"Unfortunately there aren't really that many feasible and affordable energy storage options."
If (when) LFTRs hit the market with their innate ability to load follow without taking damage, the costs involved should make a mockery of wind and solar power, meaning that in a century or so we'll point and laugh and the rusting relics on the hillsides.
Wind and solar are nice if you're not grid connected. Everywhere else they're only connected to farm subsidies, not electricity.
The more practical reality is that an attempt to replace all carbon-sourced electricity with renewables would only _just_ match existing generation capacity.
(The short version is that you can't generate one place and transport more than about 1500 miles before transmission losses kill the economics, so paving the deserts is a non-starter for the most part.)
That's fine but to replace other carbon sources and go more-electric (gas/oil heating, industrial process heat, transportation, etc) will need an increased power generation capacity around 8 times current capacity in the developed world - and then you need to factor in the developing world.
The only practical way to generate that much electricity is nuclear power, preferably LFTR (which is doable now, and the chinese are working on commercialising it). Fusion will be nice if it happens but I don't expect to see it commercialised within the next century and we can't afford to wait that long - Global warming/ocean level rises are only a small part of the risk. The CO2 spike we've generated is more extreme than anything in history and they've geologically gone hand-in-hand with Anoxic Oceanic Events. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer my planet's oxygen level to stay at the 19.5% we evolved with as having it drop to around 14% would not be good news for our very oxygen-hungry brains.
"Nuclear can and is operated in a load following manner [oecd-nea.org] in e.g. France and even Germany... You can really ramp up and down on a dime, as it were, i.e. there's no technical reason not to."
_Conventional_ Nuclear can load follow to a limited extent. You very much _can't_ turn them up and down on a dime even if the thermal lag allowed you to. Xenon-131 neutron poisoning is a very real issue and so are the physical effects of gas overpressure in the fuel rods.
LFTRs and other Molten Salt Fuel reactors will allow this, but they're a decade off commercial reality (at least)
"Spectacular when it happens though, one or more of the blades fall off"
You don't want to live downwind. The blades have been known to go more than a mile before landing - and they _will_ demolish a building if they land on it.
Large windmills have an uncomfortable habit of chewing up their gearboxes - usually setting them on fire along the way. It's been reckoned that even with subsidies the only guaranteed way of making money off a windmill is to keep it stationary and take money from the powercos to _not_ connect to the grid (The going rate is about £30k per month per windmill - which gives you an idea how much the powercos hate windmills messing up their grid.)
"This is a perfect incentive for companies to install storage"
Europe has a number of pumped hydro storage systems. Rest assured that when this kind of event happens they're running flat out pushing water uphill, but can only do it until they're full.
The bigger problem is that windpower is highly unpredictable, backing systems can only go "so low" and powercos are not allowed to disconnect "renewables" sources.
(It's also worth noting that UK Wind and Solar is tiny compared to the "renewables" output of stations like Drax, which burns clearfelled+chipped virgin canadian and louisianan forests instead of coal. Greenwash is the order of the day)
"- Renewable and nuclear generators which have zero, or near zero, marginal operating costs are reluctant to reduce output as it reduces revenue, without a saving in fuel costs"
I'm glad you mentioned fatigue issues on nuke plants (which are avoidable by making sure you keep things hot), but a bigger issue is that when you turn a nuke plant down substantially there's a period where Xenon-131 poisoning means you can't turn it back up again safely(*)(**)(***)
(*) During normal operation Xenon-131 is held in equilibrium inside the fuel rods. It will break down after a few hours when you turn the power down.
(**) You don't want to do this too much though, as the pressure from the generated gas is what reduces the ceramic pellets inside the fuel rods to ceramic powder after a while. Turning a system down should be done slowly if at all possible.
(***) Depends on the design but this holds true with all fuel-rod or pebblebed plants(****). You _can_ turn the power up quickly, but there's a very real risk of major overshoot and prompt criticality, which is a "VERY VERY bad thing" because your 400MW plant may go from making 200MW to making 20GW for a few seconds and boil its water (It was a steam explosion from prompt criticality which blew the roof off at Chernobyl when the operators tried to turn it up quickly after running their unauthorised experiments)
(****) Molten Salt Fuel reactors are immune to this as the xenon can come out in the sparge space, but there haven't been any of those operating since 1968 and won't be any until the planned chinese experimental one comes online in late 2018 or thereabouts (the 2017 one is a molten salt cooled pebblebed design)
"The distribution companies may be required by law to accept all wind energy (and pay for it) in which case they are going to end up paying someone to take it off their hands or risk grid instability."
