molten salt nuclear systems can turn up/down faster than coal plants
The ORNL MSR was switched off every Friday afternoon and fired up again on Monday morning, because noone wanted to nursemaid it over the weekend. Whilst only 8MW it means it got subjected to thermal stress cycles out of all proportion to what any power plant would see.
Molten salts for solar thermal systems are the "battery" which helps relieve the grid of the "spiky" nature of current renewables generation, but the reality is that if MSR plants are built, the renewables sites are a gigantic waste of money and space.
"Perhaps but the dramatic price drops that have been seen with wind"
In the current environment, the only time a wind turbine is profitable is when it's blades are stationary because the operator is being paid not to connect it to the grid.
The big units have a nasty tendency to catch fire (overheated gearboxes) or simply destroy gearboxes with monotonous regularity and the total power output if you carpeted an area the size of the UK with the things is about the same as 2-4 conventional plants, plus there's the twee safety issue of the blades being known to go more than a mile if they break so you need an exclusion zone around each one.
Yes, Denmark produced 110% of its demands - for less than 2 hours, on a warm afternoon with historic low demands. The rest of the time they buy in coal sourced power from germany (it's filthy lignite coal) and the germans have resorted to supplementing their "nuclear free" grid capacity with power generated in french nuclear plants instead of german ones.
Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. Those massive plants in California don't even produce enough to supply all the housing within their county, let alone export surplus or be reliable industrial suppliers.
We're unlikely to see practical commercial fusion before the end of this century. In the meantime we need to drop CO2 emissions by 80% or risk poisoning the oceans in a global anoxic event (this will kill off large land animals including us far sooner than global warming does), so unless you plan to kill off more than 50% of the planet's population a crash plan of nukebuilding needs to be underway. Conventional fission for now and LFTRs as soon as they're available.
Uranium plants don't scale to this kind of rollout requirement because there's not enough uranium, it's insanely expensive to enrich to the 3% level needed to run a conventional plant(*) AND the resulting U238 "depleted uranium" is itself a weapons proliferation risk (U238 is used as the casing of H-bombes to dramatically increase the yield.). Thorium on the other hand is a nuisance waste product of rare earth mining which doesn't need any special treatment before it's used in the nuclear cycle. The US DOE buried a few (ten-)thousand tons of it in Utah some time back, simply to get rid of it.
(*) The actual cost of enriching uranium for civil nuclear use is a classified military secret in the USA.
That entirely depends on the country - and the energy sources.
OIl/gas-based heating accounts for at least as much energy consumption as electricity does at the moment. With them inevitably being banned in the future (plus EVs spreading), night consumption will only rise.
Speaking as someone who lives in london, the vast majority of people won't use black cabs. If they need transport they'll use public transport or hire a minicab.
The only people who use black cabs are tourists, those so wealthy they don't care about the cost, those who have someone else paying the cost and those who have no other choice.
Black Cabbies routinely break the laws by refusing fares and get away with it and a couple have been discovered to be the most prolific rapists in the city, which shows the lie of the "vetting proedures".
London Black cabs are one of the last remnants of mideval guilds, with their restrictions on entry and competition. It's about time they faced the same competitive market as every other type of taxi operator.
"And yeah, this is the point where someone mentions medallions, and I shoot right back with pictures of New York City streets utterly crowded with taxis"
So, NYC reacted to one problem by making another one which has made those lucky enough to have medallions effectively the holders of licenses to print money.
The funny thing about streets full of taxis is that in the end it's self-regulating as fares can only go down so far and there are only so many riders.
The specific reason for the band being used for both weather radar and ISM have the same source - water.
It and the 2.45GHz bands were originally regarded as useless because they're close to resonance points of the water molecule.
This gives nice reflectivity in the case of weather radar and high attentuation in the case of radio linking. That's fine for "around the house" but companies using the ISM bands for long-haul radio linking really need to think through why they're using the band and migrate somewhere else.
I note again that virtually every FCC enforcement case is against commercial entities using high-mounted external antennas which are line of sight from the doppler weather radar installations (not forgetting the 4/3 rule which makes "Line Of Sight" slightly over the horizon)
My 5GHz router (FritzBox) and a couple of 5GHz access points (netgear) take the quite simple step of listening for 2-3 minutes for weather radar systems if you choose any frequency which overlaps Doppler radar bands. If they detect anything, they won't let you use those channels.
Aviation is only one of the uses for DWR systems but it's the most critical.
