> Economically feasible hydro is pretty much tapped out.
That's simply not true. In almost every area I looked, hydro was at about 1/2 capacity. And that's counting economically doable sites, using conventional technology.
For instance, here in Canada the James bay has about 35% more capacity that they simply never bothered to build out because there was no market. Here in Ontario none of the northern rivers have really been built out. There's 25 GW in northern Alberta unused. Those upgrade alone, put together, are equal to what has been built. And if built, they're enough to power the entire country and all our cars.
> You know in places like Canada where the vast majority of our winters are overcast, same with the spring, fall is hit or miss.
You've clearly never actually bothered to look a solar resource map, have you?
Canada has some of the best solar resources for its latitude. Calgary, for instance, has a solar resource not much lower than Mohave. Compare to southern German or Switzerland and we're downright balmy.
> When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage.
And again, you clearly don't have the slightest clue what you're on about.
Any power source, *any*, has downtime. We consider that in a figure known as the "capacity factor", or CF. Basically you take how much power actually comes out of the plant in a period of time, normally a year, and divide that by how much would have come out if it was running at perfect capacity 24/7. So that "too fast" gets lumped into the "too slow" and the "down for maintenance" and even the "tree fell on lines". All of that goes into the CF.
A typical reactor has a CF around 85 to 90%. A typical wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%. A reactor costs about $8 per watt peak, whereas a modern wind turbine is around $1.50/Wp. So even though you need three turbines to make the same amount of energy as that single reactor, those three turbines still cost you almost half as much. And that is precisely why no one is building reactors any more and turbines are sprouting up like weeds, yes, even here in Canada.
Don't worry, people who actually know what they are doing have the problem well in hand. As you can see, if you read the article.
Gas most certainly is baseload. Cogen plants are mostly baseload with some load following, and that's mostly what's being built today. Peakers are so passe.
Of course one should also point out that coal has not been baseload in a lot places for some time, and is used primarily for load following. Anywhere with a reactor nearby, for instance.
And gas+solar+software is most certainly baseload, and as numerous articles over on Ars have noted, cheaper than either gas or solar alone.
You can find someone selling these boxes in almost any low-rend strip mall around here, there's one up the street from me. The content is all ripped, and they sell a "service" consisting of lists of IP numbers for the latest streams. I'm surprised the networks didn't get on this ages ago. I'm not sure stopping the box sales will help, they'll have to stop sales of the content lists too.
Clearly all the people complaining don't actually use Swift for production code and/or just like to complain.
I converted my antenna modelling project to 3.0 in about three minutes. Most of this was due to the new selector syntax, which I had to spend time looking up on Stackoverflow. The rest was trivial, and my code is cleaner and shorter than ever.
Every fast food chain spends all of its time trying to figure out how to lower costs. This is one way to do it.
This has nothing to do with minimum wage raises. After all, McD's installed self-serve kiosks around here in spite of no changes to minimum wage.
> and now I was contributing to their bottom line
That's nothing, here in Ontario the government adds $2 to your license renewal if you use the machines, for the "convenience fee". Admittedly, $2 is a small price to pay to avoid looking into those dead, self-important eyes...
"Renewables Fastest-Growing Energy Sources, Feds Say"
No, everyone says this. And has for years. Ok, in the US things were upset by the NG expansion, but everyone knew that would only last so long. And outside the US this has been true since about 2010.
With wind at $1.50 and PV not much more than that, and PPA's for PV at 3 cents/kWh and wind at 4 to 5, nothing else can compete. And those are subsidized prices.
> Here is a graph of electricity prices where I live
And here's the version for Ontario:
http://www.ieso.ca
When I looked, the current price was zero. It goes negative almost every night in the spring and fall.
> How is this news?
You know perfectly well how: someone in a greenwashing PR firm wrote a press release, either to make it look good or bad depending on who was paying them. In this case I suspect it's the pro-green side, anything from Americans for Prosperity tends to say something about old people.
And it's just as bad for the non-science journals too. IEEE charges a flat fee around $18 for a reprint, even if the article long ago fell into the public domain. All the journals do this, and when they go bankrupt, which they will, they'll sell it ad-infinitim down the line. All of our science and engineering history behind a paywall, yay.
The only exception I can find is Embalse, which is only under the original budget because the original construction was delayed 10 years.
Although the industry continues to claim that refurb costs are on the order of 1.2 cents/kWh, not one single such effort has come close to this number and more reactors are simply abandoned than refurbed.
In this particular case, I have exactly zero doubt that in 35 years a refurb will not be worth it. PPAs for PV are being signed at 5.5 cents, and current estimates are panels will last for 60 to 100 years with close to zero OPEX. Anyone building a reactor now is mental.
You have not considered the effects of inflation over that period, or more specifically, the discounted cashflows.
