> First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes. > Then nuclear. > Then rooftop solar PV. > Then wind. [snip] > it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor
So, is your argument that we should do nothing for 20 years? No, I know, I'm being silly. But the point in there is valid: nuclear is too slow to fix the problem.
> US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can
This tired old bromide. *sigh*
Regulatory load, the favourite bugaboo of nuclear supporters, accounts for 5 to 10% of system cost. It has no real effect, as one can see by the fact that regulatory load has fallen from as much as 20% to 5% over the last 30 years yet the number of reactor projects plummeted.
The actual problem, as it has been well known for decades, is size. Economic efficiency scales with reactor and plant size, which means the sweet spot is somewhere around 900 to 1100 MW per reactor, and 2 to 4 reactors per plant. This means that building costs alone push the price into the $30 billion range. And when you turn on such a system, supply and demand drops your spot price and your profit margins. Everyone's known this for decades, which is why there were efforts like CANDU6 and SMRs, but none of these exactly took the world by storm because their economic performance sucked.
This year the average price for new nuclear is $7.50/W and wind is $1.25/W. The cost of integrating wind is actually lower than nuclear, contrary to other bromides. Even scaling for CF, wind is at least 1/2 the price of nuclear on a kWh basis. That is everything you need to know about the state of the nuclear industry right there.
It's fairly trivial to handle, period. And this is a statement of fact, one based on the fact that 5% of all power in the US is generated by wind, yet grid performance continues to improve.
You see, the grid operators have this magical stuff called "software" that allows them to predict the output of all of the generation assets with extremely high accuracy faster than the actual changes take place.
This "software" thus allows them to switch from one power source to another faster than the rise and fall in production. And this "software" doesn't just work for wind, but any source at all.
You might want to look up this "software" thing, I hear it's going to be big.
> That depends entirely on the licensing agreement between Saban and Toei, no "probably" about it - that's how the law works.
No, it's not. Unless Toei *transfered the ownership of the copyrights", they still own them. Copyrights are not jurisdictional beyond the international boundaries of the group being applied. You cannot transfer the copyright for the united states. You can *license* someone to *use* the copyrights, clearly happened, but the fact that Toei continued to make products with the same characters suggests it is highly unlikely the transfer occurred. So it remains Toei's copyright to protect.
> you've downed a fifth of Jack and snorted a couple of grams a coke
You sound like an expert.
> The established principle (with regards to trademarks)
Great argument. In case you didn't read it, the claim is copyright violation, not trademark.
> As the Saban's version of the Power Rangers is a licensed work, that principle cannot possibly apply here
"That depends entirely on the licensing agreement between Saban and Toei"
> No, this is another case of a Slashdot poster, ignorant of the law, creating assumptions out of thin air > and then using convoluted sophomoric logic to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Sophomoric... like name calling, claiming the other person is drunk and high, etc, like that?
Haim Saban's "creation" consists of dubbed versions of the characters from Super Sentai, which you can see on the Wiki page for one installment, Kagaku Sentai Dynaman - scroll down.
As a derivative work, Saban doesn't own squat, and ownership, if there is any, probably belongs to Toei Company. However, as the same characters have appeared in many works *as different characters*, the argument might also be made that they are generic.
So this is basically yet another example of someone claiming ownership of something they never owned, which is precisely why copyright is such a farce in general.
> but it has little to offer over C for tasks other than GUI programming
That strikes me as similar to saying a Porsche has little to offer other than performance and fun. That statement is demonstrably true, but appears to be missing the point. Is it the case that only some programming is GUI-based? Yes. Is it true that almost every program ends up with a GUI? Also yes. Lets not ignore the forest for the trees.
But more directly, I disagree with the statement at its core. ObjC, and other languages like it, offers several features that make *very* common tasks *dramatically* simpler:
1) Late-bound methods. In ObjC you can send any message to any object at any time. That includes dangling pointers or null. What that means is that if you do this...
String x = LoadStringFromFile("a file that doesn't exist") x.printToDebug
the code runs fine. The answer to any method passed to null is null, which is precisely what you actually want. Why is this useful? Because it eliminates the 10% of the code you write, the code that checks every step of a method like this for any nulls...
The correct answer for this method is null in the case that anything in it is null. ObjC does that (from now on, I'm using "ObjC" to refer to other languages with similar features, the Smalltalk family). Sure, you *can* put in all the IFs if you feel that you really need to know if Another is null and not AField, but in 99% of the cases I've seen, that's not what you actually need.