And on the flipside, when the wind stops blowing, the distribution companies will use rolling blackouts rather than fire up an OCGT plant if there's any risk of it being online for less than 12 hours. (This is happening in South Australia regularly)
not in Europe, but I can assure you that in "certain countries", electricity can be more than $1/kWh.
Think "Tiny island country, middle of Pacific Ocean with ancient big diesel generator in the hills behind the main town"
In many of these countries the local power company has total a monopoly over power generation and you not only need an (expensive) license to put up solar panels on your own house, but if you grid connect them, you'll be stung for extra fees.
The telco has a total monopoly on Internet as well as dialtone, as well as handling all the radio licensing in the country (used to be the post office) and running your own satellite link is (now) legal, but expect the licensing fee to be three times as much as buying the same (vastly oversubscribed) from the Telco which charges extortionate rates ($200/month for 2Mb/s, etc). No, you can't offset the charges by selling to your neighbours, that would be a breach of the monopoly.
I can tell you a story like that about a NEAX61M telephone exchange with 30,000 subscribers on the other end.
Which was writing crap to backups. For at least 2 years before it was discovered. It was discovered when the system was restarted and came up braindead. It had been restarted after loading in y2k software to prevent any crashes and stepping back to the old software wasn't an option.
Mobile phones weren't a big thing in 1999
People get upset when they can't make phone calls. They get even more upset if they have no dialtone and 911 isn't working.
It took over a day for a 2.5 year old backup to be located and restored - but the problem with phone switches is that people move house regularly, so thousands of phone lines didn't have the number they were supposed to have.
People get even more upset that they can't _receive_ phone calls than when they dial Fredd and end up talking to a complete stranger on Fredd's number and someone dialling Bill ends up talking to Fredd, etc.
It took more than 6 weeks to replay every single transaction into the switch to bring it up to date - and even after that had supposedly been done properly there were still hundreds of errors because on every played back transaction worked.
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the PHONE company (Since the market opened up to dialtone competition in 2011, this company has dropped from 100% of the enduser market to something less than 20%. I wonder why?)
Managing to simultaneously piss off everyone in an entire city takes some doing.
"And you might have tape or cloud backups but another few commands and the tapes get zeroed overnight "
1: The backup server should be its own physical and administrative space, with its own security policies and be entirely separate from the backup clients (ie: only the backup admins needs access to the backup server.)
2: Tapes should be rotated frequently enough that the last full backup is ALWAYS in a data safe along with as close to current as you can get on differentials/incrementals. it's hard to zero a tape that isn't in the robot - and if you're really paranoid you can use WORMs or password the ability to write to the tape, so that zeroing can't happen without a good deal of insider knowledge.
3: LTO drives have encryption. Use it. That saves the embarassment if tapes are stolen or otherwise go missing on their way to Iron Mountain or whatever other offsite storage you may use (I spent $9k each on a pair of decent data safes and the building can't burn for more than an hour without dropping an airliner full of fuel on it.). In some countries that embarassment comes with a side helping of large fines from your data protection office should the backups happen to contain anything resembling personal information.
"In my ideal system, you have incremental backups to a disk, and routinely (weekly, monthly) do a full backup to tape, "
Why? A decent tape backup system(*)(**) will let you do nightly incrementals/differentials etc and ONLY restore the files you need if the time ever comes to do a full restore in anger.
Being able to do synthetic full backups is also handy when you can't afford the backup window on a particular server.
(*) Decent tape backup systems are backed with a database that keeps hashes of the files - that way you know what changed and when. It's a useful little basis for an IDS amongst other advantages (like being able to seek to the exact point on a tape where any version of any given file is, to restore that file and nothing else.) If the database gets trashed you can still do restores but it takes longer.
(**) The backup server should be entirely separate to everything else. That helps minimise exposure. I use Bacula plus a multidrive robot and am _very_ happy with it.
Yes, but the BA systems were supposed to measure mass of everything _before_ loading and allow sensible placement to ensure CoG limits are OK, etc.
Having to do it the long way can take hours if you're totally dependent on the automated system and have to break out manual methods, now multiply that out by a few hundred flights and you've got severe gate gridlock.
As you say, you can't even taxi until you have this all sorted and if you can't do that _until_ all the baggage, freight and squishies are onboard - when the system won't let them on because boarding passes aren't being printed, then you have a version of mexican standoff on your hands.