The overriding concern is shown in the enforcement actions - commercial system antennas using 5GHz band, mounted high and in line-of-sight from a TDWR system. Such systems are less likely to include automated protection because they're assumed to be operated by knowledgable persons. Clearly such assumptions are wrong, but the FCC could (and should) be calling in the FAA and NTSB in such cases because the fines being imposed are clearly insufficient to discourage repeat offences (see the Towerstream enforcement history for an example) and it's time to use the laws which are already on the books for endangering aircraft against company principals (the issue of personal as well as corporate liability has a nice effect of focussing attention on fixxing the problem)
"These days, there's nothing but a few bucks and a couple of minutes online keeping Joe Schmo from running a wireless router with firmware he doesn't understand that he downloaded from who-knows-where that may be at an early stage in the quality control process."
99.9% of the time a 5GHz router in a home is not going to cause interference, by simple fact of being indoors.
If you read up on the FCC actions: In virtually every case they involve external, directional, elevated antennas in direct line of sight of the Doppler radar systems being interfered with.
For what it's worth this isn't just a USA problem. Doppler radar is used extensively worldwide and enforcement actions tend to be a lot harsher than the FCC ones.
In many countries, spectrum enforcement staff are empowered to rip out and impound interfering equipment on the spot as well as imposing large fines for a first offence when it comes to safety-of-life stuff - and there are a raft of civil air transportation laws which can be and are used as further weapons - interfering with aviation systems can get you 15 years in some jurisdictions.
China is the first port of call for several tens of millions of NK refugees should the NK government collapse. They don't have the infgrastructure to cope with that and they know it.
Chinese support of NK is mostly grudging and they've cut off oil/electricity feeds for months at a time to make a point to KJI - unfortunately the result was that the leadership simply hunkered down with what they could lay their hands on and let the general populace starve, so the chinese relented to avert millions of deaths.
Remember that China only got involved in the Korean War when McArthur directly disobeyed orders and chased the NKs right up to the chinese border (he was odrered to stay 50 miles from it) to the point that the NKs were crossing into China.. One of the reasons NK continues to exist is as a buffer zone between China and US bases in the south. If they were to close things might move faster towards normality.
"A country that makes no secret about its genocidal desires against Israel"
They also say "death to america" when they mean "american foreign policy" - a bit like Krushev's "We will bury you" speech was actually "invaders come and invaders go, we buried their dead when they left and we will bury yours when you leave too"
Israel is the greatest destabilising influence in the middle east and it's a nation that was ESTABLISHED via terrorism. Look up the illustrious history of Begin and Meyer (amongst others) sometime.
I bring that up because it's the proof that ISIS and others can use to justify their own actions.
"Iran's government was overthrown before the counter-coup that restore the Shah to power"
Look a little further behind the curtain and you'll see that both events were orchestrated by foreign powers.
I'm not saying the mullahs or the shah are/were nice people, but the background is _always_ more complicated than it might appear at first glance.
The current situation (until very recently) is that since the end of the cold war, spittle-flecked invective from Iran was useful for the USA govt to use as a bogeyman to scare/control its population and the USA's ratcheting up of pressure in response to the spittle-flecked invective was useful for the Iranian govt to use as a bogeyman to scare/control _its_ population.
The USA no longer needs Iran as there are other threats it can use to keep scaring its population and thereby keep the federal government on the war footing it's been on since 1941. Ever since the Cold War ended it's been flailing about looking for (or manufacturing) an enemy to avoid the dissolution of power back to the states that was supposed to happen when WW2 ended.
It's arguable that this is the reason NK is desperate to develop nukes.
Iran has more than enough enriched uranium to build a few dozen weapons. It's quite clear they have no intention of doing so - and that's a MOSSAD assessment, not mine.
" Especially when those ambitions might include a weapon on a barge in New York Harbor."
Some argue that the cold war ended when Krushev said "NO" to something similar and that the remaining 20 years was simply echoes because noone wanted to admit it was over.
Nuclear weapons perhaps, and only if they're using conventional means towards them.
There's no need to enrich uranium to make LFTR systems and the USA was actively researching thorium-based weaponry before it got its uranium ones going (the research stopped as it did for LFTRs, because the USA could only afford to research one line of promise. Once uranium bombs and uranium submarine reactors got going, interest in thorium ceased - which is a shame because it's like never graduating from germanium to silicon electronics.
