If it's to be half decent as a museum - it needs an entire room devoted to Turing and Bletchley Park and if anybody can do it - a working replica of Christopher - the machine that broke ENIGMA.
That was the start, not only modern cryptography but of the entire computer age - every modern CPU is really just a Turing machine after all, and we are long past the nearly 50 years of secrecy and denial - it's time the man got due credit for his role in winning World War 2. Turing, more than any other single person, saved the free world from the NAZI war machine. Churchil, Paton and Stalin got all the credit - but it was Turing's work that allowed them to choose their battles well and succeed. The D-Day invasion would not have been possible without Turing's work. Historians believe that Bletchley Park shortened the war by at least 2 years, saving millions of lives, and turned a likely defeat into an ultimate victory.
That's a story children need to hear, they need to hear how the GI's lives were saved by a nerd who loved maths and crossword puzzles, and because history isn't supposed to be a nice subject, that he was gay - and the horrible way the free world 'thanked' it's saviour.
Not to mention it's debatable whether Orion even qualifies as a "rocket" engine. Rockets gain thrust from burning in the opposite direction, Orion causes explosions and then rides the shockwaves.
>> To get into a higher orbit you have to increase your acceleration.
> Umm, no. You have to increase your SPEED (not velocity, just the magnitude of velocity) relative to the ground.
You're right, I put that clumsily. What I meant was you need more acceleration than you need to just get into orbit. Which would be better put as "you need to increase your orbit from there".
>Assuming a horizontal burn, of course. If you change the direction of the velocity vector to nearly vertical without change the magnitude of the velocity vector, you'll also reach a higher orbit.
True, but this is rarely done because it is extremely expensive on fuel as you can't take advantage of the Oberth effect.
>Assuming, of course, in both cases, a second burn to make your new orbit circular when you get as high as you want to get. True but that's not an unreasonable assumption as nearly all space exploration does use circularized orbits. The only time you would generally have an eliptical orbit is as a transfer orbit, i.e. to get from LEO to moon intersect you would only raise AP to intersect and then go do a capture burn on the other end, there's no sensible reason to circularise that.
>That said, if should be noted that deltaV required to reach LEO is more than half that required to reach the Moon. Also correct. You need about 7400m/s^2 of deltaV to get to LEO (like I said) but lunar intersect is only about 9K. Lunar intersect is only half the battle though, you would just flyby (or crash into) with that. To actually do a lunar landing you need to do a flyby intersect, then do a slowdown burn close-by to get into an lunar orbit. How much you need depends on how close you can get your flyby - the closer to the moon, the more it's gravity helps you capture and the cheaper the capture becomes. You're talking at least 2000m/s^2 though. At this stage your orbit is extremely eliptical however, which means your orbital speed at the lowest point is massive - no way you can safely land like that (at least, not with any technology we've developed yet). So now you have to circularize at a low height first, which is another 1000m/s^2 or so (depending how high your AP was, how low your PE is etc. etc.). But you may want to hold off on that, you want to choose a good landing spot so you need an orbit that fly's over that (your capacity to steer a landing is limited)... changing inclination is expensive but it's cheaper the higher your orbit is, so it's good to adjust it while you still have that very high AP - a 100m/s^2 burn will give you the same inclination change there that would take several thousand from low lunar orbit. Finally you're in a lunar orbit that fly's over your LZ at a lowish altitude (moon landings typically went from between 50 and 100 km). You can now land, but if you want to return - you add complexity, a good lunar landing rocket is probably not a good return rocket -this is why the apollo's left a module in orbit with a good space-travel rocket and sent a small lander down. So you send your lander down, having to burn away speed. There are a few approaches - the easiest is a suicide burn. You burn hard horizontally until you bring your horizontal velocity down to zero, and then you just brake against gravity until you land. That one is risky though - despite being easy and cheap it's got a high risk of killing your pilots so the NASA landings used an approach that burned at an angle to gradually slow down both horizontal and vertical velocity in one long burn. Much trickier, much harder to steer - but much safer (if you have to abort the landing you just flip over and burn in the exist opposite direction to regain orbit - can't do that from a suicide burn).
So you land, you take off, you orbit again - now you need to dock with your transfer stage... that's not so easy. NASA's analogy was 'it's like throwing two tennisballs over a roof from opposite ends and having them hit each other at the halfway point). Lots of minor steering, lots of fuel needed, lots of v
Not a chance. No ICBM could reach the moon, let alone land without causing a massive explosive crash. There is simply no way you can get to the moon from earth with a single stage rocket.