Using your numbers, we would expect to produce 3200 * 0.9 * 8766 * 50 = $1,262,304,000, or 1.26 billion a year. Note that that rate is not generally subject to inflation, it is a guaranteed rate signed as part of the PPA (aka LTPP) when the plant is built.
So now put those numbers into a DCFV calculator like this one:
I used an interest rate of 6.5%, the current unsecured rate used here, selected 1 for the Number of Lines, compounding 4 times per period (quarterly) and entered 35 @ 1.26. Clicking calculate, we find that the total value of the stream for 35 years is 17.98 billion.
18 billion is smaller than 35 billion
So what would they have to charge per MWh to break even? Well if I change the input to 2.5 I get 35.67 billion. So in other words, the WHOLESALE rate I would have to charge is $2500 million / 3200 MW * 0.9 * 8766 hours/year = 9.9 cents.
9.9 cents WHOLESALE.
And we haven't even factored in fuel or OPEX. Done like dinner.
Here is all the facts you need to know in two quotes and a formula. Start with a quote from this article:
"proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth"
and now from the Wiki:
"Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is a project to construct a 3,200 MWe nuclear power station"
And now it's time for our formula. In the power industry, we are very very interested in the CAPEX, expressed in terms of dollar-per-watt. In this case:
CAPEX = 35 billion / 3.2 billion = $11/W
Why is that everything you need to know? Well I lied, it's *almost* everything. The other bit is this:
Commercial PV: $1.50 Commercial wind: $1.40 Gas co-gen: $1.15
All numbers up-to-date within about 6 months, taken from real-world projects and summarized on page 11 here:
And that's basically that. If you consider a modern wind turbine with a CF of 32%, and the Hinkley reactors with a CF of 90%, then you get relative LCoE's of:
This is a terrible summary, and the linked articles aren't great either.
This technique has been used since the 1800's, and specifically for supersonic aircraft design since the 1930s. If you poke about in Google Images you'll find German war-era photographs of swept-wing designs being tested. It was used for artillery design long before that.
The real "news" here, which is hardly news because it's been used for a while now, is the use of outdoor photography to produce these images. Previously you needed perfect-enough conditions that only a wind tunnel was suitable, but now they're using fancy image processing to do the same. Clever, and interesting, but misleading all the same.
> Supersonic flight adds a new source of drag, called wave drag [wikipedia.org],
As the author of the article you are linking to (if you don't believe me, click History and look) I find it somewhat odd that you apparently didn't *actually read it*.
Wave drag is primarily and effect in the *transonic* from about M0.8 to 1.1 or 1.2, and then basically disappears at speeds above that. Jet airliners spend a significant portion of their flight time dealing with it, which is why it is important for modern air travel.
Supersonic aircraft do indeed use much more fuel than subsonic, but it's not due (primarily) to wave drag, and designing to lower boom does not necessarily upset it for the worse.
> Personally I don't see much need for wireless charging, at least for Tesla
Combined with the auto-parking feature, I'd say this is actually a very nice idea. Basically it would mean you would never have to do anything, and the car would always be fully charged. And the auto-park would ensure it was always perfectly aligned.
Slashdot Mirror
> Economically feasible hydro is pretty much tapped out.
That's simply not true. In almost every area I looked, hydro was at about 1/2 capacity. And that's counting economically doable sites, using conventional technology.
For instance, here in Canada the James bay has about 35% more capacity that they simply never bothered to build out because there was no market. Here in Ontario none of the northern rivers have really been built out. There's 25 GW in northern Alberta unused. Those upgrade alone, put together, are equal to what has been built. And if built, they're enough to power the entire country and all our cars.
> You know in places like Canada where the vast majority of our winters are overcast, same with the spring, fall is hit or miss.
You've clearly never actually bothered to look a solar resource map, have you?
Canada has some of the best solar resources for its latitude. Calgary, for instance, has a solar resource not much lower than Mohave. Compare to southern German or Switzerland and we're downright balmy.
> When windmills don't work because the winds are so high that they'd cause damage.
And again, you clearly don't have the slightest clue what you're on about.
Any power source, *any*, has downtime. We consider that in a figure known as the "capacity factor", or CF. Basically you take how much power actually comes out of the plant in a period of time, normally a year, and divide that by how much would have come out if it was running at perfect capacity 24/7. So that "too fast" gets lumped into the "too slow" and the "down for maintenance" and even the "tree fell on lines". All of that goes into the CF.
A typical reactor has a CF around 85 to 90%. A typical wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%. A reactor costs about $8 per watt peak, whereas a modern wind turbine is around $1.50/Wp. So even though you need three turbines to make the same amount of energy as that single reactor, those three turbines still cost you almost half as much. And that is precisely why no one is building reactors any more and turbines are sprouting up like weeds, yes, even here in Canada.
