I'd say "quicker" in the southwest where the sun shines a lot... Sure, if you live in the desert and can take advantage of the sun more often than not, your ROI will be quicker. But the question really is HOW LONG?
If you can show that you can recover your costs in 5-7 years, I'd recommend you think seriously about putting up solar panels. I know that we are NOT there yet in general here in the US. Remember that most systems will only generate their rated capacity if the sun is shining *directly* on your panels. Any angles (like when the sun is rising or setting) drastically reduces output. If your panels are mounted on the roof but the angle of your roof doesn't match the sun's angle during the day and your system will again produce less. In fact, at my location I get on average (clouds and sun angles included) about 70% rated output for maybe 5 hours a day with less than 200 days usable a year (not being in a desert). My ROI was like 15 years on a $25K system investment.
$25K buys a LOT of electricity at today's rates...
Yep.. I was being sarcastic, although I don't think many caught on to it.
You do know that this whole time zone thing was invented long before folks started wondering if the world was round or flat. Time was told by sundial and everybody lived in their own zone. With the advent of train schedules, it became pretty hard for conductors to keep track of the schedule (important in the days before electronic signals kept trains from running into each other) with the time changing at each stop slightly when running east and west.
I'm not buying this.. If there really was a supply problem then why are solar companies dying on the vine right and left. I know of two companies, both had US government loan guarantees that went belly up and a third "research" project that ran out of money before it could generate a single watt hour.
I know why commercial power generators don't use photovoltaic generation very much. It is the same reason they don't/can't use wind power all that much considering. Even with free fuel, maintenance and up front standup costs are still way to high to get the ROI down to a reasonable point.
Truly the cost per watt hour is still unable to compete with fossil fueled generation when you look at total life cycle costs.
The author is not correct in reasoning, although he is generally correct in the end results.
Electricity must be generated the instant it is used. Power generation is generally scheduled hours in advance based on projected demand plus some safety margin. Fuel burn rates are determined and set in advance at all but the smallest fossil fueled plants and it may be a long time between when the fuel is actually burned and when the steam it generates is used. Throttling up and down a large power plant can take hours and days. So, unless they project an hour with lower demand because of this "Let's turn off our lights" idea it is likely that the amount of fuel burned will not change. What happens is any excess heat that cannot be stored in the system is simply dumped. They have to be ready to generate the scheduled power, and that means they have to burn the fuel.
If you can actually shed enough load, you *might* be able to reduce the fuel burn, but I'm guessing the event won't be big enough and about all you will really do is generate a lot of extra steam.
Last time I checked the ROI on Solar power was well above 10 years (more like 20 which is beyond the useful life of the equipment) f you took away all the tax incentives and price rebates. It does vary by location some, but here in the south west 10 year ROI is about the best you can hope for. If you could do what you claim, you would see companies like Wal-Mart putting up Solar generation on their roof tops as fast as they can import them. So far, commercial power generation is NOT going to be solar because it is WAY more expensive than the electric company.
You couple that with the fact that electricity rates are falling within the United States and you have a serious problem with Solar. It's not cost effective, it doesn't seem like it will be anytime soon. There is a really good reason residential Solar isn't really taking off yet....
Well.. You can run your life on GMT or Zulu if you want, but it is a bit less confusing if the sun is overhead at noon at lunchtime for me. There is just something wrong with dragging your self out of bed at 12:00 Noon wondering why it is still dark. Besides, then your sundial won't work AT ALL, unless you live at the prime meridian...
Actually, no offense to the Pi guys, but the concept is absolutely not new. They were just really good at marketing.
I don't disagree that you can find other options out there that have comparable features and less overall cost. Depending on your application, there may be a bunch of other options that are cheaper or have better performance in the same price ranges. My point was that you can usually get into a Pi for well under $100 for almost all of the normal use cases I've seen.
