colonies of eusocial insects, where the individual insects take on the role of plant parts. The trouble with this metaphor is that most people think that the queen caste run things (it's right there in the word queen after all). In fact, the queens are the reproductive system (making new worker units), and the workers make decisions through distributed information processing systems using chemical and other signals. As do plants. It's probably worth considering that an ant colony is on of the wasp clade's attempts at converging on a plant root system. Now if ants could photosynthesize...
The other thing is that humans process information on multiple levels using different organs. As an example, if we had to use our conscious, sense-integrating brains to work out how to digest food in our guts, we'd likely starve (too many decisions, too fast, at a microscopic scale in an anaerobic environment. And it's yucky in there). But our guts work with bacteria to do it routinely. Which organ is better at data processing, brain or intestines? That's a miserable comparison to make, because they're so different in process and scale. It's probably better to consider that we have organs specialized for different types of information processing. A section of one of them uses self-awareness in its information processing systems, and that self-aware subsystem thinks this is terribly, terribly important, to the point where that self-aware portion "thinks" this is the most important type of information processing to have. I suspect that's an assumption, even though it's one my self-aware subsystem happens to agree with.
Plants don't work that way, so far as I (or anyone) know. They don't have that self-aware system. Whether this, in turn, means that their information processing is less voluminous or complex than what goes on in a human body? Especially in big clonal organisms like Pando or a large banyon? That's a much harder question to answer.
I had written a rant about how valuable nickel actually is, but doing more research to figure out what this worthless alloy actually was reveals that it isn't a nickel disk, but a titanium disk with a thin layer of nickel plated on it, with the nickel engraved, according to the guys who actually built a few of things. I guess my real issue is that in my experience, which includes occasionally buying "scrap," people just don't give a crap about what's in a bit of metal, and will toss it into a larger load of whatever they think they can pass it off as to maximize their payout. It seems unlikely to happen with such a pretty design and fancy stainless steel and glass holder, but over centuries it may well end up marred beyond recognition, separated from its protected shell, and thrown away as a bit of bent tinsel.
Understandable, although I think we'd agree that nickel tablets would have a marginally better chance at surviving awhile than would gold tablets, just because of the difference in scrap values.
That said, I didn't dive as deep as you did. I remembered reading about the rosetta disks years ago, when they were playing with engraving them stuff on nickel alloy disks, with the alloy chosen for low corrosion rates and low treasure value. And that's what I thought they'd gone with, so I didn't check. What they came up with (nickel-plating etched silicon-titanium thingies in complex holders) seems quite silly, I agree, the more so since the text they chose for the ages is Genesis 1:3...
However I feel about the Bible as an interesting book (and it is interesting in multiple senses), I'd argue that engraving Pi to a few million digits, or a table of logarithms, is more useful than Genesis 1. Heck, even Matthew 5 (The Beatitudes) is more useful and equally widely translated.
For what it's worth, in Hot Earth Dreams I made my pitch for my ideal "Foundation" system: really durable copies of the last good climate model we make, showing the most accurate regional climate maps we can create for the next 100,000 years, or however long it takes to get back to 350 ppm. There's value in those, since they tell everyone where the good farmland will be for the next thousand centuries. Do I think they'd survive? No, because Trump-level artistes show up fairly regularly in regional rulership, and one of their common tactics is to destroy previous systems so they can loot the joint before the opposition becomes sufficiently organized. So I'd expect any good future climate predictions to be wiped out by two-bit dictators and hitlerinimalist bureaucrats who are more interested in grabbing power than in people surviving for the long haul. But I could be wrong, and it would at least help someone for awhile, even if it didn't say much about who I was. That's probably better than blowing wads of Genesis 1 at the future. But humans being what we are, we're blowing wads of expensive Genesis 1 engravings instead.
"...really durable copies of the last good climate model we make, showing the most accurate regional climate maps we can create for the next 100,000 years, or however long it takes to get back to 350 ppm. There's value in those, since they tell everyone where the good farmland will be for the next thousand centuries."
This brings up an interesting question. It's looking more and more like we aren't going to take strong-enough action on climate change. Where in the US would you most want to live 20-30 years from now?
Canada can (sadly) no longer trust the US on something so important and critical as electricity supply.
That was the case even before Trump, he just made it painfully obvious by gloating about breaking deals and screwing supposed partners and allies.
Remember how we had to upgrade our security after 9/11, or be cut off at the border? Canadian security before the attacks was greater than American security after, but we were still forced to spend millions on security theatre or have our trade unilaterally cut.
Let's see, I'm not starting out, and I am doing my little thing to try to slow the 6th Mass Extinction where I live. And I live in the most biodiverse county in the United States.
So to answer your question, I'm not going anywhere unless forced out. Adapting long term to climate change isn't that high on my list of important reasons for where I live.
Other people likely will have different responses. But if you're trying to figure out where The Keep will be, send them to Detroit, Cleveland, and points around there. They need more people right now.
Right. It was very clear that the USA's opposition to Nordstream 2 and Russian gas generally was partly to line their own pockets, and secondly to have Europe's balls in a vice. The UK has been repeatedly shafted by the USA, and keeps going back and begging for more :-(
Haven't read it. Need to read more of his fiction, anyway, but nope. And from a quick look on wikipedia, nope, mine are not vaguely that kind of plant.
They grow mostly underground. Each an independent "trunk". They connected via runners. Some runners are on the surface, and they, along with the leaves, use sunlight for energy.
Oh, and they can "wirelessly" connect with shed leaves that are still alive, and can order them to create an above-ground stack... and it can move/walk, and do other things.
To really understand them, though, you need to understand a beowulf cluster of computers.
In what way? Are you suggesting that IQ 45 is uber-Mandate (or thinks he is)?
Yes. It is extremely clear that there are some extremely complex systems with some form of communication in many organisms, and plants are definitely no exception, but have received much less attention than ones in mammals. Irrationally, in my view.
The reason that I think the meristem viral exclusion mechanism (specifically) justifies a lot more funding is that plants and humans are both eukaryotes, and it might just give us some indication of how to tackle RNA viruses more systematically.
Not moving, either. I'm in the mid-Atlantic - between the Appalachians and the sea, there's plenty of rain, and decent soil going down to the Pennsylvanian granite.
I don't like the idea of spending my declining years* in FL or TX, but that's where I see the climate going**... but having relocated five fucking times half-way across the continent, I am NOT MOVING AGAIN.
** Not fire ants, no, no, please....
This brings up an interesting question. It's looking more and more like we aren't going to take strong-enough action on climate change. Where in the US would you most want to live 20-30 years from now?
At a guess (and this applies both within the US and other places.
Where there is abundant fresh water, with an avoidance of being too close to sea level and a consideration of the wildfire risk.
Avoid local low areas given the increased risk in the future of flash flooding.
So for the US, a reversal of the last 30 years of moving to Florida/Arizona/Nevada.
Thank you for the information, but I doubt the US could be persuaded to start producing a French reactor design in less than 10 years. The point of suggesting the naval reactors is that they are currently being produced at the rate of 2-3 per year so production could be expanded in the near term.
As for the fuel issue, given the point that they are intended to last 30 years without refueling, I see this as a feature, not a bug. That implies 30+ years of uninterrupted operation which would help buy the time to get an adequate network of conventional renewables without having to scheduled extended downtime every decade for refueling. Yes, it is inefficient and a sub-optimal use of reactor fuel, but it could be started in the next year or two as opposed to the next decade.
I do have two questions though. How much uranium is available and how long will it last? If there is enough for several thousand years, wasting some in an inefficient US naval design does not seem that important. Also, is the fuel really being wasted? Can't they reprocess it to extract the useful remnants at the end of the reactor's life?
Note, I am not a nuclear engineer, just an interested civilian, so I really am ignorant about the answers to those questions.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fuel-loading-under-way-at-China-s-HTR-PM
The HTR-PM is based on a much smaller experimental prototype pebble-bed reactor, the HTR-10 which can generate 10MW of electricity when it is operating so the commercial sort-of-SMR HTR-PM is not a leap in the dark. Saying that it has taken nine years to go from beginning construction in 2012 to, hopefully, first fission in a few weeks time.
I was under the impression there is a world-wide shortage of helium and this is a drawback for the helium cooled reactors. Would this design work with some other "fluid" as the heat exchange medium?
“world-wide shortage of helium ” Nah, don’t worry, we can make loads of it in the fusion reactors.
David L @ 784:
3 guys in a pickup can nearly silently grab a cover in 15 or 30 seconds if not tacked down.
The grinder adds noise and time. And reequires a level of expertise not shown by many of the folks in this line of work.
I think the more effective deterrent was when the cops had a word with the scrap metal buyers around the area. What use is it to steal a manhole cover if you can't find a buyer? Or worse yet (from the thief's point of view) the "buyer" rats you out to the cops?
I'm making a joke about the Vaccine Mandate of Biden.
On a different note, what is going on with geothermal power? This article from Vox suggests that there have been some promising developments.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical
Traditional geothermal has been limited to areas where there is underground hot water relatively close to the surface in places like Iceland and California and Hawaii. The US apparently has 3.6 GW of installed geothermal.
However, by branching out from obvious hot springs and just drilling for hot rock there should be a lot more geothermal energy available. The underground rock temperatures don't vary that much, so it should have high availability unlike solar or wind.
The big drawback that I could see is the potential for micro earthquakes like those from fracking. However, unlike fracking, it doesn't involve toxic chemicals, just water.
Another important advantage for geothermal is that it would allow the big oil companies to leverage their drilling expertise into a more sustainable direction.
There's no world-wide shortage of helium. A number of natural gas production facilities around the world have started recovering helium from gas domes (it's a byproduct of radioactive decay) for sale, expanding production as demand has crept up due to new uses being found for it in cryogenics, rocket tank pressurisation, deep-sea diving etc. Worst case helium can be extracted (at greater cost) from the atmosphere, it's actually more common than the rarest noble gas, xenon.
The HTR-series reactors recirculate helium coolant through the pebble-bed core using gigantic fans, it's not expended or used up. AFAIK there's no neutron activation products from helium or at least so little that they can be either ignored or filtered out of the coolant as it circulates.
Nojay @ 787: An electricity substation near a convention hotel I used to frequent had a little tard-shrine wired to the boundary fence, wilted flowers and a weather-beaten "Luv U" message card. It commemorated the achievements of a couple of entrepreneurs from the Traveller community who had decided one night to convert some high-voltage cabling into cash money at the scrap yard. When the lights went out over half a suburb the power maintenance team who attended the trip-out found the two crispy critters inside the fence hand-in-hand alongside hacksaws and other tools. The investigation later decided one of them auto-Darwinated while cutting through the insulation of a 110kV line and the other grabbed him in an attempt to pull him away when the BBQ smell got too mouth-watering.
Many years ago - around about 1965 I think, because it was in the news while I was in high school - beer cans (and soft drink cans) had pop-tops that pulled off when you opened them. And 18 year olds could buy beer in North Carolina at the time.
https://pulltabarchaeology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/mini-pulltabs-1494-e1551353583400.jpg
People would make chains out of the pop tops.
Behind one of the high-rise residence halls (what used to be called dormitories) at NC State there was a sub-station where High KV distribution lines came in to feed the University. The HIGH TENSION lines ran parallel to the back wall of the dormitory; about 50 feet out.
Along about the last day of the school year a couple of students who lived on one of the upper floors of the residence hall decided to see how long their beer can pop-top chain was. So they dangled the end of it out a back window of the residence hall and the guy on the ground pulled on it & started backing up while his roommate fed the chain out of the window. Eventually the guy backing up got far enough back that the chain came into contact with one of the HIGH TENSION lines.
Killed 'em both.
And the story was that when the emergency medical people got to the dorm room there was still several pounds of melted aluminum on the floor next to the window from the part of the chain that hadn't been pulled out of the window.
I just looked in Google Maps and apparently the substation has been moved, but I remember it was still there when I went to State. In fact it was part of Freshman Orientation to point out the location of those HIGH TENSION lines to entering students along with a warning about what could happen if you made the same mistake those other guys made.
35.78660195239252, -78.67577600498656 if you're interested. The lines ran along what is now Thurman Drive (which dead-ended at the parking lot immediately to the west back then), and the dormitory was Sullivan Residence Hall.
All references I see online are recent. I remember the stories, including in the underground newspapers (where the Weatherpeople would send communiques to) as reporting warnings.
These are "recent" articles involving interviews with people who were there at the time. (Here's a documentary made in 1998, including an interview with one of the bombers.)
There was indeed a phone-call warning -- saying the bomb would go off in five minutes. Which is of course way too little time if you actually want a building evacuated in the middle of the night; at best, you might get some extra people killed if they happened to show up at the building rapidly enough in an effort to see if there was anyone who needed evacuating, though in the event no one was able to get there that fast (in part because the bomb went off prematurely, less than five minutes after the call.) I don't believe the bombers actually wanted to get potential evacuators killed; they were just criminally negligent.
(And they weren't part of the Weathermen, either, for what that's worth. They were a purely local, Madison-based group.)
And I wave off his death?
You called him an "idiot" and said he "was told to get out of the building, along with everyone else, but avoided being shepherded out." So, according to you, he was an idiot, and it was basically his fault he died. (This is called "blaming the victim.")
Here's another account by someone else who was in the building when the bomb went off and was badly injured and buried under the rubble. As is very clear, no one in the building was "told to get out" and no one was "shepherded out". Charitably: your memory and knowledge of the event is very faulty.
What use is it to steal a manhole cover if you can't find a buyer?
Add to that that the price was not much. $.04/lb as I recall when I asked someone who generates a lot of scrap metal a couple of years ago.
Wind power forecasting (various time scales, and note seasonality adds to predictability) is an active area of research. This 2009 piece is very long and detailed. (To be honest, I did not go far down these research rabbit holes before coming back up.[1]) Wind Power Forecasting: State-of-the-Art 2009 (C. Monteiro1, R. Bessa, V. Miranda, A. Botterud, J. Wang, and G. Conzelmann) And then look at the citations for that piece. (Sort by date if interested in the most recent works.) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=504601741287729894&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33&hl=en Some of the recent work seems to be about site-specific corrections to NWP models. (Middling-complex ML models seem to perform pretty well.)
[1] The story bits related to the title of The Name Of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss, 2007, ignore the chaos in/size of weather systems. (Wikipedia has spoilers.)
I live in Gloucester, MA, and feel fairly secure. Plenty of fresh water, and when there is too much it runs off quickly -- Gloucester has a very pronounced relief and we live on top of a hill. And while it is on the sea, hurricanes lose most of their power by the time they get to New England, so we just get a lot of rain.
Troutwaxer @ 798:
This brings up an interesting question. It's looking more and more like we aren't going to take strong-enough action on climate change. Where in the US would you most want to live 20-30 years from now?
Raise your hand if you expect to still be around 30 years from now. (I might make 20, but I don't think 30 is in the cards 1.)
That said, Raleigh should be about as good as any place in the U.S. Won't have to drive as far to get to the beach. Second choice would be anywhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina or Virginia.
1 If I live 20 more years I will be 92 years old. I think that's probably about the limit of my life-span. I don't really expect to make it to 100 ... or past.
"it's a byproduct of radioactive decay"
Surplus alpha particles.
timrowledge @ 809:
Nah, don’t worry, we can make loads of it in the fusion reactors.
1. AFAIK, "fusion reactors" are still "only 50 years away" in the future
2. Once we DO get "fusion reactors", we won't need helium to cool fission reactors will we?
Nojay @ 813: There's no world-wide shortage of helium. A number of natural gas production facilities around the world have started recovering helium from gas domes (it's a byproduct of radioactive decay) for sale, expanding production as demand has crept up due to new uses being found for it in cryogenics, rocket tank pressurisation, deep-sea diving etc. Worst case helium can be extracted (at greater cost) from the atmosphere, it's actually more common than the rarest noble gas, xenon.
Ok, I just remember reading something about a shortage several years ago.
The HTR-series reactors recirculate helium coolant through the pebble-bed core using gigantic fans, it's not expended or used up. AFAIK there's no neutron activation products from helium or at least so little that they can be either ignored or filtered out of the coolant as it circulates.
I understand how it works, and that the helium would recirculate. A gas can be a "fluid" (or probably more accurately a fluid can be either a gas or a liquid). I'm still curious if there are other gasses besides helium that would work for the heat exchange.
I was thinking either the Great Lakes region or the Colorado Rockies; someplace not too far from a hospital.
That said, Raleigh should be about as good as any place in the U.S. Won't have to drive as far to get to the beach.
Actually our issue is water. Our watersheds are small (the watersheds for the entire state are small) and thus without Falls Lake and Jordan Lake we would be low on water a LOT. Google will show you how small it is.
The drought 20 years ago made that clear. And with Durham (NC) continually getting the Legislature to delay (2 to 5 years at a time) their cleanup of run off caused issues of Falls Lake it is even worse.
I'm still curious if there are other gasses besides helium that would work for the heat exchange.
The UK has Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) that use carbon dioxide as the coolant circulated through the core before it goes through heat exchangers to make steam. The older Magnox reactors used the same cooling system.
Our Good Host got a white-glove tour of the AGRs at Torness which is about 80km to the east of Edinburgh where we both live. There's a link on this blog to a report of the visit, "Nothing like this will ever be built again."
As far as I know the AGRs are the only operating gas-cooled power reactors. The last Magonx reactor in Anglesey was shut down a few years ago. There's also the prototype/experimental HTR-10 reactor in China which is helium-cooled and the tech base for the HTR-PM reactors being commissioned at the moment.
I think the US had plans, at least, to build gas-cooled power reactors at one time. I don't know if any were ever actually built or operated though.
That's not true at all. We'll have fusion power in 20 years. Or is that 30 years? I can't remember what I've read the last 40 years....
third star on the right and all that.
Navigation warning: second star to the right. Then straight on ‘til morning.
20 years. Of course it's been "we'll have fusion generation in 20 years for the last 40 years"...
They wear the uniform as a matter of course. Their pick-up trucks mostly began life in legitimate use for similar purposes; they still have the adornments like big yellow "highway maintenance" stickers on the back and orange flashing lights on the roof, and they come with accessories like battered hard hats and tar-smeared high visibility clothing discarded by the original users and stuffed under the seats for subsequent users to recover and consider to still be usable. There is considerable overlap between the casual shit-shovelling stratum of the legitimate construction industry and the plain criminal element, so resources available on one side of the legal boundary are readily available on the other side too.
Not that it matters much as people won't take any notice anyway. A friend and I once locked our bikes to a lamp post, and came back later to find that some bastard had come along with an additional lock and chain and re-locked both bikes so we couldn't take them away. So I bought a junior hacksaw from the nearest ironmongers and spent the best part of half an hour sitting in the middle of a busy street full of people, sawing the thing off again (it was huge); not a single person took the blindest bit of notice of such an obviously nefarious-seeming operation being carried out in full public view.
The important factor is simply the ability to patently not give a fuck who sees you or says anything. Act in a manner that advertises such an attitude and nobody will say anything. And they have that ability in spades, having been developing it from the cradle onwards.
As for noise and tools, one of the favourite activities of their nocturnal brethren with a more nuanced appreciation of scrap metal values is removal of catalytic converters from parked vehicles. Either they cut them off with a battery-powered recip saw or angle grinder etc, or they tie a chain round them and use their own vehicle as a tractor to brutally rip the things out. Silence obviously doesn't come into it, but they compensate with speed, and can easily clear out a whole yard of parked vehicles before anyone notices.
But such an apparently reasonable effort vs reward calculation is by no means universal practice. An inspection of a disused railway line with a view to reinstating it discovered that a considerable section of the track had been stolen. Rails weigh 40-50kg per metre, take forever to cut into carryable sections even if you do have power tools, and don't fetch any more than any other ferrous scrap; quite likely they didn't even recover the cost of the fuel for their cut-off saws, but the fox-in-a-henhouse instinct just takes over or something: for some weird reason there's something about scrap metal theft that acts like heroin craving on significant numbers of people.
That Vox piece on geothermal energy is surprisingly technical/detailed. For UK people, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_the_United_Kingdom (Worth a skim, but TL;DR district heating is plausible. e.g. https://www.engie.co.uk/energy/district-energy/southampton/ )
"I'm still curious if there are other gasses besides helium that would work for the heat exchange."
Certainly there are. In one sense you could use any gas you felt like, but most of them are obviously silly choices for cooling anything for quite everyday reasons.
Helium has the advantage that it is as close to inert to nuclear reactions as you get, so you don't have to worry about it turning into something nasty and then leaking out, nor do you have to worry about it pinching neutrons out of the chain reaction (not that that is particularly significant at gaseous densities of substance).
But 16O is very nearly as good, and 12C not far behind, so carbon dioxide is your next best alternative from that point of view, and a lot easier to obtain and handle.
Helium has a very large heat capacity by mass, whereas carbon dioxide is rather small; but helium also has a very low density, so in terms of how much heat can be absorbed by a given size pipe full of coolant, carbon dioxide wins.
It sort of reminds me of silver vs. copper for electrical conductors. One is excellent while the other is merely very good, but the very good one is nearly always perfectly adequate, and only in exceptional situations do you actually need to use the excellent one.
"However, unlike fracking, it doesn't involve toxic chemicals, just water."
Unfortunately at the temperatures and pressures involved water becomes a pretty vicious solvent, so when you circulate it through random rock it concentrates in solution all sorts of crap that the rock contains in trace amounts, and becomes both toxic and corrosive. And also liable to deposit stuff back out of solution in awkward places when the conditions back off a bit. From what I recall reading of experimental geothermal installations some of the biggest problems are in handling this horrible shit you get your heat in, and also in trying to be sure that it won't get mixed up with ordinary water underground and end up coming out of people's taps or inside dead fish.
"random rock"
I don't know why I said that. It isn't random rock. It's the remains of old volcanism, which is a lot worse and quite likely has people digging various interesting metals out of the more accessible bits already.
If I live as long as my dad did, I'll make it to just past New Year's, 2049. So 27 years and change.
I find the 'where is a good place to live if the climate really goes Pete Tong questionable, to say the least.
If the climate goes kablooie, lots of long supply chains snap like chains made of tissue paper. So no complex medicines or machinery. Also, probably no food. A better question might be "approximately where would you like your refugee camp to be located?"
I'd like to be wrong.
It sort of reminds me of silver vs. copper for electrical conductors. Well, some audiophiles might disagree about the virtues of silver: Also with your cable more life and energy and actually more fun. Who could argue with "more fun"? :-) or "better separation but also more intimate.", or "truly magical.", or "silky smooth and sweet", or "three dimensional glory".
Imagine the superlatives that would be used to describe superconducting audio cables. (By people with ... too much money.)
As for noise and tools, one of the favourite activities of their nocturnal brethren with a more nuanced appreciation of scrap metal values is removal of catalytic converters from parked vehicles.
Actually this pops up on our local nextdoor web site where they are stolen from driveways. About 1/2 get caught as so many of us now have security cams on our driveways.
As my brother in law in law the retired cop said. "A cop's job would be brutally hard if 90% of the crooks weren't so stupid."
so when you circulate it through random rock it concentrates in solution all sorts of crap that the rock contains in trace amounts, and becomes both toxic and corrosive.
All someone needs to do is an image search of the various features of Yellowstone Park in the US.
Silver-plated cables... they existed before the audio-fools discovered them in the component catalogues. They're intended for high-frequency RF signalling because of the "skin effect". RF tends to travel mostly along the outside of a wire, silver-plating copper wire reduces the perceived resistance at high frequencies. It has buggerall effect at audio frequencies where the skin effect is vastly reduced but Shiny!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect
See also oxygen-free cables, meant for things like microphones and guitars which get moved around on a stage when performing. The idea is there are no copper oxide inclusions in the cables that can emit noise via the piezo-electric effect when the cable is flexed. The use of oxy-free cables in fixed audio setups is pointless but, again, Shiny!
RF tends to travel mostly along the outside of a wire, silver-plating copper wire reduces the perceived resistance at high frequencies.
You may know this but all AC travels mostly on the edge. You can calculate the depth needed to carry a certain percentage which is why some power distribution systems use pipes in switch yards.
But at audio frequencies stranded (so you can better flex it) cables are just fine as long as they are big enough to carry the current load.
For pure hype see Monster Cable products at double / triple the price of decent cables. Or just ADP[1].
[1]I saw this on a car sticker years ago. The salesman explained it was "Additional Dealer Profit". It was on a hard to get car.
An AC cable phenomenon that does have a measurable (though not audible) effect at audio frequencies is speaker cable inductance. So if you want to make a fancy speaker cable that does have at least some thin technical claim to be better than plain cooker cable, you can find some four-core cable of comparable conductor area with the cores arranged in a square, and connect them as diagonally-opposite pairs to cancel the inductance.
But of course, and despite it being even easier than colouring in the edges of your CDs, the gold-plated-optical-connector twats never do this ever.
It comes back the different continental configuration. A lot of it (as I mentioned before) is Antarctica and Greenland being already glaciated, so that removes two continents worth of high latitude boreal permafrost carbon reserve - if you melt them, they're not going to release that much carbon. And because we're already in an icehouse world, we don't have the hothouse high ocean levels leading to lots of shallow continental shelf seas with plenty of clathrates to come out of the high latitude continental shelves if you warm the seas.
Couple that with our long recovery from the PETM permanently locked a lot of carbon up in silicates and carbonates (there was a whole lot of limestone formation as the planet recovered - the blackshales and other high carbon deposits of the anoxic ocean events do the initial hard yards, but most of the drawdown happens over several tens of millions of years of silicate weathering and marine limestone formation, and most of those rocks are still holding their carbon. Of course, everyone's model is different, - some calculate almost the same carbon budget as the PETM available if we let it all out, some calculate less. I'm on the 'probably less' side.
As I recall it, one of the problems they have in Iceland with Geothermal is that the control valves become plated with electrum (silver/gold alloy).
Oh to have the problem of what to do with that sort of crap in my heating system, eh?
So is Musk out to "Save the World"?
Or just a spoiled brat who refuses to obey the rules in almost any game he plays?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/spacex-calls-amazons-protest-of-starlink-plan-an-irrelevant-diatribe/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/elon-musk-rule-breaker-trailblazer-alison-rg-van-diggelen/
Congratulations on spotting the joke.
Generally, I'd say it's probably more cost effective to just print multiple copies of the salient wiki or britannica [insert useful encyclopaedia/lifeboat document of choice here] articles on stabilised archival paper or vellum, and stash them in cold, dry cave situations in the Atacama, the Altai, the Gobi, Tibetan plateau, Bolivian plateau, inland South Australia, etc. That's the situations where we've had high quality preservation of material culture before, and those areas have sufficient climatic stability that they're probably the best spots to put one's time capsules, a whole lot cheaper than metal methods.
" it's probably more cost effective to just print multiple copies of the salient wiki or britannica [insert useful encyclopaedia/lifeboat document of choice here] articles on stabilised archival paper or vellum, and stash them in cold, dry cave situations in the Atacama, the Altai, the Gobi, Tibetan plateau,"
Sort of a random thought here, but it occurs to me that this discussion touches on the general topic of survivability/resilience. That has a number of general considerations like hardness, redundancy, dispersion, stealth and the like. I like redundancy and dispersion, as above, but the others need to be considered.
Not quite, but close. Doing geothermal power from active hydrothermal systems generally means you're not working with hot water, you're working with supercritical fluids under very high pressure - they're aqueous, sure, but they're also containing a significant number of nasty species (HCl, HF, a bunch of sulphides) and a significant number of metals and metalloids in solution. They're hot. Usually in the 250 to 300 degrees centigrade range. This is really, really nasty stuff to work with. In natural hotspring systems as these things rise through the crust, each time they drop pressure, they boil, and when they boil, they dump the nasties they're carrying out of solution, because losing temp and pressure pushes some things to the wrong side of a pressure-solution curve. So when you drop a borehole into them, you have to work quite hard to not let the pressures drop suddenly, because bad shit happens - you lose heat and pressure you'd rather use to drive your powerplant, sometimes they blow up, and pretty much always they deposit crud everywhere. Essentially each pressure baffle valve system in your powerplant becomes the same as pressure fracture induced choke-boil points in a hotspring system - a place where geothermal minerals are deposited. But it's not as if anyone in a power plant is coining it from scraping shiny electrum off the inside of their pipes. Instead they've got a maintenance nightmare of nasty black crud and chunky quartz crystals growing inside their system, requiring constant maintenance, and annoying regulatory oversight (One of our groundbreaking geothermal powerplants built in the '50s is the chief source of arsenic in one of our major river systems here (Hi! Wairakei, how's it going?). Generally the cost of cleaning and replacing valves and dealing with the toxic metalliferous crud is almost met by the amount of precious metal in the crud, but not quite.
