The magnitude of an air disaster and a nuclear disaster are rather different.
If a German nuclear plant had a failure similar to Fukushima, a relatively small accident on the scale of possible outcomes, it could bankrupt Germany. Not only would the government be on the hook for all the losses its own citizens incurred, but it would have to compensate many other neighbouring Europeans that were affected by it.
Plus it's very expensive and they were fed up of subsidising it. They were reducing coal subsidies greatly at that time too.
Renewables offered a very desirable change for Germany. Take energy production away from big, welfare addicted companies and let smaller businesses and individuals participate in the energy market. It also created a lot of new jobs at a time when they were trying to power out of the global financial crisis. Nuclear creates relatively few jobs, especially compared to distributed renewables.
In Europe our politics tends to be a bit more stable, with the new government not completely throwing out what the last one did. In particular voters often demand that they stick to environmental policies, and part of the pitch is usually a guarantee to do so.
Renewables are already up to about 30% of Germany's electricity production and continue to grow. For reference that's about the same percentage as coal. Meanwhile coal use continues to fall year on year.
France is slowly moving away from nuclear power. They got fed up of paying for it - the subsidies were basically corporate welfare or companies like EDF. Now those companies are floundering around, trying and failing to build nuclear plants in other countries and getting bailed out by the French government.
Species are just a useful but largely arbitrary label for groups of animals with similar characteristics. Evolution is a continuous process, and there are no clear lines where one species ends and another starts.
Race is something invented long ago to give a pseudo-scientific explanation of why white people are superior. Europeans viewed everyone else as inferior and wanted a scientific explanation of why that was, so made up some races along largely arbitrary lines and started looking for reasons why they were less intelligent or more savage.
It's an interesting idea. Particularly where light levels are on the low side or the panels are not ideally angled it could really help to get them working for a greater part of the day.
On the other hand there is going to be a lot of heat concentrated by these things which could be an issue. With buildings you do have to be careful about anything reflective, lest you accidentally start melting nearby cars and tarmac.
I'd also suggest that it might be better to use the heat directly, rather than converting to electricity, e.g. to produce hot water. It's more efficient and the tech is already proven, it just needs further cost reduction of this type.
The problems facing LFTR are nothing to do with "environmental obstructionism", they are all to do with funding and the fact that every one built so far has had severe problems.
Only governments will invest in the technology now, because of the high risk and the fact that there are much better (safer/higher return) energy investments available.
The problem is the errors. Say you had facial recognition checking people entering a venue against their recorded details, and it decided that you were the wrong gender and barred you. At best it would be annoying as you had to get someone to manually intervene, at worse you could be badly disadvantaged.
There was a story last year about a woman who had endless trouble with telephone banking because the system was convinced her voice sounded male. The bank said they couldn't do anything about it.
Note that neither of TFAs or the summary claim that it's racism. You are not the only poster assuming that either... Like you were primed to think that anything involving race or ethnicity is a claim of racism.
Anyway, the issue here is that the companies developing this tech don't properly test it and don't use suitable technology (like cameras that see into IR), and worse they don't seem to care. They market it anyway, and lie when confronted with the poor results.
Whoosh. That the sound of the point completely passing you by.
Your face gets matched, they haul you in, or send a SWAT team to your house, or make you miss your flight. These systems encourage lazy policing. We have seen it before, and they assured us that it wouldn't be rolled out until the problems were fixed. They lied.
If you were being pulled over and detailed regularly because your face kept triggering the facial recognition software you would get pissed off pretty quickly. For some people it's more than an inconvenience and many think that the police are already biased against them.
The most I ever used was when gathering evidence of the performance problems with the ISP. It was Virgin Media, and they were prioritizing speed test sites so that you couldn't prove that their service was crap.
I decided to use a non-speed test site to gather evidence. They ran an FTP server that mirrored some popular Linux distros and games. I created a simple script to keep downloading some ISOs with 16 threads, saturating my connection for weeks at a time. All the while I gathered speed data, and could see that regular as clockwork every afternoon and all weekend it was crippled. 150Mb down to about 1.5Mb with massive packet loss.
Eventually they noticed and shut down the FTP server, but by that point I had enough data to make my case. Got a fairly substantial refund and out of my contract, moved on to Zen over wet string.
Interesting. In the UK they use pools for medium term storage. They have had problems with things like birds picking up contaminated material from the pools due to the poor state of repair they were in. "Dirty 30" is kinda infamous.
Rooftop solar is one of the worst, but also hard to estimate because how many lives were saved by extending the lifetime of the roof before it needs maintenance? Also a lot of solar is being installed during build now, or as part of the roof refurb.
In any case, you can get insurance for that kind of stuff. You can't get insurance for nuclear accidents. That's just how the world works, and any plan to build lots of new nuclear has to somehow deal with that. Maybe it is unfair or costs more lives, but you still need a plan to change it.
Instead of breaking them up, you should do two things.
1. Copy/paste GDPR into your laws.
2. Install privacy and user advocacy regulators in those companies. They would be government employees, and able to comment on and if necessary send and new services or changes to terms for review. They would have full, unlimited access to the company, to all meetings and all documents, with secrecy enforced by law.