The Pi Foundation does have unusually good marketing for the kind of thing they are selling. They do spend a lot of time with their trademark on their website but I think they have accomplished quite a lot with their current offering. They have working hardware that's selling like hotcakes (Seems they are selling 10K + units a month) and they also have multiple supported software platforms which is based on common Open Source systems that can be easily extended. Want compile some standard package? We have a compiler for you. Want SAMBA? You can build it. The list is seemingly endless. Most of the other cards available do not have as much support or they are much more expensive, or both.
You know it will be a cold day in..... when that happens.... Unless we can get everybody to move to Android, Linux and other open sourced platforms for everything.
It's called EULA.
If you own an XBOX, an iPhone or a Wii, you'd already know about it!
Some may not already know, but EULA's provide the terms under which you can use the intellectual property your latest gadget is dependent on. You may own the hardware, but software is not usually "sold" but licensed, and sometimes licensed only on the *hardware* you purchased. Of course, your hardware is likely useless without the licensed software so you are pretty much stuck with the EULA....
All you really need to get a Pi running is a power supply ($10), a SD card ($10). Everything else is "optional" depending on what you want to do with your Pi. So by my calculations you are going to be out $55.00 (or less if you go with the stripped down model they announced a few weeks ago). Of course, if you want to do something more with your Pi, your costs then go up from there. So it's not >$100 unless you simply have to have a case $10, USB Keyboard $10, USB hub $10, USB mouse $5, USB WIFI adapter $15, Network Cable $5, HDMI Cable $10 and a large SD Card $10 more. (Total of $130) Then if you want to add special interface cards things go up from there. As with anything, you can spend as much as you like on your Pi.
Personally, all I need is the Pi. I have a workable USB power supply and the needed cables in my junk box and I have some old SD cards laying around from old cameras that should work great. So for me, it's $35 plus shipping. I even have an HDMI cable, old USB keyboard and mouse in the junk box now that I looked.
Pi's are not that hard to get these days. Initially they limited you to one Pi per order, but the limit has been lifted of late and you can usually get one (or ten) within a few weeks or less. I expect the supply to continue to get better as manufacturing yield improves and demand starts to abate some.
So I'm not really convinced you are correct on your claims.
Actually, "Old Unix" and "Today's Unix" really differed in the standard security settings. In the old days.... Nobody really cared about security and you got a *nix system with all the standard services running, no firewall and with a default Root password straight out of the install. Now days, this is not generally the case. You are not going to get Telnet, FTP and RPC unless you ask for them and they will likely make you change the root password and setup a firewall during the install process.
I don't think *nix has changed all that much overall, only the default security posture is different.
What you say is true, up to a point. 99.999 is going to be really hard to meet if the hardware under the application is not up to the task. N+1 redundancy is helpful, but you still need reliability in the N+1 system or you will pay a price.
Up-time north of 99.9 starts getting really expensive even if you are looking at application availability. Consider automated fail-over processes and things like clustering. The problem becomes increasingly more complicated and solutions become more and more prone to errors as you add hardware to overcome the reliability issues of each system. The classic problem is a data base holding financial data that must always be accurate. When you go check your bank balance, it needs to be the actual balance right now. If there is a chance of it not being correct or a time window for a transaction to post, then you can bet somebody will figure out how to game the system and say withdraw the same money twice from different ATM's. Banks would not stay in business too long if they allowed this or made it where you couldn't hit the ATM at 3:15 AM because the server was being failed over for patches.
Having 3AM maintenance windows is *not* an option for some applications. We did have redundancy in hardware but as it turns out, the application I was fielding was one of those that couldn't stand downtime so even scheduling in advance didn't get me off the hook for 99.999. It helped keep the customer happy to tell them we where patching for reliability and do it at times the transaction rates where lowest, but we still had to count the down time. This pretty much made it so we didn't patch unless we knew the patch set actually fixed something we needed fixed.