"Broadcom has the lion's share of the market for network ASICs, and is very much a closed environment. "
In the last decade they've gone from being sued for breaching GPL to being one of the most prolific contributors to the Linux kernel and have put a bunch of other stuff into GPL or BSD licensing.
As long as Avago don't screw the pooch, it's entirely possible that they will move towards being more open on asics.
"People use it in those places because it's free, not because it's particularly good"
So is BSD, but that's not used nearly as much, even though a lot of the companies using Linux would find that the pesky GPL stuff is no longer handcuffing them.
FWIW there are "linux" distros out there which have been rebased on BSD kernels.
I use both and have done for more than 20 years. The issue isn't Linus - whenever he's called someone out it's because it really was needed - it's more that developers in this kind of arena tend to be special flowers with talent in an environment where collaboration may bring uniformity but it also eliminates innovation. Those devs need to exist, but so do people like Sarah who have the time and patience to rip that innovative code apart/rewrite so that lurking bugs can be found and nailed. The former often see the latter as a threat and react as you'd expect.
In many ways it's like the constant battle between architects and quantity surveyors.
"The law limits his hours in the cab so unless he is breaking the law that truck will sit still at least 12 hours a day."
For an owner-driver perhaps. If there is a large enough network of trucks (or depots being driven between) then multiple shifts can keep a large truck running almost continuously. It's for this reason that large ones (44 tonnes) tend to have relatively "short" lives - in 4 years they may put 2million km on the clock.
Once "drivers" are mostly "minders", the operating hours of trucks are likely to extend out even further even if current working hour directives are adhered to (or shortened), as a minder can simply be changed out every few hours and returned to home base as part of his shift (which in turn means lower costs as no accomodation charges/meals, etc need to be covered).
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"How do you melt salt inside a pump and hundreds of feet of piping? "
Electric heaters. That was solved 50 years ago.
molten salt nuclear systems can turn up/down faster than coal plants
The ORNL MSR was switched off every Friday afternoon and fired up again on Monday morning, because noone wanted to nursemaid it over the weekend. Whilst only 8MW it means it got subjected to thermal stress cycles out of all proportion to what any power plant would see.
Molten salts for solar thermal systems are the "battery" which helps relieve the grid of the "spiky" nature of current renewables generation, but the reality is that if MSR plants are built, the renewables sites are a gigantic waste of money and space.
"Perhaps but the dramatic price drops that have been seen with wind"
In the current environment, the only time a wind turbine is profitable is when it's blades are stationary because the operator is being paid not to connect it to the grid.
The big units have a nasty tendency to catch fire (overheated gearboxes) or simply destroy gearboxes with monotonous regularity and the total power output if you carpeted an area the size of the UK with the things is about the same as 2-4 conventional plants, plus there's the twee safety issue of the blades being known to go more than a mile if they break so you need an exclusion zone around each one.
Yes, Denmark produced 110% of its demands - for less than 2 hours, on a warm afternoon with historic low demands. The rest of the time they buy in coal sourced power from germany (it's filthy lignite coal) and the germans have resorted to supplementing their "nuclear free" grid capacity with power generated in french nuclear plants instead of german ones.
"Their fast-breeder is a conventional sodium-cooled design"
Uh yeah. A metal which burns furiously when exposed to air in its molten state.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" applies in spades. Ask the Japanese why.
"Solar is the only thing that scales"
Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. Those massive plants in California don't even produce enough to supply all the housing within their county, let alone export surplus or be reliable industrial suppliers.
We're unlikely to see practical commercial fusion before the end of this century. In the meantime we need to drop CO2 emissions by 80% or risk poisoning the oceans in a global anoxic event (this will kill off large land animals including us far sooner than global warming does), so unless you plan to kill off more than 50% of the planet's population a crash plan of nukebuilding needs to be underway. Conventional fission for now and LFTRs as soon as they're available.
Uranium plants don't scale to this kind of rollout requirement because there's not enough uranium, it's insanely expensive to enrich to the 3% level needed to run a conventional plant(*) AND the resulting U238 "depleted uranium" is itself a weapons proliferation risk (U238 is used as the casing of H-bombes to dramatically increase the yield.). Thorium on the other hand is a nuisance waste product of rare earth mining which doesn't need any special treatment before it's used in the nuclear cycle. The US DOE buried a few (ten-)thousand tons of it in Utah some time back, simply to get rid of it.
(*) The actual cost of enriching uranium for civil nuclear use is a classified military secret in the USA.