The cooling ponds are not a good solution for a couple of reasons.
They need active management and protection. They are potentially dangerous as accidents can cause criticality and other disasters. They also take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money to maintain. That's why reprocessing and burial are done - it's cheaper and a better long term solution.
After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.
Hinkley Point C in the UK is looking at costing around £34 billion. On top of that you have around £50 billion in bill payer subsidies (the rate for electricity generated is guaranteed for many decades) and the usual taxpayer subsidies like free insurance that are impossible to value.
Hinkley C will provide 3.2GW, so ignoring the unlimited free insurance let's say £26.25 billion per GW, which is about $35 billion.
That pushes the nuclear cost up to $38.8 per watt. These are not theoretical costs, these are what have been agreed and are being built in the UK right now.
I note that you also chose to compare with a domestic PV panel rather than a commercial one, or better yet wind.
What's going on is that people are really bad at appraising big but rare risks.
Indeed, they tend to focus on very specific metrics like "deaths per TWh" and ignore the stuff that makes their favourite technology uneconomical.
In nuclear's case the problem is that even relatively small scale accidents like Fukushima cause hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. Fukushima was the first time it had happened on that scale in a democratic capitalist society, and what were previously theoretical costs suddenly became real and investors fled. Even with the government picking up most of the tab and a country with relatively low awards in civil legal cases, investors aren't going to risk their assets being made both worthless and nationalized, and governments are now reluctant to provide the usual free insurance they offered in the past.
Fukushima could have been a lot worse. You can keep telling us that honestly, this time nuclear really is safe, the last dozen times it was just unknown unknowns and we really have made it meltdown-proof now, but the people holding the purse strings are not buying it.
It's an Audi. It's a luxury barge with pretend sport features.
Get a Niro or Kona. One third the price, longer range, high spec. Only problem is the Kia/Hyundai badge, which is only really of much concern to people who buy Audi rep-mobiles.
By the way Mashiki, you are back on the shit list of people I'm not engaging with until you stop using your sock puppets. You had your chance to play fair and you demonstrated that you prefer your little pyrrhic victories.
Slashdot Mirror
As TFA also notes, it would be extremely unusual for the government not to accept this recommendation.
The magnitude of an air disaster and a nuclear disaster are rather different.
If a German nuclear plant had a failure similar to Fukushima, a relatively small accident on the scale of possible outcomes, it could bankrupt Germany. Not only would the government be on the hook for all the losses its own citizens incurred, but it would have to compensate many other neighbouring Europeans that were affected by it.
Plus it's very expensive and they were fed up of subsidising it. They were reducing coal subsidies greatly at that time too.
Renewables offered a very desirable change for Germany. Take energy production away from big, welfare addicted companies and let smaller businesses and individuals participate in the energy market. It also created a lot of new jobs at a time when they were trying to power out of the global financial crisis. Nuclear creates relatively few jobs, especially compared to distributed renewables.
In Europe our politics tends to be a bit more stable, with the new government not completely throwing out what the last one did. In particular voters often demand that they stick to environmental policies, and part of the pitch is usually a guarantee to do so.
Renewables are already up to about 30% of Germany's electricity production and continue to grow. For reference that's about the same percentage as coal. Meanwhile coal use continues to fall year on year.
France is slowly moving away from nuclear power. They got fed up of paying for it - the subsidies were basically corporate welfare or companies like EDF. Now those companies are floundering around, trying and failing to build nuclear plants in other countries and getting bailed out by the French government.
Species are just a useful but largely arbitrary label for groups of animals with similar characteristics. Evolution is a continuous process, and there are no clear lines where one species ends and another starts.
Race is something invented long ago to give a pseudo-scientific explanation of why white people are superior. Europeans viewed everyone else as inferior and wanted a scientific explanation of why that was, so made up some races along largely arbitrary lines and started looking for reasons why they were less intelligent or more savage.
It's an interesting idea. Particularly where light levels are on the low side or the panels are not ideally angled it could really help to get them working for a greater part of the day.
On the other hand there is going to be a lot of heat concentrated by these things which could be an issue. With buildings you do have to be careful about anything reflective, lest you accidentally start melting nearby cars and tarmac.
I'd also suggest that it might be better to use the heat directly, rather than converting to electricity, e.g. to produce hot water. It's more efficient and the tech is already proven, it just needs further cost reduction of this type.
The problems facing LFTR are nothing to do with "environmental obstructionism", they are all to do with funding and the fact that every one built so far has had severe problems.
Only governments will invest in the technology now, because of the high risk and the fact that there are much better (safer/higher return) energy investments available.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-...
Their fraud system sees that the account belongs to a woman and flags it up when it things a man is calling.
The problem is the errors. Say you had facial recognition checking people entering a venue against their recorded details, and it decided that you were the wrong gender and barred you. At best it would be annoying as you had to get someone to manually intervene, at worse you could be badly disadvantaged.