I read with interest OGH's ideas about Mr. Musk using the massive orbital capability of the Starship system to build Solar Power satellites and the replies of the loyal Commetariat in dispute. Respectfully I think that we're missing a trick here (that is if the Starship doesn't go the way of the Great Eastern Dog forbid). Picture this: SpaceX claims that the cargo section of the Starship will be nine meters in diameter by eighteen tall. Given structural wall thickness and various hatch mechanisms we'll start with six to six-and-a-half meters of slightly curved tube with a length of fifteen meters (or as long as will fit the cargo bay and still be viable to load and extract). Already fully loaded with supplies each should mass quite a bit under the full system capability. In orbit the tubes would be assembled end to end and coupled to a center hub and three to four spokes, all made up of common units. Forget power stations: even with only one flight a week (as a very conservative estimate) in a year Sir Musk could have in orbit a fifty-plus meter wheeled space station right out of a Del-Ray juvenile. Such a monster would make the ISS look like the government issue pup-tent that it actually is. Spin it for one-sixth gee and imagine what NASA would pay for access to cheap Lunar gravity experiments. After a year up it Mars level and charge them again... And that's not even THINKING about the tourist market: how much would YOU pay for a Week inside the Wheel bouncing in the low gravity and watching the Earth (slowly) turn below? And next week the ferry flight swaps out another hundred paying customers. Obviously (we think?!) Elon doesn't have such a grandiose thing abuilding in a Boca Chica tent, but how long would it take those fast-movers to start welding up stainless if He gives the Word? Or give Bigelow a call for the first few dozen B330's off the line as a faster, free-fall alternative? Either way Starship could pay for itself in only a handful of years while providing Musk with an Orbiting Fortress fit for a Bond villain. Just call him Dr. Yes...
As Pigeon and Dave point out, it's not just water. Also, we use fracking to open up a geothermal reserve to exploitation in almost exactly the same way we use it to open up an insufficiently porous oil reservoir. In the geothermal case, the fluids that are down there are generally way more unpleasant to deal with than the biocides used in fracking fluid.
A big problem with a lot of the 'lets drill into this hot rock and make it into a geothermal station' is that in many cases the reason there isn't a surface expression of the heat to use for a more traditional shallow sourced geothermal plant is because the rock is insufficiently permeable to allow that to happen, so you have to frack it anyway. And the problem is that a lot of the time, after you frack it, you discover that the fracking didn't go the way you wanted, so either your hot fluid is going somewhere else you inadvertently fracked open, and not your exit borehole, or your entry borehole, if you are pumping cold fluids down to get hot and then use, doesn't communicate with your exit no matter how carefully you did your fracking. We're getting way better at it with directional drilling these days, but it's still not as easy as it sounds.
In response to Troutwaxer's #823:
There are hospitals, and there are hospitals: The big highly publicized medical school hospital on Portland's 'Pill Hill' has only a C+ rating from https://www.healthgrades.com/quality/americas-best-hospitals and a depressingly high incidence of post-surgical complications per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid stats. Other area hospitals have solid B, B+, and A- ratings. Choose Wisely.
Couple that with our long recovery from the PETM permanently locked a lot of carbon up in silicates and carbonates (there was a whole lot of limestone formation as the planet recovered - the blackshales and other high carbon deposits of the anoxic ocean events do the initial hard yards, but most of the drawdown happens over several tens of millions of years of silicate weathering and marine limestone formation, and most of those rocks are still holding their carbon. Of course, everyone's model is different, - some calculate almost the same carbon budget as the PETM available if we let it all out, some calculate less. I'm on the 'probably less' side.
Thanks. I figured limestone and shale, along with the Alps, Himalayas, and New Guinea (big ol' lumps of limestone, marble, and other goodness uplifted post-PETM, for those playing along), as Our Saviors in this instance.
I do hope you're right that we're fucking around with a smaller total carbon budget. The problem, following your logic, isn't the "Clathrate Gun" or "Permafrost apocalypse" (although they could be bad), because this is carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere at most a few million years ago, so it's a comparably small part of the total pool. Instead, the problem is the Carboniferous coal and Devonian, Permian, etc. oil that hasn't seen daylight for the entire Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Much of the stuff we've pulled out of the ground as fuel in the last century was too deeply buried to be in play during the PETM. So we've got two different pools of carbon. If we had both pools getting blown skyward, we'd be closing the lid on the pressure cooker now. Instead, the PETM one may be depleted. Now if we can keep the other more in the ground...
The other problem, of course, is that we're emitting fossil fuel carbon really, really fast. I know of some reasonable genetic evidence that current clades can survive Miocene conditions, but that doesn't mean that species currently stranded in little conservation parks can make a rapid jump to surviving the fall of civilization hundreds of miles poleward after a guerilla transplant operation. Although you never know.
Thanks!
Generally, I'd say it's probably more cost effective to just print multiple copies of the salient wiki or britannica [insert useful encyclopaedia/lifeboat document of choice here] articles on stabilised archival paper or vellum, and stash them in cold, dry cave situations in the Atacama, the Altai, the Gobi, Tibetan plateau, Bolivian plateau, inland South Australia, etc. That's the situations where we've had high quality preservation of material culture before, and those areas have sufficient climatic stability that they're probably the best spots to put one's time capsules, a whole lot cheaper than metal methods.
You missed the turn. I'm not interested in leaving behind an Ozymandias monument (look at my works all ye mighty and despair) to brag about how amazing we were while we fucked everything up. Instead, I'm trying to keep us remembered as part of a living tradition.
Printing Genesis on titanium is so much useless bragging. Who cares, beyond the people who are paying for them?
Considering what we're doing to the planet now, if we wanted to actually be remembered as something other than History's Ultimate Assholes (which we are), we need to do something that says (in many, many words, so that they can be translated): "here's what we did that fucked everything up, here's what we're pretty sure will happen next for as long as we can predict it, here's how you tell where you are in time from when we wrote this, so you'll know which part of this applies to you, and here's what you can do to benefit from this knowledge."
Then you put this in a monastery-type system in a survivable but not desirable location (your typical massif with intact water springs). You need a place where people can learn, study, and curate this information for millennia. It's doable (cf monasteries in Ethiopia). The problem isn't the great and powerful, because they'll be sending their children there to learn the future. The problem instead are the scam artists who want to destroy this truth in order to profit from the resulting chaos.
And think about the corpus of knowledge that would have to be built to preserve and transmit such information. Telling time for tens of thousands of years is possible, either with a Clock of the Long Now (one gizmo, suitable for being broken by an asshole with a sledge and a grudge), or rather better, with really sophisticated celestial mechanics that teaches the best students how to track the migration of stars across the sky. It's how the heavens change that will tell them where they are in time relative to our current now, things like the movement of Alpha Centauri and Polaris, and the changing shapes of the constellations. Seeing and measuring this won't take more than Medieval tools, but it will take very careful observations with such tools. And that, in turn, means the operation will preserve some high quality math, papermaking, probably slide rules, spherical trigonometry, optics and lens-grinding for telescopes, probably basic tool making, and so forth. So keeping this one artifact, our predictions for the future for one part of Earth, in turn preserves a lot of science that will be useful, in a form that people will want to preserve it and translate it in.
That's The Foundation I'd rather send to the future.
Spin it for one-sixth gee and imagine what NASA would pay for access to cheap Lunar gravity experiments.
What radius/diameter do you need to keep humans' inner ears from going nuts and keeping everyone dizzy.
"Um, you cut a data cable and the Internet doesn't collapse.
A country cuts itself off from the Internet doesn't end the Internet.
But most importantly the Internet isn't a massive power cable with no alternate routes."
Neither is this.
We need about 25 TW. Now not all the electricity in the world will end up on an interconnect. Some will be used in the same building on which is generated. Lots will never leave the national grid. On the other hand, not all interconnects are going to run flat out. In fact, if one does, you've done something wrong, as you shouldn't be running with no reserve. Some will be connected to a country that's in darkness and not exporting, or an importer that's currently in full sun. So at a guess we'll say that the two factors balance out, which to a first approximation, they do.
So we need 25 TW of Interconnector capacity. Currently the largest in the world is 12 GW, but that figure seems to double every 5 years or so. So to a first approximation, we need at least 1000, 25 GW Interconnectors, but if there's no improvement in the art, 2000 Interconnectors. Cutting one will do nothing (except kill the people who cut it in an absolutely spectacular way). Cutting 10 will do nothing. Cutting 100 carefully chosen cables will be an annoyance. Not on the scale of brexit, but getting serious.
Currently there's are 800 oil supertankers in the world. Completely undefended. Much easier to find than a cable under 2 km of seawater.
I'm not saying that it's impossible that a determined bad actor couldn't hold the world to ransom, but rather that world trade of things already exists, is more vulnerable and no one seems to give it a second thought.
"Canada can (sadly) no longer trust the US on something so important and critical as electricity supply."
Australia (should have) learnt that lesson when we agreed to send troops to Vietnam in exchange for the USA agreeing to stop dumping subsidised wheat into our markets. The agreement lasted about to the point when the last helicopter was pushed off the side of an aircraft carrier.
The USA are ruthless liars. Lucky there's no need to trust them. If the USA betrays you, as they're wont to do and cuts off supply from Mexico, buy from South Africa, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. No one should depend on just one supplier at any time.
Not very big at all. Particularly if you reduce the apparent gravity.
Even at 1g, 60m is thought to be fine after some adaptation. At 1/6th g, 25m should be plenty.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318471827_Space_Settlement_Population_Rotation_Tolerance
In the story I wrote about this I used a tiny pipe connected to a reservoir of pitch to measure deep time. (The temperature inside deep-enough cave shouldn't vary much.)
It was 10 years away in 1950. Personally, I always thought that the cold fusion made as much sense - yes, there was only a one in a million chance of them having discovered SOMETHING (and it probably wasn't fusion) but a 1e-6 chance of success on a million dollars would have been a good investment. I.e. a breakthrough would easily be worth 1e12 dollars.
Speaking of which (missed deadlines) the James Webb Space Telescope has been pushed back again. I think they just realised that it has to be depressurised and they hadn't planned for that and it will be destroyed if it's depressurised. It can be in air, and it can be in vacuum. Just not go from one to the other.
MazDin "Wheel"? Like THIS ?? I want my future back.
Gasdive Drill some small. neat, smoothed-off holes to let the air in & out?
Sounds like a plan!
>>>>Or give Bigelow a call for the first few dozen B330's off the line as a faster, free-fall alternative?
Bigelow is dead, and no great loss, judging by the sum of evidence about the company and its leader.
That said, I'm 99% sure SpaceX is going to build space station modules using the same stainless steel ring technology they use for Starship.
The folks who have a good idea about fusion today say prototype fusion power plants (PROTO) are about eighty billion dollars away. Timescales, it depends how fast they could spend that eighty billion bucks but probably twenty years or so to first fusion in the first PROTO if the money pipeline was guaranteed.
About twenty billion dollars or so of that funding has already been agreed and is being spent right now on ITER. The EU-centred consortium made a serious mistake letting the Americans be part of the effort, given the way their unstable revolutionary governments have been throwing spanners in the works on a 4 or 8-year cycle but the rest of the nations that are actually keen on developing grid-scale fusion (if it's possible) are pressing ahead as fast as they can.
Worst case, ITER fails by proving that magnetic containment fusion can't be made to work economically at grid-scale and the world is left with a plasma research tool par excellence.
Getting back to SBSP...
The October edition of "Spaceflight", a magazine published by the British Interplanetary Society, dropped through the letterbox this morning. The cover story is a six page article titled "British Space Power" and largely discusses a recent study by Frazer-Nash Consultancy. Annoyingly the article doesn't reference the actual study results, and I can't find it online. The study title is "Space-Based Solar Power as a Contributor to Net Zero Target" and was funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy if anyone else wants to try their luck.
TL,DR: 2GW feasible for about the same cost as Hinckley C but 80% of that is upfront development and subsequent satellites ~4 billion. Heavily dependent on launch costs.
Once we DO get "fusion reactors", we won't need helium to cool fission reactors will we?
Ahem: we can achieve fusion right now and use it to manufacture Helium.
What we can't do is achieve fusion with an energy yield sufficient to power the reactor, much less deliver power to tghe grid.
But if helium somehow magically became unobtainable from natural gas wells or atmospheric fractionation, we could manufacture it -- at a stupendous cost.
#852 - And this comentatiat reacts "you have just reinvented 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' "!
The commentariat would be Simpletons if they thought that. I'm not interested in preserving science as a Revealed Truth because someone thought it was important. I could make a nickel-plated titanium copy of Genesis in multiple languages if I wanted to do that.
I'm interested in using the systems and knowledge we've developed for keeping people fed in the long term, something we're not doing a particularly good job at now. This also incidentally gives experts the tools and skills they need to navigate the world through knowledge of the sky (something we've also lost, thanks to GPS), which they'll likely need for things like trade or migration.
If you're interested in dealing with climate change, I'd very arrogantly suggest thinking a little bit less about saving the stuff that shows how great we are now, a bit more about providing the stuff the future needs.
"The folks who have a good idea about fusion today say prototype fusion power plants (PROTO) are about eighty billion dollars away. Timescales, it depends how fast they could spend that eighty billion bucks but probably twenty years or so to first fusion in the first PROTO if the money pipeline was guaranteed."
80 gigabucks? We don't need the whole of the EU and the US too just to find that really rather small sum. Compared to what the British government has spent the last few years demonstrating it is positively keen to piss away on stupid self-destructive shite... All we need to do is devise some kind of blag which can be maintained for 20 years upon the Conservative party to convince them that what is really being developed is a method for depositing a metre-thick layer of dogshit across the entire country in one night, and they'll jump at it.
Speaking of which (missed deadlines) the James Webb Space Telescope has been pushed back again. I think they just realised that it has to be depressurised and they hadn't planned for that and it will be destroyed if it's depressurised. It can be in air, and it can be in vacuum. Just not go from one to the other.
Nonsense.
Nothing to do with James Webb.
This is not a new issue - the ESA and others have been working on the issue with the Ariane 5 launch system for a couple of years now. It was discovered from past telemetry that the cargo area on the Ariane didn't fully depressurize during launch, leading to sudden depressurization when the shroud gets blown off.
While this is a particular issue for James Webb given the fragile nature of some of its components, it is also a potential danger to other Ariane cargoes.
So is Musk out to "Save the World"?
Or just a spoiled brat who refuses to obey the rules in almost any game he plays?
Well, he certainly plays the 'spoiled brat' role well on Twitter…
So is Musk out to "Save the World"?
Or just a spoiled brat who refuses to obey the rules in almost any game he plays?
Yes.
The reason that I think the meristem viral exclusion mechanism (specifically) justifies a lot more funding is that plants and humans are both eukaryotes, and it might just give us some indication of how to tackle RNA viruses more systematically.
Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier on this. I needed to look up what was going on with the meristems.
The key phrase that keeps popping up (probably due to scientific laziness in citing references) is "A biotechnological alternative to obtain large quantities of healthy plants is the isolation of meristematic tissue, since this is generally free of viruses because its active cell division reduces differentiation of vascular tissues."
So it's not a magic biochemical hack, it's a structural defense. The antiviral mechanism is that meristematic cells are getting their fluids from other live cells, rather than from dead pipes. Xylem (water-carrying cells) at maturity are literally dead pipes with sieves going off to live cells. Therefore they're viral highways through the plant, much as our circulatory cells are. Meristematic cells aren't directly connected to this vascular system. They're connected to other cells that are connected to the vascular system. Since the viruses have to infect at least one (likely multiple) cells before they get to the meristem, there's less chance that the meristem itself will get infected.
Now if you want an interesting biochemical hack, check out endoreduplication. That's doubling of chromosomes inside a cell without mitosis. Plants may use it to deal with stress, but it's a widespread cell mechanism. I'm just learning about it now.
Excuse, this is from someone who hasn't looked at it, but would you not run pipes down to the hot water/rock, and run clean water (or whatever) through the pipes, with no direct input from anything that's down there?
I'm the age each of my parents died at. However, I had cancer, and was "cured", and had a quad bypass in Feb, so the reasons they both died dealt with.
Several of my grandparents lived to their mid-eighties, so....
You mean like cryogenically-treated audio cables, for $1k for 6', for the true audiophile? (There are suckers everywhere.)
https://www.takefiveaudio.com/contents/89-cryo
So is Musk out to "Save the World"?
Or just a spoiled brat who refuses to obey the rules in almost any game he plays?
What makes you think one can't be both?
Actually, I would say that assuming the world is broken enought to need saving, anyone who obeys the rules is incapable of saving it. That's because the rules are part and parcel of what is broken.
Thanks, you've just given me an idea for a long-post-apocalyptic story, tough guy (wearing a fedora?) comes into town, looking for rumored ruined monestery that has maps, er, clay tablets that lead to a treasure of pre-apocalypse origin (which turns out to be a library of "how to build it" with "where you can find the resources".
No idea where you got that one, but it's just passed all its on-ground testing the other day, and launch is scheduled for 18 Dec.
Damn it, we can't go down - Worldcon (and we're working it) starts then.
YES! That's my future, too, and we want it back now, thankyouveddymuch.
Farnsworth demonstrated a fusion reactor in the 60s. Didn't come near to break even though (but easy to build).
However, recent developments: https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908
Sounds promising.
And from the other ocean side: https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-experiment-puts-researchers-threshold-fusion-ignition
I think this idea is pure fantasy. A manual on how to recreate a technological civilization after collapse is impossible. You'd need many thousands of books, and then many thousands of people dedicated to studying these books.
Besides, if several hundred (or even thousand) years have passed, the language will be indecipherable. There won't be any helpful Rosetta stones for future historians to find, either, because no one is making Rosetta stones in a Mad Max setting.
In short, this is BS. Any money aimed at helping people in the distant future is better used to help living people right now.
Launch is from Kourou so a bit of a trip to watch it go. NASA and ESA are likely to stream it so find a spare room with monitor and connectivity?
I think the US had plans, at least, to build gas-cooled power reactors at one time. I don't know if any were ever actually built or operated though.
Fort St. Vrain in Colorado was a high-temperature helium-cooled reactor that ran commercially off and on. All of the nuclear aspects of it worked quite well: thorium fuel, thermal efficiency, high burn-up. The big problem was moisture intrusion through a water-lubricated bearing. That would be a solved problem today.
The plant was converted to a combined cycle gas-fueled plant, reusing the steam turbines. If you know where to look, you can find the building where the half-spent last fuel load is stored in stainless steel casks in a steady state passive flow air cooled arrangement.
I wrote a story about this 3-4 years back and the conclusion I came to was that the language would have to be taught pictorially. Numbers would be easy of course, as would most nouns. it would be difficult to teach adjectives and adverbs, but not impossible. Measurements could be taught pictorially, of course. The important thing would be to teach the grammar as soon as possible, so your pictograms could be noted as adjectives, nouns, adverbs, etc. It's not impossible, and there might be misunderstandings, but it's definitely doable.
I'm not optimistic. You might be underestimating the cultural difference between the modern culture and the cultures before scientific method and rapid technological progress. The very concept that these books are meant to teach you something that can significantly change your entire civilization will be alien.
I did cheat to the point of having the receiving civilization already be literate... I should probably send that one out and see if someone will publish it.
Actually, an unknown language can be in part deciphered if there's enough text (for cryptographic analysis), it's structured with a relatively simple vocabulary (like Randall Munroe's thing explainer, and there are pictures that go along with it.
While I agree that rebuilding civilization (especially ours) is a fools' errand, passing information forward, like what the climate is likely to do, is helpful and probably can be done.
One thing to realize is that there's good evidence for multi-thousand year textural transmission (Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Euclid's Elements, etc), and verbal transmission by Australian Aborigines of information even longer. In this last case, the evidence is accurate descriptions of lands that are currently underwater, but which were not under water thousands of years ago.
The longest technology transfer we know about is probably around two million years, possibly more: that's at least how long hominids have been teaching each other to make fire. And I think that's the critical point: critical information can be saved, translated, and transferred. We don't know who first spun up a fire all those years ago, but we've inherited that part of their knowledge.
Less critical information gets lost. This is why Genesis 1 is such a bad choice for a long transmittal. Who cares what our origin myth is? Everyone has one. Similarly, there's little point in memorializing the names of politicians or oil companies either, except where that information is tied to a memorable story that relates to something more critical (like, say, where the hazardous waste dump is located and why you shouldn't go there). But how to make a fire? That's worth knowing. What makes good tinder and firewood? Also useful. And so forth. But how to make an iPhone? That probably can't been memorialized.
>>>>Actually, an unknown language can be in part deciphered if there's enough text (for cryptographic analysis), it's structured with a relatively simple vocabulary (like Randall Munroe's thing explainer, and there are pictures that go along with it.
By the time you can do anything like this, you probably have technological civilization already and don't need the help.
>>>>One thing to realize is that there's good evidence for multi-thousand year textural transmission (Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Euclid's Elements, etc)
These are all examples of textural transmission in a continuous civilization, not anything that survived a collapse. A better example is Linear A, which is still not deciphered and would probably never be.
The practical side of things tend to be forgotten but is crucial for our civilization. How do you build a mine that does not collapse? What are the signs of an imminent collapse? If the metal workers could not build a steam engine of sufficient quality, the industrial revolution would have ruptured before it even started.
"...would you not run pipes down to the hot water/rock, and run clean water (or whatever) through the pipes, with no direct input from anything that's down there?"
You would if you could but you can't so you don't...
Rock is a poor conductor of heat, so you have to be drawing the heat out of a very large volume of rock to avoid simply having it go cold on you and taking all month to heat up again. You can't just stick an ordinary heat exchanger down there and use it to keep the two sides separate; you'd never be able to make one big enough and in thermal contact with a large enough amount of rock, even if you weren't limited to what you can manage by guddling down at the end of a borehole. So you have to use the rock itself as the heat exchanger surface, by allowing the water to percolate through a huge volume of it, either by natural porosity or by artificial fracturing if there aren't enough natural fissures; you drill two boreholes some distance apart, with pipes lining the boreholes themselves but not extending beyond the bottoms of them, pump water down one, and eventually, you hope, it starts coming back up out of the other one without having lost too much leaking away through fissures that lead out of the volume you're using and head off into the deep black yonder. You have bugger all idea of what's really going on down there and even less control over it, so there is a lot of "you hope", and if you find you've ended up with a leak which is letting arsenic solution into some town's water supply, there's not a lot you can do except fix that town a water supply from somewhere else.
"Thanks, you've just given me an idea for a long-post-apocalyptic story..."
I'm sure someone's already done that. I think it goes something like seekers who have heard rumours that something of the kind might exist stumble upon these awesome deserted caverns full of dust and information after most of them have died in the search, jump a few hundred years, now the place is inhabited by a tribe of fat wankers who are using the knowledge to keep themselves in luxury and enslave half the rest of the continent...
>>>>now the place is inhabited by a tribe of fat wankers who are using the knowledge to keep themselves in luxury and enslave half the rest of the continent...
...isn't it basically what the European countries did to the rest of the world?
"By the time you can do anything like this, you probably have technological civilization already and don't need the help."
Not at all. You don't need computers, you just need it to be possible for curious people to indulge their interest in it. Look at enough of it for enough time and you will start to spot patterns, because that's what minds do. Especially if the stuff has been designed by minds that understand that point and are trying to make the patterns easy to spot, as opposed to just being a few paragraphs out of the middle of some ancient bugger's record of what they saw when they ate the funny mushrooms. If we had a few gigabytes of Linear A rather than just a few scraps, we'd have far less of a puzzle.
Rosetta Stones, to translate? And you doubt it could be done? Really? Sorry, but there are millions and millions of them, all over the place, right now, to teach a language, and I don't mean online stuff.
Let's see, one well known one starts "See Spot. See Spot run."
Or have you never seen early education books to teach kids to read?
If the metal workers could not build a steam engine of sufficient quality,
The first practical reciprocating steam engines were made mainly from wood. The pistons were sealed in the wooden cylinders with straw manure as packing material. Substitute 'barrel-makers' for 'metal workers' and you're more correct.
What about geothermal for climate control (all that lovely 50F air) rather than for energy production?
As for transmitting knowledge to the future, there's a lot of guesswork involved. How much is remembered anyway? What do they need?
How long do stainless steel knives last?
Will garbage dumps function as high grade ore?
I assume that contemporary languages might still exist to some extent. Roman numerals will exist and the concept of zero won't need to be re-invented.
Lens-making might be worth teaching.
It seems a little presumptuous to not teach them how to make mechanical clocks.
It's possible that they will still know to boil the drinking water, but it should be mentioned.
"Or have you never seen early education books to teach kids to read?"
Ones that assume there are no literate adults around to guide the kids? No I haven't.
JHomes
In the end high burnup and thermal efficiency were rendered less important thanks to the ready and continuing availability of cheap mined uranium. The British AGRs are about 41% thermally efficient and have a good burnup ratio but they're not being built any more while the Chinese, Russians and South Koreans are turning out 32%-efficient PWRs like jelly babies.
Interesting to read on the Wikipedia page that the Fort St. Vrain reactor had problems with its gas circulating pump(s). That's apparently what has delayed commissioning the Chinese HTR-PM reactors which were originally supposed to achieve first fission in 2017. The British AGRs use carbon dioxide as a coolant gas and AFAIK there have been no show-stopping issues with their pumps in production for forty years in more than a dozen reactors.
I think this idea is pure fantasy. A manual on how to recreate a technological civilization after collapse is impossible. You'd need many thousands of books, and then many thousands of people dedicated to studying these books.
I think you are over estimating things.
To get the basics of say the sciences, from high school to undergraduate - and even some doctorate level stuff - could with careful choice of texts be done in a small number of books.
Same thing with math.
That would be more than enough to bootstrap a new civilization
The hardest part would be protecting that knowledge from those who would prefer it be destroyed.
In short, this is BS. Any money aimed at helping people in the distant future is better used to help living people right now.
Ah, the constant argument from those who disagree with something - we can't do A because we should be doing B.
That ignores that we are more than capable of doing more than 1 (or even 2, etc.) things at once as a society.
The money it would take to attempt to preserve knowledge wouldn't even be a rounding error in the money to attempt to fight climate change / world hunger / choose your cause.
Really, the biggest problem wouldn't be money - it would be finding the way to keep the knowledge safe.
A long time ago, I thought of a language that did not use any form of noun or verb, where the constructs were 'attributes' and 'relations', but rapidly realised that I was neither smart enough nor determined enough to design such a thing properly.
You may get some amusement from reading up on Lojban (the successor entity to Loglan). It sounds as if you were exploring the same basic operational space as how Lojban grammar works, by attaching specifiers to core words.
I read the original Loglan book, which was great for teaching me the basic concepts but only gets in the way of me easily accessing Lojban vocabulary...
Wikipedia offers this example: For instance, the [core word] klama has the [modifiers] of:
x1: One which goes x2: The destination of a goer x3: The source of a goer x4: The route taken by a goer x5: The vehicle used by a goer
Orwell took it even further. The ultimate goal for the development of Newspeak was to reduce it to one single core word plus a great array of modifiers.
I guess my real issue is that in my experience, which includes occasionally buying "scrap," people just don't give a crap about what's in a bit of metal, and will toss it into a larger load of whatever they think they can pass it off as to maximize their payout.
Yes, definitely. And sometimes this happens to people who do care what's in the load.
A friend of mine occasionally did aluminum sand casting. (You can do this in your driveway if you live out in Far Ruraltania but it probably shouldn't be an apartment dweller hobby.) He'd get some coal burning in what was basically a well insulated bucket and slowly feed scrap aluminum into the crucible. When you have everything ready, pouring molten metal is straightforward and fun.
One day it turned out that one of the scraps was actually magnesium...
"A friend of mine occasionally did aluminum sand casting."
Also a pesticide:
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/13/5207824/anthill-art-molten-aluminum
If you're looking for books to translate, don't waste your time on college text books, long rambling explanations of things, or pretty picture books showing simple mechanisms; the people who need that sort of exposition are not those who are going to figure out how to read text that requires a 650x microscope. Stick to equations, tables of engineering data, and terse, precise explanations of basic concepts and their corollaries, that will get you past the major hurdles of bootstraping the Scientific Learning Curve.
A modern Pocket Ref will get you 90% of the way there.
A modern Engineering Handbook (or similar non-pocket general engnineering reference) will get you 99% of the way there, but at nearly 10x the size. Ok, toss in a medical reference: anantomy, treatment, drugs. It's still engineering, just on organic instead of mechanical systems.
Getting that last 1% would be the hardest. How do you plant resistance to religious dogma? The scientific method isn't all that complex, but it demands just as much if not more submission to the rules of the system as well as of ego, pride, and autonomy. As we have learned to our horror, rules of ethics and morality need to be explicitly stated and agreed upon and enforced -- that's going to be a fun one to communicate, and there's no "Ethics Handbook" (googles) ok, there are several, but we lack a simple "equations, tables, and charts" general reference because the subject is too complex, and still not generally understood. How do you provide the information to go into those forbidden chambers, find the spent nuclear fuel, extract the plutonium, and build an atomic device, but not include a convincing argument that you really, really shouldn't.
"Lens-making might be worth teaching."
I think that might be an important step. Use found glass or natural clear quartz or made glass (need to explain how to do that) to make simple lenses. Then show how to put them together to make them into telescopes and microscopes. Telescopes have immediately practical uses and microscopes might interest the nerds into looking into the nature of things.