Sparc was a processor manufactured by Sun Micro Systems and Solaris was the Unix operating system that ran on that hardware. Towards the end of Sun's life, when Linux was cleaning their clock, they ported Solaris to X86 although the hardware supported was pretty limited. In the end they where purchased by Oracle, which was the seller of the software most likely to be running on a Sun system.
The biggest thing you could learn from Sun is that stability is expensive because it takes lots of dedicated testing to prove your stuff is good. Sun's failure proves that getting reliable systems is cheaper if you go for N+1 redundancy and automated fail over. Not that Sun's clustering solution wasn't useable for applications properly written to support it, it just turned out to be cheaper to write on Linux platforms in the long run.
Security holes? Only if you put them on line without securing them do you have many holes. Unix did come "out of the box" wide open and needed to be configured some to be safe, but they never where cesspools of virus attacks and script kiddie exploit targets like IIS and Windows...
Only a few systems can patch the kernel without rebooting and those are the exception, not the rule.
You sir, must be a windows admin... Server up-time DOES mean a lot when you have an SLA that specifies 99.999%. Rebooting complex systems of servers just to apply patches simply doesn't fit in the allowed down time. Your mileage apparently varies, and obviously your up-time requirements are lower.
Windows services have grave difficulty with "five nines", heck X86 hardware has problems meeting that. You have to reboot once a quarter or more just to install the required patches on Windows and that will drive you under five nines.. Put a windows box on the internet and you had better keep pace with the patches or else. Not so with Sparc/Solaris. Solaris/Sparc hardware could easily meet 99.999% with limited amounts of fuss and patching was usually not an issue with these systems. Solaris was SOLID, the hardware was SOLID, these systems just run and if you set them up correctly they where safe enough to run unpatched when necessary.
It's not like Sun has issued very many Solaris 2.6 patches in the last few years...
Besides... Many Solaris patches simply didn't require a full reboot. In fact, unless you are changing the Kernel, there was no reason to because it just takes longer. Then there is the mission critical system that is on an isolated network that you take a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. Who cares what patches are on or not? The system just needs to work, day in and out, sans patches.
Windows users amaze me with all the "got to reboot the box" they put up with. Install software? Reboot! Install new drivers? Reboot! Things start to slow down for unknown reasons? Reboot! I simply don't believe that it should be necessary to reboot a box very often. Reboots should not be required unless you are changing hardware and have to actually power it off or need to change parts of the memory resident portions of the operating system (i.e. the booted kernel image). Windows is getting better about this, but you still need to reboot it way too often for all the "recommended" patches to get installed.
I work at a Very Large Company (who must remain nameless.) We've got Solaris boxes that were last rebooted in the 90's. Yes. Really. Running Solaris 2.6, even.
I am not surprised. I've seen Sparc/Solaris boxes run for very long times and even when not properly cared for have run times measured in months and years. I've had to shut down boxes to move them that had been running for 5 years. We where scared to death the disk drives would not spin back up after 2 days in the truck, but when we plugged them back in, they powered right back up. Sun built some SOLID hardware and produced a SOLID operating system.
maybe the sysadmins liked them but as a developer i hated solaris boxen. the libraries were always years old, nothing modern would compile, the cli tools were slightly incompatible with linux scripts,...
They may be a pain to write and deploy programs on but they will run forever once you do...
Fully characterized platforms, take a LOT of testing effort and testing at this level takes lots of time. The Sparc/Solaris platform was behind the state of the art, but it was stable, stable, stable. Solaris on X86 wasn't bad, if your hardware was supported and you didn't really need the GUI to be local, but it wasn't as stable (mainly due to the hardware).
Sun did their stuff right for the most part, but got seriously hurt by Linux (Red Hat in particular) and in the long run couldn't make reliability pay well enough. Who wanted to buy new when the old stuff was still humming without a reboot 5 years later? Not me.