Maybe some non-rocket based technology, but if it's a rocket it will have to be multi-stage - and need steering abilities to do orbital manuevers. You can't just aim a rocket at the moon and fire, the moon orbits, it won't BE there by the time your rocket gets there and your rocket will simply run out of fuel eventually and crash back down on earth.
You have to remember that about 99% of the rocket burn you do to get into any orbit is SIDEWAYS.
To just get out of the atmosphere, straight up, is quite cheap - you can do it with a simple sounding rocket - even a balloon assisted one. It takes about 2000 m/s^2 of acceleration from 0 to get above the atmosphere. Then you fall straight back down.
To actually orbit you need to move sideways - fast enough that at the height you're aiming for you are basically falling off the edge of the earth constantly. The 100km figure is the Karman line, that's the point where the air is too thin to use an aircraft, the rocket power you would need to get enough speed to get lift out of wings is high enough that you would have flown without wings. The actual atmosphere however extends to about 140km - anywhere below that air drag will bring your craft down in days or hours. To orbit at 150km you need to accelarate by about 7400m/s^2 - that's a lot more, and nearly all of it is horizontal acceleration.
To get into a higher orbit you have to increase your acceleration. Typically this is done in two burns - you start at the lowest point in your orbit and burn - which raises the highest point (this manner minimizes energy and fuel needs). Then orbit to the new high point and do another burn there to raise the low point until you are circularized. And all that is without considering timing, you can't just aim at the moon and burn, you are trying to get an orbit that intersect it's orbit and time it so you arrive at the intersecting point at the same time the moon does (nobody wants to spend weeks in orbit waiting for a close encounter).
And those numbers are based on an equatorial launch into an equatorial orbit - but the moon isn't in an equatorial orbit, it's inclined by almost 30 degrees - and launching into an inclined orbit costs MORE fuel.
Now on top of all this - nearly all rockets can only be ignited once. It is only the most advanced rockets that can be fired more than once, and then often only 3 or 4 times and real rockets usually have no throttle control. So with anything but the most cutting edge rockets you need a new rocket (which you have to carry along) for every orbital adjustment. A lunar intersect (not even landing) is at least 3 major orbital manoeuvres.
Now these days we have some more advanced technologies. For orbital adjustment we usually use rockets that are pressure-fed with infinite ignitions - using very cheap and light fuel - they can't get you into space but can steer you once you're there. They are also very hard to build and very weak - so your burns are slow. They often use the same fuel as the mono-propellant steering thrusters you use just to adjust your orientation before burning.
Then consider there are many dozens of different rocket fuels - all with their pros and cons. Some are self-igniting (which you need for infinite burns rockets) but generally extremely toxic and quite hazardous if not expertly handled (which is what you get from things that ignite themselves), for launching you need high-thrust fuels like kerolox (Russian rockets mostly use kerolox first stages) or Ethanol (US first stages were mostly ethanol based) but those are heavy and takes ridiculous engineering to get the best bang for buck. Then you have your most efficient fuels which are the ultra low-density stuff like hydrogen but those are cryogenic and that means that even with heat-shielded tanks they bleed off once out of the freezer, so you have to use them quickly or they evaporate.
And through all this there is the tyranny of the rocket equation. Without going into too much detail - the simple answer is that the acceleration you can get out of a given mass of fuel goes down exponentially as the mass goes up. So to lift you need fuel, to lift further you need more fuel but to lift that fuel you need even more fuel - and you get less and less out of each kilogram you add. This is why space exploration uses multiple stages - you burn a bunch of fuel and drop the empty tank and r
I wasn't saying that WAS the answer - I was just pointing out that the current system HAS killed millions of people needlessly, not speculatively as your numbers - actual corpses.
Oh -and there is absolutely ZERO reason why such a scheme would lead to job-losses, since cost includes wages, nobody said they should sell it at a loss.
I wasn't arguing what the best type of reform would be - just contrasting the success of the non-profit motive drug with the very profit motive drug in terms of lives saved.
Saying he isn't inspired by something is not the same as saying he refuses to participate. It's just the difference between participating out of need and participating out of joy.