The difference is that up to about 3-400 years ago, China and the west were about technologically equal. What's happened since then is attributable to the industrial revolution and China's coal resources being virtually inaccessible in the hinterland vs Europe and North America's being easy to get at.
300 years ago Russia was mostly swamp, forest and steppes with an agrarian economy and the population mostly inward looking peasants. 150 years ago it was still much the same, with some beginnings of nationalism stirring.
China's got the brains, the numbers to make things work and a will to avoid repeats of the civil wars which wracked the country during the 19th and 20th centuries. Russia would have gotten much further if not hamstrung by the Stalin and crippling corruption that never went away when the royals were removed.
Chinese people I speak to in Europe are happy to criticise their government and surprised that we can particpate so freely in politics but generally choose not to. Russians are reluctant to speak about politics or their leaders unless they have zero intention of ever returning home. That says a lot.
"China's rapid growth is not impacting half of the country, and that's causing a lot of unrest. "
If you look at the 7 lines system (The High Speed rail network) and associated works it's clear the chinese government is rolling out massive infrastructure developments to try and pull investors away from Shenzen and the coastal areas in general.
Whilst China's slowed down/stopped rolling out more coal plants (as in more than existing, but still replacing older ones), they're going hell-for-leather in nuclear development and if still on the roadmap as planned, will have a pebblebed-based Molten Salt Reactor running soon. They're aiming for a test LFTR technology reactor to be live towards the end of 2018 - more than 50 years since the Oak Ridge Experiment was last run and 45 years since Nixon killed the project.
Why is this important? A lot of the posturing by the USA and other militaries around the world is about access to energy resources. If the chinese commercialise LFTRs and roll them out en masse to developing countries, then energy costs are set to drop dramatically, oil becomes mostly obsolete and most of the "renewables" projects are simply silly trinkets.
There may be some milage in the thought that the chinese presence in the south china sea really is intended to keep the area neutral and more importantly to dissuade anyone from attempting to drill for gas/oil in the region. China is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and I'd imagine they're planning on the basis of avoiding mass movement of ~3-400 million people off the coastal plains.
" If evaporation could drive warming the way CO2 does, we'd be looking at a runaway positive feedback loop that would end with the oceans boiling away."
It can and the shift in temperature from current isn't particularly difficult to achieve.
There are very real fears amongst climate scientists that a 7C global average change could trigger a venus runaway.
"the DOE devised a diabolical scheme where instead of being returned to their regular duties these teachers where placed in these "rubber rooms" for the purpose of forcing them to resign by wearing down their mental state."
Pull that in any EU country and you'll be in front of labour courts for constructive dismissal - and you would lose, badly.
"autoworker jobs from going to Mexico and elsewhere"
11,000 jobs in Detroit turned into 1500 jobs in Sonora, thanks to greater line automation.
If the companies were forced to stay in the USA they might relocate to New Mexico and only employ 400 people.
What they won't do is stay in Detroit and only employ 1500 people, because the unions won't let them do that, so relocation is the only available option other than closing down.
It's not just outsourcing - This happens primarily because workforces refuse to accept increasing automation reducing the number of jobs.
A classic example is the destruction of the British shipbuilding industry. Thanks to advanced and semi-automated welding techniques a single japanese lightweight female operator (and at the time they were mostly lightweight female operators) could get more work done - of better quality - in a single shift than a dozen teams of Glaswegian welders could achieve in 3 shifts.
Understandably the (very well paid) single operator was cheaper than paying that many people and the british unions' stubborn refusal to modernise resulted in japanese shipbuilding getting all the contracts.
The "british" car industry self-destructed due to incompetent management, not the unions. When you have a company with 14+ layers of management and a dozen different divisions all competing internally you have a recipe for disaster and the unions were militant because the incompetence was harming people. Some of the machinery being used even into the 21st century were well over 100 years old.
Compare and contrast with unionised japanese workforces in the UK - these are generally well settled and there is constant feedback between workers and management both to make better products (rather than the attitude of "bash it into shape" expected by british management) and to make the workplace a better, safer environment.
A well-run business has nothing to fear from unions. A well run union will not back rogue employees who want to pick fights on everything. One of the more common things here is unions informing workers than they don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to a legal claim.
