Huh? There is nothing fundamentally wrong with meta analysis. I do not understand why you think "it's no longer science because the underlying hypotheses are not falsifiable". Most meta-analysis papers I have seen are about hypotheses which are falsifiable.
I don't agree with the sentiment that only genuinely unique and innovative things should be published. Science is incremental and also less important reports are useful for a various number of reasons. For example. - as many have pointed out - reporting even about unsuccessful or failed experiments is useful. Publishing intermediate results also helps preventing duplicate work or provides technical details helpful to others. For a scientist the primarily output to society are the publications. A scientist who does not publish is wasting tax-payer money.
Without saying what you what question you want to answer, it is a meaningless thing to compare anything to anything. If the question is how Germany can best reduce the use of coal today, comparing to France or Norway is irrelevant as these countries are in a completely different situation. If your point is that for reducing coal now, you should do what France or Norway did in the past, you are simply wrong. Scaling up nuclear power as France in did in the past is far too expensive. (and France itself is not going to repeat this mistake) And comparing to Norway is simply moronic as only Norway has the option to generate all electricity only from hydro power.
No, Germany exports a lot of electricity even at times when there is not much power generated from solar or wind. It has also lot of power plants - much more than needed. You could just shut down a couple of coal plants now and export less electricity and - despite what uninformed masses on slashdot believe - this would not be a problem at all.
And yes, we can all remove baseload. Baseload plants are plants you run continuously and which are then produce cheaper electricity than other non-baseload plants. Of course, you can simply replace baseload plants with other plants at increase cost. In the past, this did not make sense, but if you have a lot of intermittent power sources such as wind and solar the economics change and the baseload plants simply become unnecessary.
Have you read the article? There are just backpedaling on the time frame, but sill plan to reduce nuclear. "Hulot said President Emmanuel Macron's government remains committed to reducing nuclear energy and ordered his ministry to produce a new timetable."
The strawman is that Germany reducing coal has nothing to do with France and Norway. You bringing this up as a comparison is a classical strawman argument.
Germany is not running out of reliable sources of power. In fact, Germany has far more power plants than it actually needs. The only real reason the use of coal has not been decreased in Germany until now is because a lot of jobs depend on it. This will change now.
And addressing the straw man you bring up, yes, it will not fall to the level of France or Norway. France will replace a lot of nuclear with renewables in the next years, and Norway already uses mostly hydroelecric power. On the other hand, Norway exports a lot of fossil fuel...
Ramping renewables up to 30% electricity production in one of the largest economies of the world and creating a world market for PV is a substantial achievement. This is money well spent. And no, nuclear is far too expensive to be the solution for our energy problems. But I agree that it was a mistake to shut down nuclear plants before coal. Now people like you can still run around and claim the energy transition was for nothing, only because coal plants got a little more time before they get shut down in Germany
There have been many simulations which clearly show that it is not really a problem. I know it got a lot of bad press in english speaking countries, but the energy transition in Germany was something people put a lot of thought in.
The US made some progress, but this looks good only when compared to itself from the past. The US still has CO2 emissions per capita much larger than everyone else. This while having a negative trade deficit. This is nothing to be proud of.
And no, wasting a trillion dollar on nuclear is certainly not the best to help the planet.
Increasing electricity production from renewables from 10% to 30% in about fifteen years in one of the largest economies of the world is a substantial achievement. This is also helped to create an overall world market for renewables with a corresponding huge decrease in price in the last years. I agree that Germany should have closed coal plants first instead of nuclear, but they are now fighting about shutting down 10 or 20 major coal plants in the coalition talks. Empty gestures, my ass.
It is completely irrelevant how much CO2 could be saved by using nuclear, as it is too expensive.
What? CO2 saved doesn't matter? I thought that CO2 output was the ultimate threat to life on Earth, and reducing it was to be done at any cost!
Spending money for nuclear would prevent spending money on much more cost-effective ways to reduce CO2.
Also, wind and solar keep promising to be cheaper than coal and any claim that nuclear could get cheaper as well is dismissed. Why can't nuclear get cheaper too? Is there some magical force in the universe preventing this? Nuclear is only going to get cheaper if people take it seriously as an alternative to coal.
First, one has to acknowledge that nuclear is already an old technology where a lot of money has already spent in research and development. I did not get cheaper in the past, instead it got much more expensive. In contrast, wind and solar quickly got much cheaper once people started to invest in it. So let's turn the question around: what is the reason more money should suddenly cause a breakthrough in nuclear technology? There is no such reason. The magical force in the universe making it difficult to develop cheap nuclear reactors is called complexity. It simply is an extremely complex technology. It would not even exist, if governments hadn't spent an insane amount of money to develop it in the first place.
