The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.
Technically you're right, but only if we develop both reliable industrial-scale breeder reactors and the technology to extract seawater uranium on a large scale. There's just not enough U235 to generalize the use of nuclear energy on a worldwide scale, so we need breeders to burn U238, and get more of it than current reserves. Not sure about thorium reserves, but that would also require breeders. But indeed, with the aforementioned technologies we can sustain some growth, though not indefinitely. Further down the road, the only technology I'm sure would leave room for lots of growth is deuterium fusion; not deuterium-tritium (which would need to tap into lithium reserves to make tritium) but deuterium-deuterium, which is of course harder and much, much less certain than fission with breeder reactors.
What makes your point correct is that, although renewables can probably sustain us at current consumption rates, they won't allow for any significant growth. OTOH, any significant growth with any energy source will incur lots more waste heat, which would compound global warning. I don't have numbers for how waste heat would compare to current greenhouse-gas emissions in terms of warming the planet. But the numbers supporting my post can be found in Sustainable energy without the hot air, a bit dated but still a must-read.
Any analysis that is more than a couple of years old is very likely to be wrong.
The cost of renewable energy has dropped significantly faster than predictions [...]
The book I mention is not about cost, but about available energy, as in e.g. how many kWh the sun is giving you over time per unit of area. That won't change; the efficiency of solar panels does, but the book already takes an optimistic stance, looking for fundamental rather than technological limits.
That study is quite interesting. However, if you account for the global energy consumption, especially in transportation, heating, manufacturing, etc., electricity is only a fraction of the required energy. This may, I'd even say must, change in an electric-car future; but this will increase a lot the electricity demand.
This book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, although a bit dated, is a good reference on how much energy we actually consume, and what can possibly be produced with renewables and others. The conclusion agrees with TFA: North America probably can live on solar, wind and enough storage. Not that easily, but it seems possible.
The UK is surrounded by sea for offshore turbines and almost every roof could have solar and storage (home and plugged in EVs) which can be linked together via microgrids.
we can run our civilization for 10000's of years with nuclear. That makes is sustainable. If we include seawater extraction and thorium we can run our civilization for millions of years.
According to http://withouthotair.com/ it's more like a few thousand years with seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors (and maybe thorium). Without those technologies, uranium reserves would only last a few decades. And that's assuming total power consumption remains stable.
What stunned me further is that even deuterium-tritium fusion doesn't do better. It takes deuterium-deuterium fusion, if we ever manage it, to last millions of years at current consumption rates.
Wishing that everyone had access to food, shelter, and healthcare makes me a liberal.
Nitpick: I thought that everybody would wish that, but liberals think society should intervene directly to force that goal, while conservatives think society will be better off as a whole if this is left to the actions of private organizations and individuals. Am I correct?
Isn't Spain in the EU? How the hell is this allowed to happen?
The EU doesn't have a police force like the FBI that could override state authorities. It does have a supranational court, the ECHR, that can judge human-rights issues and force an EU country to implement a decision. However, I believe that it can only hear a case after it has gone through the country's judicial system and all possible appeals have been tried. In this case, the catalonians could, and probably will, sue the spanish state before spanish courts first, then appeal to the ECHR, which may then condemn Spain. This could take years, of course.
I used to think that, and I still don't really disagree, but it's not quite that clear-cut. This book, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air runs the numbers. I find 2 points particularly significant:
North America does have enough sun (and deserts) to live entirely on renewables; Europe doesn't, though a Europe+North Africa block could; it doesn't say about China, which has deserts but also a much larger population. The book dates from 2009, meaning it didn't anticipate photovoltaics' improved efficiency, which helps. Wind power can also provide a significant part of the required power, though not all.
Nuclear isn't renewable, but assuming you want it to last 1000 years at current consumption levels, you need both breeder reactors and an industrial-scale process to extract uranium salts from the ocean, otherwise you can't provide more than a fraction of the required power for the world's population with known uranium reserves — and that's without population or consumption growth. Not sure about thorium, but I think that uses breeder designs anyway. As for fusion, even deuterium-tritium fusion doesn't cut it; we can only hope to manage deuterium-deuterium fusion someday, in which case we'll be home free with lots and lots of margin.
