Using a coupled hydrological-electricity modelling framework with data on 24,515 hydropower and 1,427 thermoelectric power plants, we show reductions in usable capacity for 61-74% of the hydropower plants and 81-86% of the thermoelectric power plants worldwide for 2040-2069. However, adaptation options such as increased plant efficiencies, replacement of cooling system types and fuel switches are effective alternatives to reduce the assessed vulnerability to changing climate and freshwater resources. Transitions in the electricity sector with a stronger focus on adaptation, in addition to mitigation, are thus highly recommended to sustain water-energy security in the coming decades.
I do not think this study does what you want it to.
In my opinion, the most daring and successful progressive accomplishments lead to the most enduring conservative periods. Conversion to solar power may be as large a step as Plato's invention of a republic. It may leave technical people with little to do. Bread and circuses may be back for a long stay.
The full life-cycle GHG emissions of nuclear power is extremely low, comparable to wind and solar.
Check this figure from the IPCC:
http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/repor...
Read the wikipedia write-up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I wrote about this a while back using a WNA meta-study:
http://www.dailykos.com/storie...
There's this persistent myth among the anti-nuclear greens that nuclear power is a big CO2 emitter, but it's based on cherry-picking some discredited studies and ignoring anything that contradicts what you want to believe. This is really no better than the way the global warming denialists rely on minor figures like Singer and Seitz.
By the way: the cooling under discussion has to do with how the plant as a whole transfers heat to its environment. Yes, it can be done without a cold water source (e.g. with big cooling towers, you can air cool the plant), but there are reasons you'd rather use water.
The way heat is transferred inside of the main reactor loop also involves a choice of coolant, and it could be water, steam, molten salt, etc, but this issue has nothing to do with how plants exchange heat with the environment.
Sorry: thermal efficiency is one minus the the low temperature over the high temperature, of course, not the other way around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are being dense now. Gas plants are 60% efficient, coal, 40, and nukes 30.
What the hell kind of efficiency are you talking about? Coal plants are really efficient at spewing GHG, and the natural gas industry is only a little better. Even if you really understood something about thermal efficiency (you clearly don't) you'd go with nukes rather than your "more efficient" gas and coal, because nuclear's GHG emissions are down near zero (full life cycle numbers are better for nukes than solar: you know that, right?).
Anyway, maximum thermal efficiency (web search: "Carnot Cycle") is one minus the high temperature over the low temperature. It's no different for coal or for nukes.
There's a kernel of truth in the notion that efficiency declines when the temperature of your cold sink goes up, but the idea that nuclear is the only power source constrained by thermodynamics is completely crazy. (websearch: "charge carrier recombination").
"I guess not. It has something vague to do with cooling of nuclear power plants, google is your friend, so I can spare me citations for what is considered 'common knowledge' here in my world...."
Your world is a strange bubble reality in which the IPCC has seemingly missed that nuclear power doesn't work in the summer time.
By the way, the efficiency of solar power panels decline at higher temperatures. Strangely enough, thermodynamics applies to all power sources.
No, there is something wrong with this statement:
"Consider that if you cover the roof of a typical house in solar panels, they will generate more energy than what is used by that house."
If you have an analysis that shows that's correct, you should link to it... I guarantee the assumptions are unrealistic.
Look, I am a lifelong classical music snob, and like a lot of jazz as well (especially the more modern jazz pianists and the new Japanese jazzists)... but I think also that disco was at least OK.
But how old are you? Disco was being pushed down our throats by major media (seriously, no news broadcast was completely without a "how To Do The Hustle" fluff piece), it had a culture based on expensive clothes far out of the reach of any teenager, not to mention the heavy cocaine use. The big disco venue was Studio 54, which was famous for being Exclusive, if you weren't a Big Star good luck getting in the door. And no one liked the music, the record companies lost their shirts pushing disco records. This entire business sucked, the suckiness of the music was just a small part of it.
Dude: you're the musical analog of a Very Serious political pundit. What exactly do you think you're saying? Bowie wasn't really exceptional he was merely memorable. Or something.
Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):
Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.
So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is
supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right?
It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they
know better than the IPCC.
In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy)
I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing
something over at the Guardian UK site
written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom
Wigley,
Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change
(it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something
by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark
Jacobson approvingly).
Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece:
"Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference".
Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit
player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes
research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't
dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we
can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great
fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or
nukes plus renewables.
Hansen and company say:
For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could
entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by
2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven
by population growth and development in poorer countries, which
would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total
requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely
decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative
scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because
France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high
levels in just 15-20 years."