He has a point as well - imagine if big pharma today was mostly run by CEO's with the same attitudes as Jonas Salk: "screw patents, screw profits, I make a nice middle class salary as a professor - I'll just give my vaccine away so I can save more lives sooner". Imagine if anti-retrovirals were never patented, always sold at cost - how many millions of lives could we save ?
In an interesting twist - this has, on occasion, created islands that fall within the ocean borders of more than one country leading to some terrible sovereignty disputes. There's one on-going between Canada and Denmark for decades now where the dispute largely consists of them taking turns to send some sailors to the island to plant a flag... and leave a bottle of booze for the next lot who has to come to that barren rock to plant a meaningless flag in the middle of the arctic ocean.
The same decision was made here - but it wasn't a sane decision, there is already evidence of massive corruption.
The thing is - the best way to reduce those black-outs is increased capacity over-all, and you need to do that with the tech you can get online the fastest.
If politicians made decisions based on engineering input rather than "who paid the biggest bribe" the developing world would be a lot less poor.
That's a common argument, but it's not actually true, you can achieve the same by simply having so many wind and solar plants in different regions that you can reliably assure enough of them will be going at any given time to power everything.
Even ignoring the costs of climate change - the operating and building costs of these plants are so much lower that you can achieve this and still save money.
Please provide proof... as in any proof at all of your ridiculous claim.
South Africa's government is utterly in bed with nuclear and coal companies - there has not been a single renewable build in the country ever done with government support - if anything government would like to shut it down since there isn't enough bribe money in it. They are happening anyway since private industry is choosing it.
But overbuilding for solar at least is easy and cheap since you can massively distribute the cost. You only need plants to supply base-load.
The right way to do solar in a country with South Africa's high level of sun is to stick it on every rooftop and encourage every homeowner to do their own, then your plants only need to supply industrial users.
My father is an electrical engineer and has done several project designs for solar - and he consistently showed how local full-capacity solar with storage is so much cheaper than power from the coal-grid that it pays for itself before the first battery replacement and becomes profitable within a year after that - EVEN if you borrow the money to build it at prime interest. With the interest repayments it still works out massively cheaper.
Solar actually works better that way - and this is one reason why it's getting popular. Every office park and commercial building in the country has solar on the roof as their primary power source now, and it's not being pushed- it doesn't need to be, companies are doing it because it is profitable to do. It is just as (in fact more) profitable for home-owners to do the same but that is happening slower because not many home-owners can afford the capital outlay (or qualify for the loans to get it). That capital outlay will ONLY be going down for the foreseable future though so you can expect that lag to catch up fast.
If you drive through the Karoo every farm has wind generators now, every single one of them - because it's cheaper and more reliable to power a farm in that vast and remote semi-desert with wind than to rely on grid power. It's already how we're doing it.
I shared a link to the study itself in another post, which does answer the questions. Short versions: >Do those figures include the cost of storage Yes, though there are quite a bit of assumptions around that (a lot of it based on having multiple areas for each that won't be out at the same time and so reducing storage requirements significantly).
> and new infrastructure to get power from the few areas that have reliable wind or sunlight? None required. South Africa already has a massive power distribution grid that takes power over long ranges since the best areas for coal were never anywhere close to the major urban centers and the best areas for hydro is in another country and the best area for nuclear is on the coast. Long-range transmission has been part of the design for everything for ever - so firstly there is no cost DIFFERENCE there (any new plant needs to be hooked into the long-range grid regardless of type) and most of that grid already exists. New nuclear will not need any less new infrastructure than new wind or solar will. I can't speak for Asia but the same pattern holds for most of the rest of Africa for the same reasons.
Oh come now, practically every word Naomi Klein ever wrote on climate change has had that it's primary focus. She's hardly unique. You won't find that in scientific reports however, because climate scientists are not sociologists. They keep their focus to their field of expertise: x causes y, reduce x.