I do agree that, to prevent a global catastrophe, we must decarbonate the world's entire economy as fast as possible, which requires:
Phasing out all gas-based transportation in favor of electric vehicles (EVs); both cars and trucks. In turn, this requires...
A several-fold increase in total electricity production even while phasing out gas- and coal-powered power plants. For this, we need a massive deployment of solar or nuclear, preferably both and preferably nuclear breeder reactors (which will take a long time, so start ASAP, and deploy solar in the meantime).
Overhauling the power grid to reliably handle the extra load. Also, in an all-renewables scenario, storage is required to smooth out variations on production and consumption. The book suggests using the new EVs' batteries, which requires cooperation from people and/or a very smart grid and market (make electricity costs fluctuate in real time even for home users).
Massively improve buildings' and homes' insulation, and replace existing heating systems with heat pumps (which can double as air conditioners when it's hot). Yes, current heating systems consume almost as much on a global scale as ground transport.
Air transport is a huge problem, because there's a minimum required energy to keep a plane aloft, and we're almost already there. Right now it's fortunate that most of the world's population doesn't fly as much as that of developed countries, but that's bound to change, which would result in completely unacceptable CO2 emissions; biofuels would help, but it's not clear whether we can produce enough. The book proposes zeppelins (efficient but way slower). I propose hydrogen planes (if they can be made safely). In the meantime, air travel should be actively discouraged.
One could argue that the above measures are too disruptive and require too much cooperation at every level (from worldwide to individuals) to be realistic. That means that we should also research ways to mitigate the catastrophe:
Increase agricultural productivity in hotter conditions.
Find ways for population to stay alive in places that will become unhinabitable due to the heat (underground cities?)
Build dams against rising sea levels, hurricane-proof coastal areas.
Promote reducing the population, handle population aging.
...
Profit! And in fact, those are economic opportunities, aren't they? King of like the broken-window fallacy, but what if you can't avoid breaking the window?
Basically, the messages are: first, yes, Russia has meddled in, and there are links between them and Trump. But it's nothing new, Russia's always tried to destabilize Western democracies and undermine their credibility, including by supporting political crackpots there. This time the crackpots won the election.
Second, the media frenzy about this is being played up because it's seemingly the only scandal that riles people enough that the Republican majority in Congress might have to take notice, instead of looking the other way as they did with all the other documented lies. So Trump opponents are playing this specific card.
But, third, there's probably nothing concrete enough there to warrant a successful impeachment. And this is beginning to border on speculation and conspiracy-theory thinking, in other words using some of Trump's foul tactics against him in the unlikely hope of getting rid of him. Bad precedent.
So, fourth, not only it won't work, it's drowning out more urgent and serious issues: dismantling healthcare, crippling budget cuts everywhere but in the military, hurting government agencies. If more attention was focused on them instead, sure, it would be even less likely to cause Trump's demise, but it would mitigate the damage, as it did for the Muslim travel ban.
Also...doesnt France get 1 year off maternity leave with pay?
Only for multiple pregnancies (triplets or more). The standard maternity leave in France is 16 weeks, extended to 26 weeks for the 3rd child and after, or more depending on the medical/family situation (e.g. pregnant with twins: 34 weeks; or with triplets: 46 weeks, indeed almost a year).
It's not quite "with pay", though: normally the employer stops paying the employee that takes a leave, the national healthcare insurance (Sécurité Sociale) pays her a portion of her salary, and optional private insurances pay the rest of the salary. Likewise for any kind of sick leave.
Fans of the book/movie "The Martian" would be happy if SpaceX does select Arcadia Planitia for their first landing site as that was the landing site of the Ares 3.
And we all know what happened to OS/2 (or I suppose I presume we all know -- I guess you could be 16 or 17 years old and not know what happened back then. When did I start getting so damned old???)
You probably know the legend of the Pea Sea. I realized that it's been longer since the end of that story than the duration of the story itself...
theres somthing called carpooling too which can help.