This eliminates many, many lines of code from your project, which makes the resulting code smaller and far easier to read.
2) Data models. In conventional languages you can't load an object in a generic class and then have it assume the qualities of your model. Let me give you a recent example from my own code. I have a library that can read and write XLSX files, turning them into Rows, Columns and Items (item is the actual value). My program has Accounts, Contracts and Addresses, which are collections of code. In order to turn the Rows into, say, and Account, I have to roll over the rows and create parallel objects that point back to the Row. It's a complete mess. In comparison, in ObjC (from now on, that's a generic term) I can swizzle the object after it is loaded and that Row magically turns into an Account.
If you don't understand the power of this concept I think you need to look at some actual examples of DB programming under Apple's late, lamented EOF. It is, bar none, the simplest and cleanest object modelling platform I've seen. I understand examples of similar simplicity and cleanliness exist on other dynamic platforms, but I've tried them all on Java, C++ and.net, and I can say from experience that nothing comes *remotely* close. And I say this as someone that's written hundreds of thousands of lines of DB code.
3) Zombies. This is really just a subset of swizzling applied to a real-world problem. You can flick a switch so that when ObjC releases an object it doesn't, it instead swizzles it into a Zombie. Recall (1)... this means that instead of your program crashing, it calls that method on the Zombie. Zombies have one method that gets all calls, and it prints out useful debugging information.
Yes, you can do this in other languages, and some even do it. But again, as in (2), ObjC's *implementation* of this is trivially simple and easy to use.
4) Method signatures are strings. I think this is what you're touching on when you say "good for GUI" but you don't specify. The advantage here is that I can save method calls in files. This has all sorts of interesting side effects. One simple one is that I can bind a button to a method directly... unlike (say).net, where the button calls a generic method that calls code the development environment writes to call your method. And lets be honest, VS isn't exactly perfect, even when you can read it.
I really can't agree with that. Quite the opposite, given that dynamic binding solves a very very common problem, and that the code required to do the same in a non-dynamic language is *extensive*, I have always found that compile-time bound languages are far more clunky and ugly. I thought that was a pretty common opinion among people that have used both.
>.Errors you don't catch at compile time are errors that you have to write tests for. Y
Sure, that's true, but of the total set of errors that compliers don't catch, the ones that are caused by dynamic binding is a tiny subset. I still get dangling objects and nulls all the time in my C# code, probably 50 to 100 times as often as I've had a binding problem in ObjC. It is a problem, sure, but it's not *the* problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact. I would posit that nulls remain the largest problem in modern code. ObjC (and Swift) allow you to call methods on null. That means you get a null instead of a crash, which in most cases is what you want in the first place. Yet in my C# and VB.net code, I have to liberally sprinkle all sorts of checks and such. C# is better in this regard than VB, and VB is adding support for better handling in the next release because it's so bad at it, but neither comes remotely close to the way ObjC handled it, from the start.
So, while dynamic binding may indeed result in some uncaught runtime exceptions, I'd say ObjC programs *on a whole* have far less runtime exceptions due to other design decisions.
> In either case, the first thing you should learn is a unit testing framework for that language
Well you've just invalidated your own point, haven't you? If the problem is runtime errors, and the solution is unit testing, then the relative paucity of dynamic binding problems is going to add maybe zero lines of code to your test suite.
It is now. It certainly wasn't when I first encountered it in 2000, running on OpenStep. Back then it was clear, far cleaner than C++, and the libraries were (and are) fantastic. Say what you will about Qt, all of it's true, but everything from strings to db programming was joke on OpenStep compared to anything else out there. Which is why the company existed at all at that point, the financial guys used it a lot.
But fast-forward a decade to 2010 when I next looked at it for an iPhone program. Uggg! What an abysmal mess! I can't believe it's even the same language! So many one-off @ commands and bizarre "well, you need to know that..." In spite of all the problems in beta testing a *languages*, I still moved to Swift ASAP. Swift is currently about what ObjC was when I first saw it - relatively lightweight and fairly clean. I'm sure that will change, but for now...
That said, C++ remains a mystery to me. The syntax steadfastly refuses to lodge in my brain. I had the same problem with Lisp, which is saying a lot. But as others have noted, it remains the only real cross-platform system one can use for base logic and then plug into the underlying GUI language whether that be ObjC or Java. The only thing that comes close is C, and I still debate which language is better to use in these cases.