"I'd also argue that in some ways, unions have also created a legacy of adversarial relationships between workers and management "
You forget that militant unions arose because of management abuse and exploitation. Look up the 19th century history of the Pinkerton agency and its involvement in systematic bullying of workers, up to and including murder.
Sociopaths will manipulate their way to the top in any organisation, which is where the corruption side comes from and there's no arguing that organised crime got a foothold in various unions, but there are many more which have never had a history of industrial action and work with management for the best possible outcome for all concerned.
In general you'll find that sociopathic union heads are able to exist because of sociopathic management in the same industry. A militant union and constant striking is an indication of poor business management, because if the workers were happy these things wouldn't happen.
An airline is a very large, very complicated IT network and logistical operation. Operating aircraft and feeding the self-loading freight is actually secondary (think wet-leasing).
Functional, reliable and resilient IT is the absolute core of the business. It's not a cost centre. If you fuck this up then your company is dead. This isn't like freight ops. You can't book two passengers in seat 13A as one example of the degree of error tolerance required.
IAG (BA's parent company) has lost sight of this fact. Alex Cruz' cost cutting in IT was explicitly blamed by Vuerlig (another IAG subsidiary) for the huge meltdown they had just after he left them and switched to running BA. The difference being that Vuerlig is a low-cost airline with limited flight ranges and much lower customer expectations.
The corporate knowledge to deal with IT problems has been systematically removed from the company. Given that - and the way the people involved were removed it's not surprising that Alex Cruz "appeals" to muck in were met with a collective yawn and "not unless you pay us a lot of money" from the recently redundant.
I'd be very surprised if the total costs falling out from this cockup are less than three times the supposed IT "savings" made in BA's cutbacks. By the time regulator fines (for failing to provide legally required support for passengers) are added in, it could be 10 times the supposed savings.
"But volume groups were not being mirrored correctly to the DR site. When they brought the DR site online, they were getting 3 or more destinations when scanning boarding passes"
The interesting part is that this part of the problem started happening on FRIDAY - around 18 hours BEFORE the total outage caused by the supposed power outage/surge.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unfortunately there aren't really that many feasible and affordable energy storage options."
If (when) LFTRs hit the market with their innate ability to load follow without taking damage, the costs involved should make a mockery of wind and solar power, meaning that in a century or so we'll point and laugh and the rusting relics on the hillsides.
Wind and solar are nice if you're not grid connected. Everywhere else they're only connected to farm subsidies, not electricity.
The more practical reality is that an attempt to replace all carbon-sourced electricity with renewables would only _just_ match existing generation capacity.
(The short version is that you can't generate one place and transport more than about 1500 miles before transmission losses kill the economics, so paving the deserts is a non-starter for the most part.)
That's fine but to replace other carbon sources and go more-electric (gas/oil heating, industrial process heat, transportation, etc) will need an increased power generation capacity around 8 times current capacity in the developed world - and then you need to factor in the developing world.
The only practical way to generate that much electricity is nuclear power, preferably LFTR (which is doable now, and the chinese are working on commercialising it). Fusion will be nice if it happens but I don't expect to see it commercialised within the next century and we can't afford to wait that long - Global warming/ocean level rises are only a small part of the risk.
The CO2 spike we've generated is more extreme than anything in history and they've geologically gone hand-in-hand with Anoxic Oceanic Events. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer my planet's oxygen level to stay at the 19.5% we evolved with as having it drop to around 14% would not be good news for our very oxygen-hungry brains.
"Nuclear can and is operated in a load following manner [oecd-nea.org] in e.g. France and even Germany... You can really ramp up and down on a dime, as it were, i.e. there's no technical reason not to."
_Conventional_ Nuclear can load follow to a limited extent. You very much _can't_ turn them up and down on a dime even if the thermal lag allowed you to. Xenon-131 neutron poisoning is a very real issue and so are the physical effects of gas overpressure in the fuel rods.
LFTRs and other Molten Salt Fuel reactors will allow this, but they're a decade off commercial reality (at least)
"Spectacular when it happens though, one or more of the blades fall off"
You don't want to live downwind. The blades have been known to go more than a mile before landing - and they _will_ demolish a building if they land on it.
Large windmills have an uncomfortable habit of chewing up their gearboxes - usually setting them on fire along the way. It's been reckoned that even with subsidies the only guaranteed way of making money off a windmill is to keep it stationary and take money from the powercos to _not_ connect to the grid (The going rate is about £30k per month per windmill - which gives you an idea how much the powercos hate windmills messing up their grid.)