Have an independent company go out and buy each vehicle in question from a retailer, perform the same standard tests and then compare the results to what the manufacturer claims their test results where. Then fine them if the independent test disagrees with their claimed test results by more than a fixed percentage. Make the fines progressive, based on the number of units sold and geometrically increasing with the number of vehicles which don't match the reported tests.
If you make the fines bad enough, manufactures will clean up their acts... It won't cost much either, because you can just turn around and sell the slightly used vehicles for most of what you purchased it for (assuming you don't want to do crash testing too).
Like Gas isn't a carcinogen.. Shesh.. Small particles of soot are easily (well, technically it can be done) dealt with. In fact, such measures are required within the US for any commercial diesel engines imported or built here or the EPA is going to have their way with you.
We can just start reprocessing existing spent fuel and recover the material we need from that?
We will actually kill multiple birds with this... First, you get the material you wanted. Second, you don't create any new nuclear waste in the process, though it will change forms some and get somewhat smaller. Third, you can create new fuel assemblies and actually use the remaining fuel that is just sitting in pools of water right now. Not to mention that it will actually do something about the used fuel assemblies that are just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Just about all of the recent fossil fuel electric grid additions are natural gas.
These plants are being built mainly because NG prices continue to fall as fracking technology allows the production of more domestic supply. NG is cheap and easy to burn clean. It is also flexible and fairly easy to throttle for peak load if you design your plant for that.
I'm not sure you can build nuclear plants that throttle on 12 - 24 hour cycles very well. Early in the fuel cycle, you can do that kind of thing some and not get yourself in trouble, but as you approach the end of your cycle, power changes are increasingly difficult to manage. I'm not sure how you can design out such issues because they are caused by the byproducts of fission building up in the fuel as it is used. Perhaps the new designs where the fuel is in liquid form can better deal with this?
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I'd say "quicker" in the southwest where the sun shines a lot... Sure, if you live in the desert and can take advantage of the sun more often than not, your ROI will be quicker. But the question really is HOW LONG?
If you can show that you can recover your costs in 5-7 years, I'd recommend you think seriously about putting up solar panels. I know that we are NOT there yet in general here in the US. Remember that most systems will only generate their rated capacity if the sun is shining *directly* on your panels. Any angles (like when the sun is rising or setting) drastically reduces output. If your panels are mounted on the roof but the angle of your roof doesn't match the sun's angle during the day and your system will again produce less. In fact, at my location I get on average (clouds and sun angles included) about 70% rated output for maybe 5 hours a day with less than 200 days usable a year (not being in a desert). My ROI was like 15 years on a $25K system investment.
$25K buys a LOT of electricity at today's rates...
Yep.. I was being sarcastic, although I don't think many caught on to it.
You do know that this whole time zone thing was invented long before folks started wondering if the world was round or flat. Time was told by sundial and everybody lived in their own zone. With the advent of train schedules, it became pretty hard for conductors to keep track of the schedule (important in the days before electronic signals kept trains from running into each other) with the time changing at each stop slightly when running east and west.
It is not that necessary now days..
I'm not buying this.. If there really was a supply problem then why are solar companies dying on the vine right and left. I know of two companies, both had US government loan guarantees that went belly up and a third "research" project that ran out of money before it could generate a single watt hour.
I know why commercial power generators don't use photovoltaic generation very much. It is the same reason they don't/can't use wind power all that much considering. Even with free fuel, maintenance and up front standup costs are still way to high to get the ROI down to a reasonable point.
Truly the cost per watt hour is still unable to compete with fossil fueled generation when you look at total life cycle costs.
The author is not correct in reasoning, although he is generally correct in the end results.
Electricity must be generated the instant it is used. Power generation is generally scheduled hours in advance based on projected demand plus some safety margin. Fuel burn rates are determined and set in advance at all but the smallest fossil fueled plants and it may be a long time between when the fuel is actually burned and when the steam it generates is used. Throttling up and down a large power plant can take hours and days. So, unless they project an hour with lower demand because of this "Let's turn off our lights" idea it is likely that the amount of fuel burned will not change. What happens is any excess heat that cannot be stored in the system is simply dumped. They have to be ready to generate the scheduled power, and that means they have to burn the fuel.