Good point, and indeed, carpooling is encouraged in Paris on smog days: although they ban half of the cars (those with odd-numbered license plates one day, even-numbered the next), cars that transport 3 people or more are exempt from the ban.
The only safe way to deal with dates/times is to use a 64-bit int for milliseconds (UTC - always UTC). No time zone nonsense, not DST issues, safe to subtract to get a duration, easy to add a duration to, always the right answer.
Except every couple of years when a leap second occurs. (There will be one at the end of this year, BTW.)
Using TAI instead of UTC may help, but conversion back to dates is harder.
They also provide Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is far superior, IMHO.
I also thought LMDE was right for my needs about 2 years ago, but I was very disappointed when I realized they didn't do regular security updates other than Firefox and Thunderbird. Specifically, IIRC, OpenSSL's "heartbleed" hole took weeks to be (partly) patched, and I didn't see any updates of LibreOffice, ffmpeg, libnss, apt and others when vulnerabilities were announced in them.
I switched back to regular Mint, which uses Ubuntu's security package repositories directly.
However, I believe the LMDE people planned to change their methods after Debian Jessie became stable. Did they?
Not the current one. In France, the only climate change denier with any standing I can think of is a former Education minister (1997-2000), now completely marginalized.
I think the "dissent" aspect is actually some denier activists, and especially people proposing alternate solutions to whatever will come out of the governments' negociations. And perhaps, piggybacking on that, protests against nuclear energy, anti-capitalist activism, the usual.
In fact, looking at a list of events (in French), I see that the canceled "protests" are in fact the Global Climate March events before and after the conference, and maybe a big free concert that was planned at the Arc de Triomphe. In other words, large crowds. The debates
and other "alternative" events are still on.
I'm concerned about the government abusing the state of emergency, but this doesn't seem to be so much about suppressing dissent as suppressing any possible violence or civil disobedience.
A better gripe would be the fact that they're blocking major roads and telling people to stay home on Nov.29-30, even not go to work if possible on the 30. Why on Earth are they not letting officials land in Le Bourget airport next to the conference center, and stay there and not bother anyone else?
keyrings [...] key derived from some set of hashes on machine-specific data, like hardware serial numbers. If you want to go hardcore, use a hardware encryption dongle (HSM).
I'm not an expert, but I'd be wary of storing passwords into a keyring that I can no longer open if some piece of hardware fails. Wouldn't a well-chosen master password be safer?
The SLS is not needed, if only because the Falcon Heavy, perhaps even a super-heavy version, has a good chance to be ready before SLS.
Even better, stop relying on single launches of heavy launchers, and develop automated in-orbit refueling instead. A lot of the required mass is going to be fuel anyway; why not launch probes (or ships) with empty tanks on a parking orbit with medium launchers, and send fuel on several launches of small/medium launchers? Small launchers used often are bound to cost less in the long run than a heavy launcher that flies once a year.
On-orbit assembly could also work: either automate docking of the probe with separate fuel tanks or booster stages; or let astronauts assemble it at the ISS (with multiple launches, the penalty due to the ISS' orbital inclination can be overcome by sending extra fuel); or even astronauts at a dedicated short-term mini-space station made of a Dragon or CST-100 capsule docked to a SpaceHab or Bigelow module.
It's only a question of time before payloads (e.g. manned ships) outgrow even the heaviest launchers and require on-orbit work. Why not develop that right away?
Only the National Assembly has voted; the bill must also pass the Senate. That said, given the multipartite consensus on it, there's not much chance that the Senate won't pass it.
You never know, though: given that the Senate is often deemed useless (in France, the Assembly has priority), sometimes it attempts to actually work on the bills, debate in more depth.