"This is a perfect incentive for companies to install storage"
Europe has a number of pumped hydro storage systems. Rest assured that when this kind of event happens they're running flat out pushing water uphill, but can only do it until they're full.
The bigger problem is that windpower is highly unpredictable, backing systems can only go "so low" and powercos are not allowed to disconnect "renewables" sources.
(It's also worth noting that UK Wind and Solar is tiny compared to the "renewables" output of stations like Drax, which burns clearfelled+chipped virgin canadian and louisianan forests instead of coal. Greenwash is the order of the day)
"- Renewable and nuclear generators which have zero, or near zero, marginal operating costs are reluctant to reduce output as it reduces revenue, without a saving in fuel costs"
I'm glad you mentioned fatigue issues on nuke plants (which are avoidable by making sure you keep things hot), but a bigger issue is that when you turn a nuke plant down substantially there's a period where Xenon-131 poisoning means you can't turn it back up again safely(*)(**)(***)
(*) During normal operation Xenon-131 is held in equilibrium inside the fuel rods. It will break down after a few hours when you turn the power down.
(**) You don't want to do this too much though, as the pressure from the generated gas is what reduces the ceramic pellets inside the fuel rods to ceramic powder after a while. Turning a system down should be done slowly if at all possible.
(***) Depends on the design but this holds true with all fuel-rod or pebblebed plants(****). You _can_ turn the power up quickly, but there's a very real risk of major overshoot and prompt criticality, which is a "VERY VERY bad thing" because your 400MW plant may go from making 200MW to making 20GW for a few seconds and boil its water (It was a steam explosion from prompt criticality which blew the roof off at Chernobyl when the operators tried to turn it up quickly after running their unauthorised experiments)
(****) Molten Salt Fuel reactors are immune to this as the xenon can come out in the sparge space, but there haven't been any of those operating since 1968 and won't be any until the planned chinese experimental one comes online in late 2018 or thereabouts (the 2017 one is a molten salt cooled pebblebed design)
"The distribution companies may be required by law to accept all wind energy (and pay for it) in which case they are going to end up paying someone to take it off their hands or risk grid instability."
And on the flipside, when the wind stops blowing, the distribution companies will use rolling blackouts rather than fire up an OCGT plant if there's any risk of it being online for less than 12 hours. (This is happening in South Australia regularly)
not in Europe, but I can assure you that in "certain countries", electricity can be more than $1/kWh.
Think "Tiny island country, middle of Pacific Ocean with ancient big diesel generator in the hills behind the main town"
In many of these countries the local power company has total a monopoly over power generation and you not only need an (expensive) license to put up solar panels on your own house, but if you grid connect them, you'll be stung for extra fees.
The telco has a total monopoly on Internet as well as dialtone, as well as handling all the radio licensing in the country (used to be the post office) and running your own satellite link is (now) legal, but expect the licensing fee to be three times as much as buying the same (vastly oversubscribed) from the Telco which charges extortionate rates ($200/month for 2Mb/s, etc). No, you can't offset the charges by selling to your neighbours, that would be a breach of the monopoly.
I can tell you a story like that about a NEAX61M telephone exchange with 30,000 subscribers on the other end.
Which was writing crap to backups.
For at least 2 years before it was discovered.
It was discovered when the system was restarted and came up braindead.
It had been restarted after loading in y2k software to prevent any crashes and stepping back to the old software wasn't an option.
Mobile phones weren't a big thing in 1999
People get upset when they can't make phone calls. They get even more upset if they have no dialtone and 911 isn't working.
It took over a day for a 2.5 year old backup to be located and restored - but the problem with phone switches is that people move house regularly, so thousands of phone lines didn't have the number they were supposed to have.
People get even more upset that they can't _receive_ phone calls than when they dial Fredd and end up talking to a complete stranger on Fredd's number and someone dialling Bill ends up talking to Fredd, etc.
It took more than 6 weeks to replay every single transaction into the switch to bring it up to date - and even after that had supposedly been done properly there were still hundreds of errors because on every played back transaction worked.
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the PHONE company (Since the market opened up to dialtone competition in 2011, this company has dropped from 100% of the enduser market to something less than 20%. I wonder why?)
Managing to simultaneously piss off everyone in an entire city takes some doing.
"And you might have tape or cloud backups but another few commands and the tapes get zeroed overnight "
1: The backup server should be its own physical and administrative space, with its own security policies and be entirely separate from the backup clients (ie: only the backup admins needs access to the backup server.)