A simple drop of water can make an unexpectedly good microscope.
Plenty of tips of that nature should be included, because they demonstrate an immediate relevance of "this stuff" to the everyday world and give people something attractive to become interested in, and if people aren't interested it doesn't matter how much stuff you have recorded.
The ultimate goal for the development of Newspeak
I thought the purpose of Newspeak was to make it impossible for people to think in a way contrary to Ingsoc.
That is so cool…
I have five anthills in my back garden that could do with that treatment.
I had a whole book on single-lens microscopy too. Leeuwhenhoek's old rigs were actually surprisingly useful. That's actually a point: magnification is good for everything from eyeglasses to pulling crap out of wounds and inspecting work for defects. Having useful lenses also necessarily entails being able to produce clear glass, which also necessarily entails having a steady source of fuel. In late Medieval England, the glassblower's guilds owned woodlands (not forests, those were for royalty) to provide the charcoal they needed for the glass furnaces.
Notice, though, that this doesn't take a huge manual to describe. Someone who's stuck with medieval levels of energy density needs to mostly know what the charcoal needs are for glass furnaces and prompted to acquire a forest, and to go from there.
They also need a grounding in glass chemistry, primarily how to identify and purify the elements needed for the glass. The lens-crafters need the relevant optics, and so it goes. But you notice how much of this stuff ties in with other industries? Setting up a monastery that monitors the shapes of constellations and the positions of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Alpha Centauri, and Polaris (and possibly a few others) sets up a trigonometry school that can help people travel immense distances, a chronological school that can help people schedule things over years, a precision metalworking school at the Renaissance level, probably based on recycling our dead infrastructure and garbage, a glassmaking industry and associated chemical industries also likely running on recycled stuff, and so on. Oh, and papermaking, printing, and mathematics (probably with slide rules and log tables). Not too shabby.
This isn't Canticle for Lebiowitz, this is trying to pay it forward, and to make the knowledge generally useful enough to enough people that they transmit it forward, rather than burying it in a dry cave somewhere, like that Clock of the Long Now or a pitch drop clock. I mean, you can do either of those, and if things get bad enough, perhaps you'll need to (hide a pitch drop system somewhere and make pilgrimages to it?). But transmitting how to tell Deep Time from the shape of the sky has some many more benefits.
As Pigeon says, a serviceable single lens "microscope" good for up to about 60x can be made with a water drop. The easiest is a small round wire loop (e.g. formed around a nail), though anything non-porous and thin with a small round hole would work and there are probably plant materials with such properties, but here's a more elaborate one (http url and perhaps not a legal copy): Water droplet lens microscope and microphotographs A compound microscope seems do-able as well. (I carry a 10X botanist's/geologist's triplet at all times, though.)
V. Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep", re rebooting civilizations, just for fun:
Elon Musk, everybody's least favourite eccentric billionaire asshole
Getting back to the original post, obnoxious question for the regulars: IQ.45 doesn't qualify as eccentric, right? Otherwise...
Elon Musk, everybody's least favourite eccentric billionaire asshole...
IQ.45 doesn't qualify as eccentric, right? Otherwise...
He may also be dismissed as not being a billionaire. Anyone who wishes to claim that title is welcome to present tax returns as evidence of net worth.
net worth
I think it's fairly widely understood that he has significantly negative net worth, although he may also have some money.
Viz, money is not the only value. Or even a very important one. Cultists notwithstanding.
I suspect Trump is a billionaire, sadly.
The more general problem is that you may be taxed on things you own. Therefore, most billionaires don't own their fortunes, they control the trusts that hold the systems that...in various recondite reparcelings, own all the intricately interweaving pieces of their fortunes.
So my guess is that if you sued Musk for all he personally owned, you'd get a few thousand out of a savings account, and that would be it. He could legitimately file bankruptcy on his personal assets after you cleaned him out. His trust managers would refuse to disburse anything out of any trust of which he's a beneficiary, simply to demonstrate that he does not control those trusts, they're under no legal obligation to cover his debts, and that would be that.
Most billionaires work in something like this way, which is why I like to compare them to D&D liches. Most of what makes them powerful isn't what they are or what they own, it's in a web of documents that to us plebs seem magical in their ability to allow them to act as if they own vast fortunes without actually owning much of anything.
And this is the critical, critical point: modern power is about control, not ownership. This is true in finance, and it's becoming true in war as well. I'm not being sarcastic or goofy for once: when you see a battle for control of something, it's a more real struggle than a struggle for ownership would be, especially if billionaires are involved.
I think it's fairly widely understood that he has significantly negative net worth, although he may also have some money.
Agreed. But as long as the cash flow keeps the payments current or he can roll over debt he can live and act large.
Currently the PACs (a uniquely US nonsense) that favor him seem to be renting all of their class AAA office space from Trump properties. And using Trump properties for hotel rooms and food services and such. With little being spent on actually politics.
So much of that fund raising to "stop the steal", "2024", etc... is going to his pockets. Via legal routes.
If he was really flush and had a net well north of $0, why doesn't he spend the money to get his plane flying again? Or is he going to walk away from that asset?
/me waiting for OGH to visit and pour some cold water on some ideas here...
How do you plant resistance to religious dogma? I keep telling you ... Hang all the priests!
Bill Arnold I always carry an old-fashioned double x5 lens in a swinging holder in my pocket - very useful for flowers - & other things.
909/910/911/912 Whatever, he's not "eccentric". He is dangerously & criminally insane
We are all doomed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58507759
Also available in the US Amazon store.
If you do a search in Amazon for the company's name you will find they have a wide range of protection devices for one and all.
I taught myself to read at age five from a "This is a cat, this is a bat" book. However, it was a phonetic alphabet for a language I knew.
I don't see how you get around that for a somewhat distant future.
How far in the future are we talking about?
Meanwhile & again.. The criminally, murderously insane loonies are at it again Surely, there must be some legal way of shutting this down & jailing a few, with horrendous fines for the rest, simply on the grounds of real public safety & health?
So, stepping slightly off the usual strange attractors of this forum, if beamed power is not practical, then what is the "has an economic return" use case for large volume launch capacity?
A: Mining. And other very dirty industry. You can land a shipment of metals from space pretty cheaply - the landing does not have to be gentle after all, it just needs to not actually catch fire.
And suddenly I am super concerned about just how anti-union Musk is.
the landing does not have to be gentle after all, it just needs to not actually catch fire.
Well yes. But it needs to be fairly precise in not landing, say, in the roaring 40s to be useful. And also it would be nice if it didn't land on top of something we consider important. Like Edinburgh.
NEW BLOG ENTRY IS UP
So, stepping slightly off the usual strange attractors of this forum, if beamed power is not practical, then what is the "has an economic return" use case for large volume launch capacity?
I suspect it really comes down to not expecting an economic return, that it really is about the goal of colonizing Mars - and if an unexpected economic use of the lift capacity appears it will be bonus.
A: Mining. And other very dirty industry. You can land a shipment of metals from space pretty cheaply - the landing does not have to be gentle after all, it just needs to not actually catch fire.
But we return to the 2 problems with space mining.
1) space is very, very big - so just getting to anything valuable and returning it to Earth is problematic
2) most minerals are valuable due to the constraints on supply - suddenly dumping the market will depress the price.
That being said, while it would have an impact on employment in mining industries on Earth if we could find a way to get essential materials from space and thus avoid blowing up mountain tops and otherwise strip mining (and the resulting environmental damages) to get our raw materials that would be a huge accomplishment.
Pigeon @ 831:
Certainly there are. In one sense you could use any gas you felt like, but most of them are obviously silly choices for cooling anything for quite everyday reasons.
Helium has the advantage that it is as close to inert to nuclear reactions as you get, so you don't have to worry about it turning into something nasty and then leaking out, nor do you have to worry about it pinching neutrons out of the chain reaction (not that that is particularly significant at gaseous densities of substance).
[ ... ]
It sort of reminds me of silver vs. copper for electrical conductors. One is excellent while the other is merely very good, but the very good one is nearly always perfectly adequate, and only in exceptional situations do you actually need to use the excellent one.
Yeah, I don't really care about the "silly choices". I was just wondering about possible "perfectly adequate" substitutes.
"OK, my parents were around, but I effectively taught myself to read aged 3."
Much the same here. By the time I got to school I had moved on to spelling reform, and used to drive the teachers up the wall by knowing the conventional spellings better than anyone but deliberately refusing to use them on the grounds that they were silly, and spelling everything phonetically instead.
(I fell in love with Bascule by the end of the first paragraph...)
Carbon dioxide, then, as Nojay and I have said.
On fusion: also take a look at the Wendelstein 7-X. Its a stellarator, which gets around the problems of tokomaks by putting a series of half-twists into the plasma. Unfortunately this has a bunch of vices of its own. Fortunately they can be minimised by applying a sufficiently large amount of CPU time to optimisation. The 7-X is a proof-of-concept device to verify that the calculations have worked. It will never do any actual fusion, but it is well on the way to demonstrating sufficient plasma confinement that would lead to ignition if it used tritium and had all the other bits required.
"I keep telling you ... Hang all the priests!"
Doesn't work. It just means you get a new religious dogma which is all about hanging priests.
Then once you have hanged all the priests, the Calcrafts get bored, and to keep themselves occupied, expand the definition of a priest to include any kind of thinker of unworldly thoughts, such as scientists, or people who prefer looking at trees and flowers to spoil heaps and streams of orange water.
That was the purpose of developing it; I'm talking about the pattern they had decided on for how the mechanics of the thing they were developing were intended to work.
Scaling up tends to be where fusion experiments break. The early days of fusion got quite good results with magnetic mirror systems[1] for maintaining a plasma hence the rather premature "too cheap to meter" claims in the 1950s. Once the plasma densities and temperatures got high enough the MM demostrators failed with the plasma leaking though the ends The original Stellarators were an attempt to get around this by having no ends in the plasma that needed mirroring, basically. The simpler Tokamaks took the lead in the 1960s after the Russian experimenters published their promising results in the West.
ITER is power-station-scale (although not full-sized), a step up from any of the smaller Tokamaks like the JT-60A and JET. That further step up in scale might introduce interesting new failure modes (Ph.D.s all round!) or it might not, we don't know. That's what makes it so much fun!
We know that stellar-scale fusion works and it's sort-of stable for long periods of time. Finding a Goldilocks intermediate is the trick if we want to derive electrical energy (and maybe district heating too) from fusion on Earth.
[1] Has anyone heard anything more about that super-trick new magnetic mirror truck-mounted fusion power plant that GE was supposed to be releasing Any Day Now a few years back? It got some press and it was even mentioned approvingly on this august blog, then nothing.
Heteromeles @ 912 And this is the critical, critical point: modern power is about control, not ownership.
This was one of the key themes in the last third of "Citizen of the Galaxy" by Heinlein.
It began to dawn on him that control and ownership were only slightly related; he had always thought of “ownership” and “control” as being the same thing; you owned a thing, a begging bowl, or a uniform jacket—of course you controlled it!
I always find it slightly quaint to hear socialists talk about "social ownership of the means of production". Modern capitalism regards owning things as a pesky nuisance best done either by specialist companies, or better yet by the workers themselves (who of course have to borrow money to gain that ownership). Hence that delivery van dropping off your Amazon parcel might well be owned by the driver, or perhaps by his immediate boss (who might own a few vans and directly employ the drivers). Having the delivery company logo painted on it is of course an expense that the contract places firmly on the shoulders of the van owner, not the delivery company. And as for fast-food franchises...
For a more documentary take on the topic, see "Moneyland" by Oliver Bullough.
But if they adults are literate, are you suggesting that no one could realize "this is a book for teaching children the language!"?
They are Rosetta Stones.
"...employment in mining on Earth".
Let's see, 1970, US people employed in mining, 780k. Currently, 76k, due to automation and strip mining.
Or it's been referred to as the "war on coal miners" (by the companies).
Which is why my political book, when I finally get around to writing it, will have socialism as control of the capital that controls production and distribution.
JReynolds @ 834:
If I live as long as my dad did, I'll make it to just past New Year's, 2049. So 27 years and change.
If the climate goes kablooie, lots of long supply chains snap like chains made of tissue paper. So no complex medicines or machinery. Also, probably no food. A better question might be "approximately where would you like your refugee camp to be located?"
I'd like to be wrong.
I hope you are, but ain't none of us getting outta' here alive anyway.
My dad died at age 54, so I've already lived 18 years longer than he did. His father died at age 70 and his mother at age 72. I'm 72 now. So that's one side of my heritage.
My mom was 93 and she managed to live independently right up until the last week or so of her life. Hospice provided assistance so we were able to care for her in her own home when those last weeks came. That's what she wanted. Her family mostly lived into their 90s, with one great-great-grandmother who supposedly made it to 105. So that's the other side ...
If I do live 20 more years, I'll be 92. It all depends on how long I might be able to take care of myself well enough to live independently. I'm figuring somewhere between 10 and 20 years.
I don't have anyone who can assist me to remain independent, and I definitely have no one who will care for me when the end comes, so I know I'm going into some "care facility" where I can be neglected to death. Don't know how long I will be able to endure that.
If/when the climate does go "kablooie" I won't be any worse off here than I would be trying to make a new life somewhere else. At least here I have a place.
I'm reading Seeds of Life about the very challenging effort it took to figure out how human reproduction works on the anatomical and cellular level. It was very difficult, especially since at the beginning, people didn't even know about the existence of cells.
I don't know whether the basics about sperm and eggs are likely to be forgotten, but presumably the information should be included just in case.
The real challenge would be explaining what an experiment is and why it's important.
Zane @ 849:
As Pigeon and Dave point out, it's not just water. Also, we use fracking to open up a geothermal reserve to exploitation in almost exactly the same way we use it to open up an insufficiently porous oil reservoir. In the geothermal case, the fluids that are down there are generally way more unpleasant to deal with than the biocides used in fracking fluid.
A big problem with a lot of the 'lets drill into this hot rock and make it into a geothermal station' is that in many cases the reason there isn't a surface expression of the heat to use for a more traditional shallow sourced geothermal plant is because the rock is insufficiently permeable to allow that to happen, so you have to frack it anyway. And the problem is that a lot of the time, after you frack it, you discover that the fracking didn't go the way you wanted, so either your hot fluid is going somewhere else you inadvertently fracked open, and not your exit borehole, or your entry borehole, if you are pumping cold fluids down to get hot and then use, doesn't communicate with your exit no matter how carefully you did your fracking. We're getting way better at it with directional drilling these days, but it's still not as easy as it sounds.
How about if you used a double walled tube sealed at the bottom. Pump your water down from the surface through the inside tube and let it pick up heat where it turns to steam and returns to the surface through the outer tube? In addition to using the steam to turn a turbine, if the water got hot enough might it dissociate into hydrogen & oxygen ... capture the hydrogen to burn in another turbine?
I wonder if you could use the same process for desalinating water?
expand the definition of a priest to include any kind of thinker of unworldly thoughts, such as scientists, or people who prefer looking at trees and flowers to spoil heaps and streams of orange water.
Cultural Revolution anyone?
Also what happened in the US Evangelical movement. Once the SBC conservative resurgence had purged all the liberals (as they defined them) from their seminaries they didn't know how to stop. And 30 years on their kids are keeping the movement going. And look where they are now.
are you suggesting that no one could realize "this is a book for teaching children the language!"?
If I follow your logic I think you're mistaken. Those books are for youngsters who have been immersed in a language being spoken around them for several years.
That would not be true for the Foundation library.
If you look at what is known about geothermal spots it is very messy down there. Many times the water/steam you see comes from a mile or more down. In a complicated reaction where the weight of the water holds things in place till the pressure/temp of the water at the bottom causes it to flash over into steam. Then the tourists go "ahhhhhhh". And cooler water flows into the "pipe" and it starts again. Sort of. Maybe. Kind of.
Iceland is basically a huge volcano with lots of normal sized volcano spread all over. And while they get a lot of their power from geothermal it is still only 25%. The rest is hydro.
I have to wonder what the maintenance of those systems is like. And how much of it goes to district heating setups vs. electrical power generation.
Auricoma @ 880: I think this idea is pure fantasy. A manual on how to recreate a technological civilization after collapse is impossible. You'd need many thousands of books, and then many thousands of people dedicated to studying these books.
Besides, if several hundred (or even thousand) years have passed, the language will be indecipherable. There won't be any helpful Rosetta stones for future historians to find, either, because no one is making Rosetta stones in a Mad Max setting.
In short, this is BS. Any money aimed at helping people in the distant future is better used to help living people right now.
I agree that the best way to serve a post apocalyptic future is to do all we can to prevent the apocalypse, but disagree with your contention that today's languages will be indecipherable. Archeologists are deciphering Linear B and there seems to be some progress on Linear A. The Rosetta Stone wasn't intended to provide a future key to lost languages, it was just a decree published in three extant languages of the day and just about everything published by the government today in the U.S. is a potential "Rosetta Stone" - English & Spanish ... or published in Canada in English & French ...
It wouldn't be just a how to manual, it would be a whole how to library. The only area for dispute is what material would be the most likely to survive.
Maybe publish our post-apocalyptic Whole Earth Catalog by impressing the letters into clay tablets?
The vox pieced linked above, Trevayne #812, is pretty readable and detailed. Here's the full link: Geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout - “An engineering problem that, when solved, solves energy.” (David Roberts@drvolts Oct 21, 2020)
Greg Tingey @ 919: Meanwhile & again..
The criminally, murderously insane loonies are at it again
Surely, there must be some legal way of shutting this down & jailing a few, with horrendous fines for the rest, simply on the grounds of real public safety & health?
If they're making fake government publications that might be a crime. What does the law in the U.K. say about forgery?
Then once you have hanged all the priests, the Calcrafts get bored, and to keep themselves occupied, expand the definition of a priest to include any kind of thinker of unworldly thoughts, such as scientists, or people who prefer looking at trees and flowers to spoil heaps and streams of orange water.
Which is pretty much how French Revolution morphed into Reign of Terror.
BTW, what English-speaking historians call "Reign of Terror", Russian historians call by a single word. Its closest translation into English is "choppery".
I think it is wonderfully descriptive.
Auricoma's missed some important points, I think.
Linear A uses symbols similar to those of Linear B. Problem is, when translated, they give back gibberish, not old Greek. The obvious conclusion is that the Linear B people were really annoyed at the Linear A people and scrambled their syllabary to spite them.
But there wasn't a rosetta stone to translate Linear B. That got worked out the hard way. Ditto with Mayan. The important part about the Rosetta stone was that people trying to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics prior to that thought the symbols were ideograms, just as they did in Chinese. They're not, they're logograms that represent sound. That was the chief breakthrough needed (and it was also needed for westerners to learn to read Chinese and Mayan).
But where there's no Rosetta Stone, the key is the number of symbols and references to pictures or other objects that can be identified. Then it's just really tedious.
In the case of Linear A and almost all undeciphered scripts (excepting the Voynich), there isn't much to work with. The Linear A corpus consists of "1,427 specimens totaling 7,362 to 7,396 signs...If scaled to standard type, would fit easily on two sheets of paper." And there are 84 known symbols. You can do the math, but most writing specimens have around 5 symbols on them. That's pretty normal for undeciphered scripts. It's also true for Vinca, Harappan, the Phaistos disk, and Rongo Rongo. The weird cases are things like the Voynich Manuscript and the Rohonc Codex, both of which are likely forgeries.
Incidentally, if you want to goof around with undeciphered scripts, check out https://omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm
But that's the point: if you set up picture books that deliberately use standardized vocabulary, it's likely possible that they could be translated. It's even more true if it's stuff that's extremely useful and not immediately obvious, so that people have a reason to want to transmit it and translate it. Euclid's Elements is a good example of this. So ideally, you don't want to just make the Dictionary of Civilization, you want to create a Foundation that maintains the libraries that hold it, the schools that teach it, and the printshops that copy it.
"Choppery."
Good to know, thanks. It's pretty similar to the Cultural Revolution, for that matter. IIRC, it's akin to the original Byzantine iconoclasm, and I'm sure it goes back much further than that (Akhenaton?).
I'd point out, for Greg's benefit, that priest is an Anglicization of presbyter, which is Greek for elder. So, effectively, an old man saying "first we hang all the elders" might be a bit surprised by what happens next. This old rallying cry fits a little better with students singing "We don't need no education..."
Coming back to my other point: you need a significant civilization in place to be able to decipher ancient languages.
So we are talking about a post-collapse civilization that already went back up to the 18th century level or more. What are we going to tell them? Don't burn oil?
So we are talking about a post-collapse civilization that already went back up to the 18th century level or more. What are we going to tell them? Don't burn oil?
Johannes Gutenberg lived 1400-1468, so you're about 300 years off. And that's moveable type. Woodblock printing was invented by the Chinese in 220 AD and used on paper in the 7th Century. That's all you really need if you're going to print it. Papermaking with climate change? Try fields of hemp.
As for what we're going to tell them, we'll start by saying that trolling is counterproductive and go from there.
Lens grinding: Never mind microscopes and telescopes. Simple eyeglasses add decades to the working life of expensively-trained scholars.
Where do you get the 18th century? Anyone after the early Greeks would understand a single panel with a picture of a dog with the word "dog" printed underneath. Also, consider something important; there's no need to understand how to pronounce the language.
The next panel show two dogs, and underneath we print "2 dogs." Now we've taught a number and the plural form! (Skipping lots of panels here.)
The next panel shows a dog running. The text reads "dog running." Now we've got a good example of a verb. So the next panel doesn't have a picture. It contains two lines. The first line reads "dog: noun" the second line reads "running: verb" Now we can identify parts of speech!
And so on. This is absolutely not rocket science!
We could actually teach pronunciation by engraving the vibrations for each world at the bottom of the panel and providing a tool to run over the engraved vibrations.
The big problem here would be making sure that everything is spelled according to a fully-phonetic alphabet. In other words, "enough" would be spelled "enuf" and so forth.
Coming back to my other point: you need a significant civilization in place to be able to decipher ancient languages.
Maybe, maybe not.
Get an enlightened noble/whatever a future civilization has to provide funding, or simply a small group (aka monastery) where those who are intellectually curious can pursue their curiosity while being fed and housed (and left alone) and given time a small group in otherwise primitive conditions - to our modern view - can achieve a lot.
So we are talking about a post-collapse civilization that already went back up to the 18th century level or more. What are we going to tell them? Don't burn oil?
Given that there is unlikely to be any oil that they can access we probably don't need to warn them about that, though a message about the greenhouse effect might be wise given we can't predict what they will end up doing/burning.
But more generally we avoid the arrogance of believing we have anything as specific as that to tell them - for we have know way of knowing what their situation will be, either in terms of knowledge or living conditions.
The point of any such endeavour is to provide the building blocks for rebuilding so that they can either continue to follow to more advanced knowledge we leave them, or they pursue their own paths.
Give them things like calculus, or the chemical tables and relationships, and let them see where it takes them.
Give them knowledge of radiation - so they don't repeat our mistakes of thinking things like x-rays are healthy and can be used for routine things like fitting shoes.
Give them astronomical records - because they current belief is that we are living in a privileged age and in the future a lot of what we can currently view will disappear from our ability to observe - and the knowledge we have from them.
Give them diagrams for building tools and machines that, while primitive to us, could be very beneficial to them (think abacus, slide rule, telescope, microscope, cotton gin, or even maps of what the earth currently looks like).
Yes, some of this stuff may be of no use to them - either because they are already more developed or because it is still in their long term future.
But when you can't make assumptions, you err on the side of too much.
Because at the end of the day it's about offering the future a potential at moving beyond mere subsistence if our worst fears turn out to be true.
My thanks to everybody who has commented on geothermal power and given me a better idea of the technical issues. I will try to find out some more myself.
I realize the issues dealing with high temperature and high-pressure water are difficult, especially after it has been contaminated by whatever is in the rocks. Anytime you affect water deep down you should be considering contamination, although while fracking goes where they think they can get oil, it seems to me that geothermal could be done nearly anywhere, and if you are worried about contaminating water, just use a cased pipe at least 50 miles or so from any community. Going a kilometer or two below the aquifer would help as well.
After acknowledging the issues, I still have to wonder.
Given that we have spent 40-50 years and many billions of dollars pursuing fusion, how difficult are the technical problems with geothermal compared with the well-known issues around fusion? How far would we be if a tenth of that money had gone to researching solutions to the problems with geothermal?
Given that we have spent 40-50 years and many billions of dollars pursuing fusion, how difficult are the technical problems with geothermal compared with the well-known issues around fusion? How far would we be if a tenth of that money had gone to researching solutions to the problems with geothermal?
Remember that a lot of the money spent (both by governments and oil companies) on improving drilling and fracking for fossil fuels also applies to geothermal, so simply looking at direct geothermal research amounts won't tell the whole story.
My understanding, probably wrong, was that fusion's pretty far down on the list of technologies that have had money dumped on them. At least, that was the complaint of some fusion backers. I think they're right, compared with fossil fuels. Whether they're right compared with wind or solar, I'm not sure.
But I don't think geothermal has gotten much love either, although the idea of using home geothermal heating (using the soil under your home to dump heat or possibly pull up heat) seems to be more popular.
The thing that rots my intellectual shorts is how little effort architects are putting into making efficient homes. I just saw a new fourplex going in. In 2021. In San Diego. With roofs that are minimally suitable for solar (per code, they'll support a few panels), but which look cool. I know it's a vain wish for people to get their slapped in for drooling the phrase "it looks cool" when buying a home, but when the unit costs a half million to 1.5 million and will likely be uninhabitable during a power failure, buying a kewl-looking, inefficient home is stoopid. I don't know how to get buyers and homeowners to wise up without multiple disasters*, but I guess that's what we're stuck with. As for the developers who build them, I'd hope there's a suburb in the Fourth Circle of Hell just for them.
/Rant.
*People are rebuilding with wood-framed homes where the old ones burned down. I'd strongly suggest reading the freaking building codes and finding out that "building to code" in no way promises that your building will be fireproof, only that it will be minimally fire resistant.
But more generally we avoid the arrogance of believing we have anything as specific as that to tell them - for we have know way of knowing what their situation will be, either in terms of knowledge or living conditions.
I assume you mean "no way of knowing?" That's what I'd disagree with.
Two years ago, I was talking with a high-level climatologist out of Scripps, and grumbling about chill hours in fruit, and how that can't be modeled. Chill hours are hours below a certain temperature, and they're critical for things like apples to ripen properly.
His response was that they were planning to get the resolution to model nightly hours of chilling "in two iterations of the models." What that means is that they're very, very far beyond mean annual temperatures, and they're starting to look at how to do daily temperatures. In global climate models.
Now I don't think they'll get these precisely right (see the current rain forecasts on Accuweather), but I suspect they'll get increasingly close.
What does that mean for the course of our changing climate? Well, it almost certainly means that they've been able to guestimate global annual temperatures for the next 100,000 years for around 10 years now, and several years ago they were able to do regional models for thousands of years. This is what Zane was referring to when he said that East Antarctica probably won't entirely melt. That's old news.
We've likely got another good decade of model development, perhaps two or three even under the worst circumstances, so I suspect we'll have good regional annual predictions going out 100,000 years about the time those reading are dying off. The best generation models will become increasingly unreliable as millennia roll by on (volcanoes happen, after all), but there will likely be halfway decent warnings for Black Flag lethal humidity as long as that lasts (a few millennia), Meganinas and Meganinos, ice sheet loss not due to volcanoes (that's also only a few millennia), and so forth. It's enough to know whether your nice dryland farming area is setting up for a few decades of bumper harvests (so build a town) or is lining up for a megadrought (so leave).
Assuming we get these models, we really should try to send them forward into deep time, especially if it looks like the computer infrastructure needed to generate them won't survive. The Descendants can use this information, and they can't really generate it on their own. I'd argue that trying to tell them is fair, especially considering we caused the mess in the first place.
I don't know how to get buyers and homeowners to wise up without multiple disasters*, but I guess that's what we're stuck with. As for the developers who build them, I'd hope there's a suburb in the Fourth Circle of Hell just for them.
Well meet my dad. In the 60s/70s he built/remodeled houses as a second job. In 69 he bought some land and subdivided it and went on a serial one house at a time build. Over the 10 year stretch he barely made above inflation when others were earning nice sums. He put money into the steak of his houses. The other folks put it into sizzle.
The sizzle sold over the steak 95% or more of the time.
It's not just solar and such. It's HVAC ducting, network wiring, window placement, underlayment for carpet, and on and on and on. Things that no one (I guess but me) notices until they've lived in the house a year or so.
In my current neighborhood there are about 10 houses being built over tear downs at any one time. I like to walk through them just before the drywall goes up to see just how they are made.
Pisses me off but what's under the drywall and flooring has no impact on the sale.
...think abacus, slide rule, telescope, microscope, cotton gin, or even maps of what the earth currently looks like...