> know I was disappointed as a kid when it came out originally in theaters
Interesting. I saw it after it passed its first run, and it was a double-feature (remember those?) with Firefox starting. I arrived late and saw the 2nd half of Firebox, which even as a 15-yr-old boy nerd I dismissed as silly. Then Blade Runner came on. I remember being awed. Not by the plot itself, but by the vision. The gritty always-raining deteriorating city stuck in my mind like no movie since Star Wars (in which case it was the *scale* that stuck in my mind). This was shortly after reading Johnny Mnemonic for the first time, so that likely has a lot to do with it.
Read the actual numbers... "(170 Wh/km), whereas the upper Midwest fared the worst in terms of energy efficiency (196 Wh/km; red)". We're talking about a 13% difference - the article uses the 15% figure from 170, cheating IMHO. BFD, one way or the other, yet the graph varies from green to BRIGHT RED!!!!
More numbers; even if you power your electric car on 100% coal, its about twice as clean per mile than a gasoline engine. The math is trivial and I suggest everyone try it themselves:
> Good point, but options for more hydro are very limited
They are far less limited than nuclear. Nuclear power has cost, infrastructure, quality and proliferation issues. Hydro costs a fraction as much, is easy to build (we were doing it over a century ago), presents no proliferation issues, and tends to threaten people only around the site. Would you be OK building a hydro dam in North Korea? What about a nuclear plant?
Before you claim it's all gone, hydro is less than 50% developed worldwide. That is a fractal measure, it is about 50% underdeveloped at every level of scale. It is about 50% underdeveloped in the US, as well as 50% underdeveloped in the east, west, north and south. There is enough in Canada to power much more than the whole country, but only a little over half currently is. Etc. The same is true for China and Brazil, let alone Egypt and Bhutan.
> On the upside, nuclear fusion research is promising here at the UW
No, it's not.
Fusion plants are fission plants with a different nuclear island. Their version of the nuclear island is far, far more expensive than the fission version. It will never not be so. At a minimum the energy is so diffuse, the construction costs alone are much more. But then when you add in huge amounts of lithium and superconducting, it's gets pear shaped very quickly.
Right now, a fission plant costs enough more than wind that no one is building them. In fact, the price of the non-nuclear portions of a fission plant is higher than wind. In other words, even if the reactor were completely free, they still wouldn't build them. And since a fusion reactor has the same non-island parts, no one is going to build one of those either. Unless you can build fusion plants for negative money, lots and lots of negative money.
You will protest that people are building reactors. Not really. You can only afford to do so if you get money for free, like in China. But even there, wind is being built at about 3 to 5 times the rate.
So if no one will build fission, they certainly aren't going to build fusion. Everyone in the power industry is perfectly aware of this, they've been publishing reports saying this for decades, but the people working on fusion refuse to believe it. They think the problem is technical, that if you build a working reactor everyone will magically start using them. They won't.
Slashdot Mirror
> All wind is subsidized. Can't compete with natural gas electricity.
Unsubsidized (onshore) wind is less expensive than natural gas:
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
Look on page 2.
> First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes.
> Then nuclear.
> Then rooftop solar PV.
> Then wind.
[snip]
> it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor
So, is your argument that we should do nothing for 20 years? No, I know, I'm being silly. But the point in there is valid: nuclear is too slow to fix the problem.
> US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can
This tired old bromide. *sigh*
Regulatory load, the favourite bugaboo of nuclear supporters, accounts for 5 to 10% of system cost. It has no real effect, as one can see by the fact that regulatory load has fallen from as much as 20% to 5% over the last 30 years yet the number of reactor projects plummeted.
The actual problem, as it has been well known for decades, is size. Economic efficiency scales with reactor and plant size, which means the sweet spot is somewhere around 900 to 1100 MW per reactor, and 2 to 4 reactors per plant. This means that building costs alone push the price into the $30 billion range. And when you turn on such a system, supply and demand drops your spot price and your profit margins. Everyone's known this for decades, which is why there were efforts like CANDU6 and SMRs, but none of these exactly took the world by storm because their economic performance sucked.
This year the average price for new nuclear is $7.50/W and wind is $1.25/W. The cost of integrating wind is actually lower than nuclear, contrary to other bromides. Even scaling for CF, wind is at least 1/2 the price of nuclear on a kWh basis. That is everything you need to know about the state of the nuclear industry right there.