If nuclear power is feared more than global warming then why should I fear global warming?
This is a strawman. I don't fear nuclear. I just realized - while studying this question - that it is too expensive to be a solution.
And it would be even more expensive, if it would be scaled up to have a global impact, because you would need to establish completely new fuel cycles.
Why would we need completely new fuel cycles? There's enough uranium on Earth to last until the sun consumes the planet.
The question is: How much a uranium can be mined cost effectively. Uranium needs to be enriched to be usable. Once we have consumed all higher grade ores which can be mined cheaply, the whole enterprise quickly becomes more expensive. This is another reason why one cannot really scale up nuclear anyway without running into even more problems with cost. In theory the solution could be to switch to thorium or have a closed fuel cycle. As regular nuclear is already very expensive, and this would require huge amounts of new investments, both ideas have essentially been given up a long time ago.
For this reasons, it is not a solution for global warming.
Which is just another way of saying that global warming is not a threat.
It clearly is a major threat, but even after huge investments in the past, nuclear is too expensive to be any usel in addressing this problem. In contrast, we have made already huge progress with renewables and some progress with better efficiency.
Stop weaseling. I debunked your previous claim: "Kind of like how Germany has been buying so much electricity from France to make up for their failure to provide for their electrical demand after shutting down their coal plants." Your new nonsense is also easily shown wrong: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/...
It is completely irrelevant how much CO2 could be saved by using nuclear, as it is too expensive. And it would be even more expensive, if it would be scaled up to have a global impact, because you would need to establish completely new fuel cycles. For this reasons, it is not a solution for global warming.
And Germany's use of coal (coal + lignite) decreased substantially: 197 TWh (1996) to 189 TWh (2006) to 161.5 TWh (2016) (source: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....)
I know, not in your alternate reality where facts don't matter.
Not that free markets can not be a useful tool to efficiently organize economic activity in many cases, but it is nothing more than a tool which is useful in some cases and completely inappropriate in many others.
You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10.
This agrees with what I wrote. I think these number are what caused the panic reaction. But measuring percentage changes with a growing total is just a meaningless thing to do. Let's say you sell 50 items and one year and 90 next year. Somebody else realized this is a profitable business and sells 10 item (after selling 0 before). Then your market share dropped from 100% to 90% despite this being a very successful business.
The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.
This true except that Nokia still was highly profitable and the largest vendor. This would have been an excellent position to introduce Meego. Although earlier would have been better, I disagree with the statement that it would have been too late.
The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.
Here I agree.
But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop.
Why? Again, they where highly profitable before Elop and already working on Meego. In my opinion, it is clear that they would just have to continue with this strategy and they would have been fine.
They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.
I don't understand this. Symbian phones were not dump phones. Also when Nokia collapsed, it was Samsung and Android filling the void - not Apple. Meego was much better than Android. So why do you think it would have failed?
Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,
You remember incorrectly. I followed this story very closely at that time. Nokia was not only - by far - the largest smartphone vendor, it also was the fastest growing smartphone vendor in absolute number (different analysts published numbers). The smartphone unit was also extremely profitable (the numbers are also public). Nokia also had an new mobile platform in the pipeline (Meego) as a replacement for their older Symbian smartphone OS with several phones nearly finished (only the N9 was then sold which got stellar reviews and some prestigious awards.) They had a convincing plan to transition developers from Symbian to Meego via Qt. They had some initial set of working apps for Meego including third party apps. And all this at a time where Android was still small. .
It is also true that they had no significant presence in the US. They also lost market share in smartphones. (Despite growing fastest in absolute numbers. This may happen if the overall market grows rapidly and new players enter the market.) For some reasons (some say large investors from the US pressured them), they hired Stephen Elop. Stephen Elop cancelled Meego, declared Symbian obsolete already before a replacement was ready, and switched to Windows Phone which alienated their workforce and customers. Sales immediately collapsed. (Who would by a phone with a OS the vendor himself has declared obsolete?) Only the N9 was brought to market and it sold well in the few markets it was released in (no major market). Windows Phone never cathched on and smartphone unit never recovered. Samsung came and filled the void. Later the smartphone unit was sold to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear is already far too expensive. Running nuclear plants as peakers makes this even worse.
BTW: nice article in the guardian on nuclear power and its economics (and where the myh its economical comes from):
https://www.theguardian.com/ne...
Huh? There is nothing fundamentally wrong with meta analysis. I do not understand why you think "it's no longer science because the underlying hypotheses are not falsifiable". Most meta-analysis papers I have seen are about hypotheses which are falsifiable.