It hasn't come up on this thread, but an abacus will be much easier to assemble from random parts than a slide rule. Scribing accurate logarithmic scales was a real hassle back in the day (a scribing engine was invented about the turn of the century, making them much cheaper), whereas mounting beads on sticks is very simple. If necessary a perfectly good abacus can be slapped together without any precision craftsmanship anywhere and broad tolerances for pretty much everything.
I'd want to start people with a Chinese suanpan or Japanese soroban though, if only because the Roman counting tray was kind of shit.
I don't have enough understanding of the yupana to have an opinion on using them but they seem generally similar to the Roman scheme.
what's under the drywall and flooring has no impact on the sale
Of course not, as you can't see it and have only the seller's word that it's there. (OK, a home inspection can verify some of it, but not all of it.)
I quite agree on the use of an abacus. The big difference between an abacus and a Roman counting table or Inkan yupana is that the latter two lack zeroes. If you want full digital, you need an abacus. And you can make them in any number base, too.
Thing is, slide rules, and nomography more generally, are perhaps better for approximating nonlinear math relationships than an abacus is. So ideally you want both, analog nomographic systems and digital abaci for calculations. Both are easier to make than a digital computer, although digital computers can be far superior in capacity.
nomography pdf.
I'd also point out that this is a both-and approach, not an either or. We should be trying to decarbonize and get to a high-tech, high-population, sustainable Earth. Failing that, we should keep our species alive (I'll get to why in a second), and try to create stuff that helps make their lives sustainably easier, from crops to compasses.
Why should we strive to not go extinct? One of the really common cop-outs is that humans are irredeemably evil, so we shouldn't be saved from the fruits of our climate follies. And since we can't be saved (note the shouldn't to can't), therefore we should continue with life as usual until we get our just deserts and the baptized go to heaven because John Wesley (not the Bible) said they would (AFAIK). This makes the difficult but potentially solvable problem of dealing with climate change that much harder, because it gives freeloaders a fallacious excuse to cause trouble.
As for what people can do now to save the planet, some thoughts include:
--Not having children (saves around 30 tons CO2/year per scion) --Not driving (saves a few tons of CO2/year, even with an electric car, although not gassing up saves a lot more, obviously) --Not flying, especially thousands of kilometers (London to Los Angeles round trip blows 1650 kg of CO2 emitted).
Things like vegan diets and recycling are well down on the list.
So, for the science fiction community, one of the biggest things we can do to decrease our carbon footprints is to celebrate international conventions in many locales across the globe simultaneously, rather than have everybody travel long distances and encourage them to play tourist. Then, normalize celebrities Zooming to events, rather than flying. Encouraging thousands of people fly around is the most polluting thing the community does. Yes, I'd like to see New Zealand (or wherever) too, but I've learned that when you say "I love a place," it's worth distinguishing whether I mean "I'd like to blow mass quantities of GHGs to be there for a few days" or "I'd love for that place to survive the 21st Century somewhat intact." I'm a partisan of the latter, although apparently that makes me an antisocial asshole in the eyes of a number of people.
For some further input on geothermal - there has been production geothermal generation in Aotearoa NZ since at least 1958 with apparently 900MW of installed electricity generation capacity - refer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_New_Zealand as a starting point - and also explore some of the links there.
In NZ geothermal is only done in specific areas where the conditions are deemed to be right, not all over the country.
Meant to respond to a much earlier comment, but that's so long ago (been engaged elsewhere for a bit due to reasons) it doesn't even make sense now. In response to this one: yes, agree with the order expressed here. Many things just won't matter, at a world level. Some things that don't still will matter a lot at a local level. But power is a substantial issue. It seems that most issues at the moment boil down to "those guys are fuckers", and the solution isn't readily accessible.
David L @ 956: Pisses me off but what's under the drywall and flooring has no impact on the sale.
In Economics this is known as The Market for Lemons (lemon in the automotive sense). Its a nice bit of economic thinking, it won the Nobel prize, and it completely skewers the idea that the free market is anything other than a collection of spherical cows in a vacuum.
I won't bother explaining the concept further because you have already provided a perfect example.
Probably a good time to repeat the disconnect between markets and capitalism. The latter does not require the former, basically, and works best when it controls them completely.
But I don't think geothermal has gotten much love either, although the idea of using home geothermal heating (using the soil under your home to dump heat or possibly pull up heat) seems to be more popular.
Heat pump heating isn't really "geothermal power", it's using a heat pump. You can have a heat pump that uses the soil under your home as a reservoir of heat, you can use a heat pump that uses the air around your home as a reservoir of heat. The former is much more reliable, the latter is much cheaper. But it is still a form of electric heating, it's just incredibly efficient electric heating. People do sometimes call a heat pump with a ground source "geothermal" but it is misleading, IMO.
Geothermal power/heating uses the internal heat of the Earth as the source of energy (so, really, it's nuclear power, because internal heat of the planet is driven by radioactive decay along with residual heat from the formation of the Solar System ;-)), heat pumps have to be supplied by some source of electricity: fossil, renewable or nuclear.
Probably a good time to repeat the disconnect between markets and capitalism. The latter does not require the former, basically, and works best when it controls them completely.
This ignores the difference between capitalists and capitalism. Under socialism there is no such disconnect: a good socialist should do whatever makes socialism work better. The capitalist under capitalism is not so constrained.
Individual capitalists are supposed to maximise their profits. ("supposed" isn't a moral imperative, just an assumption about how people tend to behave). In a pure free market this is apt to end with a small number of individuals owning everything and reducing everyone else to peons, but that isn't capitalism "working best", it is actually a reversion to feudalism. To the extent that capitalism is an ideology, that is it's antithesis.
To prevent this outcome, and to allow market mechanisms and capitalism as a system to continue functioning, we have the regulatory state. This deals with all the non-spherical aspects of cows that breathe air.
Libertarians argue that the regulatory state is merely a dead weight on the creative engines of capitalism. They are deluded. The question is not whether we have a regulatory state, it is which regulations it needs to enforce.
Unfortunately the idea of "government red tape" as a universally Bad Thing has provided those on the Economic Right with a handy tool to bash any regulations that they find personally inconvenient, while of course supporting other regulations that inconvenience potential competitors.
As I have said here many times before, there are lots of issues with our current mixed model of regulated capitalism, and I'll be happy to support a replacement system just as soon as someone comes up with one that doesn't run on rainbows and unicorns.
nomography pdf.
That link doesn't work for me. Any chance of getting a URL?
That link is to a file location on H's hard drive. That's hard for any of us to get to.
Oops.
Something I was discussing in the comments a few days ago, the No. 1 reactor of the HTR-PM nuclear plant at Shidaowan in China has achieved first criticality according to news reports.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinas-HTR-PM-reactor-achieves-first-criticality
One down, another 149,999 to go to a fossil-fuel-free future. Are we there yet?
So by not having children, I'm already ahead of the game enough to fly once a year and still have a lower footprint than my friends and family. Useful to know next time someone with four kids and a couple of minivans tries to guilt-trip me about flying to see my family…
Fortunately, it's hard for you to get to my hard drive. Sorry about that.
Anyway, I was just casting around for an explainer on what nomography is. Google's perfectly cromulent for that. Or you can try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram
In any case, you've likely used nomograms without realizing that's the proper name for the technique. Nomography produces graphical analog computers, and these are akin to slide rules, without the moving parts. If you're talking about a lower-tech future that has slide rules, might as well include nomograms and nomography too.
Do you know of a good explainer on how to create them? All I've found is documentation on a program that does it, that I don't know enough about programming* to get running.
*At least, programming in modern environments. I can still remember how to program a C-64!
Well, there's this pdf...
Here's a better link to it: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-brief-introduction-to-nomography%3A-graphical-of-Glasser-Doerfler/f111d82378a36029d9ceebe613b69c4669b387fd
That said, it's not a recipe book, but an introduction. It's an old field (technically, sundials are nomographs), so I'd start hunting the references listed in the Nomogram Wikipedia page.
For those teaching math and/or art off-screen, I'd point out that this may be a really nice way for people to try to understand equations by figuring out how to solve them graphically.
Thanks, but $53 US is pretty steep for an introduction…
Not having institutional access often makes research much more difficult. I didn't know what I had until I lost it upon retirement. :-/
That semantic scholar page has two links. One is free (the font is horrible, though, at least in my browser.). Often also good to search scholar.google.com for the title, and then show all versions; some may have a link.
Also, depending on how much rule(copyright) breaking you're willing to do, sci-hub(wikipedia link) still works. A jailed browser and/or pdf viewer is advisable (also in general). (e.g. ubuntu: firejail, windows: https://sandboxie-plus.com/ (also an associated github project) I've only used the old sandboxie; seems to work.) Use the Tor browser (or equivalent) if you don't want to be trivially trackable.
Just opening up the free pdf in firefox worked reasonably well.
I know about nomograms.
I had a whole book of them for figuring out various things like yields for nuclear bursts (based on time of detonation, air or surface burst, cloud height at T+5min, cloud width at T+10 min); downwind hazards for rad exposure (projected rad contours); transmission factors for various military vehicles (tanks have more steel to block radiation, but you're closer to contaminated ground than you are up in the cab of a 5-ton truck ...) & when it would be "safe" for troops to cross a contaminated area and how long they could stay inside it while doing so (without exceeding a given radiation guidance).
Question for my land nav students: If you are trying to identify the location of a nuclear detonation by compass readings, which method is preferred - Intersection or Resection?
I had a fairly productive day today. Went over to the VA hospital in Durham.
Got my flu shot, had my hand X-rayed and got some spots on my neck & face sprayed with nitrogen so they'll eventually fall off & stop bothering me ... no skin cancers, so I don't have to see the dermatologist for another 2 years (unless something pops up that worries me enough to make an appointment sooner).
I have an appointment Wednesday to get my Jeep into the shop to have the AC repaired. Gonna' take a couple of days because they have to remove the dashboard to get at the leaking evaporator, but I should have it back by Friday.
Went ahead and got my grocery shopping done on the way home from the VA hospital, so there's no where I need to go for the rest of the week while my car's in the shop.
One link asked me to log in or pay. The other did nothing. Maybe my browser is too old? (Firefox 78.14Osr, the latest that runs on this old computer.)
Check your email. Sorry this is such a problem.
In Economics this is known as The Market for Lemons (lemon in the automotive sense)...
It's not wrong either. I remember my father advising me that it was better to buy a used car from an individual than a used car lot, on the theory that you might wind up with a lemon anyway but it wasn't the private seller's job to cheat you.
On the whole it's worked too. I've only wound up with one true lemon car in my life. To this day I'm not sure how much was bad luck and how much was known; my immediate supervisor at work told me in no uncertain terms that I needed a car for the job, and she was the one who pointed me at the person who sold me the lemon.
OTOH, whilst I can't speak for the USian market, in the UK you have many more legal protections buying from a dealership than from a private buyer.
Interesting ... Previous to the L-R I had always bought privately - one-&-a-half were lemons, the other 3 were v. good. But, I bought the L-R from a specialist seller, who had bought the L-R VERY cheaply. ( The previous owner/idiot had failed to do up the sump drain properly, after 96 000 miles. ) So I got a 7-yr old L-R with a fully reconditioned engine ....
in the UK you have many more legal protections buying from a dealership than from a private buyer.
True, but that is not what this is about. Cars are merely an example. The more general principle is "asymmetrical information". In the car example, the seller knows things about the car that the buyer does not and has no realistic way of finding out.
Imagine for simplicity that there are two kinds of cars; good runners and lemons. Good runners are worth $20,000, but lemons are only worth $10,000. The seller knows which kind he has got, but the buyer has no idea. The buyer might estimate that half of cars are lemons, and so offer a price of $15,000 on the grounds of expected value. If the seller has a good runner then he will refuse the deal because he loses $5,000, but if he has a lemon then he will accept because he gets $5,000 extra.
So as a result the lemons drive the good runners off the market. Anyone with a good runner can't sell it for its true value, so the only cars for sale are lemons. Conversely nobody is going to pay $20,000 for a car because they know they will only wind up paying over the odds for a lemon.
Of course in reality there are ways in which car buyers can get more information about the cars they are buying, yada yada. Like I say, this isn't really about cars, its about the issue of asymmetrical information. If the two people making a bargain don't have the same information about the underlying facts then the market becomes inefficient; everyone wants good runners, but nobody can get them.
Likewise in the housing example by David L @ 956. Customers have no way of knowing what is in behind the drywall or under the floor. Conversely the builder has no way of proving it to them. So it becomes impossible for builders to offer better houses, or for buyers to find them.
(There may also be an issue with buyer education here: building codes are complicated and house buyers have enough other issues to juggle with as it is.
The only solution to this is for the government to lay down codes for new buildings. Unfortunately those codes tend to get written by the builders themselves.
I cannot stand artificial spellings, and find them unreadable (e.g. Feersum Injun), but have no problem with Elizabethan (the first) variations and not too much with Chaucerian. But reading is entirely pattetrn recognition for me, translation into sounds takes effort, and I know too many variations on how syllables are pronounced. So artificial spellings force me to go through all of that, and THEN translate back into patterns, so I can understand the word!
Thanks. I will look at Lojban. But the purpose of my thought experiment was actually to get away from the nouns and verbs that are common to all natural languages, rather than what replaces them.
The co-narrator in question in Feersum Injin was spelling phonetically.
Re Phonetic Spelling:
Who decides what is the correct pronunciation? Spelling is effectively arbitary since different dialects/accents use different pronunciations for the same word. Is "Book" a phonetic spelling, many people I know would say "Buk" was closer. My friend from Gloustershire catches public transport at a "Buzz Starp" but writes it Bus Stop.
If the objective is to teach people to read, rather than to speak, so as to transmit information standardised spellings are fine so long as they are consistent with the information.
I can't read "phonetic" fluently so I found those parts of Feersum Injin incomprehensible when I attempted to read the book and I eventually gave up on the whole thing. If anyone has produced a version with those sections translated into English, even in dialect form I might be willing to give it another go.
Workplace quality is a huge asymmetrical information quality problem. It's difficult to identify what are good places to work, but workplace quality has a large effect on quality of life.
There are languages which are "Phonetic" in the sense that, once one has learnt the rules for that language, one cam ( In theory ) speak it, even if your grammar & possibly vocabulary is crap. Like German ... except my GErman is amazingly old-fashioned in comparison to much modern pronunciation. I sound as the equivalent of a 1950's BBC formal announcer when I speak Deutsch (!)
I will point out that my rant about San Diego housing wasn't about hidden lemons, it was about a massively dysfunctional system where neither the buyers nor the sellers know what's actually valuable about a building, and developers refuse to build truly valuable buildings, but charge for them anyway.
To use the lemon rule, you guys are arguing about how fast the engine goes, but have no idea that you've been shorted two-thirds of your lug nuts, even though you can sit there and count them.
In houses, especially in suburban San Diego, here's what's important: --Your fire hazard. Insurance companies are cancelling fire insurance all over the place, because they're looking at their own risk maps and refusing to be put on the hook. I've been helping fight against developments in areas that have historically burned every ten years (!) so I happen to agree with the insurance goons this time. Without fire insurance, you can't get a mortgage to buy a home. Do homebuyers and real estate agents know to check insurance? Heck no. They just rail against the evil agencies and push for the state to insure them instead.
--Is there room near the main breaker panel for a reasonably ventilated house battery. Here in San Diego, SDG&E pioneered shutting down the grid to stop causing fires, after they lost $700 million from starting the Cedar Fire. Everybody hates them. So if you want power during an emergency (and climate change is making more emergencies), get a house that either has a big battery or space to put one. Are developers building the space into new homes? Oh heck no, no one's asking for it, until they've owned the house for a few years. Can you check to see if there's a big empty wall in the garage. Yeah...
--Does the house have a big flat area of roof pointed south or west, and unobstructed by the sky? Or a slope that's equivalent? You'll need that to charge your battery. If you're lucky, you can get one that will charge your car too, maybe in aggregate once per week. You can check houses from Google Earth, so this feature's so freaking obvious you don't even need to see the house to get a good estimate of how much solar energy you can get out of it (the solar companies indeed have programs that automatically do what I did on inspection). Do homebuyers know which direction south is? Not usually, and they don't even know how to download or use a compass app for their phones. I've pointed this problem out to several politicians, and been advised that, while it's important, they think it's too complicated for the average voting homeowner, so they're not going to bring it up (big roof pointing south or west is too complicated. Yup). And so developers keep building roofs that look more like coral formations. Aesthetically dramatic, functionally useless, and decorated with the three panels mandated by state law.
And that's before you get to the hidden construction problems. But I'd say that the asymmetric information problem is a bit different here.
paws4thot @ 981: OTOH, whilst I can't speak for the USian market, in the UK you have many more legal protections buying from a dealership than from a private buyer.
Lemon Laws are primarily State laws in the U.S., although there are Federal laws as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law
Federal law is mostly about warranties & guaranteeing manufacturers fulfill the requirements of their warranties. If you buy a vehicle in one state and take it to a different state the manufacturer cannot refuse to honor the warranty.
Franchised Dealers are the manufacturers representative, so the dealer in Raleigh cannot refuse warranty service for your vehicle if you bought it in Richmond (or vice versa). But if there is a buyback, it's going to be the manufacturer's responsibility and you probably WILL have to do that through the dealer you bought it from.
I will point out that my rant about San Diego housing wasn't about hidden lemons, it was about a massively dysfunctional system where neither the buyers nor the sellers know what's actually valuable about a building, and developers refuse to build truly valuable buildings, but charge for them anyway.
Despite what I am about to say, I actually agree with you that housing is screwed up.
But, the buyers/sellers simply disagree with you (and I) about what is valuable about a house.
They have prioritized looks (both curbside and interior) and resale value in addition to the obvious "location".
I've pointed this problem out to several politicians, and been advised that, while it's important, they think it's too complicated for the average voting homeowner, so they're not going to bring it up (big roof pointing south or west is too complicated. Yup).
Roof orientation is too complicated if it destroys the curb appeal.
The politicians are in a way stuck - your issues aren't even on the radar of the average voter. What matters to the voter is either that housing is too expensive (so any changes that increase costs aren't going to happen), or the fear that a fix to the housing cost issue will be done so that the existing homeowners lose their nest egg as their house loses its value when prices become affordable.
Nowhere in those 2 issues are logical things like energy reductions, sustainability, climate change, etc.
And that's before you get to the hidden construction problems. But I'd say that the asymmetric information problem is a bit different here.
To pile on a bit. For the home market in the US.
Most buyers don't car about south facing. Or plywood vs. particle board under carpets. (Think pet pee on the carpet being absorbed.) Or (BEFORE THEY MOVE IN) the location of TV/Network jacks. Or the location of HVAC vents in south facing rooms. Or ....
But they do go oooh aaaah about the fancy chandelier in the dining room, nice counter tops in the kitchen that are not sealed against food oils, a fridge location that will drive them insane as they actually USE the kitchen, and so on.
And like H's comments on roof layout and possible battery locations, virtually all home buyers only notice these things AFTER they've moved in and been there for a while.
A recent favorite of mine as I wander through new construction around here, a house with a 300 or 400 amp service but no 240V 30 or 50 amp outlets in the garage and no easy path for new wiring from the panel to the garage. So the builder saves $300 and if the homeowner buys an EV they are out $2000 just to get the wires to the garage. In the past I'd still want the large 240V outlet for tools, welder, whatever maybe someone would want to do in a 400sf garage.
Paul @ 983:
True, but that is not what this is about. Cars are merely an example. The more general principle is "asymmetrical information". In the car example, the seller knows things about the car that the buyer does not and has no realistic way of finding out.
[ ... ]
Likewise in the housing example by David L @ 956. Customers have no way of knowing what is in behind the drywall or under the floor. Conversely the builder has no way of proving it to them. So it becomes impossible for builders to offer better houses, or for buyers to find them.
A smart builder could offer prospective buyers tours of homes during construction & explain what goes into the construction - why what they're doing is better than what other builders are doing ... and why it matters.
Also, why do you think manufacturers offer factory tours?
(There may also be an issue with buyer education here: building codes are complicated and house buyers have enough other issues to juggle with as it is.
The only solution to this is for the government to lay down codes for new buildings. Unfortunately those codes tend to get written by the builders themselves.
It's not the only solution, just a good one.
Most building codes originated with the insurance companies getting together & proposing minimum standards so they'd be less likely to have to pay out for a building burning down or collapsing.
There's a reason why it's Underwriters Laboratories that tests & lists building products for meeting minimum safety standards.
"If you don't follow our guidelines, we won't insure you!"
That's a lot of clout. Especially when they're telling a State Legislature that unless they enact the building code they're proposing, NOBODY in the state is going to be able to buy insurance.
AJ (He/Him) @ 987: Re Phonetic Spelling:
Who decides what is the correct pronunciation?
Noah Webster.
Individual efforts to mitigate climate are nice and worth doing, except when they create the notion that a little bit of action by one person can be 'enough'. Recycling is a classic example - driving one's massive truck to the recycling center to drop off a few bottles and some paper is not a net benefit to anyone.
Here in Canada we are in the midst of a federal election in which the leader of one major party is still going back to 'incentives for individuals' to address the climate crisis. Fine, but without major reductions in INDUSTRIAL emissions, we are not going to achieve anything at all.
A quick web search has shown me that a mature tree can sequester/save about a tonne of CO2/annum. Between 1991 and 1998 I worked as a treeplanter, and individually with my left hand and a shovel planted somewhere over 500,000 trees.* Then I became a foreman and ran a crew of 18 that planted about 3-5 million/year for the next 3 years.
Those trees aren't mature yet, though the 1991 trees are now upwards of 30' tall (with some variation for latitude and growing seasons - further north grows slower).
Conservatively, if I grant myself credit for half a tonne per tree, and no credit whatsoever for those I organized as a foreman, I could spend 250,000 tonnes of CO2/annum and still have a positive karmic balance. My wife also did the same work for a few years and has her own accumulated credits.
Theoretically, I could drive a Humvee, fly weekly, eat nothing but imported beef, heat my home with coal, and have a huge bonfire in my yard every evening without coming anywhere close to emitting as much carbon as my labour has 'saved'.**
All of which is largely irrelevant because the rest of the planet has continued to ramp up CO2 emissions enough to dwarf any effect my work might have had. Individual action is fine, but not nearly sufficient.
*Daily production ranged from 800-4000, over a summer season that ranged from 65 - 100 working days. Typically >2000/day over an >80 day production season. 500k is a very conservative estimate, it is closer to >1M. I didn't keep track at the time beyond individual daily production.
** Of course some of those trees have died and others have been burnt in recent fires, which reduces the effect a bit.
I've pointed this problem out to several politicians, and been advised that, while it's important, they think it's too complicated for the average voting homeowner, so they're not going to bring it up
They may well be right.
I bought my home because my ex-fiancee fell in love with the interior decorating (and I was in love with her). There's things I knew would be problems based on growing up in a house that she had no idea about having always lived in apartments, and there was no way she could get past "I love the wallpaper" to consider them.
I am sorry, Pigeon, but anyone who claims that an English spelling is phonetic is misrepresenting English spelling and pronounciation. Almost all letters and syllables have multiple pronounciations, and almost all pronounciations have multiple representations. Choosing one and claiming that it is the canonical one is at, best, blinkered artificialism. The same would not be true if it were printed in the international phonetic alphabet, but I have never seen that done!
It is extremely clear that there are some complex and obscure rules that control how natural spelling variations are used, simply because there are people like me who can read them (even never having seen them before) and not artificial 'phonetic' spellings.
In thus case, most people don't pronounce 'sum' like the 'some' in 'fearsome', nor 'injun' like 'engine', and the rest of the book was like that. No, I wouldn't call it phonetic.
Reading your description of the house - would be nice. But I had to be in the DC area for my late job, I'd never lived in a split level before, and just under 1600'^2 (not counting the half basement) and a driveway, no garage was what I could afford. No McMansions for me, and nicer would have meant $600,000 up, and very rapidly up.
"Location" leaves me wanting to decorate lamposts with real estate agents.
Here we go, the traditional (and actually comprehensible) proposal to simplify English spelling.
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
On the other hand, what drives me crazy are speakers of other languages (say, Deutsche) deciding on how to transliterate.
Quick, for anywhere from Norway to Syria, how do you pronounce the letter "j"? "Y"? "H"? "G (as in gee)?" "zh"?
I'll point out the grim humor in the direction problem in San Diego. We're such a tourist and surfing town that the evening news has a section (usually in with the weather) about which beaches have good surf, the west-facing or south-west facing. Everyone knows the Pacific is to the west, and having a view of the ocean generally adds a rather eye-watering amount to the price of a house.
But the same people who know all this stuff can't tell you which part of their house faces south, and that's too complicated to learn, although it takes ten minutes, mostly to download the compass app on their phones.
I think this is called compartmentalization?
It gets nastier from there, but I'll stop now.
although it takes ten minutes, mostly to download the compass app on their phones.
Sigh. And finding the sun in the late morning or late afternoon is too hard? I have a story about my wife calling me (before she had a smart phone) and saying she was on a big highway in the DFW area. She needed help to get somewhere. I asked which way she was driving. She said how would she know. It was about 3pm so I asked where the sun was. Which flummoxed her greatly. So I had to ask her to name the exits as she drove by them to figure out where and which direction she was headed.
In thus case, most people don't pronounce 'sum' like the 'some' in 'fearsome', nor 'injun' like 'engine',
Bascule, the character-locutor of the phonetic sections of the story did pronounce words like that. I did decipher some of the text line by line and it was pretty clear they were Glaswegian. "I luv the deed!"
I was born and raised in the Glasgow area and even with that as a starting point I still couldn't cope with a phonetic representation on paper though. I'm surprised anyone else could, especially non-Glaswegians. I think Iain was being a bit too clever.
Charlie may remember the time at Hal-con when I read one of his stories aloud in a Glesca accent, tag-teaming with the Japanese translator who read his version of the same story in a Yamaguchi accent.
Ah! That explains it - that is a notoriously difficult dialect for most English speakers, and not one that I am much good at.
(Er, are you replying to me or Nojay?)
"...misrepresenting English spelling and pronounciation."
It's not so much "misrepresentation" as ordinary loose use of language. Bascule refers to his own style as phonetic, and really it's hard to see what else you could call it without going into multi-word descriptions of the details. My own style aged 4-5 was almost identical, and when the adults around me told me the word for what I was doing was "phonetic", a word I had not heard before, I saw no reason to question it.
What I was basically doing was objecting to the kind of nonsensical almost anti-correspondence between sound and spelling, and to a lesser extent to the kind of ambiguity, demonstrated in that "hilarious" verse about the foreign language student encountering words with "ough" - which really ought to be "oog" or something if it's anything, and has no business being any of the things it actually is...
"Ought" -> ort "through" -> throo "cough" -> coff - all much less silly than the official versions.
"Bough" -> bow - OK, it might be the front of a ship or it might be a projectile launcher, but that's still only two choices, which is a big improvement.
"Hiccough" -> hiccup - So much obviously less silly that it's now the usual spelling, and there is probably next to nobody these days who would read "hiccough" for the first time and not think you pronounced it "hiccoff". (In my own case I thought they were two different words - a formal term and a slang term - long after this stage, and it was a great many years before I encountered "hiccough" used, authoritatively, in a way that required you to pronounce it "hiccup" for the text to make sense.)
"The same would not be true if it were printed in the international phonetic alphabet"
Not sure about that. How would you represent "poor" and "pour" in a way that neither an English nor a Scottish person would object to? Or do I have a misapprehension about what might or might not be true?
"most people don't pronounce 'sum' like the 'some' in 'fearsome'"
No, but they do pronounce "sum" and "some" the same when they are standalone words, and they do contract that sound in the same way when they are tacked on the end of other words; so it is a pretty sure thing that if you show someone "feersum" written down and ask them to read it out, they will make a sound that any English speaker within hearing would instantly understand as "fearsome" without the slightest uncertainty.
The bizarre thing here is that it's not at all unlikely that the English speaker reading out the written word will not understand what they are saying. You can show someone that book title and they say "wtf does that mean?" so you say "just read it out" and they stand there going "fearsome engine, fearsome engine, fearsome engine, fearsome engine" over and over without ever catching on. Then you say "there you go, fearsome engine, just like you've been saying" and they freeze for a bit and then slowly get this look of amazed enlightenment as if they've just derived the theory of relativity from first principles for themselves. I've seen this happen numerous times (usually with more complicated examples) and I find it incredibly odd that they have to hear someone else making exactly the same sound before they understand it. It would be interesting to try using a tape recorder if I ever happen to have one around at the right time.
(It's "Feersum Endjinn", by the way, not "Injun" - the latter might work in NZ, but not in Scotland. Note also that it helps to understand Bascule to realise that he's doing it in a Scottish accent - in the same way that our esteemed fellow commentor is not "paws4thort".)