Also, the bill has been submitted to the Constitutional Council (which is unusual, before it's voted on). They too can veto it. We'll see.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically you're right, but only if we develop both reliable industrial-scale breeder reactors and the technology to extract seawater uranium on a large scale. There's just not enough U235 to generalize the use of nuclear energy on a worldwide scale, so we need breeders to burn U238, and get more of it than current reserves. Not sure about thorium reserves, but that would also require breeders. But indeed, with the aforementioned technologies we can sustain some growth, though not indefinitely. Further down the road, the only technology I'm sure would leave room for lots of growth is deuterium fusion; not deuterium-tritium (which would need to tap into lithium reserves to make tritium) but deuterium-deuterium, which is of course harder and much, much less certain than fission with breeder reactors.
What makes your point correct is that, although renewables can probably sustain us at current consumption rates, they won't allow for any significant growth. OTOH, any significant growth with any energy source will incur lots more waste heat, which would compound global warning. I don't have numbers for how waste heat would compare to current greenhouse-gas emissions in terms of warming the planet. But the numbers supporting my post can be found in Sustainable energy without the hot air, a bit dated but still a must-read.
The book I mention is not about cost, but about available energy, as in e.g. how many kWh the sun is giving you over time per unit of area. That won't change; the efficiency of solar panels does, but the book already takes an optimistic stance, looking for fundamental rather than technological limits.
This book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, although a bit dated, is a good reference on how much energy we actually consume, and what can possibly be produced with renewables and others. The conclusion agrees with TFA: North America probably can live on solar, wind and enough storage. Not that easily, but it seems possible.
It's still not enough.
According to http://withouthotair.com/ it's more like a few thousand years with seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors (and maybe thorium). Without those technologies, uranium reserves would only last a few decades. And that's assuming total power consumption remains stable.
What stunned me further is that even deuterium-tritium fusion doesn't do better. It takes deuterium-deuterium fusion, if we ever manage it, to last millions of years at current consumption rates.
Nitpick: I thought that everybody would wish that, but liberals think society should intervene directly to force that goal, while conservatives think society will be better off as a whole if this is left to the actions of private organizations and individuals. Am I correct?
The EU doesn't have a police force like the FBI that could override state authorities. It does have a supranational court, the ECHR, that can judge human-rights issues and force an EU country to implement a decision. However, I believe that it can only hear a case after it has gone through the country's judicial system and all possible appeals have been tried. In this case, the catalonians could, and probably will, sue the spanish state before spanish courts first, then appeal to the ECHR, which may then condemn Spain. This could take years, of course.
I do agree that, to prevent a global catastrophe, we must decarbonate the world's entire economy as fast as possible, which requires:
One could argue that the above measures are too disruptive and require too much cooperation at every level (from worldwide to individuals) to be realistic. That means that we should also research ways to mitigate the catastrophe:
I've read an interesting opinion piece by a Russian opponent: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/06/trump-russia-conspiracy-trap/.
Basically, the messages are: first, yes, Russia has meddled in, and there are links between them and Trump. But it's nothing new, Russia's always tried to destabilize Western democracies and undermine their credibility, including by supporting political crackpots there. This time the crackpots won the election.
Second, the media frenzy about this is being played up because it's seemingly the only scandal that riles people enough that the Republican majority in Congress might have to take notice, instead of looking the other way as they did with all the other documented lies. So Trump opponents are playing this specific card.
But, third, there's probably nothing concrete enough there to warrant a successful impeachment. And this is beginning to border on speculation and conspiracy-theory thinking, in other words using some of Trump's foul tactics against him in the unlikely hope of getting rid of him. Bad precedent.
So, fourth, not only it won't work, it's drowning out more urgent and serious issues: dismantling healthcare, crippling budget cuts everywhere but in the military, hurting government agencies. If more attention was focused on them instead, sure, it would be even less likely to cause Trump's demise, but it would mitigate the damage, as it did for the Muslim travel ban.
Only for multiple pregnancies (triplets or more). The standard maternity leave in France is 16 weeks, extended to 26 weeks for the 3rd child and after, or more depending on the medical/family situation (e.g. pregnant with twins: 34 weeks; or with triplets: 46 weeks, indeed almost a year).
It's not quite "with pay", though: normally the employer stops paying the employee that takes a leave, the national healthcare insurance (Sécurité Sociale) pays her a portion of her salary, and optional private insurances pay the rest of the salary. Likewise for any kind of sick leave.