Joe Romm argues:
According to the online database of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, France has 58 operational reactors, which
took the country more than two decades to connect to the grid!
That would be a rate of under three per year.
Actually, 58 reactors over two decades
is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.
Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year
we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god
where are we going to find that many?
Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of
decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need
to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely
huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:
Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100
square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second,
second after second, for the next 25 years. (Thatâ(TM)s about 1,200
square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000
square miles of photovoltaic cells.) [... and so on... ]
Another version of that talk is here.
Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid
construction, and we really need to get started on it.
I've heard it argued that perl programmer's tend to understand object-oriented programming better than programmer's from other languages, because they have to think about it harder... there are a lot of different ways of doing perl objects with different pluses and minuses, and you have to decide what aspects of OOP you really care about.
Does anyone still report bugs on Firefox? I gave up a long time
ago, myself, no one there ever seems to give a shit, and you end
up getting in inane arguments about why the bug isn't a bug.
(Discussions in places like slashdot are much more reasonable.)
Seriously: I have the sense that it's finally sunk in that the
various clever-clever things Mozilla's been doing over the last
ten years have been driving people away, and it could be that
they're getting back to "empowering the user" instead of
"empowering the designer"
No it's not about making webmail clients better, it's about ways
to deal with the specific objection you raised, presuming you
actually want to know how to use your box, and not just play that
swiping/zooming game everyone seems to be addicted to these days.
Let me repeat the first line of the last post:
Of course, nothing forces you to use browser tabs, you could always keep your webmail in a browser window of its own...
Of course, nothing forces you to use browser tabs, you could
always keep your webmail in a browser window of its own...
For what it's worth there are actually multiple different cyclic
lists of stuff I juggle using different keyboard commands... just
for funsies, these are:
application windows (alt-tab)
firefox browser tabs (control-next page)
emacs buffers (control-x-b)
x windows/icewm desktops (control-alt-<number>)
the emacs kill-ring (control-y, alt-y)
The emacs kill-ring is like the "clipboard" except that it can
hold multiple pages. Sort of like an actual clipboard.
Well, that's about it for me today, but before I run off I'd just
like to say how absolutely hilarious it's been chatting about the
virtues of the web platform using a web site that's hideously
broken. It keeps logging me out, and then when I log back it
throws away my context and makes me manually search for where I
was again... then I start moving faster to try to post a reply
before I get logged out again and I start getting the "Slow Down,
Cowboy" message (a blast from the Beebop 90s, that is...).
Then there's all the unnecessary extra data usage and extra battery usage as a consequence which are both very real factors for mobiles.
Um... so what you're saying is that mobile devices suck? I have
an idea: don't try to use them for serious work, then you'll stop
worrying about battery life.
Someday, computers will advance beyond this era of four inch wide
screens, wimpy processors and limited memory, and then we will
all wonder about this "bring back the 70s" movement.
Look, I agree with you that the advances in desktop OS UIs have
been incremental rather than revolutionary since Windows 95,
there has been a LOT of good work done there. Try downgrading to
Gnome 1.0 and tell me if you see anything missing...
Dude, I use icewm. I look at gnome whenever I install a new
linux, get immediately turned off and go back to running icewm.
If you want a specific complaint: in icewm, I do alt spacebar, a
window control menu pops up, and then I hit a single keystroke to
do whatever I want, and there's an underscore in the menu that
reminds me which keystroke that is. You can do an alt spacebar
in gnome, it pops up a window control menu, and then what? Then
I get to cursor around and hit return?
The trendy kids decided that mousing is all anyone needs, and let
support for keyboard alternates rot, so I don't use the software
the trendy kids came up with. This has not gotten any better
with the succeding waves of trendy kids.
Caveat: icewm isn't working right on Debian jessie: looks like
there's a systemd incompatibility (uh, just killed this thread,
didn't I? Sorry). Maybe I need to run Devjuan...
But the actual question here is not whether any of your UI
improvements are worth anything, the question is whether they're
so important that they deserve to be blasted to the user
in an automatic update.
What we really need is a distinction between security updates and
feature upgrades, which means developers need to support multiple versions,
which means we need to be able to write unit tests that work at
the level of the user interface...
Also, I can't alt-tab from email to a web page now, I must click on a tab in the browser to switch which is frustrating as well.
By the way: try Control Next Page. In firefox you can switch
between tabs with keyboard commands... provided one of the tabs
doesn't steal your keybindings.