"But reading is entirely pattetrn recognition for me, translation into sounds takes effort"
It's pattern recognition for me too - complete with pattern-recognition-style error correction from redundancy, so I can read "pattetrn" several times and not even notice it; there simply isn't the kind of obligatory sound-translation stage that might make me trip over in trying to pronounce it. But the translation into sounds happens automatically for free at pretty much the same time - more or less a matter of the pattern-recognition process returns two values, a pointer to the relevant bunch of concepts and a pointer to the sound, but most of the time I ignore the sound one. Often it won't be the same as it would be for people who learnt the word by hearing it instead of by reading it. And if the word is in a language whose pronunciation rules I don't know, I still get the sound one but it's in some kind of terrible "trench French"; this makes learning the correct rules for the language more difficult, because the database already contains entries in the form of these default values.
So the sound, being essentially unimportant, becomes for me a matter for frivolity, and these days rather than trying to put English spelling right, I play with distorting it in a most gruesome fashion. Accordingly not only can I read "Conga rat shoe laces" by whole-phrase pattern recognition, but it takes noticeable time to realise that the pattern I recognised was actually that and not "Conga: I chew lace shins" which I have as the canonical form.
That would have been fun to listen to. Reminds me, for some reason, of the first time I saw Last Yamato (last of the three Starblazers anime) in the early/mid-eighties at a relaxacon outside Philly. Phil Roglio and Nick Pollota had come up with their own version, and Nick was at the con. The film was in Japanese, and Nick "translating".
Let's just say that he called it "You Say Yamato", and leave it at that.
I had to read the Bascule bits at about one half(third) speed but had little trouble with them other than speed. Remember the scramblers that would randomly mix the inner letters of words (i.e those 4+ characters long)? Here's one: https://www.ddginc-usa.com/can-you-read-this.htm
Original Feersum Endjinn: Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.
Scrambled. Definitely a bit harder to read: Waok up. Got dserd. Had bfsekrat. Skpoe wif Etgares thi ant who sed itz jsus been wruk wruk wruk 4 u lletay mstaer Baslcue, Y dnot u ½ a hiolday? & I agreed & taht woz how we dcdeied we oettr go 2 c Mr Ziiaporla in thi I-blal ov thi gyglaroe Rrtbsioh.
The Firefox spell checker hates both of them.
Um, Etgares: is that et-gair-es, or et-gairs?
Iain does have a firmly Scottish-centred viewpoint which shows through quite a lot. There's even one passage somewhere where a Scottish character goes to England for the first time and goes on about how strange it is that the English don't say "doing the messages" for "shopping" and various similar examples, and it's one of those passages which has a very autobiographical feel to it. And there are little touches like the spoof songwriting credit to "Hlasgow" which is secretly short for "Gerald Hlasgow (the Scotsman)", that probably go right over the heads of quite a lot of his readers.
Bascule's style is very nearly identical to what I produced in deliberate rejection of standard spelling about age 4-5 based around an English accent, so I don't really think it's asking too much. It certainly makes a difference once the light goes on that it's Glaswegian, but it's more on the scale of making certain bits stop being weird than of being a basic requirement for understanding them at all; the great majority of the words are about as accent-independent as you could reasonably expect, and there is plenty of redundancy to assist in interpreting the ones that aren't.
Possibly what I found most awkward about it is that you've got this far-future setting in an equatorial location where none of the other characters seem to have any kind of accent or distinctive mode of speech, and then up pops this wee 12(?)-year-old ned in the middle of them, most incongruously. I was expecting his phonetic rendering to be of the same kind of accentless speech as everyone else, and it took a while for me to twig.
Urga tease. That one is a standard spelling. Worker ants, and all that.
most people don't pronounce 'sum' like the 'some' in 'fearsome'
I do.
"Some" and "sum" are pronounced the same, in my Canadian experience.
In thus case, most people don't pronounce 'sum' like the 'some' in 'fearsome',
So like Robert, my Canadian experience is that 'sum' and 'some' in 'fearsome' are pronounced the same way - and my UK recollection is they were pronounced the same way.
So what is this different pronunciation, that I can't recall having ever heard?
A recent favorite of mine as I wander through new construction around here, a house with a 300 or 400 amp service but no 240V 30 or 50 amp outlets in the garage and no easy path for new wiring from the panel to the garage. So the builder saves $300 and if the homeowner buys an EV they are out $2000 just to get the wires to the garage.
The automakers won't fully transition their product lines to zero emission for 14 years (2035 is the goal).
Most people aren't going to need an EV charger for 5 to 10 years - why pay for one now? (yes, I know the logic behind preparing for the future - but logic rarely is a factor in house buying).
(and that assumes that they meet that 2035 goal - nobody seems to be asking what happens if consumers refuse to buy EVs).
In the past I'd still want the large 240V outlet for tools, welder, whatever maybe someone would want to do in a 400sf garage.
Most people use the garage for storage, usually to the point where their vehicles won't fix in the garage...
"Some" has a slightly longer vowel sound that the more abrupt "sum", in my experience. Generally Glaswegian cuts off word endings and shortens vowel sounds resulting in the classic glottal stop. The Glaswegian word "sumfin" is a classic example, meaning "something" in civilised circles.
As for "doing the messages", in my neck of the woods it was "gaun' the messages" (gaun' = "going").
Most people use the garage for storage, usually to the point where their vehicles won't fix in the garage...
I know the concept. And I have to do a deep clearing of my carport every 6 to 12 months. But a 2 car garage without 240v in the US is just nuts. There's tools. EV/Hybrid charging, a chest freezer, etc... As I say these are homes that are selling for over $1mil around me (compared to $130K 10 years ago) and the garage only has a few 120v outlets? And as I said that just one of dozens of things that should be in $1mil+ homes but isn't.
And yes, the transition to EVs will take a while but people are not going to wait till EVERYONE has an EV before they want to charge theirs.
"So like Robert, my Canadian experience is that 'sum' and 'some' in 'fearsome' are pronounced the same way"
Me too, from the western US. "Sum" and "some" are the same. I have a vague sense that southern US might drawl the "some" into "sahm", but am not sure of that.
My major issue is with words that have two (or occasionally more) valid pronunciations - such as "wind" - which only able to be determined by context. eg "Gone with the Wind" vs "Wind up the clock".
"Waok up. Got dserd. Had bfsekrat. Skpoe wif Etgares thi"
Brings back memories. I bought the book while stuck in LHR because of weather in the US and, having sat around there for too long and finally in the air, finished it flying back to IAD. The spelling was off-putting for a while, but I adapted to it and got through the book. Probably should do it again.
I personally suspect that when EVs reliably crack the range anxiety barrier and people get comfortable that the batteries aren't going to catch fire, they'll take off.
Here's the reason: driving an EV is a blast. I love taking a stupid little subcompact and blasting past Camaros and Beamers who are trying to cut me off. And I had two Tesla 3s (the bottom line car) blow past me in succession today after I went past a sports coupe. Granted, it's stupid to drive like an idiot when you see the charge gauge dive, but that rapid acceleration sure is handy. And a Bolt is a car for upper middle class nerds, middle of the pack EV, news from four years ago.
As for the 240 volt outlets, yeah it's annoying to blow thousands fixing some developer's laziness in the garage wiring. New million dollar houses come do wired for an EV (e.g. there's a 240 W outlet in the garage, thanks to CEQA), and sooner or later the architects get a clue, move the garage door over a foot, and leave room for a house battery in there.
The fun part is determining, behind all that drywall, whether that 240 volt retrofit outlet is properly grounded or not. I suspect there will be a bunch of stories about handymen wiring in 240 volt outlets on the cheap and sparking house fires. It's not a bet, because when I got the 240 volt outlet installed in my garage, I had more offers to do it the wrong way than to do it right (ground the sucker, pull a permit, get it inspected, etc.)
If I were ever going to build my own house I would tackle it as a system engineering project: start with a bunch of use-cases, boil down to a set of requirements (e.g. "The door to the patio SHALL slide at least 150cm"), and then hand those to an architect.
We actually did something like that when we had the new kitchen fitted, with "shall", "should" and "would like" items listed for the kitchen designer. He'd never seen anyone do it that way before, but it worked really well. We knew what we wanted, he knew what we wanted, and we didn't suddenly think of something important half way through the installation.
I remember seeing a TV programme a few years back where an architect compared the houses being built in the UK (very traditional layout, with dining room, living room, kitchen, 3 or 4 bedrooms, pitched roof with loft etc) with houses in some places in Europe, which are more open plan with flat or low-slope roofs. The trouble is that when people contemplate the biggest investment of their lives they are very conservative, and for good reason. Nobody wants to be a guinea pig, nobody wants to be lumbered with repair bills for innovative construction that didn't work out, and nobody wants to risk holding an unsellable lemon. And that's before you try to get a mortgage for it. House builders of course just build what sells.
Innovative building techniques in the UK got a really bad name after WWII with "prefab" houses. These were low quality houses with a deliberately short design life built as fast as possible to get past the immediate housing shortage. They achieved their goals, but people very much disliked living in them, partly for practical reasons (leaks, cold, damp), and partly because it put you firmly at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Everyone wanted to get out of them and into a traditional house, and that cultural value has stuck.
Yes, and the some in 'fearsome' is usually considerably shortened, almost to 'sim', so it isn't the same as either. But my main objection is that, even if I was better at Glaswegian, I have to do a DOUBLE, CONSCIOUS translation for each word. Banks is not good enough to justify that, and the book went to Oxfam. The same applies to all so-called phonetic spellings.
Not much. I might even prefer the latter.
I fully agree with the lunacies, but artificial attempts at correcting them by introducing 'phonetic' spelling make reading hard to impossible for thiose of us that rely on pattern recognition. A better spelling system woukld make sense, but would need learning as much as a closely related foreign language would.
The fun part is determining, behind all that drywall, whether that 240 volt retrofit outlet is properly grounded or not.
OK. You've mentioned this a few times. Just how does anyone in this day and time NOT ground an outlet?
Testing isn't very hard.
I am NOT a licensed electrician but I know how most non industrical wiring works. I check the codes before I do anything to see what has changed.
Over simplifying here. And yes I know Eruope does it differently in detail.
In the US a 240V outlet will have 2 "hot" wires, a neutral, and a ground from the electrical panel to the outlet. In general off the pole is 240V center tapped with this tap being the neutral and grounded at the pole. At the breaker panel for the house/unit the neutral is tied to a ground which is rammed into the earth. (Now at two points. And no water line taps allowed anymore.) The point of the ground being to provide a return path in case something goes wrong with whatever is drawing power. Said path being less resistive than people. So 2 hot, 1 neutral and 1 ground wire from panel to outlet.
My point is if the wire bundle end at the panel has all 4 wires tied to the appropriate points in the panel and the outlet is wired to the correct points... (It is not hard at all to determine which wire is from which outlet.)
How is it hard to determine if the grounding is improper?
I was lucky in that, when they opened up the service port in the wall, there was a big steel rod next to the mains board that was obviously there for grounding things. In the immediate vicinity there was a nice gas pipe too.
Fun things that can happen? How about a plumbing system that's a mix of copper and PVC? Or just not grounding it because that's for sissies, time is money, and the homeowner's not watching? Or grounding it on the gas line that's conveniently positioned right next to the electric box? On the last, yes, they don't allow that form of construction any more, but they did when my house was built. The power main and the gas line were laid in the same trench when the house was built and come up next to each other.
The thing I insisted on was that we follow the city building code. Where I am, that says that, to install an electric car charger, you need to pull a permit and get it inspected. I'd checked the City website and knew all this before I went to hire a contractor. Over half of the people I contacted said point blank that there was no need for a permit or inspection, and gave me really lowball bids. And I watched the installation and inspection too.
Code switching from "old spelling" for us fogies, to fully phonetic spelling (for new readers) is something computers should be able to do really, really easily.
paws4thot @ 1006: #996 - Come on; it's well documented that Noah deliberately changed spellings to make them different to UK ones.
Yup.
/rimshot
OK.
It wasn't special grounding for the EV charging station. It was making sure your house had a proper ground period. Which I can understand.
Mine is grounded to the water line but 20' from where it emerges from the slab. And I have to replace some of what's between those point with PEX so now I get to patch the ground around the PEX and/or get a real ground installed. And I'd do it myself except driving 8' rods into my dirt near my panel requires a pneumatic hammer/drill. Our dirt around here is rotten granite so rocks of various sizes all the way down. 3 pound hammers need not apply.
'Fraid not. It requires solving the comprehension problem, at least.
It's not something you can do in isolation. We'd have to start teaching the kids fully-phonetic spelling when they started school. Anything with a chip which displayed text would have some kind of configuration software which would allow the user to choose between "old spelling" and "new spelling." Computationally the problem is very easily solved - it's a simple one-to-one translation.
I'm guessing it would take 30-50 years for everyone to fully switch over, but it's certainly doable - we just won't do it because anything that requires planning or regulation is "too hard."
I take it this is Pinyin envy? Or possibly Hangul aspirations? Actually, if you want to stick your hand into that proper English grinder, check out the wikipedia article on International English. Looks real fun.
Follow the conversation backwards a little. What I'm arguing with is ECs' assertion that it would be difficult for older people despite our powerful computational tools. Otherwise I don't care.
Installing new tracking radars at work. The instructions said to dig a 10' deep pit and fill it with concrete. The radar supplier insisted that we do this even though the local geology is about 1 foot of topsoil followed by several hundred feet of Lewisian Gneiss! Only one of the hardest rocks on the planet! Several hardened steel construction drills later we gave up with a hole just deep enough for the tower bolts.
No, it is NOT a one to one translation. There are plenty of words like 'wind', many that have variant pronounciations (*), and then there is stress.
(*) Choosing a canonical one would ber bad enough, but there are sometimes variations with context, especially in poetry.
Not to mention which variant of phonetic spelling do you pick? Is it "Tomato" or "Tomato"?
even though the local geology is about 1 foot of topsoil followed by several hundred feet of Lewisian Gneiss!
So how do you ground things in such?
Around the southeastern US we have "red" dirt. Well really red clay. And you can dig it fine with powered equipment. Not too bad with shovels and a pick. But you WILL hit rocks. And if driving down a rod, ugh. You're going to need to be able to drive it through. I put up a temp fence at times when dog sitting and driving in 3 steel poles 1 foot will require me to "try again" for at least one. When we mow the yard we gather up 2 to 10 fist sized and down rocks that have poked through to the top. I have a fairly big pile that I want to make into a lawn feature soon.
A geology major said this area was granite a few million years ago and what we have now they call rotten granite. If you want to grow much in the way of a garden you really want to compost. Or buy black soil at the store. Farmers are big on manure spreading.
even though the local geology is about 1 foot of topsoil followed by several hundred feet of Lewisian Gneiss!
So how do you ground things in such?
Well, let's say you want to ground 1" bolts to a depth of 12". Drill 1.5" diameter by 15" deep holes. Lower the bolts into the holes then inject concrete to fill the holes. The manufacturer's spec pits seem more applicable to your red dirt.
On inappropriate reactions to COVID19 is closed to new comments, so I'll just post this here ...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/australia-fugitive-turns-self-in-30-years-after-prison-escape-blames-covid/
The trouble is that when people contemplate the biggest investment of their lives
I work around architects in the US a lot. Many stories like yours.
One made a comment that he was beginning to think he was in the marriage breakup business. Many people who worked with him a bit or even built a house discovered during the process they really had different ideas of what their lives should be like.
I know one person where he and the firm owner went to a first meeting with a couple to discuss a possible new house. After a bit one half of the couple left the room and then called the other to come help with something. Gradually the talking they could barely hear became louder then to the point of yelling about "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU WANT OUR HOUSE TO BE ..."
The two architects after a bit packed up and let themselves out. They never heard back from the couple.
A good friend who's an architect/builder has a 10 to 15 page questionnaire he gives people to fill out before they meet for the first time. And if a couple he asks them to fill it out separately without discussing it with each other.
Totally the same situation. Phonetics? Never heard of them and I really doubt they exist in English. Russian, sure.
An interesting idea https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/11/is-unlearning-harder-than-unschooling.html
I have played around with his ideas and I rather like them
paws4thot @ 1036: Installing new tracking radars at work. The instructions said to dig a 10' deep pit and fill it with concrete. The radar supplier insisted that we do this even though the local geology is about 1 foot of topsoil followed by several hundred feet of Lewisian Gneiss! Only one of the hardest rocks on the planet! Several hardened steel construction drills later we gave up with a hole just deep enough for the tower bolts.
But that's not for the electrical ground is it?
That sounds like they wanted a heavy slab to anchor the structure so the tower holding up the radar antenna won't be wobbling around.
News just announced, out of the blue -- the Australian Navy is going to scrap the controversial Shortfin Barracuda submarine program (a modified conventionally powered version of a French nuclear sub) which was meant to replace their ageing Collins-class subs. Instead they're joining a consortium as very junior partners with America and Britain to build/source nuclear subs along with all the extras like crew training, operations facilities etc. that going to nuclear propulsion will demand.
Holy shit. This is going to be... interesting, to say the least. The political ramifications are wide and the blast radius wider. Australia has been proudly non-nuclear for a long time and I suspect a lot of citizens there are going to be furious with this decision. New Zealand has a standard policy of not permitting nuclear-powered ships to berth in their harbours, indeed most countries in that region are similarly antsy about nuclear power of any kind.
China is the perceived threat, of course, one reason for the original choice of the Shortfin Barracuda design with extended range and endurance over even the older Collins-class boats. Going nuclear will give them a months-long operational capability, right up the the Spratly Islands and beyond.
So the question is "Are the French pissed or happy?"
And is it both. In public pissed. In private happy.
I suspect it is just the beginning.
With a (currently planned subject to change) goal of winding down the use of oil I suspect most world navies will be looking at their options going forward.
Given that the usual restrictions don't typically apply to navies having future ships/boats go nuclear is going to look very attractive from a "how do we operate in 20 to 30 years" perspective.
As much as it would cause much angst I would hope a Canadian Government would be looking at getting the Canadian Navy nuclear subs as well - given the growing strategic importance of the arctic having a submarine force that can reliably operate up there would seem to me to be a good idea.
But that's not for the electrical ground is it?
Depending on the design of the electrical delivery system a "ground" in an end point system may not be tied to the earth. Not typical but done in many odd situations where an earth ground doesn't make sense. Or isn't practical.
How is it hard to determine if the grounding is improper?
You assuming that a) the person doing the work knows what they are doing and b) they care about doing properly vs doing it quick and easy.
When I was an assistant super in a 12 story apartment building one of the cell phone companies leased rooftop space for a small cell tower.
They took the easy route out and chose a convenient pipe to ground to.
Except their easy access pipe was actually part of the fire hose system - so between the roof and the ground there was a high power pump that activated when in use.
I objected to my boss, and they were forced to ground it properly (with much more work).
Maybe I was wrong, and a lightning strike wouldn't have harmed the pump - but I didn't want to risk it.
I am honestly just confused. Sure, the shortfin is a monstrosity nobody should ever buy.. but if the Australians have gotten over their fear of nuclear cooties, why the heck not just change the order already in progress to proper Barracudas? Would almost certainly come with a cost reduction, due to no redesign being required..
I am honestly just confused. Sure, the shortfin is a monstrosity nobody should ever buy.. but if the Australians have gotten over their fear of nuclear cooties, why the heck not just change the order already in progress to proper Barracudas? Would almost certainly come with a cost reduction, due to no redesign being required..
Because as the previous US President demonstrated, there is a lot of value in keeping the Americans happy/interested in your welfare.
Well yes, and I had considered commenting on this news in this thread myself.
In a lot of ways this is simply making a tacit geopolitical posture not-so-tacit. Like Japan and a couple of others, Australia has always been a nation that only didn't get nukes (as in weapons) because it had already signed the NPT, and since then has kept its position at the table on the basis that it could get them, NPT notwithstanding, if it really needed to. Examples of "really needed to" scenarios that may have unfolded in the years since the NPT are best left as an exercise, but as you (Nojay) point out this is probably in part a statement that "hey we think we might actually need to sometime". Unlike Japan, we've limited ourselves to a single reactor complex in Sydney that produces most of the medical isotopes and other radioactive material needed in a 21st century economy. This would represent a step up in terms of maintaining the requisite human capital.
The Australian government has stated firmly that there's no intention to develop civil nuclear or nuclear weapons. But it's worth mentioning that a small group of commentators in the Australian defence community has been agitating for something just like this to happen for several years. I'm inclined to believe the bit about civil nuclear: there's really no point here, Australia's renewable potential is just so huge and vastly cheaper. The only blocker we have on renewable rollout is the firm, bipartisan grip the coal mining lobby has on the testicles of the political culture. But in a world where the tacit understanding that being all allied-up with a couple of major nuclear powers, and being able to make bombs if you choose to ignore the NPT, isn't enough to put up-and-comers off trying it on a bit, then I can see bomb-making rising up the priority list, at least under the general heading of strategic reserve.
That's not at all to discount the increase in capability for the RAN submarine service, which as you note will be able to operate more freely (although less welcome in some anchorages).
There's perfect one-to-one translation in one direction, but not in the other... Perfecting English is not something I care much about, but the fact that you can do perfect translation from phonetic English to "old" English and not the other way around is a pretty good argument that the change should be made.
I suppose I should add that I personally don't see this as a welcome development at all. Sometimes it's easy to confuse "explaining the situation" with "advocating for it". For the record, I'm not clear what the most sensible way into the future for Australia and its maritime defence capability will be, but I'm not at all convinced this is it.
Nuclear subs make a lot of sense for Aus. Lot of coast line, lot of tradelanes that need to be open. Conventional subs dont have the legs, and anything on the surface is way too vulnerable to mass missile strikes - a hundred anti-ship missiles cost considerably less than a surface combatant. Other peoples subs are also a problem.
But if nuclear subs is what you want, you kind of really need to be able to maintain them. Having them with the US doing maintenance for you.. Uh, yhea, that last president kind of indicates that is Not Advised. This really should still be a French contract, because the French will absolutely transfer the tech..
Because as the previous US President demonstrated, there is a lot of value in keeping the Americans happy/interested in your welfare.
Is the concept of Danegeld (and the long-term consequences of paying it) no longer taught in Australia?
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
I suppose Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa can all make arguments that they'll need nuclear powered icebreakers and/or submarines to deal with the Southern Ocean and/or getting to Antarctica if the west Antarctic ice sheet starts to break up.
Then again, surfacing a submarine in the Roaring Forties has to be an exercise in misery, if not suicidal stupidity.
But if nuclear subs is what you want, you kind of really need to be able to maintain them. Having them with the US doing maintenance for you.. Uh, yhea, that last president kind of indicates that is Not Advised.
After going down this rabbit hole a bit one thing I read was that the ARN had trouble keeping even 2 or the current 6 ready for sea at any one time. The implication was for both maintenance and manpower. Anyone from Oz who knows more? Is this an ARN thing in keeping / recruiting sailors / qualified techs or ...
You assuming that a) the person doing the work knows what they are doing and b) they care about doing properly vs doing it quick and easy.
As I noted above I was confused by H's wording. I thought he was implying a special grounding for the EV outlet which he was not. And, yes, figuring out if a building, especially an older one is properly grounded can be a hassle. And one that many of what we call "jake leg" guys will want to ignore.
Ran into loosing some equipment to eletrical issues a while back. Then a bunch after a big thunderstorm. Discovered the ground from inside the warehouse buildings was connected to the water lines. That had been dug up and replaced 15 years earlier when the city re-did the lines. So when we had the issues the ground was connected to a pipe that extended maybe a foot past the outer edge of the building into fill under the sidewalks installed at the time.
ARN?
Sorry. RAN.
I did work it out, but it took me longer than you'd think. If I remember there was a lot of commentary about recruitment of submariners being a challenge several years ago. As I understood it this was addressed, though it could just be that the issue is no longer being publicised (the latter being a common tactic of the current government, which has been in around 8 years). But there's no reason to assume that's the case either: there are several workforce segments in Australia that have needed special attention to avoid skill shortages in recent decades with some interventions being notably successful. Health information management (as in medical records, not necessarily anything to do with IT) had a serious issue about 15 years ago and that's largely been corrected now, even in a context where the discipline is acquiring a lot of new IT related skills as part of its foundational training. Of course a similar issue will now pertain to Australian submariners who will also need to learn new nuclear engineering skills.
A quick google turns up papers released around 12 years ago describing plans to deal with the manpower issue in the RAN's submarine service. Without looking further, and without making assumptions, I would imagine there are some remedies to this in train. In relation to the Collins class boats, my understanding is that the maintenance and operational cycles were determined by the planned operational requirements and were just hard to change to meet new requirements... it wasn't that there were some special challenges. I could be wrong of course, I'm mining vague memories of mainstream media reports from years ago.
Fire in the interconnect, continent cut off.
Wholesale electricity prices jumped nearly 20%. The interconnect will be totally closed for ~10 days then half capacity until March next year.
1 in 3 is fairly common for warships. Generally at any one time you'll have one in refit, one working up and one deployed. Crewing problems will be on top of that.
I don't agree that there is always perfect one to one translation from phonetic to standard English. "Your/You're" for example.
But this doesn't address the point that different accents/dialects mean there is no universally applicable phonetic spelling anyway, so it will always be arbitary for most people and changing from one arbitary system to another is pointless.
The other thing worth mentioning is that it's pretty darn politically expedient for the current Australian government for this announcement to occur right now. There are two reasons.
The first is that there's a federal election coming in within 12 months, more likely 6-8 months. Despite the historical record not really bearing this out, conservatives are usually treated as being better on national security. Whatever else it achieves, this deal being announced now makes national security an election issue, and the government thinks it can win on that. Sadly they are probably right. This is in a context where conservative governments in Australia are in momentary disrepute due to botched pro-business pandemic responses in NSW and at the federal level, which are shown in stark relief against the Labor states which have generally done well by taking their public health responsibilities seriously. The federal government needs such an issue, and this is certainly the largest change in Australia's defence posture so far this century.
The other reason is also timing in relation to a certain cabinet minister. It's a long story, but this individual had sued a media organisation over a historical rape allegation. When the media organisation's defence became known to the plaintiff, the case was withdrawn*, but the plaintiff was ordered to pay the media organisation's legal costs at around AUD $1 million. The interesting recent development was that these costs have been covered on the plaintiff's behalf by a blind trust, where the identity of his benefactors is unknown. This is not a welcome development for the government, which has started distancing itself from the minister, having previously defended him to the hilt. So there are jokes writing themselves in the media here at the moment that go 1) rape allegation 2) blind trust 3) nuclear submarines!
What Australia really needs more of (for anything other than blue water force projection) is more of stuff like the Armadale class patrol boats.
The choice of hulls is going to be interesting -- the US Virginia Block V hulls are 10,000 tonnes-plus (over half what the original Dreadnought battleship massed) with lots of extra bits like the cruise-missile launch tube module in the payload mid-section area. Australia doesn't really need that city-ablating capability in what are intended to be blue-water patrol subs so an option would be for them to build and fitout a "monkey model" Virginia from the Block III or Block IV designs which are noticeably smaller if somewhat behind the times. They could lease older Virginias from the USN for crew training purposes while their own boats are under construction though.
The Royal Navy's Astute subs are current production, coming in at about 7,500 tonnes or so without the bloat of the Block V Virginias. They'd probably easier hulls for the Aussie shipyards to build in quantity and besides they'd get Rolls-Royce reactors to power them and a discreet R-R badge on the front sonar bulge for extra cachet.
I can't see the Aussies designing a hybrid or home-grown nuclear boat based around an off-the-shelf reactor and propulsion system and building two different designs to suck up to the US and the UK simultaneously is madness. A Block II Astute with tweaks is a possibility though.
For those folks who think that subsea interconnectors distributing overabundant renewable energy will save the world... The British end of one of the cross-Channel power cables caught fire yesterday, removing about 2GW of cheap abundant reliable French nuclear power from the UK's energy budget for a couple of weeks and causing a spike in wholesale electricity prices.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58579829
It won't be fixed completely until spring next year at the earliest, removing 1GW of capacity from the energy budget over winter (from the sound of it the switchgear of one of the two 1GW cables exploded and the resulting fire disabled the other 1GW cable's infrastructure. The wrecked cable switchgear will need to be replaced in toto, it looks like.)
Britain is commissioning a new interconnector from Norway soon, supposedly 1.4GW at maximum output but winter is when Norway's electricity demand peaks as well so how much 'surplus' renewable energy they can sell to us at that time is another matter. Right now as I type this that interconnector is supplying us with 700MW, it may well be that the commissioning process gets accelerated while we're down 2GW of French power. We are, of course, burning coal and gas right now to keep the lights on because we're Green!
Canadian Navy nuclear subs as well - given the growing strategic importance of the arctic having a submarine force that can reliably operate up there would seem to me to be a good idea.
I'd settle for a couple of nuclear ice breakers like the new ones Russians are building. Heck they are using an old one to run tourist excursions to the North Pole.
Besides, what's not to like about those used rustbuckets we bought from the British? /s
1 in 3 is fairly common for warships.
Yes. Here's what I was reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collins-class_submarine#Operations_and_deployments
Read the paragraph starting with "In 2008 and 2009, personnel shortages reduced the number of submarines able to be deployed to three; "
So how is the power coming from Ireland to Scotland and Wales generated?