If you can actually shed enough load, you *might* be able to reduce the fuel burn, but I'm guessing the event won't be big enough and about all you will really do is generate a lot of extra steam.
Last time I checked the ROI on Solar power was well above 10 years (more like 20 which is beyond the useful life of the equipment) f you took away all the tax incentives and price rebates. It does vary by location some, but here in the south west 10 year ROI is about the best you can hope for. If you could do what you claim, you would see companies like Wal-Mart putting up Solar generation on their roof tops as fast as they can import them. So far, commercial power generation is NOT going to be solar because it is WAY more expensive than the electric company.
You couple that with the fact that electricity rates are falling within the United States and you have a serious problem with Solar. It's not cost effective, it doesn't seem like it will be anytime soon. There is a really good reason residential Solar isn't really taking off yet....
Well.. You can run your life on GMT or Zulu if you want, but it is a bit less confusing if the sun is overhead at noon at lunchtime for me. There is just something wrong with dragging your self out of bed at 12:00 Noon wondering why it is still dark. Besides, then your sundial won't work AT ALL, unless you live at the prime meridian...
After some further looking... They have sold over a million Pi's in a year. So we are talking about nearly 100K per month...
Sorry to be off by nearly an order of magnitude...
Actually, no offense to the Pi guys, but the concept is absolutely not new. They were just really good at marketing.
I don't disagree that you can find other options out there that have comparable features and less overall cost. Depending on your application, there may be a bunch of other options that are cheaper or have better performance in the same price ranges. My point was that you can usually get into a Pi for well under $100 for almost all of the normal use cases I've seen.
The Pi Foundation does have unusually good marketing for the kind of thing they are selling. They do spend a lot of time with their trademark on their website but I think they have accomplished quite a lot with their current offering. They have working hardware that's selling like hotcakes (Seems they are selling 10K + units a month) and they also have multiple supported software platforms which is based on common Open Source systems that can be easily extended. Want compile some standard package? We have a compiler for you. Want SAMBA? You can build it. The list is seemingly endless. Most of the other cards available do not have as much support or they are much more expensive, or both.
You know it will be a cold day in ..... when that happens.... Unless we can get everybody to move to Android, Linux and other open sourced platforms for everything.
It's called EULA. If you own an XBOX, an iPhone or a Wii, you'd already know about it!
Some may not already know, but EULA's provide the terms under which you can use the intellectual property your latest gadget is dependent on. You may own the hardware, but software is not usually "sold" but licensed, and sometimes licensed only on the *hardware* you purchased. Of course, your hardware is likely useless without the licensed software so you are pretty much stuck with the EULA....
I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing.
All you really need to get a Pi running is a power supply ($10), a SD card ($10). Everything else is "optional" depending on what you want to do with your Pi. So by my calculations you are going to be out $55.00 (or less if you go with the stripped down model they announced a few weeks ago). Of course, if you want to do something more with your Pi, your costs then go up from there. So it's not >$100 unless you simply have to have a case $10, USB Keyboard $10, USB hub $10, USB mouse $5, USB WIFI adapter $15, Network Cable $5, HDMI Cable $10 and a large SD Card $10 more. (Total of $130) Then if you want to add special interface cards things go up from there. As with anything, you can spend as much as you like on your Pi.
Personally, all I need is the Pi. I have a workable USB power supply and the needed cables in my junk box and I have some old SD cards laying around from old cameras that should work great. So for me, it's $35 plus shipping. I even have an HDMI cable, old USB keyboard and mouse in the junk box now that I looked.