That entirely depends on the country - and the energy sources.
OIl/gas-based heating accounts for at least as much energy consumption as electricity does at the moment. With them inevitably being banned in the future (plus EVs spreading), night consumption will only rise.
Nuclear molten salt is a better answer though.
The fact that the bank requires the severed employees remain available undermines any claims that they're redundant and replaceable with H1B monkeys?
Speaking as someone who lives in london, the vast majority of people won't use black cabs. If they need transport they'll use public transport or hire a minicab.
The only people who use black cabs are tourists, those so wealthy they don't care about the cost, those who have someone else paying the cost and those who have no other choice.
Black Cabbies routinely break the laws by refusing fares and get away with it and a couple have been discovered to be the most prolific rapists in the city, which shows the lie of the "vetting proedures".
London Black cabs are one of the last remnants of mideval guilds, with their restrictions on entry and competition. It's about time they faced the same competitive market as every other type of taxi operator.
"And yeah, this is the point where someone mentions medallions, and I shoot right back with pictures of New York City streets utterly crowded with taxis"
So, NYC reacted to one problem by making another one which has made those lucky enough to have medallions effectively the holders of licenses to print money.
The funny thing about streets full of taxis is that in the end it's self-regulating as fares can only go down so far and there are only so many riders.
Like they did last time around?
The specific reason for the band being used for both weather radar and ISM have the same source - water.
It and the 2.45GHz bands were originally regarded as useless because they're close to resonance points of the water molecule.
This gives nice reflectivity in the case of weather radar and high attentuation in the case of radio linking. That's fine for "around the house" but companies using the ISM bands for long-haul radio linking really need to think through why they're using the band and migrate somewhere else.
I note again that virtually every FCC enforcement case is against commercial entities using high-mounted external antennas which are line of sight from the doppler weather radar installations (not forgetting the 4/3 rule which makes "Line Of Sight" slightly over the horizon)
Incorrect. It's easy.
My 5GHz router (FritzBox) and a couple of 5GHz access points (netgear) take the quite simple step of listening for 2-3 minutes for weather radar systems if you choose any frequency which overlaps Doppler radar bands. If they detect anything, they won't let you use those channels.
Aviation is only one of the uses for DWR systems but it's the most critical.
The overriding concern is shown in the enforcement actions - commercial system antennas using 5GHz band, mounted high and in line-of-sight from a TDWR system. Such systems are less likely to include automated protection because they're assumed to be operated by knowledgable persons. Clearly such assumptions are wrong, but the FCC could (and should) be calling in the FAA and NTSB in such cases because the fines being imposed are clearly insufficient to discourage repeat offences (see the Towerstream enforcement history for an example) and it's time to use the laws which are already on the books for endangering aircraft against company principals (the issue of personal as well as corporate liability has a nice effect of focussing attention on fixxing the problem)
"These days, there's nothing but a few bucks and a couple of minutes online keeping Joe Schmo from running a wireless router with firmware he doesn't understand that he downloaded from who-knows-where that may be at an early stage in the quality control process."
99.9% of the time a 5GHz router in a home is not going to cause interference, by simple fact of being indoors.
If you read up on the FCC actions: In virtually every case they involve external, directional, elevated antennas in direct line of sight of the Doppler radar systems being interfered with.
For what it's worth this isn't just a USA problem. Doppler radar is used extensively worldwide and enforcement actions tend to be a lot harsher than the FCC ones.
In many countries, spectrum enforcement staff are empowered to rip out and impound interfering equipment on the spot as well as imposing large fines for a first offence when it comes to safety-of-life stuff - and there are a raft of civil air transportation laws which can be and are used as further weapons - interfering with aviation systems can get you 15 years in some jurisdictions.
A trembler coil and a spark plug do a pretty good job too. Put it in a headlight and the interference is directional.
"China's continued support of North Korea"
China is the first port of call for several tens of millions of NK refugees should the NK government collapse. They don't have the infgrastructure to cope with that and they know it.
Chinese support of NK is mostly grudging and they've cut off oil/electricity feeds for months at a time to make a point to KJI - unfortunately the result was that the leadership simply hunkered down with what they could lay their hands on and let the general populace starve, so the chinese relented to avert millions of deaths.