I'd settle for a couple of nuclear ice breakers like the new ones Russians are building. Heck they are using an old one to run tourist excursions to the North Pole.
We are already getting 2 polar icebreakers, though not nuclear.
But generally speaking Canada needs to start taking our Arctic waters and border more seriously given the actions of Russia and others, and in addition to ice breakers that also means sorting out our submarine fleet - and that is an obvious place to go as a first step to a nuclear powered navy and potentially Coast Guard.
Read the paragraph starting with "In 2008 and 2009, personnel shortages reduced the number of submarines able to be deployed to three; "
Perhaps modern nuclear subs would make recruitment easier, thus eliminating personnel shortages.
I'm sure we'd keep the method for contractions and possessives even if we didn't keep the spellings: yur/yu're still translates on a one-to-one basis. For any remaining, such as to, too, and two, I suspect that the correct translation can be determined through context: "I tuu went tuu the beach, and took tuu friends with me" probably doesn't even require AI, and it's the most complicated case I can think of off hand.
As to which your other issue, I think every language which does have consistent phonetic spelling (not sure any language gets it perfect) has either formally or informally picked a dialect and declared that it is the "correct" pronunciation, so I don't see that as an obstacle (except perhaps politically.)
So how is the power coming from Ireland to Scotland and Wales generated?
Gas and wind, IIRC. Much of the time power flows from the UK to Ireland. At one point the Republic of Ireland had a peat-fired power station but I think that was closed a long time back.
Perhaps modern nuclear subs would make recruitment easier, thus eliminating personnel shortages.
The USN is having manpower shortages. The Australian population is 1/13 the size of the US. So maybe you can only support a Navy 1/15 the size of ours or less?
We have 59 or 73 nuclear subs depending on if you count boomers. So that means you can man 4 or 5 unless you recruit at much higher rates than the US for the submariners.
Oh, yeah. While nuclear subs today are incredibly better than the boats of WWII, they still require an special type of person to handle it.
http://www.trolinger.com/david/sim.htm
https://man.fas.org/dod-101/sys/ship/docs/simlife.htm
http://goatlocker.org/resources/nav/simulate.htm
Well I was right about the public part.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/world/europe/france-australia-uk-us-submarines.html
But I find this quote interesting.
The angry words from Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, in an interview with Franceinfo radio, followed an official statement from him and Florence Parly, the minister of the Armed Forces, calling “the American choice to exclude a European ally and partner such as France” a “regrettable decision” that “shows a lack of coherence.”
Given the French public stance on NATO and diplomacy in general in the decades since WWII.
Just amusing myself thinking about the new hotness in 2040s era warships:
Optically stealthed* clippers that launch and retrieve a wide variety of drones. Invisible to satellites and spy planes, inaudible to hydrophone arrays. And, well, about as deadly as you'd imagine...yeah.
Thinking about it, I actually think that if we've got to have warships, more nuke boats is a good thing. It signals that we're getting ready to dump the diesel supply chain. I mean, they're still freaking useless against major crop failure, supertyphoons, and other real threats, but if we've got to have warships...
Thomas Jørgensen @ 1050: I am honestly just confused. Sure, the shortfin is a monstrosity nobody should ever buy.. but if the Australians have gotten over their fear of nuclear cooties, why the heck not just change the order already in progress to proper Barracudas? Would almost certainly come with a cost reduction, due to no redesign being required..
I wonder if the French would have been willing to sell them the nuclear version? Did Australia even ask?
jrkrideau @ 1071:
I'd settle for a couple of nuclear ice breakers like the new ones Russians are building. Heck they are using an old one to run tourist excursions to the North Pole.
Besides, what's not to like about those used rustbuckets we bought from the British? /s
What are they going to use that nuclear ice breaker for after the polar ice cap melts?
I wonder if the French would have been willing to sell them the nuclear version? Did Australia even ask?
You know the training systems and documents for a modern sub (nuclear or not) runs into $10s of millions. Maybe $100s of millions. I wonder how much it would save to avoid the translations needed. (Surely the RAN can deal with merican English.)
Ice cap melting are on the order of decades, so icebreakers are going to remain useful regardless of how clueless we are about climate change.
Glass houses....
You really want to get into a fight where we come on here and announce every odd GW of infrastructure outage?
2008 Hinkley Point C got the go ahead from the government, along with 7 other plants.
HPC was supposed to be generating 3.2 GW 2 years ago, so that's 6 GW YEARS of unavailability. (Not to mention the other 7 plants that were supposed to be built or near built by now)
Note that the coal fired plants sparked up before the interconnect failed, not as a result as you say. Maybe I could say that's as a result of "solar won't work in the UK" mindset? The summer/autumn shortages could be just as easily blamed on lack of solar at a time when the UK is not in permanent polar darkness.
In any case, an outage that has effects is not a sign that you need less of that infrastructure. It's a sign that you need more. If the UK had 300 GW of interconnects, no one would notice if a 40 year old 1 GW connector fell over, and you wouldn't be paying £2000/MWh. (and if it had been a nuclear plant instead, being 40 years old, it would have been off line for its 2 year 15 billion pound "refurbishment" anyway...)
One consideration. The UK appears to be a bit of an edge case.
While I agree that nuclear has some desirable properties in terms of grid size reduction, most of the world's population belongs to nations with enough surface area in reasonable latitudes to power themselves entirely off of solar with high reliability. (Admittedly, taking the EU to be a single nation, which is 'iffy'.) And, nowadays, that appears to be a cost-effective solution.
For the UK, the end-game may be Scotland, Ireland, and Wales rejoining the EU, much more tightly, and building out a cross-channel grid. For England, perhaps power costs increase a bit with synthetic fuels, but, overall, in terms of carbon-reduction, the UK should be a distant afterthought rather than a focus.
Apropos of nothing, but it looks like the biologists might be starting to get a handle on how signalling works in cells. While signalling in bacteria might be circuit-like in its logic, eukaryotes do something like the opposite of smart design. Per the article, "[b]iological cell-cell communication circuits … use an architecture that is the opposite of what we synthetic biologists might have designed."
What this means is that signals are often many-to-many, context-dependent, and combinatorial. And sloppy. But they're sloppy in a way that works better in a really noisy and problem-ridden environment. Reading the Quanta Magazine article (and I haven't yet read the associated BioRxiv article), the slightly better metaphor I came up with is that signaling molecules aren't playing lock-and-key (one signal, one receptor, one effect), but are a bit more like a flash mob in rush hour with an assignment. If enough of them get to the site with the right gear, the performance happens. If not, it doesn't. This is because the signals are generally molecules floating in a liquid that makes soup look simple. The nice part of being so messy is that combinatorial math allows many things to be built out of simple processes in different contexts, while promiscuous overlap means many things can be damaged (DNA, for example) without shutting down the whole show.
Anyway, this is an early glimpse, and I doubt this will be all the story. My takeaways:
--Silver bullet medications based on a lock-and-key receptor and signal model are likely a small subset of what's possible. And this model likely works in bacteria more than eukaryotes. A better model for drugs is probably The Cocktail, used by pharmacists in hospitals, herbalists, and traditional Chinese medicine. Not that I'm saying the olds got it right (they're mostly using additional drugs to deal with things like predictable constipation), but designed complexity (for example, flooding the zone with signal stew) may be the future of treatment. --If you're a SFF writer, time to cook up some new metaphors for cells. Dump the midichlorians already. Instead of a Quest for The Cure, have a Quest for Good Enough Stone Soup While The Kitchen Gets Trashed.
Interconnects do not generate electricity, they only transmit electricity generated by nuclear power plants, wind turbine farms, tidal barrages, solar panels, hydro-electric dams, hamsters in wheels etc. somewhere else. Interconnectors cost money and waste energy and don't add to the total amount of power generated and when they break they cause disruption. The fewer and shorter links between power plants and the consumer the better for cost and reliability reasons. There's a reason Torness nuclear power station is only about 50km from the Edinburgh conurbation, ditto for the Hunterston nuclear power plant over by Glasgow.
The UK recently started burning coal to generate electricity outside the winter period because wholesale gas prices peaked a couple of months ago and it became cost-effective to do so. Those gas prices have fallen again but the coal-fired station in operation is continuing to run in part because we've lost access to 2GW of non-fossil-carbon French electricity. The French are still generating mostly-nuclear electricity and selling it to Italy, Spain and even Germany on occasion (usually when the wind isn't blowing very strongly and it's night so no solar power). There's a smaller third French interconnector to the UK that's still operational since it doesn't landfall in the same single-point-of-failure site the other two interconnectors terminate in.
We are, of course, continuing to burn lots of gas to keep the lights on -- as I type this, Gridwatch says we're generating 13.5GW using CCGT plants. I note that the Norway interconnector is reporting delivery of 1.3GW of power today, that sounds like either the commissioning process is complete and it's now in regular service or they decided to rush things in part due to the French interconnector failure.
And then there are the contractors.
About 20 years ago, some friends had a house built. They asked the contractor to put in conduit and pull Cat-5, and the guy said, "huh? no". But they did get him to put in the conduit, and on a Friday evening, had a bunch of friends over after the construction crew was gone, and pulled Cat-5.
Note there was no disagreement between the couple....
Who would not ground an outlet?
Decades ago, they seem to have "grounded" by baring the grounding wire, and clamping it into the metal box.
Now? I have mentioned that the former owner of this house raved about his handyman, and that I was up to about three pages of reasons that asshole will never set foot on our doorstep.
We've replace a lot of the sockets that were PAINTED OVER.
Sort of adjacent to the thread about simplifying English and being able to speak a foreign language ...
The SPAM calls I get on my telephone just keep getting weirder & weirder. I usually let unknown callers go to voicemail, but I had just been on the phone with the guy who's fixing the A/C in my Jeep & I thought it might be him calling me back about something.
It wasn't.
Some woman comes on the line and says "This is ??? calling from India. I'm with accounting and ..." and those were the last words I could understand.
I'm pretty sure she was speaking "English", but with the sing-song accent and mushing all the words together I could NOT understand another word. I stopped her twice & told her I could not understand a word she was saying. She started over each time and the only words I could understand were "from accounting".
I'm sure it was some kind of scam aimed at stealing account numbers and/or passwords, but I wonder how many they actually get if nobody can understand them?
PS: How stupid do they think I am? Well, they're wrong, I ain't that stupid!
whitroth #1092 'Who would not ground an outlet?'.
Apparently, electricians following the building code here in BC. My part time job is to maintain a brand new building with 40 units in it. I was replacing a couple of light switches with 'dimmable switches' per the tenant's request, and discovered that none of the switches are grounded.
The ground wire is right there, the nut is right on the switch, but they are not connected.
In alarm I called an electrician friend to see if it was legitimate (the building is still 'warrantied' and I would call the builders back to ground all the outlets and switches in 40 units. Apparently grounding is optional - my friend does it because it takes 3 seconds, but it is a 'belt & braces' option when the box is metal.
So no panic, but any time I'm in there I always connect the grounds.
A couple of thoughts about the Australian SSN program. I am really curious about why the French were excluded. The US, UK, and France are the primary western operators of nuclear subs. Australia was going to buy conventional subs from France which were basically a diesel variant of the French Barracuda SSN. So why didn't they make it a AFUKUS agreement with all providing nuclear tech to Australia? I guess they wanted to cut France out, but why? I don't recall any recent disagreements.
1055 - Nuclear subs make a lot of sense for Aus. Lot of coast line, lot of tradelanes that need to be open. Conventional subs don't have the legs, and anything on the surface is way too vulnerable to mass missile strikes - a hundred anti-ship missiles cost considerably less than a surface combatant. Other peoples subs are also a problem.
I agree that the SSNs have better legs, but it isn't really a range issue. Diesel subs can go several thousand miles. It is range and speed. Only a nuclear sub can manage a transit of several thousand miles at 25-30 knots, and arrive with no need to refuel. A diesel sub could travel the same distance, but would take 2-3 times as long.
1066 And of course, there are exactly 2 shipyards in the entire alliance who have experience in building nuclear boats; BAe Systems at Barrow in Furness, UK, and Electric Boat Company in Groton, USA.
Err, there is also Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia. They are the sole builder of nuclear carriers and are a second yard for nuclear submarines, building nine Virginia class SSNs with four more under construction.
1069 - The choice of hulls is going to be interesting -- the US Virginia Block V hulls are 10,000 tonnes-plus (over half what the original Dreadnought battleship massed) with lots of extra bits like the cruise-missile launch tube module in the payload mid-section area. Australia doesn't really need that city-ablating capability in what are intended to be blue-water patrol subs so an option would be for them to build and fitout a "monkey model" Virginia from the Block III or Block IV designs which are noticeably smaller if somewhat behind the times. They could lease older Virginias from the USN for crew training purposes while their own boats are under construction though.
AFIAK the Tomahawk cruise missiles currently fielded are all non-nuclear, so they don't ablate cities. The TLAM-Ns were retired and converted to conventional variants because the US was using those on a regular basis and the nuclear ones were just taking up space.
I think Australia might want the Tomahawk capability, but they don't need the missile module unless they want the same number of missiles, since it can also be fired from torpedo tubes.
https://fas.org/blogs/security/2013/03/tomahawk/
Ok, I'm back. The place I took my Jeep did a great job on the A/C. It's blowing COLD!!! now.
Riding the bus (and walking between stops to change lines & get to my destination from the closest stop) was NOT FUN. Took an hour & forty-five minutes to get somewhere less than five miles from my house. Back when I was still physically fit, I could have walked it in less time ... even though Raleigh doesn't have adequate sidewalks.
There are TOO MANY ASSHOLES behind the wheel today. Walking in Raleigh is dangerous even where there are sidewalks.
If I ever have to give up my car & travel by city bus and shanks mare, I'm getting a concealed carry permit and buying a gun. It was that scary.
Canada
Apparently grounding is optional - my friend does it because it takes 3 seconds, but it is a 'belt & braces' option when the box is metal.
In the US if a person can touch any metal that is a part of a circuit then all the metal must be grounded. So if you have plastic boxes and no metal poking through then you don't need the ground. If a metal box then you could have a failure where a hot wire can touch the box so the screw that holds the wall plate in place can become hot so things must be grounded.
Like you if there's a ground lug on a switch I use it. If not I move on. If I bought it in the US at Home Depot or Lowes it will UL certified and so I assume it is OK to be without a ground lug due to design.
I am really curious about why the French were excluded.
The French have a long history since WWII of refusing to work with the rest of NATO. They pulled out and agreed to work with NATO operationally when they felt like it.
They also had (have?) a policy of stealing tech from other countries.
This may all be changing.
But much of the French tech is THEIRS. Which means you must go to them for support or parts.
With the US/UK sub program there are at least two sources to draw from. The UK source may not be as complete but it is there.
And as I mentioned earlier, the documentation systems on something like a nuclear powered sub are immense. With constant updates. Hugely so. Maybe Australia also decided they'd rather deal with Merican English than translations from French to English. Which might not always be up to date or even correct.
There are TOO MANY ASSHOLES behind the wheel today. Walking in Raleigh is dangerous even where there are sidewalks.
Covid. I have it via a second hand source that the word got out that the city cops where not stopping people for non critical traffic issues. Due to an early rash of cops getting Covid due to tail holes not masking when stopped. Plus the courts were shut down for all but major issues.
So the tail hole drivers in the area have figured out they can get away with being tail holes. I can't wait till the cops get to start hauling them into court again.
David L @ 1085:
You know the training systems and documents for a modern sub (nuclear or not) runs into $10s of millions. Maybe $100s of millions. I wonder how much it would save to avoid the translations needed. (Surely the RAN can deal with merican English.)
Best I can find out from the inter-webby, the deal with France included at least some of the submarines being built in Australia. I think part of the problem was the projected cost of the program had balooned from $40 billion (USD?) to $90 billion and the program was still in the design phase with the French engineers trying to convert their nuclear submarine design into a diesel submarine design.
I suspect the new AUS/UK/US deal will still have the hulls built in Australia and the reactor systems supplied as an assembled unit. I believe the current USN reactor design is supposed to last the life of the hull without requiring refueling like earlier ones did. So, I expect something like an Australian built Astute class boat with a U.S. supplied reactor.
As I understand it, Australia's problem is their likely foe is too far away for diesel/electric boats to be effective. At long range, diesel/electric boats have to spend too much time on the surface (or near the surface at snorkel depth) running on their diesel engines recharging their batteries. That's fine if the likely zone of combat is right in your own littoral waters, but not so much if that zone is an ocean away.
Diesel/electric boats can be quieter than a nuclear submarine when running on their batteries, but they're noisy as hell when they have to run the diesels to recharge & they have limited endurance between recharges.
Range & endurance are bread & butter for nuclear submarines.
So, I expect something like an Australian built Astute class boat with a U.S. supplied reactor.
Given all the issues with building modern deep water sub hulls AND the block mode of construction of the Virginia class, I can see the US ship yards building the modular hull sections which are shipped out for the Australians to put in the guts.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine#Boats
In Toronto when the first lockdown hit traffic accidents went waaaay down. Traffic fatalities didn't budge. After lockdowns lifted accidents went up. So did fatalities, as the idiot street-racers kept at it.
On a totally different note (and forgive me if you saw the post I made earlier), I'm on the Sunshine Coast for another three days. (Not that it's very sunshiny today, with 50-100mm of rain forecast.)
I have four bottle of Brickers Cascadia Cider left and no realistic prospect of drinking them all. (Especially if I want to get some flying in — no alcohol within 12 hours of flying.) If you feel like meeting up IRL and taking a couple off my hands (and possibly sharing a rant about Kenney) let me know. first dot last at gmail dot com should reach me.
Trevayne @ 109 A couple of thoughts about the Australian SSN program. I am really curious about why the French were excluded. The US, UK, and France are the primary western operators of nuclear subs. Australia was going to buy conventional subs from France which were basically a diesel variant of the French Barracuda SSN. So why didn't they make it a AFUKUS agreement with all providing nuclear tech to Australia? I guess they wanted to cut France out, but why? I don't recall any recent disagreements.
Just a SWAG, but I think it was COST. The French program had already more than doubled in cost, from $40 billion USD (or somebody's dollars) to $90 billion. And it may be the French were not willing to sell nuclear submarines to Australia.
And then there's the question of fueling/refueling the reactors. Does anyone know how many years the French Suffren (Barracuda) class submarines are supposed to be able to operate before they have to be refueled? I believe the current U.S. design is supposed to be able to operate for the life of the boat without refueling.
I agree that the SSNs have better legs, but it isn't really a range issue. Diesel subs can go several thousand miles. It is range and speed. Only a nuclear sub can manage a transit of several thousand miles at 25-30 knots, and arrive with no need to refuel. A diesel sub could travel the same distance, but would take 2-3 times as long.
The time the diesel/electric boat has to spend on or near the surface (using a snorkel) running on diesel also makes them more vulnerable to attack while in transit. The nuclear boat can go as deep as the water will allow and stay there during the transit.
[ ... ]
AFIAK the Tomahawk cruise missiles currently fielded are all non-nuclear, so they don't ablate cities. The TLAM-Ns were retired and converted to conventional variants because the US was using those on a regular basis and the nuclear ones were just taking up space.
I think Australia might want the Tomahawk capability, but they don't need the missile module unless they want the same number of missiles, since it can also be fired from torpedo tubes.
https://fas.org/blogs/security/2013/03/tomahawk/
Reading about the Aus/France submarine deal, it appears the boats were actually going to be design variant of the French Suffren (Barracuda) class, built by DCNS (Direction des Constructions Navales) in Australia, using an Australian shipyard.
Based on that, I expect you're going to see a Australian built Astute class hull with a "drop in" reactor system supplied by the U.K. or the U.S.
That would also fit in with the just announced deal for the RAN to get Tomahawk missiles. The Astute is armed with Tomahawks (torpedo tube launched). So if they're getting Tomahawks, they probably want a boat designed for Tomahawks.
The Suffren (Barracuda) boats have a mix of armaments - torpedoes, Harpoon missiles & a couple of French missiles I don't know a UK/US equivalents for - but I didn't see the Tomahawk mentioned.
But I think the big reason - that I just found - it the French reactor design has to be refueled after 10 years and who knows how any AUS/FR joint agreement would turn out in 10 years when it came time to refuel the boats? The UK/US reactor designs are both supposed to run for 25 years (life of the hull) without refueling.
The Australian goverment wants the hulls built in Australia, no question. Getting the modules and assembling them like Legos in an Adelaide shipyard probably isn't going to fly. A cheaper option would be to get the boats built by the US or the UK and delivered as working hardware day one but that's not going to happen unless the Aussie government does a backflip on localisation and jobs.
The absolute cheapest option and quickest to implement would be for the Aussies to lease some older Virginia-class subs from the US and operate them with all-RAN crews after training up on the sparkly bits with mixed crews for a few years. This may happen anyway as a stopgap while new hulls are built in Aussie shipyards, presuming the reactor and propulsion systems come from the US or the UK as plug-compatible items.
David L @ 1097: Like you if there's a ground lug on a switch I use it. If not I move on. If I bought it in the US at Home Depot or Lowes it will UL certified and so I assume it is OK to be without a ground lug due to design.
Minor point. Underwriters Labs doesn't "certify" anything. They test samples submitted by manufacturers and if those samples pass testing they LIST that item as having passed testing. It's UL Listed, not "approved" or "certified".
Years ago, when I worked for the fire & burglar alarm company I had to work on the fire alarm out at Underwriters Laboratories Research Triangle location. Their maintenance guys were very insistent that I understood & used the correct terminology. They did show me some of the testing cells & how they test stuff ... AND I got to see some of the tests they had in progress at the time. Cool stuff!
Listings can be revoked (and are) if evidence turns up that the item is not being manufactured to the same standard, using the same materials, as the samples that were submitted for testing. If there's a design change the manufacturer has to submit new samples for testing (and the samples have to pass the testing) before the manufacturer can apply the UL listed label.
re #1069 - I find myself wondering; does carrying the torpedo-launched variant Tomahawk eat into the bow magazine's torpedo capacity? If so, then the missile module might be desirable simply for magazine and flexibility reasons?
France has recalled their ambassadors to the US and Australia as a result of the submarine deal.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/17/france-recalls-ambassadors-to-us-and-australia-after-aukus-pact
And analysis by Climate Action Tracker shows that world governments are failing to meet their Paris 2015 agreement requirements, with a claim of current levels taking the world to nearly 3C in warming.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/15/governments-falling-short-paris-climate-pledges-study
analysis by Climate Action Tracker shows that world governments are failing to meet their Paris 2015 agreement requirements
I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
Also note that in Alberta climate change, like Covid, isn't happening. We have the provincial government's word on that.
In your best imitation of Captain Louis Renault.
Well, it does appear that Alberta finally got the news that COVID is a thing. Now they’re begging for help from BC. Given the number of AB plates I keep seeing, I think they are already taking enough of our resources. I really am out of fucks to give for these idiots
My sister's on the frontline in Alberta. Kenny denied, dragged his feet, and did everything he could until the ICUs were full and the death rate was climbing, then suddenly it was an unpredicted outbreak.
Unpredicted because he's been resolutely ignoring medical advice all through the affair. While picking a fight with his medical staff. No pay raise in a decade, a 5% pay cut, grabbing their pension plan to bail out his oil buddies, imposing emergency work orders* while denying the health system is strained… and claiming that health workers are overpaid.
There's a trickle of people quitting now. I think it will become a torrent soon. You can only work so many 14-hour 7-day weeks before you break down.
But hey, at least there was a Stampede this year. Gotta get your priorities straight, right?
*Ie. work locations, hours, and conditions centrally assigned and not grievable.
Rbt Prior But Will the Albertans vote this murderous idiot out, next time round?
Trump got the second largest vote in the history of US presidential elections in 2020. More than he got in 2016.
You folks going to vote out Bozo?
Honestly? Probably not. Partly because he is doing his damnedest to ensure it is impossible.
"does carrying the torpedo-launched variant Tomahawk eat into the bow magazine's torpedo capacity?"
The Tomahawk and Mk-48 torpedo are quite close in dimensions and weight, so I imagine it would be essentially a one-for-one trade-off. Other torpedoes are possible, but Mk-48 seems like a likely choice given the presumed mission.
Will the Albertans vote this murderous idiot out, next time round?
Unlikely.
Alberta has voted in a right wing government since 1935 with the exception of the previous government in 2015 - and that change only happened because the right wing split into 2 parties - since dealt with after the 2 parties merged.
But it is hard to single out the voters of Alberta when it has become rather common for voters to not punish any government that misbehaves anymore.
Will the Albertans vote this murderous idiot out, next time round?
Unlikely. His party might turf him, which will give the average Albertan the excuse to still vote UCP.
The Liberals are hobbled by the legacy of Pierre Trudeau and the NEP; even though that was half a century ago Albertans are still carrying a carefully-stoked grudge against the word "liberal".
The NDP are 'socialists', which means they're evil. (Alberta is very American in politics and attitudes.) Things like medicare, free public parks, etc aren't socialism, they're the benefits of an enlightened oil industry.
The fact that Alberta has the lowest tax rates in Canada, has had 70% of Canada's most expensive natural disasters* (for which they took federal money) and has taken more per-capita Covid money from the feds than any other province or territory is unknown in the province, or quietly ignored while they scream at the rest of the country for being greedy leaches.
*Which includes forest fires caused by accidental cigarette butts.
The fact that Alberta has the lowest tax rates in Canada, has had 70% of Canada's most expensive natural disasters* (for which they took federal money) and has taken more per-capita Covid money from the feds than any other province or territory is unknown in the province, or quietly ignored while they scream at the rest of the country for being greedy leaches.
Not to mention that because they consistently vote in the exact same people, beholden to oil, they really aren't doing anything to prepare themselves for a day where oil is no longer boom/bust but simply bust.
And thus they will like so many Republican States in the US become dependent on federal government money to survive.
That dependence on federal government money, from dams to farm subsidies, unfortunately makes much of the western US very similar to the old western Roman Empire. If and when it becomes uneconomical to subsidize these systems, people are going to mostly have to move or else. That's the message of Cadillac Desert.
California's partly affected by this, but we'll take longer to break down. Thing is, we're a terraformed state. Our area could only hold a few hundred thousand people if we didn't have the system of mountain snow packs, dams, and aqueducts to regularize our drought and flood norm into something that provides enough water under all but the most extreme events. Thing is, we're losing our snow pack to climate change, and it's too young a system to have gone through a decade-long drought or a 1862-level flood. Eventually this whole complex will likely break down too, although properly maintained dams can last for centuries. But it's a warning about terraforming, and the problems of maintaining an infrastructure-heavy bit of civilization into anything resembling deep time.
Not to mention that because they consistently vote in the exact same people, beholden to oil, they really aren't doing anything to prepare themselves for a day where oil is no longer boom/bust but simply bust.
Well, that was the purpose of the Heritage Fund*. Of course, within a decade it was just a slush fund for crony capitalism producing worse returns than a group of chimpanzees would have got from the stock market.
So not only doing nothing, but actively looting already-made preparations, while complaining that they're hard-done-by.
*A sovereign wealth fund created by the Alberta government in the 70s to help the transition to a non-oil-based economy when the oil ran out.
1107- re #1069 - I find myself wondering; does carrying the torpedo-launched variant Tomahawk eat into the bow magazine's torpedo capacity? If so, then the missile module might be desirable simply for magazine and flexibility reasons?
1116 - "does carrying the torpedo-launched variant Tomahawk eat into the bow magazine's torpedo capacity?"
The Tomahawk and Mk-48 torpedo are quite close in dimensions and weight, so I imagine it would be essentially a one-for-one trade-off. Other torpedoes are possible, but Mk-48 seems like a likely choice given the presumed mission.
I suppose one of the drivers for which base hull Astute or Virginia is chosen would be how much of a Tomahawk capability, if any, the Australians want?
If they just want the capability of firing a few missiles, then either Astute or Virginia will do the job. Both have 21" (533mm) torpedo tubes that can fire both torpedoes like the Mk-48 and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Astute has six tubes and room for 38 weapons. The early Virginias have four tubes with room for 25 weapons, along with 12 additional vertical launch tubes for Tomahawks only. The later Virginia class boats have 2-4 VPTs (large multi-purpose that can carry up to seven Tomahawks each so 14-28) instead of the 12 vertical launch tubes.
It looks like either will do as a general purpose SSN and Astute could be a better choice for ASW and anti-shipping due to greater torpedo capacity. If they was not the ability to conduct large Tomahawk launches with over 6 missiles, the Virginia's are the better choice because they can fire larger salvos and get clear of the launch point faster.
Another consideration might be build time. Per wiki, it seems to take about 10 years to build an Astute class SSN (latest complete boat was HMS Audacious laid down on 24 Mar 2009 and commissioned 3 Apr 2020). It only takes the US about 3-5 years for a Virginia class SSN (latest boats USS Vermont from Electric Boat laid down Feb 2017 commissioned 18 Apr 2020 and USS Delaware from Huntington Ingalls* laid down 30 Apr 2016 and commissioned 4 Apr 2020).