>Obviously, there's more to extreme weather than the deaths it causes,
While you gave interesting evidence that the mortality rate from extreme weather events have gone down you 1) showed no evidence that your theory on WHY this happened is true (it may be - but you have not proven that argument) 2) failed to actively argue how to expand that to the most vulnerable societies 3) assumed that climate mitigation must be done by reducing quality of life (which is not an avenue ANYBODY is pursuing - it only exists as a strawman fallacy from deniers - on the contrary, climate change mitigation strategies are all based on replacing archaic and dangerous technologies with better and newer ones, not abandoning tech - upgrading it). 4) showed absolutely no evidence that this pattern will hold if the degree and frequency of extreme weather events were to increase significantly. That seems highly unlikely since one of the effects of extreme weather events is to be hugely expensive - they cost a lot of money to clean up and recover from. Just look how much it cost to deal with Katrina and we underspent hugely (which upped the deathtoll a lot). So that means - there must be a point where the wealth LOST due to extreme weather events will eradicate so much wealth as to start destroying any mitigating factor wealth may have had on surviving them.
Actually - those prices DO include mitigation. Not to mention that the developed world DOES have capacity in both coal and nuclear (where do you think that 'realistic' nuclear number came from - it's what it costs at the existing plants).
The general suggestion is that for short term expansion solar and wind is perfectly adequate - since we still have the older but more reliable technologies to provide a base. I can't speak for the developed world in general but in South Africa outages are EXCLUSIVELY caused by lack of capacity. They happen *ONLY* because coal and nuclear can't keep up with demand - so if you have enough other sources, that problem goes away. We also have an ideal climate for solar and for wind and the best areas for each are very, very far appart from each other and NEVER have the same weather at the same time so no extreme weather event can take out BOTH since none can possibly hit both. Even without that factor it's a temperate area where extreme weather events are extraordinarily rare. Johannesburg just had a tornado last week, it made national news since it was the first tornado in the country in over 3 decades.
Your claim is completely ignoring local realities which is fallacious. There are NO universal truths when it comes to renewables because renewables are, by definition determined by local conditions - which renewables are best to build, where to build them, what effects to account for are all local matters and there is absolutely nothing you can say about it in one place that will ever apply in any other place.
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>I doubt you can spot your own genitals from three feet.
To be fair, that's cause his gutt is in the way.
So... sexual harassment, death threats, rape threats and doxing are what 'good guys' do ?
If it's to be half decent as a museum - it needs an entire room devoted to Turing and Bletchley Park and if anybody can do it - a working replica of Christopher - the machine that broke ENIGMA.
That was the start, not only modern cryptography but of the entire computer age - every modern CPU is really just a Turing machine after all, and we are long past the nearly 50 years of secrecy and denial - it's time the man got due credit for his role in winning World War 2. Turing, more than any other single person, saved the free world from the NAZI war machine.
Churchil, Paton and Stalin got all the credit - but it was Turing's work that allowed them to choose their battles well and succeed. The D-Day invasion would not have been possible without Turing's work. Historians believe that Bletchley Park shortened the war by at least 2 years, saving millions of lives, and turned a likely defeat into an ultimate victory.
That's a story children need to hear, they need to hear how the GI's lives were saved by a nerd who loved maths and crossword puzzles, and because history isn't supposed to be a nice subject, that he was gay - and the horrible way the free world 'thanked' it's saviour.
Not to mention it's debatable whether Orion even qualifies as a "rocket" engine. Rockets gain thrust from burning in the opposite direction, Orion causes explosions and then rides the shockwaves.
Rocketry - that's a delta-V measurement, so it's none of the things you thought it was.
None. Thats multiple stages. Most launches did that with three rockets just to get into orbit.
>> To get into a higher orbit you have to increase your acceleration.
> Umm, no. You have to increase your SPEED (not velocity, just the magnitude of velocity) relative to the ground.
You're right, I put that clumsily. What I meant was you need more acceleration than you need to just get into orbit. Which would be better put as "you need to increase your orbit from there".
>Assuming a horizontal burn, of course. If you change the direction of the velocity vector to nearly vertical without change the magnitude of the velocity vector, you'll also reach a higher orbit.
True, but this is rarely done because it is extremely expensive on fuel as you can't take advantage of the Oberth effect.
>Assuming, of course, in both cases, a second burn to make your new orbit circular when you get as high as you want to get.
True but that's not an unreasonable assumption as nearly all space exploration does use circularized orbits. The only time you would generally have an eliptical orbit is as a transfer orbit, i.e. to get from LEO to moon intersect you would only raise AP to intersect and then go do a capture burn on the other end, there's no sensible reason to circularise that.
>That said, if should be noted that deltaV required to reach LEO is more than half that required to reach the Moon.