> That's fairly trivial to handle
It's fairly trivial to handle, period. And this is a statement of fact, one based on the fact that 5% of all power in the US is generated by wind, yet grid performance continues to improve.
You see, the grid operators have this magical stuff called "software" that allows them to predict the output of all of the generation assets with extremely high accuracy faster than the actual changes take place.
This "software" thus allows them to switch from one power source to another faster than the rise and fall in production. And this "software" doesn't just work for wind, but any source at all.
You might want to look up this "software" thing, I hear it's going to be big.
> I don't get why people who have no clue always write nonsense like this.
Because an ad campaign funded by the Koch brothers told them that if they don't believe this they're liberals.
Like this one: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/wont-anyone-think-of-the-seniors/
Apparently, being associated with "the kids today" is far more scary for old people than anything pollution or GHG might do.
> These detectors will let us do gravitational wave astronomy much like we do with light and radio waves now.
Mmmm, more like neutrino I'd say. You can't point your GWD at an object.
> That depends entirely on the licensing agreement between Saban and Toei, no "probably" about it - that's how the law works.
No, it's not. Unless Toei *transfered the ownership of the copyrights", they still own them. Copyrights are not jurisdictional beyond the international boundaries of the group being applied. You cannot transfer the copyright for the united states. You can *license* someone to *use* the copyrights, clearly happened, but the fact that Toei continued to make products with the same characters suggests it is highly unlikely the transfer occurred. So it remains Toei's copyright to protect.
> you've downed a fifth of Jack and snorted a couple of grams a coke
You sound like an expert.
> The established principle (with regards to trademarks)
Great argument. In case you didn't read it, the claim is copyright violation, not trademark.
> As the Saban's version of the Power Rangers is a licensed work, that principle cannot possibly apply here
"That depends entirely on the licensing agreement between Saban and Toei"
> No, this is another case of a Slashdot poster, ignorant of the law, creating assumptions out of thin air
> and then using convoluted sophomoric logic to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Sophomoric... like name calling, claiming the other person is drunk and high, etc, like that?
*plonk*
Haim Saban's "creation" consists of dubbed versions of the characters from Super Sentai, which you can see on the Wiki page for one installment, Kagaku Sentai Dynaman - scroll down.
As a derivative work, Saban doesn't own squat, and ownership, if there is any, probably belongs to Toei Company. However, as the same characters have appeared in many works *as different characters*, the argument might also be made that they are generic.
So this is basically yet another example of someone claiming ownership of something they never owned, which is precisely why copyright is such a farce in general.
> but it has little to offer over C for tasks other than GUI programming
That strikes me as similar to saying a Porsche has little to offer other than performance and fun. That statement is demonstrably true, but appears to be missing the point. Is it the case that only some programming is GUI-based? Yes. Is it true that almost every program ends up with a GUI? Also yes. Lets not ignore the forest for the trees.
But more directly, I disagree with the statement at its core. ObjC, and other languages like it, offers several features that make *very* common tasks *dramatically* simpler:
1) Late-bound methods. In ObjC you can send any message to any object at any time. That includes dangling pointers or null. What that means is that if you do this...
String x = LoadStringFromFile("a file that doesn't exist")
x.printToDebug
the code runs fine. The answer to any method passed to null is null, which is precisely what you actually want. Why is this useful? Because it eliminates the 10% of the code you write, the code that checks every step of a method like this for any nulls...
someObjectWithFields.aMethodThatReturnsAField.whichIsAnotherObjectWithAField.trim.printToDebug
The correct answer for this method is null in the case that anything in it is null. ObjC does that (from now on, I'm using "ObjC" to refer to other languages with similar features, the Smalltalk family). Sure, you *can* put in all the IFs if you feel that you really need to know if Another is null and not AField, but in 99% of the cases I've seen, that's not what you actually need.
This eliminates many, many lines of code from your project, which makes the resulting code smaller and far easier to read.
2) Data models. In conventional languages you can't load an object in a generic class and then have it assume the qualities of your model. Let me give you a recent example from my own code. I have a library that can read and write XLSX files, turning them into Rows, Columns and Items (item is the actual value). My program has Accounts, Contracts and Addresses, which are collections of code. In order to turn the Rows into, say, and Account, I have to roll over the rows and create parallel objects that point back to the Row. It's a complete mess. In comparison, in ObjC (from now on, that's a generic term) I can swizzle the object after it is loaded and that Row magically turns into an Account.
