Really? Huh. You see, I'm on the Mono dev list, and they're all saying the exact opposite. "They" including Miguel de Icaza, of course. I think I'll take his word over yours, AC.
> People don't just want to write websites with C#
That's a weird statement. Who cares what they "want"? I know lots and lots of people doing C# websites whether they want to or not.
Here too. And when you see comments to the contrary, it's always got something to do with it being OSS. "It's slower, and not OSS". But it's not slower, and now it is OSS. It's like listing to people try to convince me that vaccinations are bad for you, you wonder how they can stare bald facts in the face and then say the opposite is true.
Which, unfortunately, is a serious subset of Mono. I found that every program I tried to port used some code that wasn't supported, and most of our code simply does XML file handling.
Actually, it's difficult to even tell what you have due to MS's totally bizarre naming practices. Why is System.IO.Packaging, which deals with ZIPped XML files, part of WindowsBase? It's practically impossible to go from a namespace to the assembly that contains it. This has always bugged me.
> Even the bloated Eclipse is faster than VC++ on Windows - at least if you run Eclipse on Linux
I've run Eclipse on OS X, Windows and Linux. None of those are *remotely* as fast to work with as VS. The fact that Google is trashing Eclipse in favour of Android Studio is proof positive of the problems with Eclipse, and the compile-to-the-metal that both MS and Google are adopting is an indictment of the entire byte code regime, IMHO.
I've also used Xcode and VS head-to-head, and VS is definitely the superior platform. Although Xcode offers many of the same features, and outright superior GIT integration (it's like two clicks and one url to get it working), the indexing system is completely broken so you can't even do things like "find all references". When running one of the CLR languages the superiority of VS is magnified through on-the-fly compiles and such. Xcode claims to offer this, but it's horribly broken, and the late-stage operations like code signing and packaging make it a moot point anyway.
I don't know if you'll ever *really* be able to write iOS apps on VS, but if that day comes, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
> What we do know is that the plane was downed with multiple, small, high velocity projectiles
Yes, it's called "shrapnel".
> even entertain the possibility that this was cannon fire
Because cannon fire has a minimum size of the puncture it can make, the size of the shell. The resulting marks on the aircraft will be a circle of that size, given a nice face-on strike, or elongations if the angle was more glancing. It can get much larger if the metal tears.
Now look at the image. There are many, many holes in the aircraft that are much smaller than a cannon shell. In fact, there are quite a few that are exactly the size of a piece of shrapnel.
So that's why "west no one seems to want to even entertain" the idea, it's clearly false.
> that the airplane was hit by a continuous rod warhead
It absolutely was not. The images of the fragments *clearly* show shrapnel, and there isn't any evidence of anything hitting the plane that's longer than maybe an inch.
> modern aircraft stay airborne for a long time even without any active controls because of fly-by-wire
Perhaps, but they don't stay airborne at all when the front of the aircraft is missing. And since the controls are on or around the flight deck, losing that would take the FBW offline anyway.
> The goal was apparently to silence the crew and prevent calls for help
Pffft. Nothing silences a crew like blowing them up with a missile. Just ask KAL 007.
> They note that BUK missile makes a very brightly visible plume
No it doesn't. The booster is very smoky but the upper stage is pretty clean firing. Here's what a missile actually looks like:
Note that even though the engine is still firing in this case, there is no visible trail. That's not always the case, but just like any aircraft, the trail is caused mostly by physical effects on the atmosphere and thus highly dependant on the state of the weather.
> does sound odd that no one got any footage of the missile
Oh come on. Next time you're walking around, see how many people are looking up at planes. And how many of them are taking pictures?
> Overall, the case is getting stranger with every relevation
Sure, if you know nothing about aircraft, missiles, photography and are prone to believing conspiracy theories.
> essentially an afterburner, and does not start with stationary electrons
No major accelerator does. Most of them start with something simple like a Crockoff-Walton or even a van-degraff, then inject them into a series of ever larger synchrotrons. LCH has something like four or five "injectors" in a chain.
In any event, plasma wake accelerators have been around for years. They don't work. This one won't either. Plasma just doesn't work the way any of our ever increasingly complex computer simulations say it should. Just as the $4 billion they dumped into NIF.