I don't agree with the sentiment that only genuinely unique and innovative things should be published. Science is incremental and also less important reports are useful for a various number of reasons. For example. - as many have pointed out - reporting even about unsuccessful or failed experiments is useful. Publishing intermediate results also helps preventing duplicate work or provides technical details helpful to others. For a scientist the primarily output to society are the publications. A scientist who does not publish is wasting tax-payer money.
You realize these dams were not build primarily for power generation?
Without saying what you what question you want to answer, it is a meaningless thing to compare anything to anything. If the question is how Germany can best reduce the use of coal today, comparing to France or Norway is irrelevant as these countries are in a completely different situation. If your point is that for reducing coal now, you should do what France or Norway did in the past, you are simply wrong. Scaling up nuclear power as France in did in the past is far too expensive. (and France itself is not going to repeat this mistake) And comparing to Norway is simply moronic as only Norway has the option to generate all electricity only from hydro power.
No, Germany exports a lot of electricity even at times when there is not much power generated from solar or wind. It has also lot of power plants - much more than needed. You could just shut down a couple of coal plants now and export less electricity and - despite what uninformed masses on slashdot believe - this would not be a problem at all.
And yes, we can all remove baseload. Baseload plants are plants you run continuously and which are then produce cheaper electricity than other non-baseload plants. Of course, you can simply replace baseload plants with other plants at increase cost. In the past, this did not make sense, but if you have a lot of intermittent power sources such as wind and solar the economics change and the baseload plants simply become unnecessary.
They still plan to reduce nuclear substantially. They just backpedaled on the aggressive schedule.
Have you read the article? There are just backpedaling on the time frame, but sill plan to reduce nuclear.
"Hulot said President Emmanuel Macron's government remains committed to reducing nuclear energy and ordered his ministry to produce a new timetable."
The strawman is that Germany reducing coal has nothing to do with France and Norway. You bringing this up as a comparison is a classical strawman argument.
Germany is not running out of reliable sources of power. In fact, Germany has far more power plants than it actually needs. The only real reason the use of coal has not been decreased in Germany until now is because a lot of jobs depend on it. This will change now.
The myth is that this is the only economic way to operate the grid.
He is completely right.
And addressing the straw man you bring up, yes, it will not fall to the level of France or Norway. France will replace a lot of nuclear with renewables in the next years, and Norway already uses mostly hydroelecric power. On the other hand, Norway exports a lot of fossil fuel...
Meanwhile in France they realized that they are not doing fine and plan to decrease the use of nuclear substantially.
Ramping renewables up to 30% electricity production in one of the largest economies of the world and creating a world market for PV is a substantial achievement. This is money well spent. And no, nuclear is far too expensive to be the solution for our energy problems.
But I agree that it was a mistake to shut down nuclear plants before coal. Now people like you can still run around and claim the energy transition was for nothing, only because coal plants got a little more time before they get shut down in Germany
There have been many simulations which clearly show that it is not really a problem. I know it got a lot of bad press in english speaking countries, but the energy transition in Germany was something people put a lot of thought in.
The US made some progress, but this looks good only when compared to itself from the past. The US still has CO2 emissions per capita much larger than everyone else. This while having a negative trade deficit. This is nothing to be proud of.
And no, wasting a trillion dollar on nuclear is certainly not the best to help the planet.
Yes.
Increasing electricity production from renewables from 10% to 30% in about fifteen years in one of the largest economies of the world is a substantial achievement. This is also helped to create an overall world market for renewables with a corresponding huge decrease in price in the last years. I agree that Germany should have closed coal plants first instead of nuclear, but they are now fighting about shutting down 10 or 20 major coal plants in the coalition talks. Empty gestures, my ass.
It is completely irrelevant how much CO2 could be saved by using nuclear, as it is too expensive.
What? CO2 saved doesn't matter? I thought that CO2 output was the ultimate threat to life on Earth, and reducing it was to be done at any cost!
Spending money for nuclear would prevent spending money on much more cost-effective ways to reduce CO2.
Also, wind and solar keep promising to be cheaper than coal and any claim that nuclear could get cheaper as well is dismissed. Why can't nuclear get cheaper too? Is there some magical force in the universe preventing this? Nuclear is only going to get cheaper if people take it seriously as an alternative to coal.
First, one has to acknowledge that nuclear is already an old technology where a lot of money has already spent in research and development. I did not get cheaper in the past, instead it got much more expensive. In contrast, wind and solar quickly got much cheaper once people started to invest in it. So let's turn the question around: what is the reason more money should suddenly cause a breakthrough in nuclear technology? There is no such reason. The magical force in the universe making it difficult to develop cheap nuclear reactors is called complexity. It simply is an extremely complex technology. It would not even exist, if governments hadn't spent an insane amount of money to develop it in the first place.