Also correct. You need about 7400m/s^2 of deltaV to get to LEO (like I said) but lunar intersect is only about 9K. Lunar intersect is only half the battle though, you would just flyby (or crash into) with that. To actually do a lunar landing you need to do a flyby intersect, then do a slowdown burn close-by to get into an lunar orbit. How much you need depends on how close you can get your flyby - the closer to the moon, the more it's gravity helps you capture and the cheaper the capture becomes. You're talking at least 2000m/s^2 though. At this stage your orbit is extremely eliptical however, which means your orbital speed at the lowest point is massive - no way you can safely land like that (at least, not with any technology we've developed yet). So now you have to circularize at a low height first, which is another 1000m/s^2 or so (depending how high your AP was, how low your PE is etc. etc.). But you may want to hold off on that, you want to choose a good landing spot so you need an orbit that fly's over that (your capacity to steer a landing is limited)... changing inclination is expensive but it's cheaper the higher your orbit is, so it's good to adjust it while you still have that very high AP - a 100m/s^2 burn will give you the same inclination change there that would take several thousand from low lunar orbit.
Finally you're in a lunar orbit that fly's over your LZ at a lowish altitude (moon landings typically went from between 50 and 100 km). You can now land, but if you want to return - you add complexity, a good lunar landing rocket is probably not a good return rocket -this is why the apollo's left a module in orbit with a good space-travel rocket and sent a small lander down. So you send your lander down, having to burn away speed. There are a few approaches - the easiest is a suicide burn. You burn hard horizontally until you bring your horizontal velocity down to zero, and then you just brake against gravity until you land. That one is risky though - despite being easy and cheap it's got a high risk of killing your pilots so the NASA landings used an approach that burned at an angle to gradually slow down both horizontal and vertical velocity in one long burn. Much trickier, much harder to steer - but much safer (if you have to abort the landing you just flip over and burn in the exist opposite direction to regain orbit - can't do that from a suicide burn).
So you land, you take off, you orbit again - now you need to dock with your transfer stage... that's not so easy. NASA's analogy was 'it's like throwing two tennisballs over a roof from opposite ends and having them hit each other at the halfway point). Lots of minor steering, lots of fuel needed, lots of v
Why would anybody VOLUNTEER to be Tailor's next album ?
Kim Yong Un has no moon.
Haven't you heard ? His body is evolved to extract 100% of the energy from food and since there is no waste, he does not have a butthole.
Not a chance. No ICBM could reach the moon, let alone land without causing a massive explosive crash. There is simply no way you can get to the moon from earth with a single stage rocket.
Maybe some non-rocket based technology, but if it's a rocket it will have to be multi-stage - and need steering abilities to do orbital manuevers. You can't just aim a rocket at the moon and fire, the moon orbits, it won't BE there by the time your rocket gets there and your rocket will simply run out of fuel eventually and crash back down on earth.
You have to remember that about 99% of the rocket burn you do to get into any orbit is SIDEWAYS.
To just get out of the atmosphere, straight up, is quite cheap - you can do it with a simple sounding rocket - even a balloon assisted one. It takes about 2000 m/s^2 of acceleration from 0 to get above the atmosphere. Then you fall straight back down.
To actually orbit you need to move sideways - fast enough that at the height you're aiming for you are basically falling off the edge of the earth constantly. The 100km figure is the Karman line, that's the point where the air is too thin to use an aircraft, the rocket power you would need to get enough speed to get lift out of wings is high enough that you would have flown without wings. The actual atmosphere however extends to about 140km - anywhere below that air drag will bring your craft down in days or hours. To orbit at 150km you need to accelarate by about 7400m/s^2 - that's a lot more, and nearly all of it is horizontal acceleration.
To get into a higher orbit you have to increase your acceleration. Typically this is done in two burns - you start at the lowest point in your orbit and burn - which raises the highest point (this manner minimizes energy and fuel needs). Then orbit to the new high point and do another burn there to raise the low point until you are circularized.
And all that is without considering timing, you can't just aim at the moon and burn, you are trying to get an orbit that intersect it's orbit and time it so you arrive at the intersecting point at the same time the moon does (nobody wants to spend weeks in orbit waiting for a close encounter).
And those numbers are based on an equatorial launch into an equatorial orbit - but the moon isn't in an equatorial orbit, it's inclined by almost 30 degrees - and launching into an inclined orbit costs MORE fuel.