But you don't have to. There's lots and lots of networks already in place. What's still needed is a group of relatively shorter but very high capacity backbones to get the power from one regional grid to another. And a lot of THOSE are already in place too.
> Miami to Houston and Dallas won't give you a US wide HVDC grid
For sure, and yet one can already get power between those places already.
Your definition of "painstaking" may be different than mine.
Mine is something like "lots of actual work".
To be accurate to the article, your definition would have to be something like "We made up some shit in 1992 that turned out to be totally wrong and wouldn't stick when we threw it at the wall. We also had plenty of technical experts tell us we were full of crap, but we conveniently forgot to mention this to anyone. So we kept coming up with new shit for the last 25 years and repeatedly threw that at the wall to see if we can get it to stick. And here we are, with a sum total effort of taking some photos and looking at them, while making up new shit about stuff that we have no evidence ever existed."
One wonders how much they sweat during all this painstaking detective work.
Not if you pull them out, which would be required if the stringer isn't on the back of the plate. Which it isn't.
Just look at it. That clearly did not "tear off" anything, at least along the lines in the middle. Here's what a piece of metal torn from an aircraft actually looks like:
Note that the rivet holes along the tear lines show very clear signs that the rivet was pulled through the metal - they are large and have a somewhat ragged outline - this is especially noticeable on the left side.
Again, you can clearly see where the rivets failed at the left side. The parts where they did not fail still have the circumferential attached on the back.
And although I can't find the image of it any more, when a piece of aluminum actually is riveted to a stringer, it leaves a VERY OBVIOUS mark on the back. This isn't the one I'm looking for, but look at the main image here on the extreme right along the rivet line:
http://www.rense.com/general31/CONFIRM.htm
Do you see the "stripe" where the stringer used to be? And the large size of the holes left behind? You can see the same on the highest part on the left too.
Now compare and contrast this with the image on their web site. Do you see any sign of stress or failure along any of the lines? I don't. And there's no sign of either the rivets or the stringers.
I conclude that this piece of metal was likely not connected to anything, and may have been spare material. Considering it was found *at a 1960s construction site on a pacific island*, water tanks and aluminum motorboats seem like as reasonable guesses as theirs.
No they didn't. They made up a bunch of crap about how it might be matched to the aircraft if they did this, that, the other thing, none of which is known to have happened. Moreover, they make a bunch of claims about how it was installed, all of which they invented. They also completely fail to explain why the holes show no sign of failure and the stringers they claim were riveted to this metal are not there in spite of there being no evidence they were pulled off.
Now, to put this to bed, I want to point out a very important statement made elsewhere on their web page. This piece of metal was found at the end of a channel that was blasted into the island in 1963. In fact, there used to be a building at that location, and they found it after the building collapsed (if I understand their web page correctly).
So, hmmm. They didn't happen to use common aircraft aluminum for other tasks in the pacific, did they? You know, like a water tank, or something like that? Something that might be located near a building? That might be used in construction efforts?
What twaddle.
Here, go read this: http://web.randi.org/swift/-group-obsessed-with-finding-amelia-earharts-plane
"The rivet pattern and other features on the 19-inch-wide by 23-inch-long Nikumaroro artifact matched the patch and lined up with the structural components of the Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR detailed the finding in a report on its website."
What sort of BS is this? Just look at the images right in the article:
1) they DON'T line up. look at the guy holding the plate in front of the stringers. They're not even close!
2) the holes in the plate are *clearly* smaller than the rivets. They look smaller than any rivet I've ever seen on any aircraft, and I've seen/flown a lot of aircraft.
3) in order for this plate to detach, it would have to pull out the rivets, which either leaves the rivet in the plate or the stringer. There's none in the plate so it would have to be in the stringer, which would mean the rivet head would have to pull through the plate (this is the normal failure mode BTW). yet this clearly did not happen to this plate, the holes remain perfectly formed.
> around the world flight were of Earhart and Noonan getting out/in on the port side
I recently wrote an article on a radar set from WWII and wanted to find images of aircraft with the system. The main antennas were located on the starboard wing. Oddly, almost every image I found, at *least* 80% of them, were taken showing the port side. I found this very odd. In this case, the hatch was on the right, so that doesn't explain it.