Remember that China only got involved in the Korean War when McArthur directly disobeyed orders and chased the NKs right up to the chinese border (he was odrered to stay 50 miles from it) to the point that the NKs were crossing into China.. One of the reasons NK continues to exist is as a buffer zone between China and US bases in the south. If they were to close things might move faster towards normality.
"A country that makes no secret about its genocidal desires against Israel"
They also say "death to america" when they mean "american foreign policy" - a bit like Krushev's "We will bury you" speech was actually "invaders come and invaders go, we buried their dead when they left and we will bury yours when you leave too"
Israel is the greatest destabilising influence in the middle east and it's a nation that was ESTABLISHED via terrorism. Look up the illustrious history of Begin and Meyer (amongst others) sometime.
I bring that up because it's the proof that ISIS and others can use to justify their own actions.
"Iran's government was overthrown before the counter-coup that restore the Shah to power"
Look a little further behind the curtain and you'll see that both events were orchestrated by foreign powers.
I'm not saying the mullahs or the shah are/were nice people, but the background is _always_ more complicated than it might appear at first glance.
The current situation (until very recently) is that since the end of the cold war, spittle-flecked invective from Iran was useful for the USA govt to use as a bogeyman to scare/control its population and the USA's ratcheting up of pressure in response to the spittle-flecked invective was useful for the Iranian govt to use as a bogeyman to scare/control _its_ population.
The USA no longer needs Iran as there are other threats it can use to keep scaring its population and thereby keep the federal government on the war footing it's been on since 1941. Ever since the Cold War ended it's been flailing about looking for (or manufacturing) an enemy to avoid the dissolution of power back to the states that was supposed to happen when WW2 ended.
It's arguable that this is the reason NK is desperate to develop nukes.
Iran has more than enough enriched uranium to build a few dozen weapons. It's quite clear they have no intention of doing so - and that's a MOSSAD assessment, not mine.
" Especially when those ambitions might include a weapon on a barge in New York Harbor."
Some argue that the cold war ended when Krushev said "NO" to something similar and that the remaining 20 years was simply echoes because noone wanted to admit it was over.
Nuclear weapons perhaps, and only if they're using conventional means towards them.
There's no need to enrich uranium to make LFTR systems and the USA was actively researching thorium-based weaponry before it got its uranium ones going (the research stopped as it did for LFTRs, because the USA could only afford to research one line of promise. Once uranium bombs and uranium submarine reactors got going, interest in thorium ceased - which is a shame because it's like never graduating from germanium to silicon electronics.
"You can even get gigabit speeds on old retires desktops..."
Yes, at 70-90W power consumption, not 5-15
"Broadcom has the lion's share of the market for network ASICs, and is very much a closed environment. "
In the last decade they've gone from being sued for breaching GPL to being one of the most prolific contributors to the Linux kernel and have put a bunch of other stuff into GPL or BSD licensing.
As long as Avago don't screw the pooch, it's entirely possible that they will move towards being more open on asics.
"Most switches that can perform layer-3 functions tend to do so in software or with the general purpose CPU"
Unless they happen to be based around something like the Broadcom Trident2 or newer.
You're talking seriously old silicon that can only operate at L2
"People use it in those places because it's free, not because it's particularly good"
So is BSD, but that's not used nearly as much, even though a lot of the companies using Linux would find that the pesky GPL stuff is no longer handcuffing them.
FWIW there are "linux" distros out there which have been rebased on BSD kernels.
I use both and have done for more than 20 years. The issue isn't Linus - whenever he's called someone out it's because it really was needed - it's more that developers in this kind of arena tend to be special flowers with talent in an environment where collaboration may bring uniformity but it also eliminates innovation. Those devs need to exist, but so do people like Sarah who have the time and patience to rip that innovative code apart/rewrite so that lurking bugs can be found and nailed. The former often see the latter as a threat and react as you'd expect.
In many ways it's like the constant battle between architects and quantity surveyors.
"The law limits his hours in the cab so unless he is breaking the law that truck will sit still at least 12 hours a day."
For an owner-driver perhaps. If there is a large enough network of trucks (or depots being driven between) then multiple shifts can keep a large truck running almost continuously. It's for this reason that large ones (44 tonnes) tend to have relatively "short" lives - in 4 years they may put 2million km on the clock.
Once "drivers" are mostly "minders", the operating hours of trucks are likely to extend out even further even if current working hour directives are adhered to (or shortened), as a minder can simply be changed out every few hours and returned to home base as part of his shift (which in turn means lower costs as no accomodation charges/meals, etc need to be covered).