No, that would be Acidalia Planitia, not Arcadia Planitia. Completely different location.
You probably know the legend of the Pea Sea. I realized that it's been longer since the end of that story than the duration of the story itself...
Almost a quarter-century ago, people were suggesting that way to drive down launch costs: http://www.fourmilab.ch/docume...
Good point, and indeed, carpooling is encouraged in Paris on smog days: although they ban half of the cars (those with odd-numbered license plates one day, even-numbered the next), cars that transport 3 people or more are exempt from the ban.
Except every couple of years when a leap second occurs. (There will be one at the end of this year, BTW.) Using TAI instead of UTC may help, but conversion back to dates is harder.
There was a nice comic about pre-security last summer after the Thalys train shooting. (In French, but self-explanatory.)
Thanks for the information, I might give LMDE another try.
That's what I thought too, but before you switch, check my reply to grandparent post.
I also thought LMDE was right for my needs about 2 years ago, but I was very disappointed when I realized they didn't do regular security updates other than Firefox and Thunderbird. Specifically, IIRC, OpenSSL's "heartbleed" hole took weeks to be (partly) patched, and I didn't see any updates of LibreOffice, ffmpeg, libnss, apt and others when vulnerabilities were announced in them.
I switched back to regular Mint, which uses Ubuntu's security package repositories directly.
However, I believe the LMDE people planned to change their methods after Debian Jessie became stable. Did they?
Not the current one. In France, the only climate change denier with any standing I can think of is a former Education minister (1997-2000), now completely marginalized.
I think the "dissent" aspect is actually some denier activists, and especially people proposing alternate solutions to whatever will come out of the governments' negociations. And perhaps, piggybacking on that, protests against nuclear energy, anti-capitalist activism, the usual. In fact, looking at a list of events (in French), I see that the canceled "protests" are in fact the Global Climate March events before and after the conference, and maybe a big free concert that was planned at the Arc de Triomphe. In other words, large crowds. The debates and other "alternative" events are still on.
I'm concerned about the government abusing the state of emergency, but this doesn't seem to be so much about suppressing dissent as suppressing any possible violence or civil disobedience. A better gripe would be the fact that they're blocking major roads and telling people to stay home on Nov.29-30, even not go to work if possible on the 30. Why on Earth are they not letting officials land in Le Bourget airport next to the conference center, and stay there and not bother anyone else?
I'm not an expert, but I'd be wary of storing passwords into a keyring that I can no longer open if some piece of hardware fails. Wouldn't a well-chosen master password be safer?
The SLS is not needed, if only because the Falcon Heavy, perhaps even a super-heavy version, has a good chance to be ready before SLS.
Even better, stop relying on single launches of heavy launchers, and develop automated in-orbit refueling instead. A lot of the required mass is going to be fuel anyway; why not launch probes (or ships) with empty tanks on a parking orbit with medium launchers, and send fuel on several launches of small/medium launchers? Small launchers used often are bound to cost less in the long run than a heavy launcher that flies once a year.
On-orbit assembly could also work: either automate docking of the probe with separate fuel tanks or booster stages; or let astronauts assemble it at the ISS (with multiple launches, the penalty due to the ISS' orbital inclination can be overcome by sending extra fuel); or even astronauts at a dedicated short-term mini-space station made of a Dragon or CST-100 capsule docked to a SpaceHab or Bigelow module.
It's only a question of time before payloads (e.g. manned ships) outgrow even the heaviest launchers and require on-orbit work. Why not develop that right away?
Only the National Assembly has voted; the bill must also pass the Senate. That said, given the multipartite consensus on it, there's not much chance that the Senate won't pass it.
You never know, though: given that the Senate is often deemed useless (in France, the Assembly has priority), sometimes it attempts to actually work on the bills, debate in more depth.
Also, the bill has been submitted to the Constitutional Council (which is unusual, before it's voted on). They too can veto it. We'll see.
The Cupola.
http://clientsfromhell.net/