Actually... the fact that google doesn't break the back button is
one of the few things I like about gmail.
Complaining about the "waste" of screen real estate here seems
pretty fucking crazy to me, but then I guess you guys are all
"mobile" suckers (hint: don't try to do serious work on a gadget
with a screen a few inches wide, with fucked ergonomics
that keeps your chin clenched against your chest).
Please inform us on how you think web email clients (Google Inbox/Gmail for instance) "totally suck"
I don't need to, I've proved it to myself empirically by copping
out and switching to gmail several years ago when the situation changed
with my old mail server. Since then I've all but given up on
email, I went from checking it every twenty minutes to checking
it every three days. I've stopped reading the dozen or so
technical mailing lists I'm subscribed to. There's something
about gmail that makes using email subtly unpleasant and
uninteresting: it isn't really *my* problem to figure out what
that is, it's my problem to switch to something better.
If I were going to pick a detail to complain about: the
javascript popup window for composing a message. The
non-standard behavior of that thing drives me crazy. If only it
were a textarea it wouild work with the "It's All Text" firefox
plugin, but Google Knows Best, why would I want control over the
behavior of my software?
Slashdot Mirror
And quoting that abstract:
I do not think this study does what you want it to.
This truly awesome:
I may need to make that my sig quote.
(Slashdot featured a story by this guy, huh?)
The full life-cycle GHG emissions of nuclear power is extremely low, comparable to wind and solar. Check this figure from the IPCC: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/repor... Read the wikipedia write-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I wrote about this a while back using a WNA meta-study: http://www.dailykos.com/storie... There's this persistent myth among the anti-nuclear greens that nuclear power is a big CO2 emitter, but it's based on cherry-picking some discredited studies and ignoring anything that contradicts what you want to believe. This is really no better than the way the global warming denialists rely on minor figures like Singer and Seitz.
By the way: the cooling under discussion has to do with how the plant as a whole transfers heat to its environment. Yes, it can be done without a cold water source (e.g. with big cooling towers, you can air cool the plant), but there are reasons you'd rather use water.
The way heat is transferred inside of the main reactor loop also involves a choice of coolant, and it could be water, steam, molten salt, etc, but this issue has nothing to do with how plants exchange heat with the environment.
Sorry: thermal efficiency is one minus the the low temperature over the high temperature, of course, not the other way around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What the hell kind of efficiency are you talking about? Coal plants are really efficient at spewing GHG, and the natural gas industry is only a little better. Even if you really understood something about thermal efficiency (you clearly don't) you'd go with nukes rather than your "more efficient" gas and coal, because nuclear's GHG emissions are down near zero (full life cycle numbers are better for nukes than solar: you know that, right?).
Anyway, maximum thermal efficiency (web search: "Carnot Cycle") is one minus the high temperature over the low temperature. It's no different for coal or for nukes.
There's a kernel of truth in the notion that efficiency declines when the temperature of your cold sink goes up, but the idea that nuclear is the only power source constrained by thermodynamics is completely crazy. (websearch: "charge carrier recombination").
Your world is a strange bubble reality in which the IPCC has seemingly missed that nuclear power doesn't work in the summer time.
By the way, the efficiency of solar power panels decline at higher temperatures. Strangely enough, thermodynamics applies to all power sources.
No, there is something wrong with this statement: "Consider that if you cover the roof of a typical house in solar panels, they will generate more energy than what is used by that house." If you have an analysis that shows that's correct, you should link to it... I guarantee the assumptions are unrealistic.
But yeah, we could here all day talking about David Bowie oddities, and probably will be.
But how old are you? Disco was being pushed down our throats by major media (seriously, no news broadcast was completely without a "how To Do The Hustle" fluff piece), it had a culture based on expensive clothes far out of the reach of any teenager, not to mention the heavy cocaine use. The big disco venue was Studio 54, which was famous for being Exclusive, if you weren't a Big Star good luck getting in the door. And no one liked the music, the record companies lost their shirts pushing disco records. This entire business sucked, the suckiness of the music was just a small part of it.
Disco is why punk was necessary.
Dude: you're the musical analog of a Very Serious political pundit. What exactly do you think you're saying? Bowie wasn't really exceptional he was merely memorable. Or something.
Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):
So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.
In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).
Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.
Hansen and company say:
Joe Romm argues:
Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.
Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?
Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:
Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.
By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.
I've heard it argued that perl programmer's tend to understand object-oriented programming better than programmer's from other languages, because they have to think about it harder... there are a lot of different ways of doing perl objects with different pluses and minuses, and you have to decide what aspects of OOP you really care about.