If you don't understand the power of this concept I think you need to look at some actual examples of DB programming under Apple's late, lamented EOF. It is, bar none, the simplest and cleanest object modelling platform I've seen. I understand examples of similar simplicity and cleanliness exist on other dynamic platforms, but I've tried them all on Java, C++ and .net, and I can say from experience that nothing comes *remotely* close. And I say this as someone that's written hundreds of thousands of lines of DB code.
3) Zombies. This is really just a subset of swizzling applied to a real-world problem. You can flick a switch so that when ObjC releases an object it doesn't, it instead swizzles it into a Zombie. Recall (1)... this means that instead of your program crashing, it calls that method on the Zombie. Zombies have one method that gets all calls, and it prints out useful debugging information.
Yes, you can do this in other languages, and some even do it. But again, as in (2), ObjC's *implementation* of this is trivially simple and easy to use.
4) Method signatures are strings. I think this is what you're touching on when you say "good for GUI" but you don't specify. The advantage here is that I can save method calls in files. This has all sorts of interesting side effects. One simple one is that I can bind a button to a method directly... unlike (say) .net, where the button calls a generic method that calls code the development environment writes to call your method. And lets be honest, VS isn't exactly perfect, even when you can read it.
But t
> JavaScript is probably the mainstream language that fits closest (it's actually very close to Smalltalk).
It's much closer to Self. IIRC it was a fork.
> it was swiftly replaced after his demise
Nice.
> Dynamic binding and loading is ugly and clunky
I really can't agree with that. Quite the opposite, given that dynamic binding solves a very very common problem, and that the code required to do the same in a non-dynamic language is *extensive*, I have always found that compile-time bound languages are far more clunky and ugly. I thought that was a pretty common opinion among people that have used both.
>.Errors you don't catch at compile time are errors that you have to write tests for. Y
Sure, that's true, but of the total set of errors that compliers don't catch, the ones that are caused by dynamic binding is a tiny subset. I still get dangling objects and nulls all the time in my C# code, probably 50 to 100 times as often as I've had a binding problem in ObjC. It is a problem, sure, but it's not *the* problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact. I would posit that nulls remain the largest problem in modern code. ObjC (and Swift) allow you to call methods on null. That means you get a null instead of a crash, which in most cases is what you want in the first place. Yet in my C# and VB.net code, I have to liberally sprinkle all sorts of checks and such. C# is better in this regard than VB, and VB is adding support for better handling in the next release because it's so bad at it, but neither comes remotely close to the way ObjC handled it, from the start.
So, while dynamic binding may indeed result in some uncaught runtime exceptions, I'd say ObjC programs *on a whole* have far less runtime exceptions due to other design decisions.
> In either case, the first thing you should learn is a unit testing framework for that language
Well you've just invalidated your own point, haven't you? If the problem is runtime errors, and the solution is unit testing, then the relative paucity of dynamic binding problems is going to add maybe zero lines of code to your test suite.
> Objective-C is an ugly, clunky language
It is now. It certainly wasn't when I first encountered it in 2000, running on OpenStep. Back then it was clear, far cleaner than C++, and the libraries were (and are) fantastic. Say what you will about Qt, all of it's true, but everything from strings to db programming was joke on OpenStep compared to anything else out there. Which is why the company existed at all at that point, the financial guys used it a lot.
But fast-forward a decade to 2010 when I next looked at it for an iPhone program. Uggg! What an abysmal mess! I can't believe it's even the same language! So many one-off @ commands and bizarre "well, you need to know that..." In spite of all the problems in beta testing a *languages*, I still moved to Swift ASAP. Swift is currently about what ObjC was when I first saw it - relatively lightweight and fairly clean. I'm sure that will change, but for now...
That said, C++ remains a mystery to me. The syntax steadfastly refuses to lodge in my brain. I had the same problem with Lisp, which is saying a lot. But as others have noted, it remains the only real cross-platform system one can use for base logic and then plug into the underlying GUI language whether that be ObjC or Java. The only thing that comes close is C, and I still debate which language is better to use in these cases.
They've been running one of these in nova Scotia for decades. And I'm sure it's not the first either.