2: Tapes should be rotated frequently enough that the last full backup is ALWAYS in a data safe along with as close to current as you can get on differentials/incrementals. it's hard to zero a tape that isn't in the robot - and if you're really paranoid you can use WORMs or password the ability to write to the tape, so that zeroing can't happen without a good deal of insider knowledge.
3: LTO drives have encryption. Use it. That saves the embarassment if tapes are stolen or otherwise go missing on their way to Iron Mountain or whatever other offsite storage you may use (I spent $9k each on a pair of decent data safes and the building can't burn for more than an hour without dropping an airliner full of fuel on it.). In some countries that embarassment comes with a side helping of large fines from your data protection office should the backups happen to contain anything resembling personal information.
"In my ideal system, you have incremental backups to a disk, and routinely (weekly, monthly) do a full backup to tape, "
Why? A decent tape backup system(*)(**) will let you do nightly incrementals/differentials etc and ONLY restore the files you need if the time ever comes to do a full restore in anger.
Being able to do synthetic full backups is also handy when you can't afford the backup window on a particular server.
(*) Decent tape backup systems are backed with a database that keeps hashes of the files - that way you know what changed and when. It's a useful little basis for an IDS amongst other advantages (like being able to seek to the exact point on a tape where any version of any given file is, to restore that file and nothing else.) If the database gets trashed you can still do restores but it takes longer.
(**) The backup server should be entirely separate to everything else. That helps minimise exposure. I use Bacula plus a multidrive robot and am _very_ happy with it.
Yes, but the BA systems were supposed to measure mass of everything _before_ loading and allow sensible placement to ensure CoG limits are OK, etc.
Having to do it the long way can take hours if you're totally dependent on the automated system and have to break out manual methods, now multiply that out by a few hundred flights and you've got severe gate gridlock.
As you say, you can't even taxi until you have this all sorted and if you can't do that _until_ all the baggage, freight and squishies are onboard - when the system won't let them on because boarding passes aren't being printed, then you have a version of mexican standoff on your hands.
"Still no hacking of voting machines"
Given the lack of audit trails in Diebold's systems, how would you ever know?
"Everything China is doing, Russia tried to do."
The difference is that up to about 3-400 years ago, China and the west were about technologically equal. What's happened since then is attributable to the industrial revolution and China's coal resources being virtually inaccessible in the hinterland vs Europe and North America's being easy to get at.
300 years ago Russia was mostly swamp, forest and steppes with an agrarian economy and the population mostly inward looking peasants. 150 years ago it was still much the same, with some beginnings of nationalism stirring.
China's got the brains, the numbers to make things work and a will to avoid repeats of the civil wars which wracked the country during the 19th and 20th centuries. Russia would have gotten much further if not hamstrung by the Stalin and crippling corruption that never went away when the royals were removed.
Chinese people I speak to in Europe are happy to criticise their government and surprised that we can particpate so freely in politics but generally choose not to. Russians are reluctant to speak about politics or their leaders unless they have zero intention of ever returning home. That says a lot.
"China's rapid growth is not impacting half of the country, and that's causing a lot of unrest. "
If you look at the 7 lines system (The High Speed rail network) and associated works it's clear the chinese government is rolling out massive infrastructure developments to try and pull investors away from Shenzen and the coastal areas in general.
Whilst China's slowed down/stopped rolling out more coal plants (as in more than existing, but still replacing older ones), they're going hell-for-leather in nuclear development and if still on the roadmap as planned, will have a pebblebed-based Molten Salt Reactor running soon. They're aiming for a test LFTR technology reactor to be live towards the end of 2018 - more than 50 years since the Oak Ridge Experiment was last run and 45 years since Nixon killed the project.
Why is this important? A lot of the posturing by the USA and other militaries around the world is about access to energy resources. If the chinese commercialise LFTRs and roll them out en masse to developing countries, then energy costs are set to drop dramatically, oil becomes mostly obsolete and most of the "renewables" projects are simply silly trinkets.
There may be some milage in the thought that the chinese presence in the south china sea really is intended to keep the area neutral and more importantly to dissuade anyone from attempting to drill for gas/oil in the region. China is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and I'd imagine they're planning on the basis of avoiding mass movement of ~3-400 million people off the coastal plains.
Trump has handed the embassies back and now wants to let the expelled staff back.
These walls are useless for particulate catching were they're located.