Don't worry, people who actually know what they are doing have the problem well in hand. As you can see, if you read the article.
> is there enough factory capacity and available rare earths to MAKE sufficient solar panels to do so
There's enough to make 65 GWp this year. At its peak in the late 1960s, nuclear was being installed at about the same rate.
That number, however, increases at about 15 GWp a year. By 2020 PV will be incompletely outpacing the install rates of pretty much any source ever.
And really, is that surprising? A panel is made up almost entirely of glass, by weight. What do you think a solar cell is? Tinted glass, basically.
And what's all this about rare earth's? Been reading the FUD pages about CdTe cells or something?
> Gas and solar isn't baseload,
Gas most certainly is baseload. Cogen plants are mostly baseload with some load following, and that's mostly what's being built today. Peakers are so passe.
Of course one should also point out that coal has not been baseload in a lot places for some time, and is used primarily for load following. Anywhere with a reactor nearby, for instance.
And gas+solar+software is most certainly baseload, and as numerous articles over on Ars have noted, cheaper than either gas or solar alone.
> You can't simply destroy whole communities with a stroke of a pen
We do all the time. Like when when banned asbestos. Or when the price of [insert commodity] dips below [critical value].
If your entire town is based on a coal mine and people stop buying coal, you leave.
This is how it's worked for thousands of years. Like Palmyra. Or Fort McMurray.
It's not like everyone hasn't been perfectly aware this was going to happen for the last 25 years.
You can find someone selling these boxes in almost any low-rend strip mall around here, there's one up the street from me. The content is all ripped, and they sell a "service" consisting of lists of IP numbers for the latest streams. I'm surprised the networks didn't get on this ages ago. I'm not sure stopping the box sales will help, they'll have to stop sales of the content lists too.
> Reminds me of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000s
I'm shocked I'm this far down the comments before anyone mentioned this.
Clearly all the people complaining don't actually use Swift for production code and/or just like to complain.
I converted my antenna modelling project to 3.0 in about three minutes. Most of this was due to the new selector syntax, which I had to spend time looking up on Stackoverflow. The rest was trivial, and my code is cleaner and shorter than ever.
"However, just because this figure has recovered a bit, that doesn't mean the numbers are good"
Arg! These ARE good numbers!
In the past we had to actually buy software, or find a demo on some random web page or download site that might be filled with viruses.
Now I go to a single location where I can find millions of programs, and instantly try them to see if I like them.
How can anyone think this is bad? It's simply Sturgeon's law sped up.
"Smaller Xbox One Coming This Year, More Powerful Xbox One In 2017"
So everyone waits for 2017, right?
Every fast food chain spends all of its time trying to figure out how to lower costs. This is one way to do it.
This has nothing to do with minimum wage raises. After all, McD's installed self-serve kiosks around here in spite of no changes to minimum wage.
> and now I was contributing to their bottom line
That's nothing, here in Ontario the government adds $2 to your license renewal if you use the machines, for the "convenience fee". Admittedly, $2 is a small price to pay to avoid looking into those dead, self-important eyes...
"Renewables Fastest-Growing Energy Sources, Feds Say"
No, everyone says this. And has for years. Ok, in the US things were upset by the NG expansion, but everyone knew that would only last so long. And outside the US this has been true since about 2010.
With wind at $1.50 and PV not much more than that, and PPA's for PV at 3 cents/kWh and wind at 4 to 5, nothing else can compete. And those are subsidized prices.
> Here is a graph of electricity prices where I live
And here's the version for Ontario:
http://www.ieso.ca
When I looked, the current price was zero. It goes negative almost every night in the spring and fall.
> How is this news?
You know perfectly well how: someone in a greenwashing PR firm wrote a press release, either to make it look good or bad depending on who was paying them. In this case I suspect it's the pro-green side, anything from Americans for Prosperity tends to say something about old people.
"Does BitKeeper now stand a chance against free software systems like Git and SVN?"
Not a chance. GIT is simply better. A lot better.
It took me a long time to "get" GIT after coming from SVN, it's just *different*. But once I got it, I'd never go back.
And it's just as bad for the non-science journals too. IEEE charges a flat fee around $18 for a reprint, even if the article long ago fell into the public domain. All the journals do this, and when they go bankrupt, which they will, they'll sell it ad-infinitim down the line. All of our science and engineering history behind a paywall, yay.
> FYI, the plant's design life is 60 years, not 35,
Including planned refurbs. Refurbs have a long and very consistent history of costing more than the original plant.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/point-lepreau-costs-could-hit-3-3b-pmo-memo-says-1.1344861
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/darlington-nuclear-refurbishment-1.3395696
http://www.startribune.com/july-9-2014-xcel-management-blamed-for-cost-overruns-at-monticello-nuke-plant/266353511/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentilly_Nuclear_Generating_Station
The only exception I can find is Embalse, which is only under the original budget because the original construction was delayed 10 years.