Pi's are not that hard to get these days. Initially they limited you to one Pi per order, but the limit has been lifted of late and you can usually get one (or ten) within a few weeks or less. I expect the supply to continue to get better as manufacturing yield improves and demand starts to abate some.
So I'm not really convinced you are correct on your claims.
Actually, "Old Unix" and "Today's Unix" really differed in the standard security settings. In the old days.... Nobody really cared about security and you got a *nix system with all the standard services running, no firewall and with a default Root password straight out of the install. Now days, this is not generally the case. You are not going to get Telnet, FTP and RPC unless you ask for them and they will likely make you change the root password and setup a firewall during the install process.
I don't think *nix has changed all that much overall, only the default security posture is different.
What you say is true, up to a point. 99.999 is going to be really hard to meet if the hardware under the application is not up to the task. N+1 redundancy is helpful, but you still need reliability in the N+1 system or you will pay a price.
Up-time north of 99.9 starts getting really expensive even if you are looking at application availability. Consider automated fail-over processes and things like clustering. The problem becomes increasingly more complicated and solutions become more and more prone to errors as you add hardware to overcome the reliability issues of each system. The classic problem is a data base holding financial data that must always be accurate. When you go check your bank balance, it needs to be the actual balance right now. If there is a chance of it not being correct or a time window for a transaction to post, then you can bet somebody will figure out how to game the system and say withdraw the same money twice from different ATM's. Banks would not stay in business too long if they allowed this or made it where you couldn't hit the ATM at 3:15 AM because the server was being failed over for patches.
Having 3AM maintenance windows is *not* an option for some applications. We did have redundancy in hardware but as it turns out, the application I was fielding was one of those that couldn't stand downtime so even scheduling in advance didn't get me off the hook for 99.999. It helped keep the customer happy to tell them we where patching for reliability and do it at times the transaction rates where lowest, but we still had to count the down time. This pretty much made it so we didn't patch unless we knew the patch set actually fixed something we needed fixed.
Sparc was a processor manufactured by Sun Micro Systems and Solaris was the Unix operating system that ran on that hardware. Towards the end of Sun's life, when Linux was cleaning their clock, they ported Solaris to X86 although the hardware supported was pretty limited. In the end they where purchased by Oracle, which was the seller of the software most likely to be running on a Sun system.
The biggest thing you could learn from Sun is that stability is expensive because it takes lots of dedicated testing to prove your stuff is good. Sun's failure proves that getting reliable systems is cheaper if you go for N+1 redundancy and automated fail over. Not that Sun's clustering solution wasn't useable for applications properly written to support it, it just turned out to be cheaper to write on Linux platforms in the long run.
Mod Parent up!
If I ever get my hands on the guy who had this crazy idea of taking lead out of solder... Huge mistake, even with the environmental issues... /P?
Security holes? Only if you put them on line without securing them do you have many holes. Unix did come "out of the box" wide open and needed to be configured some to be safe, but they never where cesspools of virus attacks and script kiddie exploit targets like IIS and Windows...
Only a few systems can patch the kernel without rebooting and those are the exception, not the rule.
You sir, must be a windows admin... Server up-time DOES mean a lot when you have an SLA that specifies 99.999%. Rebooting complex systems of servers just to apply patches simply doesn't fit in the allowed down time. Your mileage apparently varies, and obviously your up-time requirements are lower.
Windows services have grave difficulty with "five nines", heck X86 hardware has problems meeting that. You have to reboot once a quarter or more just to install the required patches on Windows and that will drive you under five nines.. Put a windows box on the internet and you had better keep pace with the patches or else. Not so with Sparc/Solaris. Solaris/Sparc hardware could easily meet 99.999% with limited amounts of fuss and patching was usually not an issue with these systems. Solaris was SOLID, the hardware was SOLID, these systems just run and if you set them up correctly they where safe enough to run unpatched when necessary.
It's not like Sun has issued very many Solaris 2.6 patches in the last few years...