*Huntington Ingalls is the corporate parent of Newport News shipbuilding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astute-class_submarine
"I suppose one of the drivers for which base hull Astute or Virginia is chosen would be how much of a Tomahawk capability, if any, the Australians want?"
None.
They don't care. The actual armament hasn't been mentioned in public beyond "not nuclear" and quite possibly not even mentioned in private.
The submarines aren't submarines, they are gigantic pork barrels.
The French deal was purely about winning a marginal seat that has a ship yard in it. They don't need that seat now that the election is won, so they can cancel that order and grease the palms of some defence contractors and look forward to a seat on the board in retirement. This has exactly zero to do with which sub is better for blockade tasks that Australia will never do.
...they really aren't doing anything to prepare themselves for a day where oil is no longer boom/bust but simply bust.
Well, that was the purpose of the Heritage Fund*. Of course, within a decade it was just a slush fund for crony capitalism producing worse returns than a group of chimpanzees would have got from the stock market.
So not only doing nothing, but actively looting already-made preparations, while complaining that they're hard-done-by.
At the risk of pointing out the painfully obvious, they'd have done better to go the route of the Alaska Permanent Fund established the same year (1976).
For anyone unaware of the later, it gets money from oil taxes and investment and funds various state operations. The secret of its success is that it also pays out dividends directly to the citizens. Yes, Alaska has had a universal guaranteed income since the 1980s, though it's too little to live on. It turns out Alaskans care a whole lot about keeping looters out of the fund! Naturally any large pile of government money attracts looters and scammers, but since Alaskan citizens clearly recognize that it's their pile of money no crooked politician or billionaire has been able to make off with the whole thing.
My reading of this, and it is very superficial, is that we are getting something that is "ice capable" not even conventional ice breakers. Trans: We are not dropping in for tea at Alert in February. The Russians can. For a number of reasons I have read about but am not qualified to summarize, apparently nuclear ice breakers due to power output are just better for sustained running in heavy ice.
Here is a quick look at the new Arkita which seems to be being superseded by a more powerful class as she is launched. The Russians take their icebreakers seriously. I am not sure about the paint scheme, though. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a34128219/russia-nuclear-powered-icebreaker-arktika/
I believe we are commissioning Dinky Toys in comparison.
I have no idea but the Russian Federation seems to be maintaining the USSR's tradition of mothballing everything (at least in the military and ROSATOMFLOT looks semi-military).
Last I looked, the Lenin, the first Soviet nuclear ice breaker, built in the mid-1950s was tied up to a pier in Murmansk.
BTW, here is a video of a "smaller" Russian nuclear icebreaker, the Taymir, blasting up a Siberian River. There does not look to be a lot of ice but she is still impressive.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17891/this-video-of-a-russian-nuclear-icebreaker-blasting-by-some-guys-and-their-trucks-is-nuts
Not to mention that because they consistently vote in the exact same people, beholden to oil, they really aren't doing anything to prepare themselves for a day where oil is no longer boom/bust but simply bust.
I had not realized how delusional Kenny was/is until I realized that he really believed that the 1970s oil boom would return. I live in Ontario and Ford is an incompetent idiot but not actually delusional.
Surely the RAN can deal with merican English. Probably but did not Charlie recently say he had a 3 month course on how to write "murrican" when he started a new job?
In Canada tabling a motion in Parliament has exactly the opposite meaning as tabling a motion in the US Congress.
Cheers for the figures. I don't know the details of the Virginia class, but I do know that the Astute class are state of the art in submarine stealth technology. Some of these technologies are not even mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on the Virginia class.
The current-build USN Virginia-class subs are mainly intended for shore bombardment duties, able to turn a distant city centre, air base or port facility into rubble using seventy or eighty cruise missiles dispensed from a central vertical-launch magazine. They also work as patrol subs but that's not their main role.
I'm not sure the Australian government could afford that many cruise missiles even for one Virginia-class boat, never mind the six or so hulls they'll need to keep two boats on station covering the part of the southern Pacific they need to interdict if necessary. The original conventionally-powered Shortfin Barracuda submarine order from the French was based on having three or four boats on patrol at any time since they were more limited in speed, endurance etc.
I'm guessing somewhat but the US/UK/AU alliance is probably going to end up with the subs being built in Australia with a lot of US and UK financial help with the implicit understanding that the Aussie subs become a minor part of an international anti-China military force controlled by the US, like the British QE-class aircraft carriers and the new Japanese Izumo 'helicopter destroyers'.
Robert Prior 751 - just noticed your note and sent you an email. If you're still around get in touch.
Alberta and Kenney have been doing their best to serve as a cautionary example of how not to run a province.
They have had practice at this, having been in power (same party, slightly different names) for most of the last century, with the exception of a 4 year dystopic nightmare of competent governance when the SOCIALISTS were elected. Which only happened when the corrupt conservative party were split by a party that didn't think they were extreme enough.
I have a distinct memory of a conversation I had with an Alberta couple I met on the ferry in BC about 1 week after the SOCIALISTS were elected. They were quite adamant that the entire economy had been wrecked by 'that woman' who hadn't even been sworn in yet.
Albertan politics in wholly defined by the oil industry, with some social conservative flavour mixed in. The boom in the 1970s, the crash in the 80s, the boom on the late 00s and subsequent crash - all were defined by global oil prices. The first time round was the OPEC embargo, the second was the spike in oil prices driven Goldman Sachs and all the other post 2008 Wall Street grifters jumping into commodity speculation and derivatives.
At no point were these facts even remotely considered in Alberta political consciousness. When the oil crashed in the early 80s it was because OPEC ended the embargo. In Alberta the only acceptable explanation was the demon Trudeau and the damn Frenchies. More recently it was because the oil speculation bubble crashed - and again Alberta blames the demon Trudeau's spawn and the damn environmentalists who hate Alberta and want to gay marry your children etc (coherence is not a virtue in this political context).
Brutal gerrymandering that pushes the absolute limits of riding sizes mean that rural, conservative ridings and voters have an outsized representation, and you get a government that knows it can never lose.
This is not a government that is prepared to address reality in any meaningful way. So when reality intrudes on their fantasy it gets ugly.
Brutal gerrymandering that pushes the absolute limits of riding sizes mean that rural, conservative ridings and voters have an outsized representation, and you get a government that knows it can never lose.
How true is this?
The current provincial boundaries in Alberta are the result of a commission called by the NDP Government, and enacted by the NDP Government - and saw rural Alberta lose 3 ridings to allow more ridings in the cities and still keep to the 87 seat limit.
Are you trying to say that the NDP gerrymandered the ridings to ensure the NDP loses?
Then of course we look at the 2019 federal election - where the Conservatives took every seat in Alberta except for 1. Yet it seems reasonable to guess that the federal ridings aren't gerrymandered given it is decided federally.
What that really tells us is that regardless of ridings Alberta is (no surprise) a right wing province - and that the NDP is effectively the defacto opposition provincially because of Liberal hatred and not necessarily due to left wing support - particularly given that the Alberta NDP is probably closer to the federal Liberals (and thus more of a centre party) politically than they are to the federal NDP.
Which would suggest that Alberta has the same problem as us ... IF you could, even temporarily get the Lem-0-Crts & Labour to.. 1) Combine, via official tactical voting to get the tories OUT & 2) Whilst, in power, actually SHANGE the voting system ... THEN The problem would be solved, but in the meantime. selfishness rules,,,,
Which would suggest that Alberta has the same problem as us ... IF you could, even temporarily get the Lem-0-Crts & Labour to.. 1) Combine, via official tactical voting to get the tories OUT
In this case, unlikely.
Alberta is effectively a 2 party province - UCP (United Conservative Party) and NDP - the Liberals essentially poll at 1% or 2%.
Thus most ridings are (despite FPTP) won with 50% plus of the vote. Thus why the only way the NDP won in 2015 was because the right wing vote was split.
Similar results I expect in federal elections - the Conservative Party popular vote in Canada is distorted by just how crazy high their support is in Alberta and Saskatchewan (in 2019 federal election the Conservatives took 69% in Alberta, 64% in Saskatchewan).
As noted above - Alberta is a right wing province.
Conservative Party popular vote in Canada is distorted by just how crazy high their support is in Alberta and Saskatchewan
To be honest, this still surprises me.
Not Alberta, but Saskatchewan. When I was growing up Saskatchewan had been voting NDP for years. Not only that, but the provincial NDP government had kept the province in the black (small budget surpluses for a rainy day fund).
Even though I was there, I still don't understand how people who saw the first Conservative government in a generation run up the deficit and cut services can be so resolutely against "socialism". Given that this was all pre-internet, I have a hypothesis that this blaming was shepherded by the media (radio and newspapers back then) but am really not certain.
Trudeau appears to have retained power, but without an absolute majority ...
Trudeau appears to have retained power, but without an absolute majority
We essentially are back where we started, with the results very close to the previous election.
(the caution, not that it is likely to change things substantially, is there is the possibility of a lot of mail in ballots - which Elections Canada won't start counting until today - which could influence any close races).
But currently Trudeau has 158 seats (170 needed for majority) vs 157 in previous election.
But the big surprise is that the Liberals took 1 seat in Alberta and are leading in another.
The thing to watch going forward is the PPC (People's Party of Canada), an extreme right wing split of the Conservative Party, who has gone from 1.6% in 2019 to over 5% today. The growth in popularity has been driven by anti-lockdown anti-mask beliefs so it may disappear as we leave Covid behind or it may be the boost the party needed to gain some momentum.
Based on the first hundred or so comments (plus a terms search), I think we're forgetting another major application of this rocket technology--air transport. These rockets have the capability of transporting people anywhere in the world in about an hour.
Now, there would certainly be issues--e.g., it would be hard to distinguish a starship civilian transport from an ICBM. But, at $20/kg, you're talking about tickets prices that would be comparable to international first class tickets today. That kind of technology could potentially displace the entire long-haul airline industry. Airplanes would be treated more like trains are now--good for short to medium journeys, but not 3000-mile trips.
And the carbon budget? As compared to the current system, damaging as it is?
How about we replace the entire long-haul aviation industry with sub-orbital Verne cannons powered from geothermally-generated steam?
The War on Terror Was Corrupt From the Start
Now, there would certainly be issues
One way of putting it.
This article claims the CO2 penalty of current airline flying is 1 to 3 tons per passenger - it's about 50 tons per passenger on a rocket flight.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/19/billionaires-space-tourism-environment-emissions
A new resource on CO2 emissions by year, fuel type and country/region:
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel
Interesting, thanks. Seriously needs an update that includes 2020, and the GHG emissions changes (most but not all temporary) caused by the worldwide pandemic response. (The causality was often complicated.)
Related, China (Xi) is making some moves. We'll see how real they are (but it looks good). China's own coal usage is still horrifying though.[1] (The charts in that ourworldindata.org piece are stark.) Bolstering Confidence and Jointly Overcoming Difficulties To Build a Better World - Statement by H.E. Xi Jinping, at UN General Assmembly (21 September 2021) "China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad."
[1] 7 gigatons CO2, 1.9 gigatons/petagrams carbon per year. Plug in your working mortality cost of carbon number. (Mine is 250 tonnes of carbon per human death; 7-8 million per year not counting deaths due to air pollution.)
The projection is to use synthetic methane with the carbon sourced from direct air capture.
But I don't think it will fly for other reasons. The landing flip with hoverslam seems a step too for for commercial passengers for one. The airspace and sea restriction zones for another, the travel time to and from the offshore spaceports and probably some others that I haven't thought of.
Other problems:
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype...
Seriously, what's the market for a ride that can get you anywhere in the world in eight hours, but never in less time? I added the hours of getting to and from the spaceport, getting suited up and unsuited, and so forth. Only an hour is in flight.
A preflight physical will be necessary, and I shudder to think of what might happen if someone went scuba diving before flying.
Turnaround of the vehicles will be a problem, as will the number of trips each unit takes before being decommissioned, something that will jack its price no end.
And so forth. I can see spec ops forces riding this thing, or diplomats, or similar. But with the misery and inconvenience, it's an expensive niche product for terrestrial transit.
And just what government would allow the landing pads anywhere near a population center? Well any sane government. You know that the safety record will not be 100.0000%. And an uncontrolled "landing" will be a bit spectacular. Especially if the fuel left in the unit is more than trivial. But that only adds to the release of kinetic energy.
A friend talks of a carrier launch where they thought their eyeballs slammed into the back of their skulls. For operational reasons they had to launch with a tail wind instead of into the wind. Which translated to the catapult having to overcome a 50+ knot deficit. I can only imagine the G force of a Verne cannon launch.
China's own coal usage is still horrifying though.
In 2020 they brought online 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity. The rest of the world made cuts of 17.2 GW.
China has plans for 247 GW of coal power under development before they plan to stop building new coal plants in 10 years.
David L So the PRC is even more hypocritical than BoZo ... They need to stop building coal plants RIGHT NOW
Seriously, what's the market for a ride that can get you anywhere in the world in eight hours?
How many people fly from the UK to Oz and NZ (or vice versa, and for this purpose I'd consider a holiday or business trip to be 2 person journeys) in a 12 month period? It's not like you'd save time on a trans-Atlantic trip (well if not for security theatre and/or immigration), never mind pan-European, trans_Australia, Oz to NZ or vice versa...
"How many people fly from the UK to Oz"
Well over 700 000. A bit over 2000 a day (precovid).
"and NZ"
Couldn't find numbers for NZ/UK, but NZ get about 11 million visitors a year from all destinations.
"security theatre and/or immigration...Oz to NZ"
Last time I flew NZ-Oz it took 40 hours door to door. There were a few issues.
Cheers; that the sort of market size I'd think of for this sort of sub-orbital service, treating price and less of a factor than time. Given the design constraint on landing sites, I've ignored services where I don't think we can get oceanic landing sites, and/or the conventional flight time is under 8 hours.
Seriously, what's the market for a ride that can get you anywhere in the world in eight hours, but never in less time? I added the hours of getting to and from the spaceport, getting suited up and unsuited, and so forth. Only an hour is in flight.
My one and only (so far) trip to Indonesia took 36 hours, not counting getting to and from the airport. I mean, from stepping onto the plane at Logan to getting off the plane at Ambon was 36 hours and four different planes:
Boston to Chicago Chicago to Tokyo Tokyo to Jakarta Jakarta to Ambon
And reverse order on the way back.
Granted, chances of a direct Boston-Ambon rocket ever materializing are zero, cutting it down to "Boston to Jakarta suborbital, then local flight to Ambon" would be an enormous improvement.
I could maybe see a use for flights from Asia to Europe or the Americas, but the safety would have to be far more flawless than rockets are known for. It's akin to Mike Mullane's critique of the space shuttle in Riding Rockets. He saw the shuttle as an experimental craft that was actually fairly risky, pushed out as a safe workhorse due mostly to politics. It doesn't take too many crashes (cf Concorde, R.101, Hindenburg) to really devastate an industry like that.
Unfortunately, my take is still that the Starship, if it flies, will most likely get used for launching satellites by the gross into LEO, under the assumption that a Kessler Cascade will be initiated due to idiot politics, and that it's cheaper to just loft lots of ephemeral satellites to do satellite jobs than to try to clean up the mess or better yet, prevent it. I don't like this approach, because it means we've learned absolutely fucking nothing from every previous environmental disaster we've caused. But if everyone rushes to militarize space, that's where it may well end up, trashing yet another frontier.
Apropos of nothing, what do all y'all think of the prototype US Space Force Dress Blacks? As a southpaw, I'm partial to the left-handed fencing jacket look, and that Star Wars Imperial Officer thing will attract the right crowd too, I'm sure.
Granted, chances of a direct Boston-Ambon rocket ever materializing are zero, cutting it down to "Boston to Jakarta suborbital, then local flight to Ambon" would be an enormous improvement.
The traveling public, airline marketing staffs, politicians, etc... all want DIRECT flights from "here to there". And every now and then the airlines provide one. And they almost never last as the number of people who want to go directly from "here to there" never meets the loads to make the flight profitable. So we get lots of flights to hubs with changes of planes.
And it is not just does the demand support 2 flights a day from "here to there" but also can the planes for said flights be in the right place at the right times without sitting around unused at other times. And can each end point be staffed and equipped (spare tires and such).
Like it or not flights need to be profitable. Which doesn't mean an airline will have a particular flight be unprofitable if it can feed other profitable flights.
I suspect the same economics would apply to flying a rocket between two points on the planet.
Well we don't have all the crazies in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/22/canada-man-allegedly-punched-nurse-for-vaccinating-his-wife
The man appeared to be shocked that his wife was vaccinated at the pharmacy “without his authorization”, and hit the nurse in the face, Carrier added.
Does "Canadian punches nurse" really seem like a plausible headline to you?
There is a news article with references to statements by the local local police.
Does "Canadian punches nurse" really seem like a plausible headline to you?
Yes. Almost a million Canadians voted for the Peoples Fascist Party of Canada…
These were the people picketing hospitals and threatening cancer patients.
In the story, it's not noted that the accused is a PPC supporter. He was reportedly angry that his wife had received a Covid vaccine without his permission, which ticks two PPC boxes (male supremacy and anti-vaxxer.
Apropos of nothing, what do all y'all think of the prototype US Space Force Dress Blacks?
Immediately made me think of David Weber and Honor Harrington
Does "Canadian punches nurse" really seem like a plausible headline to you?
As I Canadian, sadly yes. We are immune from the craziness infecting the world.
As noted by Robert the PPC grew quite a bit in the last 2 years (2019 election 1.6% to 2021 5%).
And sadly, based on online commentary, we are following other countries like the US in pretending it's not a problem - people saying it was only Covid driving people to the PPC so when Covid is gone the PPC support will collapse.
I could maybe see a use for flights from Asia to Europe or the Americas, but the safety would have to be far more flawless than rockets are known for.
And that's the biggest problem.
Space X isn't interested in building commercial passenger stuff (at least not yet), where the design is thoroughly vetted and their is years of testing before commmercial use.
They like their quick iteration method where almost every rocket is unique.
And in fairness, it is working for their current goals - but those goals aren't commercial aviation.
Unfortunately, my take is still that the Starship, if it flies, will most likely get used for launching satellites by the gross into LEO, under the assumption that a Kessler Cascade will be initiated due to idiot politics,
Don't agree - because if we make LEO that dangerous then that threatens Musk's Mars dreams.
He isn't building massive rockets to put massive numbers of replacement satellites into a hazard zone, he wants to colonize Mars. And you need to be able to safely get into space, and move about in orbit (to transfer ships) to achieve what he wants.
Apropos of nothing, what do all y'all think of the prototype US Space Force Dress Blacks?
Makes me happy.Not a bad look. I will laugh if I ever see one F2F, though.A man punched a police horse at an anti-lockdown protest in Sydney a few weeks ago. Added the epithet "horse puncher" the list of names we have for such people down here...
He isn't building massive rockets to put massive numbers of replacement satellites into a hazard zone, he wants to colonize Mars. And you need to be able to safely get into space, and move about in orbit (to transfer ships) to achieve what he wants.
It's not an either/or, it's a both/and. Musk is lofting Starlink satellites, which weigh 570 pounds on launch. There are already 1600 up there, with 12,000 approved for launch. A starship can put 200-300 of them up per launch, so it would take 40-ish Starship launches to (re)stock the entire constellation as it is already approved.
To give you an idea of how this adds to the clutter, NASA catalogs something like 27,000 objects 10 cm and larger in all orbits right now, so the Starlink constellation will increase this by over a third, all in LEO.
Yes, kindly Mr. Musk is planning to deorbit the satellites when they get sufficiently buggered, and that's nice. I'm sure it will work. I'd similarly point out that a Kesslered LEO will clear itself out in a few decades due to drag from the exosphere* deorbiting crap, so it's not a permanent catastrophe, just enough to kill a company.
The other thing I'd point out is that Musk isn't the only one thinking of flooding LEO with constellations of cheap satellites and replacing them frequently. The USSF seems to be planning that way too. And if Starlink, the USSF, the Chinese, and the other Illuminati all decide that Swarmbots In Space is the new hotness, then there might be a few things bumping in the night as it were, with problems Cascading from there.
To be utterly depressing, initiating a Kessler Cascade might be something the someone might decide is a good thing. Why? More than any other nation, the US has militarized space, and we depend on it for intelligence and drone control more than any other nation. That makes us both powerful and vulnerable. If they can live without it and want the US overseas hegemony crippled, then starting a Kessler Cascade is a viable strategy.
Personally I hope not, but then again, I'm not one of the authoritarian leaders in charge of this mess, I just live here and get gloomy.
*LEO is inside the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere, the exosphere. Without an occasional rocket toot, anything in LEO eventually slows down enough to deorbit and go boom in the mesosphere or lower.
Slightly different thought, but here's the question: Is Elon Musk the kind of guy who can simultaneously plan for going to Mars and make such a mess in LEO that his starships can't make it to Mars?
Well, let's look at his Hyperloop and the Boring Company.
The Hyperloop (which he wanted other people to build for him) was supposed to be high speed rail in California. If you look at the routes for where the tubes might go, they loop over a number of rather famous earthquake faults. Repeatedly. Plans for the Hyperloop didn't account for what might happen to a big system of vacuum tubes when the pipes shear during an earthquake, but it would make for a perfectly cheesy disaster movie.
Then there was his Boring Company, a plan to make a(nother) private tunnel system under west Los Angeles. He poo-poo'ed the idea that he needed to do any environmental review. Him? He was being a beneficent genius. Environmental reviews are for sleezy billionaire developers.
Problem is, he wanted to bore tunnels through the Inglewood Fault System, which is a parallel side-shoot of the San Andreas. Not only is it quite active, it's made things bulge and torque such that most of the oil patches that fueled LA's growth a century ago are clustered around the Inglewood fault zone. That's where the La Brea Tar Pits are. Digging tunnels in the zone is possible, and LA's slowly constructing its subway system through there anyway, with special systems to deal with the oil and tar oozing out of the walls. But Musk didn't wanna deal with any of that.
So, do I think Musk could simultaneously plan to go to Mars and trash Earth's LEO? Sadly, it seems he could. In this he is very, very, very far from alone. I'd venture to suggest that a large majority of humans aren't capable of dealing with these kinds of problems, which is why they pose existential threats to our civilization. And so it goes.
Apropos of nothing, what do all y'all think of the prototype US Space Force Dress Blacks? Makes me happy. Not a bad look. I will laugh if I ever see one F2F, though.
Agreed. I think maybe it needs more shiny buttons? Or fewer? Having a dramatic line of buttons that ends at the waist with a boringly normal suit coat bottom below seems not quite there yet.
I also find myself hoping that the buttons on the flap are for show, and that the flap is held by velcro. Reason is it would be so great if some officer ripped it open as they howled "Khaaaan!" into the uncaring void.
What else did they leave off? Oh yes, the matching face mask for in person events.
As it stands, the prototype is simply perfect for Zoom meetings. Not that the USSF is in any way a Chair Force (never!), but having a good head and shoulders is enough for now, while they work on the bottom of the suit to make it classier. They should, at least, give the Marines a run for their sartorial money, seeing as how they're new and hip and all.
To be utterly depressing, initiating a Kessler Cascade might be something the someone might decide is a good thing. Why? More than any other nation, the US has militarized space, and we depend on it for intelligence and drone control more than any other nation.
I don't think your pessimistic enough.
Never mind a non-US government (or a billionaire) starting a Kessler Cascade, what happens if the US decides it is advantageous to initiate the Kessller Cascade?
China is investing heavily in space, and thus it is likely that at some point they will at least equal if not surpass the US.
But a weak point is still in aircraft (for now at least) - so what if someone in the US military/intelligence community decides the advantage to the US of being able to hide things by eliminating satellites can be offset by modern U2/SR71 type aircraft that China or others aren't capable of building and flying?
It doesn't even have to be true for someone with the right access to believe in it and do it...
Personally I hope not, but then again, I'm not one of the authoritarian leaders in charge of this mess, I just live here and get gloomy.
There are sadly lots of intelligent reasons to get gloomy when looking around at the mess we as a species are making.
Slightly different thought, but here's the question: Is Elon Musk the kind of guy who can simultaneously plan for going to Mars and make such a mess in LEO that his starships can't make it to Mars?
I think the general pattern of not considering any of the negatives/consequences of his ideas/projects pretty much answers that question as a yes now that you mention it.
You may be right. But again, the USSF has a program called Tactically Responsive Launch. In June, they launched Tac-RL2 as a test. They report the entire design, integration, and testing loop took them four months.
"[O]ne of the goals of the TacRL-2 mission was to simulate the "rapid reconstitution" of space capabilities to ensure there would be no gap in space-based missile detection and warning in the event of a satellite being damaged or rendered inoperable. "During conflict, the ability to rapidly reconstitute degraded systems within hours forces adversaries to rethink the economic benefit of attacking on-orbit assets," said U.S. Army Gen. James Dickinson, commander of USSPACECOM."
And this loops back in to why the USSF exists. It was a solution that was kicking around for over a decade, and Trump just pulled the trigger. This is the solution the USSF announced to a Kessler-style "Cascadian" attack. I suspect it's been in the works for quite awhile.
While I don't think Musk's Starship is a explicit part of the USSF Tactically Responsive Launch system, it could certainly be pressed into use. Moreover, there are complaints that space systems are overly burdened with secrecy (even some training courses are top secret), so it's quite hard to tell.
Remember though that China has a population of about 1400 million people. They burn about 2.3 tonnes of coal annually per capita. The US burns about the same amount of of coal per capita annually. I think Australia burns about 4 tonnes of coal per capita as well as exporting a lot more coal to other nations nearby.
Indonesia is the dark horse of the Orient, one graph I saw recently (not sure about its accuracy) said they have increased their coal consumption by a factor of seven over the past twenty years.
A man punched a police horse at an anti-lockdown protest in Sydney a few weeks ago.
Life imitating art?
Mongo
[Space Force] should, at least, give the Marines a run for their sartorial money, seeing as how they're new and hip and all.
Not yet, they're not. Check out this link and scroll down to the quartet of Marines illustrated. To be fair, that's a high bar to clear and the Marines do clean up nicely.
People have noticed that this is the Battlestar Galactica uniform, so the Space Force may get a week or two of relief from jokes about them stealing the Star Trek logo.
Given all the references to various science fiction (I have Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Royal Manticoran Navy and maybe Galaxy Quest), is this organisation the "USS Farce"?
No, they don't. Here's a pretty comprehensive take-down of the idea, covering more aspects of it than Heteromeles did in his reply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI
The guy (Adam Something) has similar takes on Elon Musk's other ideas as well. I find his channel quite educating (and funny).
I for one am most relieved that the US Space Force is apparently led by Bruce Willis (the guy in the middle). Now I know that we're all in the best of hands (and I imagine him fighting it out with the villain in hand-to-hand combat dangling from a Falcon Heavy in orbit with bare feet and nothing but a helmet and a ripped-to-shreds T-shirt on).
Back to the original topic, what does the commentariate think of this...
The issue with Solar Power Satellites as I see it is the conversion from photons to electricity, then back to photons, then back to electricity is pretty lossy. Plus some of those losses happen in space where rejecting waste heat is difficult.
So why not mirrors in space rather than solar panels?
We're going to need big solar farms, 1000 km on a side big. That makes a big target. It's infrastructure we're going to need anyway, so there's no additional cost for rectennas or land or wiring.
Mirrors can be a few molecules thick, and cheap and they don't stop working if a micro meteorite makes a tiny hole.
So put a bunch of big big big mirrors in space (maybe half way to GEO) where it's almost always sunny and have them redirect photons, cutting out a bunch of lossy conversions. I'm obviously not thinking of a monolithic single mirror, but rather lots of steerable elements.
What do you think?
No, no no! Do that and some idiot will say "we can eliminate night time darkness," and there will be attempts, possibly successful, to do it.
This will be a ecological disaster that would make global climate change look like a minor inconvenience. Much of the biosphere, including many food crops, relies on darkness, sometimes specifically changes in day length through the year. And, whatever the party animals might say, we humans really do need our darkness periods.
And of course, given the geometry, destroying the night is the easy way to use the mirrors.
JHomes.
I think those are called solar sails, and will need to have interesting bits of station-keeping gear attached. How you keep an enormous sheet of mylar focused on a single point will probably turn out to be one of those interesting questions.
Yes, I'm aware of Project Echo, which used mylar balloons (inflated, then evacuated) to bounce radio signals off as a relay system, until telecommunications satellite technology got mature enough. A solar reflector isn't a sphere, it's something like a solar oven.
I think the best option would probably be a spinning solar sail-type satellite. Given all the misery attendant on testing solar sails in space, I assume getting this to work is harder than it looks, and setting it up so that it doesn't accidentally occlude a critical weather or communications satellite adds extra zest to the navigation problem.