The most effective position is at knee level on the roadside. If you don't believe me, check any roadside hedge.
" If evaporation could drive warming the way CO2 does, we'd be looking at a runaway positive feedback loop that would end with the oceans boiling away."
It can and the shift in temperature from current isn't particularly difficult to achieve.
There are very real fears amongst climate scientists that a 7C global average change could trigger a venus runaway.
"the DOE devised a diabolical scheme where instead of being returned to their regular duties these teachers where placed in these "rubber rooms" for the purpose of forcing them to resign by wearing down their mental state."
Pull that in any EU country and you'll be in front of labour courts for constructive dismissal - and you would lose, badly.
"autoworker jobs from going to Mexico and elsewhere"
11,000 jobs in Detroit turned into 1500 jobs in Sonora, thanks to greater line automation.
If the companies were forced to stay in the USA they might relocate to New Mexico and only employ 400 people.
What they won't do is stay in Detroit and only employ 1500 people, because the unions won't let them do that, so relocation is the only available option other than closing down.
It's not just outsourcing - This happens primarily because workforces refuse to accept increasing automation reducing the number of jobs.
A classic example is the destruction of the British shipbuilding industry. Thanks to advanced and semi-automated welding techniques a single japanese lightweight female operator (and at the time they were mostly lightweight female operators) could get more work done - of better quality - in a single shift than a dozen teams of Glaswegian welders could achieve in 3 shifts.
Understandably the (very well paid) single operator was cheaper than paying that many people and the british unions' stubborn refusal to modernise resulted in japanese shipbuilding getting all the contracts.
The "british" car industry self-destructed due to incompetent management, not the unions. When you have a company with 14+ layers of management and a dozen different divisions all competing internally you have a recipe for disaster and the unions were militant because the incompetence was harming people. Some of the machinery being used even into the 21st century were well over 100 years old.
Compare and contrast with unionised japanese workforces in the UK - these are generally well settled and there is constant feedback between workers and management both to make better products (rather than the attitude of "bash it into shape" expected by british management) and to make the workplace a better, safer environment.
A well-run business has nothing to fear from unions. A well run union will not back rogue employees who want to pick fights on everything. One of the more common things here is unions informing workers than they don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to a legal claim.
"I'd also argue that in some ways, unions have also created a legacy of adversarial relationships between workers and management "
You forget that militant unions arose because of management abuse and exploitation. Look up the 19th century history of the Pinkerton agency and its involvement in systematic bullying of workers, up to and including murder.
Sociopaths will manipulate their way to the top in any organisation, which is where the corruption side comes from and there's no arguing that organised crime got a foothold in various unions, but there are many more which have never had a history of industrial action and work with management for the best possible outcome for all concerned.
In general you'll find that sociopathic union heads are able to exist because of sociopathic management in the same industry. A militant union and constant striking is an indication of poor business management, because if the workers were happy these things wouldn't happen.
"There's nooooooo way that a German autoworker makes north of 130K year"
They do. Go and check for yourself if you don't believe it.
An airline is a very large, very complicated IT network and logistical operation. Operating aircraft and feeding the self-loading freight is actually secondary (think wet-leasing).
Functional, reliable and resilient IT is the absolute core of the business. It's not a cost centre. If you fuck this up then your company is dead. This isn't like freight ops. You can't book two passengers in seat 13A as one example of the degree of error tolerance required.
IAG (BA's parent company) has lost sight of this fact. Alex Cruz' cost cutting in IT was explicitly blamed by Vuerlig (another IAG subsidiary) for the huge meltdown they had just after he left them and switched to running BA. The difference being that Vuerlig is a low-cost airline with limited flight ranges and much lower customer expectations.
The corporate knowledge to deal with IT problems has been systematically removed from the company. Given that - and the way the people involved were removed it's not surprising that Alex Cruz "appeals" to muck in were met with a collective yawn and "not unless you pay us a lot of money" from the recently redundant.
I'd be very surprised if the total costs falling out from this cockup are less than three times the supposed IT "savings" made in BA's cutbacks. By the time regulator fines (for failing to provide legally required support for passengers) are added in, it could be 10 times the supposed savings.
"But volume groups were not being mirrored correctly to the DR site. When they brought the DR site online, they were getting 3 or more destinations when scanning boarding passes"
The interesting part is that this part of the problem started happening on FRIDAY - around 18 hours BEFORE the total outage caused by the supposed power outage/surge.