Besides... Many Solaris patches simply didn't require a full reboot. In fact, unless you are changing the Kernel, there was no reason to because it just takes longer. Then there is the mission critical system that is on an isolated network that you take a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. Who cares what patches are on or not? The system just needs to work, day in and out, sans patches.
Windows users amaze me with all the "got to reboot the box" they put up with. Install software? Reboot! Install new drivers? Reboot! Things start to slow down for unknown reasons? Reboot! I simply don't believe that it should be necessary to reboot a box very often. Reboots should not be required unless you are changing hardware and have to actually power it off or need to change parts of the memory resident portions of the operating system (i.e. the booted kernel image). Windows is getting better about this, but you still need to reboot it way too often for all the "recommended" patches to get installed.
I work at a Very Large Company (who must remain nameless.) We've got Solaris boxes that were last rebooted in the 90's. Yes. Really. Running Solaris 2.6, even.
I am not surprised. I've seen Sparc/Solaris boxes run for very long times and even when not properly cared for have run times measured in months and years. I've had to shut down boxes to move them that had been running for 5 years. We where scared to death the disk drives would not spin back up after 2 days in the truck, but when we plugged them back in, they powered right back up. Sun built some SOLID hardware and produced a SOLID operating system.
>
maybe the sysadmins liked them but as a developer i hated solaris boxen. the libraries were always years old, nothing modern would compile, the cli tools were slightly incompatible with linux scripts, ...
They may be a pain to write and deploy programs on but they will run forever once you do...
Fully characterized platforms, take a LOT of testing effort and testing at this level takes lots of time. The Sparc/Solaris platform was behind the state of the art, but it was stable, stable, stable. Solaris on X86 wasn't bad, if your hardware was supported and you didn't really need the GUI to be local, but it wasn't as stable (mainly due to the hardware).
Sun did their stuff right for the most part, but got seriously hurt by Linux (Red Hat in particular) and in the long run couldn't make reliability pay well enough. Who wanted to buy new when the old stuff was still humming without a reboot 5 years later? Not me.
Got to love that sun blue...
Have an independent company go out and buy each vehicle in question from a retailer, perform the same standard tests and then compare the results to what the manufacturer claims their test results where. Then fine them if the independent test disagrees with their claimed test results by more than a fixed percentage. Make the fines progressive, based on the number of units sold and geometrically increasing with the number of vehicles which don't match the reported tests.
If you make the fines bad enough, manufactures will clean up their acts... It won't cost much either, because you can just turn around and sell the slightly used vehicles for most of what you purchased it for (assuming you don't want to do crash testing too).
Like Gas isn't a carcinogen.. Shesh.. Small particles of soot are easily (well, technically it can be done) dealt with. In fact, such measures are required within the US for any commercial diesel engines imported or built here or the EPA is going to have their way with you.
We can just start reprocessing existing spent fuel and recover the material we need from that?
We will actually kill multiple birds with this... First, you get the material you wanted. Second, you don't create any new nuclear waste in the process, though it will change forms some and get somewhat smaller. Third, you can create new fuel assemblies and actually use the remaining fuel that is just sitting in pools of water right now. Not to mention that it will actually do something about the used fuel assemblies that are just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Just about all of the recent fossil fuel electric grid additions are natural gas.
These plants are being built mainly because NG prices continue to fall as fracking technology allows the production of more domestic supply. NG is cheap and easy to burn clean. It is also flexible and fairly easy to throttle for peak load if you design your plant for that.
I'm not sure you can build nuclear plants that throttle on 12 - 24 hour cycles very well. Early in the fuel cycle, you can do that kind of thing some and not get yourself in trouble, but as you approach the end of your cycle, power changes are increasingly difficult to manage. I'm not sure how you can design out such issues because they are caused by the byproducts of fission building up in the fuel as it is used. Perhaps the new designs where the fuel is in liquid form can better deal with this?