> know I was disappointed as a kid when it came out originally in theaters
Interesting. I saw it after it passed its first run, and it was a double-feature (remember those?) with Firefox starting. I arrived late and saw the 2nd half of Firebox, which even as a 15-yr-old boy nerd I dismissed as silly. Then Blade Runner came on. I remember being awed. Not by the plot itself, but by the vision. The gritty always-raining deteriorating city stuck in my mind like no movie since Star Wars (in which case it was the *scale* that stuck in my mind). This was shortly after reading Johnny Mnemonic for the first time, so that likely has a lot to do with it.
> Just because manufacturers haven't provided many affordable solutions doesn't mean that Steam in the living room is a pointless concept
It strongly suggests it.
> and in-fact it's a rather welcome one
Another console that doesn't play any console games, but does play all the ones I already have on my PC. How is this welcome?
> Patience is a virtue.
Lolz. Out-of-the-gate momentum tells you a lot.
> Why is this particular to electric cars?
Electric cars will generally have a 230V/30A connection, rather than 115/15. So they get four times the power.
They also have electrically powered heaters. So they can turn on the interior heat without having to start anything else.
> gas cars have electric heaters in the cooling
These slightly warm the fluid or oil. They are useful, but don't heat the interior.
Read the actual numbers... "(170 Wh/km), whereas the upper Midwest fared the worst in terms of energy efficiency (196 Wh/km; red)". We're talking about a 13% difference - the article uses the 15% figure from 170, cheating IMHO. BFD, one way or the other, yet the graph varies from green to BRIGHT RED!!!!
More numbers; even if you power your electric car on 100% coal, its about twice as clean per mile than a gasoline engine. The math is trivial and I suggest everyone try it themselves:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
That's right, because Apple's has a terrible track record when it comes to investing in marketing. ::rolleyes::
> They really need some sort of better name to differentiate between these...
Like "PV" vs. "CSP" maybe?
$850 million for 130 MW? That's $6.50 a watt. Commercial scale solar is supposed to be around $1.60. Am I missing something here?
> Hard to do the financing when you have 10-15 years of lawsuits to settle before you can pour the first yard of concrete...
There is no such thing. Regulatory overhead was calculated to be 3.7% in recent builds.
Meanwhile, actual paid-for costs for new plants are around $8/W, about 7 to 8 times the CAPEX for wind.
You can pretend this isn't the problem and invent boogiemen all you want. But it *is* the problem.
> the high cost of wind and solar implies
Wind and solar are far, far cheaper than nuclear. Between four and eight times cheaper. Here, read some up-to-date numbers...
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
> Good point, but options for more hydro are very limited
They are far less limited than nuclear. Nuclear power has cost, infrastructure, quality and proliferation issues. Hydro costs a fraction as much, is easy to build (we were doing it over a century ago), presents no proliferation issues, and tends to threaten people only around the site. Would you be OK building a hydro dam in North Korea? What about a nuclear plant?
Before you claim it's all gone, hydro is less than 50% developed worldwide. That is a fractal measure, it is about 50% underdeveloped at every level of scale. It is about 50% underdeveloped in the US, as well as 50% underdeveloped in the east, west, north and south. There is enough in Canada to power much more than the whole country, but only a little over half currently is. Etc. The same is true for China and Brazil, let alone Egypt and Bhutan.
> On the upside, nuclear fusion research is promising here at the UW
No, it's not.
Fusion plants are fission plants with a different nuclear island. Their version of the nuclear island is far, far more expensive than the fission version. It will never not be so. At a minimum the energy is so diffuse, the construction costs alone are much more. But then when you add in huge amounts of lithium and superconducting, it's gets pear shaped very quickly.
Right now, a fission plant costs enough more than wind that no one is building them. In fact, the price of the non-nuclear portions of a fission plant is higher than wind. In other words, even if the reactor were completely free, they still wouldn't build them. And since a fusion reactor has the same non-island parts, no one is going to build one of those either. Unless you can build fusion plants for negative money, lots and lots of negative money.
You will protest that people are building reactors. Not really. You can only afford to do so if you get money for free, like in China. But even there, wind is being built at about 3 to 5 times the rate.
So if no one will build fission, they certainly aren't going to build fusion. Everyone in the power industry is perfectly aware of this, they've been publishing reports saying this for decades, but the people working on fusion refuse to believe it. They think the problem is technical, that if you build a working reactor everyone will magically start using them. They won't.
> the single energy technology that has already offset huge amounts of carbon generation
Hydro. Longer and more. By far.
> Nobody seems to want to give nuclear credit for what its already done.
Says the guy that forgets about hydro.