It is. Doing some quick math on the USDA site, it's more like 1,000, so it might just be a typo. Specifically:
707 lb fruits and veg 75 lb of fat and oil 600 lb of dairy 200 lb of meat
1600 lb totalling just these, so when one adds fibre and straight carbs and such you're looking around the 1000 kg range.
BTW, interesting points I found in this document:
1) red meat consumption has only gone up a bit since the 50's. chicken has over tripled! 2) fruit and veg has fallen slightly 3) dairy has almost doubled 4) grains are up 45%
So, doesn't this seem like the best systematic long-term argument against the south-bay type diets you've ever seen? In comparative terms, the US *has* switched to a high-protein, low(er)-carb diet. Clearly it's not working, I say over the large bulge of my stomach.
> My parents have a feed in system that pays 50c / kwh. That is more than double what they pay for electricity.
So yeah, you left out all the important bits of that statement.
Most FITs in Oz work on a net metering arrangement, which means that they get paid the normal retail rate, about 24 cents, for the power they use, and then get paid the FIT rate for net exports. So in this case, I strongly suspect your parents are actually getting a net rate somewhere around 30 cents, which doesn't seem at all out of line with a retail rate of 24, does it?
But governments do odd things all the time, and judging the success or failure of a technology by how the government handles it seems like an idea no one here would take very seriously. So why don't we look at the underlying technology on the commercial side and see where that gets us?
PV in Oz for anything larger that 50 kWp probably has a LCoE around 10 to 15 cents. Actually forget guessing... PVWatts says Sydney gets 1400 MWh/kW/year. There's 8550 hours in a year, so that's a CF of 16.4%. A trip over to the LCoE calculator with a 16.4 CF, zero fuel costs, $25 O&M and a CAPEX of $1.75/W (the average US rate for 2013) gets you...
10 cents/kWh
Which means that rooftop residential, which is around $4/W, would be...
20.4 cents/kWh
Which is cheaper than the retail rate. Paying people 10 cents/kWh to use their capital to put up PV instead of public funds seems like a pretty f'ing great deal for everyone.
Let me guess, you don't believe me. Fine, you can do the math yourself - although in my considerable experience on this point, I've found that less than 2% of the people reading this will click the following links, let alone do the calculations. Nevertheless, here are the three sources you need:
1) current CAPEX for PV plants, see page 11: http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
2) to calculate the insolation, go to this page and select the location on the right: http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/pvwatts/version1/
3) to calculate the LCoE that results, divide the result from PVWatts by the number of hours in a year and type that in as the input here: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
And if you really do want to do this, complete instructions are available here, using Apple's PV installs as an example:
Lots of things do. Olkiluoto 3 is currently budgeted at over $10 billion, about the same as Flamanville. To power Europe to the level we're discussing here, it would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars. Renewables plus the network would probably cost about the same. Doing the same with coal or NG would cost maybe half that, or maybe a bit less because you wouldn't need as much transmission (you can locate the plants closer to the loads).
> To do a continent wide HVDC network...currently costs about $2,000 to $2,500 per GW km. You might need 1500 km of 10 GW total, so 1500 x 10 x 2500 = 37 billion. If you want to add an Iceland link, add 2000 km to that, but all of that is cable which is less expensive. Some good reading here, you can do your own calcs:
Slashdot Mirror
"As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?"
Ummm, no.
As long as NG peakers are $1/W CAPEX and ~2 cents OPEX, nuclear is as dead in the water as it is today.
For comparison, the average price for nukes in the western hemisphere is about $8/W and ~5 cents OPEX.
> They come with free overheating problems. Solar panels need the airflow behind them to keep cool
Using conventional Si cells, yes. Using CdTe, CIGS or other thin-film tech, no. Which is why...
http://www.myplant.com/doc/solar-pamphlet.pdf
> "about 10 cents a watt..."
Watt hour. So would you like you re-state your invective in light of that mistyping on my part?
Here, I'll just point you to the calculator so you can do it yourself... http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
Any estimates on how much power will be needed to run the crypto so a bunch of static web sites can put an S in the URL?
> Client-side code (WPF) in .NET is utterly dependent on DirectX
Which is why they...
1) allow you to use the platform's native UI, and...
2) developed the new "modern" UI that has no (or few) such dependancies
> That's being either mistaken or misleading.
Really? Huh. You see, I'm on the Mono dev list, and they're all saying the exact opposite. "They" including Miguel de Icaza, of course. I think I'll take his word over yours, AC.