The other cheerful fun feature is figuring out where to put it so that it does something useful. Sunlight is around 1360 w/m2 in cislunar space. It won't be reflected perfectly (loss one), not all of it will go where you want it (loss 2), it's going to fall off as 1/d2 per distance (loss 3), and a majority will be absorbed by the atmosphere (loss 4). So the challenge is devising a system that concentrates enough light somewhere where it's needed. Hopefully we're not talking about a solar sail the size of Texas in GEO to light a used car lot for an extra 150 w/m2 at night during a sale, but someone better check the math to make sure this isn't the case.
I've been holding that one in reserve for when somebody gets too annoying about how solar power won't work in the UK. There's also the issue that the mirrors could be pointed (by malicious actors) at places that don't want to bake/fry in too much extra light. Those threats would be interesting, politically. Elon Musk sort of pointed it out when he disparagingly noted that all the conversions in the normal schemes were pretty wasteful.
Heteromeles:"Hopefully we're not talking about a solar sail the size of Texas in GEO to light a used car lot"
I was thinking about aiming it at something 1000 km on a side. That's a big used car lot.
Bill Arnold: "I've been holding that one in reserve for when somebody gets too annoying about how solar power won't work in the UK."
We haven't passed that point?
ilya187 @ 1162:
Immediately made me think of David Weber and Honor Harrington
Made me think of Paul Verhoeven having an inappropriate relationship with Heinrich Himmler.
Apropos of nothing, what do all y'all think of the prototype US Space Force Dress Blacks?
Since the question has come up on a science fiction writer's page, I want to share this Terminal Lance strip. Remember, you don't fight Moon Spiders in the uniforms you want, you fight Moon Spiders in the uniforms you have...
Our Gracious Host sort of has you covered there. Although in this case it's not a mirror per se, but still the results are quite spectacular…
Big mirrors Not a new idea IIRC ... A C Clarke had a word on the subject ... & much further back, Archimedes did something similar at Syracuse, discombobulating the Romans ....
much further back, Archimedes did something similar at Syracuse, discombobulating the Romans ....
Pretty much proven to be a myth.
I will note, on the feel-good side, that the USAF/USSF Academy commissioned a 2nd LT into the USSF who was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes while in the academy. Normally, this would be an automatic disqualification, as someone with Type I diabetes can't deploy. Given what the USSF does, inability to deploy does not limit this dude from having a career in the force.
One can argue whether this is good or bad, especially if (Gods help us) the USSF follows the Army Air Corps of a century ago and starts killing people in the sky. But right now, that's not what they do, so casting an unusually wide diversity net is not a bad thing.
And I'll repeat yet again: my particular beef with my country's armed forces isn't with whether a particular forces exists or is a joke or whatever, it's that it's entirely too fucking big and damaging because of that alone, let alone all the extremely problematic things they do.
From a purely SFF angle, I find the USSF fascinating because they're actually working out the problems of how to deal with violence and coercion on this latest human frontier. The answers they're coming up with so far aren't quite what fiction would have predicted. That, in itself, leaves all sorts of new openings for stories, and I think that's a good thing. Turns out, it's not wagon train to the stars, it's programming bullets speeded up 10x to grapple with and mess with each other in midflight. At least at the moment. Then again, the first air battles had pilots leaning out of cockpits at 60 mph to shoot at each other with their handguns. That evolved rather rapidly.
I will note, on the feel-good side, that the USAF/USSF Academy commissioned a 2nd LT into the USSF who was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes while in the academy. Normally, this would be an automatic disqualification, as someone with Type I diabetes can't deploy.
Given the number of personal who never deploy outside of the home country, and a potential number of positions in at least some of the branches that even if they deploy it will be in a way that shouldn't interfere with medicating, perhaps it is time for a rethink on that restriction and make it dependent on the actual role.
Given the number of personal who never deploy outside of the home country, and a potential number of positions in at least some of the branches that even if they deploy it will be in a way that shouldn't interfere with medicating, perhaps it is time for a rethink on that restriction and make it dependent on the actual role.
Agreed. That might have been the point of publicizing this, actually.
"From a purely SFF angle, I find the USSF fascinating because they're actually working out the problems of how to deal with violence and coercion on this latest human frontier."
I trust that some of them are asking the question, "Who has the most to lose?" if war flames in space.
"From a purely SFF angle, I find the USSF fascinating because they're actually working out the problems of how to deal with violence and coercion on this latest human frontier." I trust that some of them are asking the question, "Who has the most to lose?" if war flames in space.
Probably they are, and probably more than we are, since they get paid to do SWOT analyses and we post on blogs for free. Whether their analyses matter to the deciders?
One interesting thing right now is that their actual orbital warfare wing seems to be hypothetical and satellite based (the "Space Delta 9" unit), not spacecraft and astronaut based. See Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force, and links from there. I recommend looking down at the specialties of the officers and enlisted first, then cruising up to the "Deltas" (oh so kewl, that name!)
The other interesting thing, getting back to Lord Musk of Mars, is that it turns out that SpaceX already has contracts to loft 4 USSF satellites on their various Falcons. So yes, unfortunately, I'd now say it's highly likely that the USSF will be flying SpaceX starships if those rockets ever get certified. It may be that his mission to Mars thing was a bit...metaphorical?
Given the number of personal who never deploy outside of the home country, and a potential number of positions in at least some of the branches that even if they deploy it will be in a way that shouldn't interfere with medicating, perhaps it is time for a rethink on that restriction and make it dependent on the actual role.
If you want a career in the non USSF branches at some point you have to have a combat/fighting command.
My wife's father over his career did USSR missile test watching from IRAN (we think), missile testing in AZ or NM, got a degree over several years, was deployed in Italy for 3 years (not sure why), commanded an artillery battery in VN, did a year each at 5th and 7th corp in Germany, and was the head accountant at 3 locations the last being Fort Mead. And I've left a few postings out. Aside from Italy my wife never went to school in the same city two years in a row.
Without the diversity you get career / rank stuck after a few years.
"the "Deltas" (oh so kewl, that name!)"
You're better off than being an Epsilon, they get to shovel shit with their bare hands... and being a Gamma would be too much like thinking.
You're making a difference, but it's only a tiny one and it doesn't change the overall situation.
You're a giant pile of all the shit that's come down the river over the last few million years.
"If you want a career in the non USSF branches at some point you have to have a combat/fighting command."
A cynic might remark that might have something to do with the number of wars, conflicts and so on started by the USA.
If you want a career in the non USSF branches at some point you have to have a combat/fighting command.
I'd point out that this is kind of like asking a Marine if they want a career in the Navy? It's the same setup with the USAF/USSF. They're two independent services, but under the Civilian Secretary of the Air Force, just as the USN and USMC are under the Secretary of the Navy.
I'd also point out that the reason the USSF is a separate service on par with the USMC is that grouping space assets in a single service, rather than under four of them, is one potential way to save resources. Also, space is a different place than the atmosphere, so it makes sense to develop specialists on it within a single service, rather than develop them in parallel among a bunch of mutually antagonistic services. And yes, I can make the other arguments too, including folding the entire US military into the Navy, just because admirals are unwilling to accept generals over them, but apparently the converse is marginally less true (/sarcasm).
As for what the USSF is...It's a part of Ye Olde Strategic Air Command (the watching stuff from satellites part). It's now Vandenburg (aka Black NASA), the military satellite launch and control people. It's 40% of the staff of the NRO (used to be USAF, got sheep-dipped into the USSF), and there's at least one serious proposal out there to merge the NRO and USSF, since they share so much equipment and people already. It's all the SPAWAR and space and satellite programs from the other services, as they get wound down and folded in. It's at least one astronaut (a USAF officer on the ISS who was sworn into the new service in space, just because). And it's got no respect, for fairly obvious reasons.
So it's basically an intelligence service at this point. As with the US Air Corps at the start of WWI, it's mostly about information gathering, because people are still (after 60 years) struggling to work out how to hit each other in space. And that's actually the other point: space is so alien, it's taking a very long time to work out how to do violence and coercion out there, at 10x bullet speed at the top of a mediocre gravity well. But if they're planning super-sekret manned space stations, they aren't advertising that fact, for some reason. It may be a head-fake*, but their publicity is aiming more towards flooding cislunar space with lots of cheap and powerful satellites, rather than big fragile human-holding satellites.
Also, I don't think it's the world's first military space force. Russia and India got there first.
*Head-fake for those who don't speak American English: it's a basketball term, about feinting a direction with your head to get your opponent to go the wrong way, so you can get past him. Obama's initial take on the Syrian Civil War is a good example of a political head fake (he made all sorts of noise about lines in the sand and stuff, but it was quickly became apparent he didn't want to get sucked into it any more than absolutely necessary).
Re Obama, er, no. The USA started arming Syrian rebels in 2010 (i.e. BEFORE the 'Arab Spring'), and that caused the civil war. That has been admitted before Congress. Yes, he was doing a head-fake, but not the one you described.
Re Obama, er, no. The USA started arming Syrian rebels in 2010 (i.e. BEFORE the 'Arab Spring'), and that caused the civil war. That has been admitted before Congress. Yes, he was doing a head-fake, but not the one you described.
I'd appreciate a reference, because I'm not finding it. There's this from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-usa-obama-timeline/timeline-u-s-policy-shifts-on-syria-in-obama-administration-idUSBRE86Q05D20120727 which has the US and Syria strengthening diplomatic ties in 2010 before the war broke out in 2011. There's this from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war which doesn't have the US dealing with the Free Syrian Army until 2010, and then only with nonlethal aid in food rations and pickup trucks. There's also a segment in Blueprint for Revolution (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LYXXZUO/) where Srda Popovic, one of the architects of the Serbian uprising and member of Otpor, got together with Syrian activists to try to teach them how to pull off a nonviolent uprising. The session went badly, and they shortly thereafter got ignored when the rebels decided to go for an armed uprising and the slaughter started.
Thing is, the US could get little, if anything, out of a Syrian war, no matter who won or who was involved. There was political leverage if democracy could prevail nonviolently, but I think the hopes brought on by the Arab Spring have pretty much fizzled. Revolutions are tricky, whether you do it with arms or without. Per Popovic, who helped train many of the nonviolent leaders in the Arab Spring, in Syria, apparently the nonviolent activists couldn't find common ground. In Egypt, the nonviolent activists thought that getting to an election was sufficient, not about who would win the election. His book's worth reading for that alone.
Obama's head fake was when he did a big tough talk about how the US wasn't going to stand for blah blah blah. It was pretty clear he was playing the crazy one, while his friends "talked him down" and presented a purportedly rational alternative that involved the US not getting involved. It ended up not working, of course, but that's what I'm talking about.
With regard to the USSF, they're making big noises about lofting lots of satellites, presumably to discourage US adversaries from shooting military satellites down to see what happens next. In this scenario, there's not much use for a militarized space base. If this is a head fake, then they actually do have a use for boots in orbit, and things are very different up there than I'm currently guessing.
If you want a career in the non USSF branches at some point you have to have a combat/fighting command.
If you define the time in the military as attempting to climb the rank ladder, then yes (though the actual need up to a point is perhaps debatable.
Without the diversity you get career / rank stuck after a few years.
As in the corporate world though, there are a lot of people whose goal is not to climb the ladder and/or they simply can't get into the diminishing number of slots.
So there will be a lot of career military personal who never climb very high in the ranks.
Which brings us back to the point that a lot of those positions won't be impacted by something like Type 1 diabetes.
Take at random the Navy. Outside of say the seals or pilots, there are a lot of positions in the Navy that never leave the comfort of a safe non-directly-combatant base or even a ship where the supply of medicine is readily available.
There doesn't seem to be (other than likely out of date rules) any reason to disqualify someone in those circumstances just because they are Type 1.
Yes, combat roles are special - but they don't define much of the modern military.
And a military that seems to frequently (not just the US) to be short of personel should perhaps re-evaluate the refusal to even consider willing recruits when perhaps in 2021 they could serve with no issue.
The USA started arming Syrian rebels in 2010 (i.e. BEFORE the 'Arab Spring'), and that caused the civil war. That has been admitted before Congress. Yes, he was doing a head-fake, but not the one you described.
There doesn't seem to be anything verifying this - the closest would seem to the CIA program to arm the Syrian rebels but that didn't start until 2012, the Syrian Civil War started a year earlier.
and the link to Wikipedia about the CIA program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
So there will be a lot of career military personal who never climb very high in the ranks.
I'm sorry. I thought everyone knew. If you don't advance you get moved out. That is just the way it works. The services don't way people who stay still. This is on the commissioned officer side, not the NCO side.
Take at random the Navy. Outside of say the seals or pilots, there are a lot of positions in the Navy that never leave the comfort of a safe non-directly-combatant base or even a ship where the supply of medicine is readily available.
And they will never have a meaninful command. They will be told / asked / forced to retire at some point.
This from a friend who was a carrier pilot. But on a supply plane. He said he'd never advance past that without switching to a career where he was responsible for dropping a big bang or aiming a guided something. And by the time he got serious about it the Navy was not going to put him in the career path with people 10 years younger than him. And several rank below.
USSF may be different but for the rest it is up or out.
I think you're confusing the NCO career path with th commissioned path.
David L @ 1195:
My wife's father over his career did USSR missile test watching from IRAN (we think), missile testing in AZ or NM, got a degree over several years, was deployed in Italy for 3 years (not sure why), commanded an artillery battery in VN, did a year each at 5th and 7th corp in Germany, and was the head accountant at 3 locations the last being Fort Mead. And I've left a few postings out. Aside from Italy my wife never went to school in the same city two years in a row.
Without the diversity you get career / rank stuck after a few years.
Also be aware that the biggest enemy the Air Force faced was not the USSR or Iran or ... It was the U.S. Army & the U.S. Navy, same as it was before the Army Air Corps was split off into it's own branch service.
And now a new branch of service, the Space Farce, has split off from the Air Farce.
David L @ 1204:
I'm sorry. I thought everyone knew. If you don't advance you get moved out. That is just the way it works. The services don't way people who stay still. This is on the commissioned officer side, not the NCO side.
Works the same way on the enlisted (NCO) side. It's just a bit more subtle and there is a bit more room to keep worker bees in the lower NCO ranks.
To be "fair" to the military, I did know about the up or out policy (promote or retire). My understanding was that it's designed to avoid the Peter Principle, where people get promoted beyond their competence level, then get stuck there, accumulating seniority without necessarily accumulating competence.
That said, my counter-example is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes at age 7 and is now 67 and working harder than I am. For someone in the USSF who will likely have a career of 2-3 decades, has limited prospects for being deployed overseas due to a dearth of USSF overseas bases (Thule Air Base in Greenland is it) and the need to have various and sundry security clearances to work on space operations? I'm not sure that the diagnosis really limits what they can do, career wise. Of course they can't go to space, but the chances of that are thousands to one against anyway.
As for the clearance limiting travel, I already mentioned my father worked on nuclear physics in the 1960s. His hometown draft board kept calling him up to send him to Vietnam, and he kept having to explain that his security clearance prevented him from being sent overseas. Since one publicized argument in the USSF is whether the level of security is so high and so ubiquitous that it's hindering operations, I doubt that USSF officers are going to be in places where they can be captured by unfriendlies, at least for awhile. Apparently at Colorado Springs, students need top secret clearances to take undergrad space operations classes, just to know what systems they're going to be training on.
AS I SAID, it was admitted by a general when giving evidence to a congressional committee. No, I didn't keep the link, but you should be able to search for it.
AS I SAID, it was admitted by a general when giving evidence to a congressional committee. No, I didn't keep the link, but you should be able to search for it.
The point is searching is not finding anything that indicates US involvement prior to the start of the civil war.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but so far there appears to be zero information online stating that it did happen.
As for the 240 volt outlets, yeah it's annoying to blow thousands fixing some developer's laziness in the garage wiring. New million dollar houses come do wired for an EV (e.g. there's a 240 W outlet in the garage, thanks to CEQA)
Maybe in SoCal but not around here. I live in tear down central. In my 400+ subdivision from the 60s we have 20 or so tear downs new builds going on at any one time. And I live in a sea of 2000 or more 1/5 to 1/3 acre lot suburban homes.
Anyway, went to dinner at a friend's a couple of block away. The house next door to him is a tear down new build. Doors aren't up yet so he and I walked through it a day or so ago. 400+sf 2 car garage has THREE 120v 20amp outlets. That's it. One per wall. This will be a $1.5mil home. And instead of putting in a couple of 240v/40 or 50amp outlets for the plug in car needs that will be there day one or soon for an extra $400 to $500 the new owner will get to spend $2K to $5K to do the upgrades themselves.
And instead of putting in a couple of 240v/40 or 50amp outlets for the plug in car needs that will be there day one or soon for an extra $400 to $500 the new owner will get to spend $2K to $5K to do the upgrades themselves.
This is America. By the time an electric car charger or two is needed the current building being constructed will have been torn down and be in the process of being rebuilt. As you say, you live in tear down central.
ObSF: Heinlein's Martians who abandoned cities because they were old and they couldn't bear to live in places others had lived in before them. You can tell Bob was a Californian, yes?
Today is National Coffee Day here in the U.S. Why did no one tell me this this morning when it would be of some use?
By the time an electric car charger or two is needed the current building being constructed will have been torn down and be in the process of being rebuilt. As you say, you live in tear down central.
I hear your sarcasm.
But around here the buyers already own Teslas and such. I mean it would be a great FEATURE to advertise. But nooooo.
We are a different area than much of the US. Apple is showing up with 3000 jobs with an average pay of $190K. Google 1000 jobs. Fidelity 1500. And a lot more. Now add in all the support little companies and jobs and we can't keep up. But no one wants to allow anything but single family housing NEAR THEM. I try and point out they are building a mini Atlanta but they don't get it.
This prompts the question: Why aren't the prospective buyers requiring this feature then? I mean, if I had a Tesla I'd very much want to charge it in my own garage, wouldn't I? And if there's a demand there should be a supply, shouldn't it? I mean, the US is supposed to be a market economy after all, isn't it?
Real estate / housing sales do not follow rational analysis. At all.
And in a fast growing area where houses in "hot" neighborhoods sell in a week with $10K earnest money down non-refundable no mater what you find on an inspection, sizzle sells. Hidden steak is ignored. This was discussed here recently.
When people buy a $1mil house based on the wallpaper in the dining room, not on the size and location of the electrical panel, builders quickly learn what to put in for the sale and what can be ignored. Even though wall paper is trivial to replace compared to a change in the electrical panel.
I'm the odd duck in all of this as I grew up with a father who, as a side job, built decent homes. So I know what to look for better than the average person.
My father decided when it was all said and done he might not do it again if given a do over.
David L 1213:
But around here the buyers already own Teslas and such. I mean it would be a great FEATURE to advertise. But nooooo.
We are a different area than much of the US. Apple is showing up with 3000 jobs with an average pay of $190K. Google 1000 jobs. Fidelity 1500. And a lot more. Now add in all the support little companies and jobs and we can't keep up. But no one wants to allow anything but single family housing NEAR THEM. I try and point out they are building a mini Atlanta but they don't get it.
In other local news:
Looks like a Land Rover Defender. The article didn't say where they're going to build their factory.
David L @ 1215: Real estate / housing sales do not follow rational analysis. At all.
House down on the corner sold last week. The last two residents put in the most incredible gardens - rivaling some major botanical gardens.
New owner had a crew in today. Stripped it down to the ground except for two trees & three bushes. I think the two trees are mandatory; they belong to the city.
I saw baby rabbits crying over their lost habitat.
The article didn't say where they're going to build their factory.
Mexico?
Sarcasm aside:
The company is INEOS Automotive who will be importing their Grenadier model.
A company spokesperson said:
"“Vehicles will be built in Hambach, France,” the spokesperson notes. “No U.S. manufacturing is planned at this time.”"
With a thin note about how assembly was to be in Wales but Brexit caused them to move it to France.
New owner had a crew in today. Stripped it down to the ground except for two trees & three bushes.
Since we're talking about Raleigh NC, there's a larger than normal thread here on Nextdoor about the dangers of hawks trying to swoop up small dogs. Started by someone whose dog was attacked and lost an eye. With a side note of how terrible it is that they eat the other small creatures. Some of us contrarians point out that the hawks are wired to go after small creatures in the open. And clearing lots creates open spaces for them to hunt.
The people getting the vapors outnumber us pragmatists about 5 to 1.
I'm wanting SMR's to be a good thing. But so far they are not reality.
So is this a real step forward in reality land or a UK boondoggle way of spending big sums of money?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/U-Battery-unveils-full-scale-SMR-mock-up
My initial read of the project as described is... meh. It's based on a 'proven gas-cooled reactor' technology, then the article mentions TRISO fuel so it looks like it's based on the current Chinese HTR-series reactors which have ten years or so of intermittent runtime on the prototype HTR-10 reactor.
The U-battery unit is a TINY modular reactor, not just "small". It produces 4MW of electrical power which can be matched, on average by a single large 13MW wind turbine. It costs four times as much to build as wind (large wind turbines price out at about UKP 1 million per MW installed and grid-connected) and that's if you believe the proposed UKP 50 million price tag, never mind operating costs, decommissioning and other expenses. The only extra wind doesn't provide is the process heat that can be tapped off for manufacturing, ore processing etc. if needed.
The press release is a "tick the boxes" exercise in the "give us more money" stakes. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Ah yes, the Disney view of nature. Lasts until they try to have a garden of their own, and discover that squirrels have other plans…
Friend of mine who has a magnificent (albeit somewhat unkempt) garden had been steadily photographing insects in her garden. She's identified over 300 species, and that's without crawling looking under leaves or using UV to find all the moths. Willing to be her neighbours yards don't have the same biodiversity.
We have a very well connected set of greenways. They mostly follow the old creeks which are mostly allowed to be overgrown. (For a while now the city has people who understand that flood control is helped by having a tangle of plants along meandering waterways.)
Of course this means the bears that migrate from 100+ miles west in the mountains to 100 miles east to the coastal swamps now go through the city at times instead of around it. So we get multiple bear sightings in back yards and such twice a year. Earlier this year one decided to climp a tree in a hospital parking lot which tied up a policeman for about 24 hours to keep the gawkers back.
There are foxes resident in central London.
Then there are these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rats_in_New_York_City#Control
NYC has a rat for every 4 residents.
I seem to recall something about the London tube system having a few.
"I try and point out they are building a mini Atlanta but they don't get it."
I suspect that I may understand the significance of that, but may not and others from farther away probably won't.
Please explain about mini Atlantas, if you would.
Atlanta is the definition of suburban sprawl.
The actual city of Atlanta which has tall buildings and other urban features has just under 500K residents. Which is the same size as my city of Raleigh NC. The metropolitan area of Atlanta has 6 million people. And most of those people live in smaller cities and towns surrounding Atlanta. Mostly in single family housing or garden apartments. (2-3 stories). So Atlanta is very flat with a big spike in the center and a few smaller spikes scatter around. Most people in that area don't want to live in a big city so they've traded that fear off for having to drive in huge traffic jams to get anywhere but the local store. The few times I've had to drive "around" Atlanta in the last few decades I've tried to do it on weekends or late a night. Last time the timing didn't work out so even though we were on the loop 5 to 10 miles from the city center we were stuck in traffic for 2 or 3 hours going around the edge.
This has also created the fractured politics of the area as most people think and vote about THEIR local town instead of the area.
H can talk about the similarities to So Cal.
Joys of a global map program with a free database!! :-) That seems entirely correct to me.
I used to visit Atlanta to stay with friends about twenty years ago. They lived out in Cherokee County, the husband worked at Georgia Tech campus and later on at TNT in the city centre. It was about an hour's commute each way on a good day (he wangled flexitime and did a lot of Saturday and Sunday shifts).
There were endless plans to extend the MARTA light rail lines out into the suburbs east and west of Five Points. These plans were always knocked down because the suburbanites didn't want Those People riding the trains into Their Neighbourhoods and being Black in a White area. They were also pissy assholes who hated paying for their maids, nannies and groundskeepers to get a taxi back home to the city centre at night because there was no public transport.
David L @ 1220:
Since we're talking about Raleigh NC, there's a larger than normal thread here on Nextdoor about the dangers of hawks trying to swoop up small dogs. Started by someone whose dog was attacked and lost an eye. With a side note of how terrible it is that they eat the other small creatures. Some of us contrarians point out that the hawks are wired to go after small creatures in the open. And clearing lots creates open spaces for them to hunt.
The people getting the vapors outnumber us pragmatists about 5 to 1.
It doesn't really bother me when hawks get the baby bunnies. That's what nature does. Although I'd much rather see them eat squirrels.
It does make me a bit unhappy if people harm them. Makes me unhappy when people bother the hawks.
The work crew didn't do anything to the baby bunnies other than tear out all the plants that their nests were hidden in. And I guess they (the baby bunnies) either found new nesting sites or the hawks ate them, 'cause I didn't see them today when I walked past there.
Friend of mine who has a magnificent (albeit somewhat unkempt) garden had been steadily photographing insects in her garden. She's identified over 300 species...
I think you're right about her biodiversity, but watch out for sampling bias. Years ago I read that the most biologically diverse area in the UK, by documentation, is in and around Oxford. This makes a lot of sense once you realize that Oxford has a lot of highly educated biologists who have spent centuries poking the bushes and writing letters to other biologists about what they found.
David L Lots of mice on the UndergrounD ( Fun activity on a empty-ish station is watching the mice ... ) Rats? Not so much, if at all in the central zone, anyway. At the fringes, where the tunnels become surface-rail, rats there, yes.
I never saw a rat on the Sydney underground until I started doing server upgrades after hours and was catching the last train. Then I saw lots.
So that might be sampling bias.
David L @ 1229: The few times I've had to drive "around" Atlanta in the last few decades I've tried to do it on weekends or late a night. Last time the timing didn't work out so even though we were on the loop 5 to 10 miles from the city center we were stuck in traffic for 2 or 3 hours going around the edge.
The first time I ever had to drive around Atlanta was April 1976, in an Army M52 semi-tractor truck pulling a 33ft AN/ASM-189 Mobile Electronic Shop. We were in convoy from RDU airport to Ft. Rucker, AL and it was my shift behind the wheel when we arrived at the junction between I-85 and I-285. I was the co-driver in training, but the convoy commander was not going to stop for us to change drivers just because it was rush-hour on I-285, so I got my first taste of Atlanta driving behind the wheel of a "big rig".
I probably had more fun than some of the other drivers trying to get around I-285 that evening.
Rats are fairly smart.
I suspect they had/have learned when the trains stop for the night and come out then. fewer annoying people trying to kill them at that time. And their food sources tend to be unmanned then.
I read some stories about rats in the first year or so after 9/11 in downtown Manhattan. With all the people mostly gone from a large area (along with their food sources) they could be seen at times in waves headed down empty streets late at night. Haven't been able to source the story to find out if true.
David L @ 1237: Rats are fairly smart.
I suspect they had/have learned when the trains stop for the night and come out then. fewer annoying people trying to kill them at that time. And their food sources tend to be unmanned then.
I read some stories about rats in the first year or so after 9/11 in downtown Manhattan. With all the people mostly gone from a large area (along with their food sources) they could be seen at times in waves headed down empty streets late at night. Haven't been able to source the story to find out if true.
There were rats when we were building the Shearon Harris plant. I saw them on first & second shift. They didn't seem too fussed about people being around.
There were also feral cats out there hunting them.
We were using #18 rebar for the containment building (18/8ths = 2¼ in. diameter) and I was generally working 200-300 ft straight up. It was not unusual to have a rat come scurrying along one of the bars up there with a feral cat in hot pursuit.
Animals generally are smarter than humans give them credit for, but different.
I worked with a guy who used to clean mussels out of seawater pipes that delivered cooling water to airconditioning units. It had to be done manually because they had tried putting poison in the system and the mussels had wised up to when the poison was being dosed. Initially by the time of day (these are in a pipe that's perpetually dark) and then when the humans started randomising the time, by some other means. He suspected they knew the sound of it being added, but who knows. (can mussels hear?)
Oh yes. I'm involved with 3 60+ pound dogs on a regular basis. Interesting how they vary in "smarts". But the consistent thing is their look ahead event horizon is about what is in their field of vision. They definitely live in the moment. Their only advance planning to about how to achieve a current goal.
Interesting analysis of the potentials for persistence of some pandemic-caused human behavioral changes to lead to (cause) decreases in the difficulties of global heating mitigation: Climate mitigation scenarios with persistent COVID-19-related energy demand changes (Jarmo S. Kikstra et al, Nature Energy, 11 October 2021) Here we present a set of global COVID-19 shock-and-recovery scenarios that systematically explore the effect of demand changes persisting. Our pathways project final energy demand reductions of 1–36 EJ yr−1 by 2025 and cumulative CO2 emission reductions of 14–45 GtCO2 by 2030. Uncertainty ranges depend on the depth and duration of the economic downturn and demand-side changes. Recovering from the pandemic with energy-efficient practices embedded in new patterns of travel, work, consumption and production reduces climate mitigation challenges.
TL;DR modest effects, that will help. Doesn't really address how to maximize the lock-in of said behavioral changes. (Back-to-the-office pushes are obviously
evilcounter to such lock-ins.)( via phys.org )