There was a story last year about a woman who had endless trouble with telephone banking because the system was convinced her voice sounded male. The bank said they couldn't do anything about it.
Note that neither of TFAs or the summary claim that it's racism. You are not the only poster assuming that either... Like you were primed to think that anything involving race or ethnicity is a claim of racism.
Anyway, the issue here is that the companies developing this tech don't properly test it and don't use suitable technology (like cameras that see into IR), and worse they don't seem to care. They market it anyway, and lie when confronted with the poor results.
Whoosh. That the sound of the point completely passing you by.
Your face gets matched, they haul you in, or send a SWAT team to your house, or make you miss your flight. These systems encourage lazy policing. We have seen it before, and they assured us that it wouldn't be rolled out until the problems were fixed. They lied.
If you were being pulled over and detailed regularly because your face kept triggering the facial recognition software you would get pissed off pretty quickly. For some people it's more than an inconvenience and many think that the police are already biased against them.
The most I ever used was when gathering evidence of the performance problems with the ISP. It was Virgin Media, and they were prioritizing speed test sites so that you couldn't prove that their service was crap.
I decided to use a non-speed test site to gather evidence. They ran an FTP server that mirrored some popular Linux distros and games. I created a simple script to keep downloading some ISOs with 16 threads, saturating my connection for weeks at a time. All the while I gathered speed data, and could see that regular as clockwork every afternoon and all weekend it was crippled. 150Mb down to about 1.5Mb with massive packet loss.
Eventually they noticed and shut down the FTP server, but by that point I had enough data to make my case. Got a fairly substantial refund and out of my contract, moved on to Zen over wet string.
How do you mine wind and sunshine?
Maybe you are thinking of a different GDPR. This one is the one that protects you from spying and data retention.
Interesting. In the UK they use pools for medium term storage. They have had problems with things like birds picking up contaminated material from the pools due to the poor state of repair they were in. "Dirty 30" is kinda infamous.
How could any insurance company offer trillions of dollars of coverage?
Rooftop solar is one of the worst, but also hard to estimate because how many lives were saved by extending the lifetime of the roof before it needs maintenance? Also a lot of solar is being installed during build now, or as part of the roof refurb.
In any case, you can get insurance for that kind of stuff. You can't get insurance for nuclear accidents. That's just how the world works, and any plan to build lots of new nuclear has to somehow deal with that. Maybe it is unfair or costs more lives, but you still need a plan to change it.
Instead of breaking them up, you should do two things.
1. Copy/paste GDPR into your laws.
2. Install privacy and user advocacy regulators in those companies. They would be government employees, and able to comment on and if necessary send and new services or changes to terms for review. They would have full, unlimited access to the company, to all meetings and all documents, with secrecy enforced by law.
The cooling ponds are not a good solution for a couple of reasons.
They need active management and protection. They are potentially dangerous as accidents can cause criticality and other disasters. They also take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money to maintain. That's why reprocessing and burial are done - it's cheaper and a better long term solution.
After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.
$1bn/GW is ridiculously optimistic.
Hinkley Point C in the UK is looking at costing around £34 billion. On top of that you have around £50 billion in bill payer subsidies (the rate for electricity generated is guaranteed for many decades) and the usual taxpayer subsidies like free insurance that are impossible to value.
Hinkley C will provide 3.2GW, so ignoring the unlimited free insurance let's say £26.25 billion per GW, which is about $35 billion.
That pushes the nuclear cost up to $38.8 per watt. These are not theoretical costs, these are what have been agreed and are being built in the UK right now.
I note that you also chose to compare with a domestic PV panel rather than a commercial one, or better yet wind.
What's going on is that people are really bad at appraising big but rare risks.
Indeed, they tend to focus on very specific metrics like "deaths per TWh" and ignore the stuff that makes their favourite technology uneconomical.
In nuclear's case the problem is that even relatively small scale accidents like Fukushima cause hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. Fukushima was the first time it had happened on that scale in a democratic capitalist society, and what were previously theoretical costs suddenly became real and investors fled. Even with the government picking up most of the tab and a country with relatively low awards in civil legal cases, investors aren't going to risk their assets being made both worthless and nationalized, and governments are now reluctant to provide the usual free insurance they offered in the past.
Fukushima could have been a lot worse. You can keep telling us that honestly, this time nuclear really is safe, the last dozen times it was just unknown unknowns and we really have made it meltdown-proof now, but the people holding the purse strings are not buying it.
And nuclear would not. Nuclear generates a lot of CO2 due to the need to mine, transport and store fuel.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/asset...
It's an Audi. It's a luxury barge with pretend sport features.
Get a Niro or Kona. One third the price, longer range, high spec. Only problem is the Kia/Hyundai badge, which is only really of much concern to people who buy Audi rep-mobiles.
Wait, who the fuck was triggered by this?!? What new kind of snowflake considered talking about CAD packages to be trolling?
Holy crap there are some sensitive little crybabies here.
By the way Mashiki, you are back on the shit list of people I'm not engaging with until you stop using your sock puppets. You had your chance to play fair and you demonstrated that you prefer your little pyrrhic victories.