Although the industry continues to claim that refurb costs are on the order of 1.2 cents/kWh, not one single such effort has come close to this number and more reactors are simply abandoned than refurbed.
In this particular case, I have exactly zero doubt that in 35 years a refurb will not be worth it. PPAs for PV are being signed at 5.5 cents, and current estimates are panels will last for 60 to 100 years with close to zero OPEX. Anyone building a reactor now is mental.
> (3200 MW) * 0.9 * (8766 hours/year) * (35 years) * ($50 / MWh) = $44.16 billion revenue.
You have not considered the effects of inflation over that period, or more specifically, the discounted cashflows.
Using your numbers, we would expect to produce 3200 * 0.9 * 8766 * 50 = $1,262,304,000, or 1.26 billion a year. Note that that rate is not generally subject to inflation, it is a guaranteed rate signed as part of the PPA (aka LTPP) when the plant is built.
So now put those numbers into a DCFV calculator like this one:
http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/present-value-cash-flows-calculator.php
I used an interest rate of 6.5%, the current unsecured rate used here, selected 1 for the Number of Lines, compounding 4 times per period (quarterly) and entered 35 @ 1.26. Clicking calculate, we find that the total value of the stream for 35 years is 17.98 billion.
18 billion is smaller than 35 billion
So what would they have to charge per MWh to break even? Well if I change the input to 2.5 I get 35.67 billion. So in other words, the WHOLESALE rate I would have to charge is $2500 million / 3200 MW * 0.9 * 8766 hours/year = 9.9 cents.
9.9 cents WHOLESALE.
And we haven't even factored in fuel or OPEX. Done like dinner.
> Still better then fossil fuels, which have done a great job of poisoning the environment. :rolleyes:
You know all hope is lost when the best argument for something is "it killed less people that the other terrible option".
> So why are these alternatives - and others - not a smart financial option?
They are.
The world is installing wind and PV at 25 times the rate of nuclear. **Each**.
> What am I doing wrong here?
Nothing whatsoever, you've done it perfectly correct. As has everyone in the power industry.
Here is all the facts you need to know in two quotes and a formula. Start with a quote from this article:
"proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth"
and now from the Wiki:
"Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is a project to construct a 3,200 MWe nuclear power station"
And now it's time for our formula. In the power industry, we are very very interested in the CAPEX, expressed in terms of dollar-per-watt. In this case:
CAPEX = 35 billion / 3.2 billion = $11/W
Why is that everything you need to know? Well I lied, it's *almost* everything. The other bit is this:
Commercial PV: $1.50
Commercial wind: $1.40
Gas co-gen: $1.15
All numbers up-to-date within about 6 months, taken from real-world projects and summarized on page 11 here:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
And that's basically that. If you consider a modern wind turbine with a CF of 32%, and the Hinkley reactors with a CF of 90%, then you get relative LCoE's of:
Hinkley : 11 / 0.9 = 12.2
Wind: 1.40 / 0.32 = 4.38
Which means wind is about three times cheaper than nuclear. It's actually more than that because there's no fuel cost and OPEX is lower.
And that, dear reader, is why nuclear is dead.
They can fuse a spinal cord? Color me confused, but then why are there still paraplegics?
> How 'The Jungle Book' Made Its Animals Look
The trailers I've seen look terrible. As is too often the case, the kinematics are just *wrong*.
"technique called schlieren imagery"
This is a terrible summary, and the linked articles aren't great either.
This technique has been used since the 1800's, and specifically for supersonic aircraft design since the 1930s. If you poke about in Google Images you'll find German war-era photographs of swept-wing designs being tested. It was used for artillery design long before that.
The real "news" here, which is hardly news because it's been used for a while now, is the use of outdoor photography to produce these images. Previously you needed perfect-enough conditions that only a wind tunnel was suitable, but now they're using fancy image processing to do the same. Clever, and interesting, but misleading all the same.
> Supersonic flight adds a new source of drag, called wave drag [wikipedia.org],
As the author of the article you are linking to (if you don't believe me, click History and look) I find it somewhat odd that you apparently didn't *actually read it*.
Wave drag is primarily and effect in the *transonic* from about M0.8 to 1.1 or 1.2, and then basically disappears at speeds above that. Jet airliners spend a significant portion of their flight time dealing with it, which is why it is important for modern air travel.
Supersonic aircraft do indeed use much more fuel than subsonic, but it's not due (primarily) to wave drag, and designing to lower boom does not necessarily upset it for the worse.
> Personally I don't see much need for wireless charging, at least for Tesla
Combined with the auto-parking feature, I'd say this is actually a very nice idea. Basically it would mean you would never have to do anything, and the car would always be fully charged. And the auto-park would ensure it was always perfectly aligned.