Does anyone still report bugs on Firefox? I gave up a long time ago, myself, no one there ever seems to give a shit, and you end up getting in inane arguments about why the bug isn't a bug.
(Discussions in places like slashdot are much more reasonable.)
Seriously: I have the sense that it's finally sunk in that the various clever-clever things Mozilla's been doing over the last ten years have been driving people away, and it could be that they're getting back to "empowering the user" instead of "empowering the designer"
There's a simple solution to a growing quantity of open bugs: just hire someone to close them. There's plenty of ways to close bugs:
(Everything I know about software development, I learned from the Mozilla project.)
No it's not about making webmail clients better, it's about ways to deal with the specific objection you raised, presuming you actually want to know how to use your box, and not just play that swiping/zooming game everyone seems to be addicted to these days.
Let me repeat the first line of the last post:
Of course, nothing forces you to use browser tabs, you could always keep your webmail in a browser window of its own...
For what it's worth there are actually multiple different cyclic lists of stuff I juggle using different keyboard commands... just for funsies, these are:
The emacs kill-ring is like the "clipboard" except that it can hold multiple pages. Sort of like an actual clipboard.
Well, that's about it for me today, but before I run off I'd just like to say how absolutely hilarious it's been chatting about the virtues of the web platform using a web site that's hideously broken. It keeps logging me out, and then when I log back it throws away my context and makes me manually search for where I was again... then I start moving faster to try to post a reply before I get logged out again and I start getting the "Slow Down, Cowboy" message (a blast from the Beebop 90s, that is...).
Right, just like adblock. Only a real nerd would care about something like adblock right?
Geeks tend to obsess about problems early, the mugs always try to pretend it doesn't matter until they get fucked over by them.
Um... so what you're saying is that mobile devices suck? I have an idea: don't try to use them for serious work, then you'll stop worrying about battery life.
Someday, computers will advance beyond this era of four inch wide screens, wimpy processors and limited memory, and then we will all wonder about this "bring back the 70s" movement.
schnell wrote:
Dude, I use icewm. I look at gnome whenever I install a new linux, get immediately turned off and go back to running icewm.
If you want a specific complaint: in icewm, I do alt spacebar, a window control menu pops up, and then I hit a single keystroke to do whatever I want, and there's an underscore in the menu that reminds me which keystroke that is. You can do an alt spacebar in gnome, it pops up a window control menu, and then what? Then I get to cursor around and hit return?
The trendy kids decided that mousing is all anyone needs, and let support for keyboard alternates rot, so I don't use the software the trendy kids came up with. This has not gotten any better with the succeding waves of trendy kids.
Caveat: icewm isn't working right on Debian jessie: looks like there's a systemd incompatibility (uh, just killed this thread, didn't I? Sorry). Maybe I need to run Devjuan...
But the actual question here is not whether any of your UI improvements are worth anything, the question is whether they're so important that they deserve to be blasted to the user in an automatic update.
What we really need is a distinction between security updates and feature upgrades, which means developers need to support multiple versions, which means we need to be able to write unit tests that work at the level of the user interface...
And here we have "designer" excuse number #37: you are an experienced user so you don't count.
But aren't we all experienced users? Why would your Target Market sit still and let you treat them like drooling morons? (Note: see "adblock").
By the way: try Control Next Page. In firefox you can switch between tabs with keyboard commands... provided one of the tabs doesn't steal your keybindings.
Actually... the fact that google doesn't break the back button is one of the few things I like about gmail.
Complaining about the "waste" of screen real estate here seems pretty fucking crazy to me, but then I guess you guys are all "mobile" suckers (hint: don't try to do serious work on a gadget with a screen a few inches wide, with fucked ergonomics that keeps your chin clenched against your chest).
anonymous insincerly guffawed:
I don't need to, I've proved it to myself empirically by copping out and switching to gmail several years ago when the situation changed with my old mail server. Since then I've all but given up on email, I went from checking it every twenty minutes to checking it every three days. I've stopped reading the dozen or so technical mailing lists I'm subscribed to. There's something about gmail that makes using email subtly unpleasant and uninteresting: it isn't really *my* problem to figure out what that is, it's my problem to switch to something better.
If I were going to pick a detail to complain about: the javascript popup window for composing a message. The non-standard behavior of that thing drives me crazy. If only it were a textarea it wouild work with the "It's All Text" firefox plugin, but Google Knows Best, why would I want control over the behavior of my software?