Now on top of all this - nearly all rockets can only be ignited once. It is only the most advanced rockets that can be fired more than once, and then often only 3 or 4 times and real rockets usually have no throttle control. So with anything but the most cutting edge rockets you need a new rocket (which you have to carry along) for every orbital adjustment. A lunar intersect (not even landing) is at least 3 major orbital manoeuvres.
Now these days we have some more advanced technologies. For orbital adjustment we usually use rockets that are pressure-fed with infinite ignitions - using very cheap and light fuel - they can't get you into space but can steer you once you're there. They are also very hard to build and very weak - so your burns are slow. They often use the same fuel as the mono-propellant steering thrusters you use just to adjust your orientation before burning.
Then consider there are many dozens of different rocket fuels - all with their pros and cons. Some are self-igniting (which you need for infinite burns rockets) but generally extremely toxic and quite hazardous if not expertly handled (which is what you get from things that ignite themselves), for launching you need high-thrust fuels like kerolox (Russian rockets mostly use kerolox first stages) or Ethanol (US first stages were mostly ethanol based) but those are heavy and takes ridiculous engineering to get the best bang for buck. Then you have your most efficient fuels which are the ultra low-density stuff like hydrogen but those are cryogenic and that means that even with heat-shielded tanks they bleed off once out of the freezer, so you have to use them quickly or they evaporate.
And through all this there is the tyranny of the rocket equation. Without going into too much detail - the simple answer is that the acceleration you can get out of a given mass of fuel goes down exponentially as the mass goes up. So to lift you need fuel, to lift further you need more fuel but to lift that fuel you need even more fuel - and you get less and less out of each kilogram you add. This is why space exploration uses multiple stages - you burn a bunch of fuel and drop the empty tank and r
I think North Korea has better odds than you. But in both cases, the odds would only improve if you throw a tonne of money at the problem.
I wasn't saying that WAS the answer - I was just pointing out that the current system HAS killed millions of people needlessly, not speculatively as your numbers - actual corpses.
Oh -and there is absolutely ZERO reason why such a scheme would lead to job-losses, since cost includes wages, nobody said they should sell it at a loss.
I wasn't arguing what the best type of reform would be - just contrasting the success of the non-profit motive drug with the very profit motive drug in terms of lives saved.
Saying he isn't inspired by something is not the same as saying he refuses to participate. It's just the difference between participating out of need and participating out of joy.
He has a point as well - imagine if big pharma today was mostly run by CEO's with the same attitudes as Jonas Salk: "screw patents, screw profits, I make a nice middle class salary as a professor - I'll just give my vaccine away so I can save more lives sooner". Imagine if anti-retrovirals were never patented, always sold at cost - how many millions of lives could we save ?
In an interesting twist - this has, on occasion, created islands that fall within the ocean borders of more than one country leading to some terrible sovereignty disputes. There's one on-going between Canada and Denmark for decades now where the dispute largely consists of them taking turns to send some sailors to the island to plant a flag... and leave a bottle of booze for the next lot who has to come to that barren rock to plant a meaningless flag in the middle of the arctic ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Funny how you conveniently forget that both houses in PA are GOP. The governor just *signs* the laws, he doesn't write them you know.
Are they also exempting other religious texts ? Is this not a violation of the separation of church and state ? Why not ?
The same decision was made here - but it wasn't a sane decision, there is already evidence of massive corruption.
The thing is - the best way to reduce those black-outs is increased capacity over-all, and you need to do that with the tech you can get online the fastest.
If politicians made decisions based on engineering input rather than "who paid the biggest bribe" the developing world would be a lot less poor.
That's a common argument, but it's not actually true, you can achieve the same by simply having so many wind and solar plants in different regions that you can reliably assure enough of them will be going at any given time to power everything.
Even ignoring the costs of climate change - the operating and building costs of these plants are so much lower that you can achieve this and still save money.
Please provide proof... as in any proof at all of your ridiculous claim.
South Africa's government is utterly in bed with nuclear and coal companies - there has not been a single renewable build in the country ever done with government support - if anything government would like to shut it down since there isn't enough bribe money in it. They are happening anyway since private industry is choosing it.
But overbuilding for solar at least is easy and cheap since you can massively distribute the cost. You only need plants to supply base-load.
The right way to do solar in a country with South Africa's high level of sun is to stick it on every rooftop and encourage every homeowner to do their own, then your plants only need to supply industrial users.