If nuclear power is feared more than global warming then why should I fear global warming?
This is a strawman. I don't fear nuclear. I just realized - while studying this question - that it is too expensive to be a solution.
And it would be even more expensive, if it would be scaled up to have a global impact, because you would need to establish completely new fuel cycles.
Why would we need completely new fuel cycles? There's enough uranium on Earth to last until the sun consumes the planet.
The question is: How much a uranium can be mined cost effectively. Uranium needs to be enriched to be usable. Once we have consumed all higher grade ores which can be mined cheaply, the whole enterprise quickly becomes more expensive. This is another reason why one cannot really scale up nuclear anyway without running into even more problems with cost. In theory the solution could be to switch to thorium or have a closed fuel cycle. As regular nuclear is already very expensive, and this would require huge amounts of new investments, both ideas have essentially been given up a long time ago.
For this reasons, it is not a solution for global warming.
Which is just another way of saying that global warming is not a threat.
It clearly is a major threat, but even after huge investments in the past, nuclear is too expensive to be any usel in addressing this problem. In contrast, we have made already huge progress with renewables and some progress with better efficiency.
Stop weaseling. I debunked your previous claim: "Kind of like how Germany has been buying so much electricity from France to make up for their failure to provide for their electrical demand after shutting down their coal plants." Your new nonsense is also easily shown wrong: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/...
It is completely irrelevant how much CO2 could be saved by using nuclear, as it is too expensive.
And it would be even more expensive, if it would be scaled up to have a global impact, because you would need to establish completely new fuel cycles.
For this reasons, it is not a solution for global warming.
And Germany's use of coal (coal + lignite) decreased substantially: 197 TWh (1996) to 189 TWh (2006) to 161.5 TWh (2016)
(source: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....)
I know, not in your alternate reality where facts don't matter.
+1 Insightful.
Not that free markets can not be a useful tool to efficiently organize economic activity in many cases, but it is nothing more than a tool which is useful in some cases and completely inappropriate in many others.
Units: TWh
Germany foreign trade of electricity 2006-2016 (negative values are exports):
-5,3 -2,3 -0,6 +1,0 +3,1 -1,3 +0,7 -8,1 -7,3 -8,5 -19,8 -19,1 -22,5 -14,3 -17,7 -6,3 -23,1 -33,8 -35,6 -51,8 -53,7
Source: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
But I know, nuclear fanboys do not care for facts.
You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10.
This agrees with what I wrote. I think these number are what caused the panic reaction. But measuring percentage changes with a growing total is just a meaningless thing to do. Let's say you sell 50 items and one year and 90 next year. Somebody else realized this is a profitable business and sells 10 item (after selling 0 before). Then your market share dropped from 100% to 90% despite this being a very successful business.
The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.
This true except that Nokia still was highly profitable and the largest vendor. This would have been an excellent position to introduce Meego. Although earlier would have been better, I disagree with the statement that it would have been too late.
The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.
Here I agree.
But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop.
Why? Again, they where highly profitable before Elop and already working on Meego. In my opinion, it is clear that they would just have to continue with this strategy and they would have been fine.
They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.
I don't understand this. Symbian phones were not dump phones. Also when Nokia collapsed, it was Samsung and Android filling the void - not Apple. Meego was much better than Android. So why do you think it would have failed?
Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,
You remember incorrectly. I followed this story very closely at that time. Nokia was not only - by far - the largest smartphone vendor, it also was the fastest growing smartphone vendor in absolute number (different analysts published numbers). The smartphone unit was also extremely profitable (the numbers are also public). Nokia also had an new mobile platform in the pipeline (Meego) as a replacement for their older Symbian smartphone OS with several phones nearly finished (only the N9 was then sold which got stellar reviews and some prestigious awards.) They had a convincing plan to transition developers from Symbian to Meego via Qt. They had some initial set of working apps for Meego including third party apps. And all this at a time where Android was still small. .
It is also true that they had no significant presence in the US. They also lost market share in smartphones. (Despite growing fastest in absolute numbers. This may happen if the overall market grows rapidly and new players enter the market.) For some reasons (some say large investors from the US pressured them), they hired Stephen Elop. Stephen Elop cancelled Meego, declared Symbian obsolete already before a replacement was ready, and switched to Windows Phone which alienated their workforce and customers. Sales immediately collapsed. (Who would by a phone with a OS the vendor himself has declared obsolete?) Only the N9 was brought to market and it sold well in the few markets it was released in (no major market). Windows Phone never cathched on and smartphone unit never recovered. Samsung came and filled the void. Later the smartphone unit was sold to Microsoft.