My father is an electrical engineer and has done several project designs for solar - and he consistently showed how local full-capacity solar with storage is so much cheaper than power from the coal-grid that it pays for itself before the first battery replacement and becomes profitable within a year after that - EVEN if you borrow the money to build it at prime interest. With the interest repayments it still works out massively cheaper.
Solar actually works better that way - and this is one reason why it's getting popular. Every office park and commercial building in the country has solar on the roof as their primary power source now, and it's not being pushed- it doesn't need to be, companies are doing it because it is profitable to do. It is just as (in fact more) profitable for home-owners to do the same but that is happening slower because not many home-owners can afford the capital outlay (or qualify for the loans to get it). That capital outlay will ONLY be going down for the foreseable future though so you can expect that lag to catch up fast.
If you drive through the Karoo every farm has wind generators now, every single one of them - because it's cheaper and more reliable to power a farm in that vast and remote semi-desert with wind than to rely on grid power. It's already how we're doing it.
I shared a link to the study itself in another post, which does answer the questions.
Short versions:
>Do those figures include the cost of storage
Yes, though there are quite a bit of assumptions around that (a lot of it based on having multiple areas for each that won't be out at the same time and so reducing storage requirements significantly).
> and new infrastructure to get power from the few areas that have reliable wind or sunlight?
None required. South Africa already has a massive power distribution grid that takes power over long ranges since the best areas for coal were never anywhere close to the major urban centers and the best areas for hydro is in another country and the best area for nuclear is on the coast. Long-range transmission has been part of the design for everything for ever - so firstly there is no cost DIFFERENCE there (any new plant needs to be hooked into the long-range grid regardless of type) and most of that grid already exists. New nuclear will not need any less new infrastructure than new wind or solar will.
I can't speak for Asia but the same pattern holds for most of the rest of Africa for the same reasons.
>Funny how I don't believe you
Oh come now, practically every word Naomi Klein ever wrote on climate change has had that it's primary focus. She's hardly unique.
You won't find that in scientific reports however, because climate scientists are not sociologists. They keep their focus to their field of expertise: x causes y, reduce x.
>Obviously, there's more to extreme weather than the deaths it causes,
While you gave interesting evidence that the mortality rate from extreme weather events have gone down you
1) showed no evidence that your theory on WHY this happened is true (it may be - but you have not proven that argument)
2) failed to actively argue how to expand that to the most vulnerable societies
3) assumed that climate mitigation must be done by reducing quality of life (which is not an avenue ANYBODY is pursuing - it only exists as a strawman fallacy from deniers - on the contrary, climate change mitigation strategies are all based on replacing archaic and dangerous technologies with better and newer ones, not abandoning tech - upgrading it).
4) showed absolutely no evidence that this pattern will hold if the degree and frequency of extreme weather events were to increase significantly. That seems highly unlikely since one of the effects of extreme weather events is to be hugely expensive - they cost a lot of money to clean up and recover from. Just look how much it cost to deal with Katrina and we underspent hugely (which upped the deathtoll a lot). So that means - there must be a point where the wealth LOST due to extreme weather events will eradicate so much wealth as to start destroying any mitigating factor wealth may have had on surviving them.
http://www.ee.co.za/article/co...
Actually - those prices DO include mitigation.
Not to mention that the developed world DOES have capacity in both coal and nuclear (where do you think that 'realistic' nuclear number came from - it's what it costs at the existing plants).
The general suggestion is that for short term expansion solar and wind is perfectly adequate - since we still have the older but more reliable technologies to provide a base. I can't speak for the developed world in general but in South Africa outages are EXCLUSIVELY caused by lack of capacity. They happen *ONLY* because coal and nuclear can't keep up with demand - so if you have enough other sources, that problem goes away.
We also have an ideal climate for solar and for wind and the best areas for each are very, very far appart from each other and NEVER have the same weather at the same time so no extreme weather event can take out BOTH since none can possibly hit both. Even without that factor it's a temperate area where extreme weather events are extraordinarily rare. Johannesburg just had a tornado last week, it made national news since it was the first tornado in the country in over 3 decades.
Your claim is completely ignoring local realities which is fallacious. There are NO universal truths when it comes to renewables because renewables are, by definition determined by local conditions - which renewables are best to build, where to build them, what effects to account for are all local matters and there is absolutely nothing you can say about it in one place that will ever apply in any other place.