> People don't just want to write websites with C#
That's a weird statement. Who cares what they "want"? I know lots and lots of people doing C# websites whether they want to or not.
> It was easy and I will never come back
Here too. And when you see comments to the contrary, it's always got something to do with it being OSS. "It's slower, and not OSS". But it's not slower, and now it is OSS. It's like listing to people try to convince me that vaccinations are bad for you, you wonder how they can stare bald facts in the face and then say the opposite is true.
> sticking to Xamarin's toolset
Which, unfortunately, is a serious subset of Mono. I found that every program I tried to port used some code that wasn't supported, and most of our code simply does XML file handling.
Actually, it's difficult to even tell what you have due to MS's totally bizarre naming practices. Why is System.IO.Packaging, which deals with ZIPped XML files, part of WindowsBase? It's practically impossible to go from a namespace to the assembly that contains it. This has always bugged me.
> Even the bloated Eclipse is faster than VC++ on Windows - at least if you run Eclipse on Linux
I've run Eclipse on OS X, Windows and Linux. None of those are *remotely* as fast to work with as VS. The fact that Google is trashing Eclipse in favour of Android Studio is proof positive of the problems with Eclipse, and the compile-to-the-metal that both MS and Google are adopting is an indictment of the entire byte code regime, IMHO.
I've also used Xcode and VS head-to-head, and VS is definitely the superior platform. Although Xcode offers many of the same features, and outright superior GIT integration (it's like two clicks and one url to get it working), the indexing system is completely broken so you can't even do things like "find all references". When running one of the CLR languages the superiority of VS is magnified through on-the-fly compiles and such. Xcode claims to offer this, but it's horribly broken, and the late-stage operations like code signing and packaging make it a moot point anyway.
I don't know if you'll ever *really* be able to write iOS apps on VS, but if that day comes, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
> What we do know is that the plane was downed with multiple, small, high velocity projectiles
Yes, it's called "shrapnel".
> even entertain the possibility that this was cannon fire
Because cannon fire has a minimum size of the puncture it can make, the size of the shell. The resulting marks on the aircraft will be a circle of that size, given a nice face-on strike, or elongations if the angle was more glancing. It can get much larger if the metal tears.
Now look at the image. There are many, many holes in the aircraft that are much smaller than a cannon shell. In fact, there are quite a few that are exactly the size of a piece of shrapnel.
So that's why "west no one seems to want to even entertain" the idea, it's clearly false.
> that the airplane was hit by a continuous rod warhead
It absolutely was not. The images of the fragments *clearly* show shrapnel, and there isn't any evidence of anything hitting the plane that's longer than maybe an inch.
> modern aircraft stay airborne for a long time even without any active controls because of fly-by-wire
Perhaps, but they don't stay airborne at all when the front of the aircraft is missing. And since the controls are on or around the flight deck, losing that would take the FBW offline anyway.
> The goal was apparently to silence the crew and prevent calls for help
Pffft. Nothing silences a crew like blowing them up with a missile. Just ask KAL 007.
> They note that BUK missile makes a very brightly visible plume
No it doesn't. The booster is very smoky but the upper stage is pretty clean firing. Here's what a missile actually looks like:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F-105_dodging_SA-2_over_Vietnam.jpg
Note that even though the engine is still firing in this case, there is no visible trail. That's not always the case, but just like any aircraft, the trail is caused mostly by physical effects on the atmosphere and thus highly dependant on the state of the weather.
> does sound odd that no one got any footage of the missile
Oh come on. Next time you're walking around, see how many people are looking up at planes. And how many of them are taking pictures?
> Overall, the case is getting stranger with every relevation
Sure, if you know nothing about aircraft, missiles, photography and are prone to believing conspiracy theories.
> essentially an afterburner, and does not start with stationary electrons
No major accelerator does. Most of them start with something simple like a Crockoff-Walton or even a van-degraff, then inject them into a series of ever larger synchrotrons. LCH has something like four or five "injectors" in a chain.
In any event, plasma wake accelerators have been around for years. They don't work. This one won't either. Plasma just doesn't work the way any of our ever increasingly complex computer simulations say it should. Just as the $4 billion they dumped into NIF.
Is anyone else amused by the rapidity of this race to the bottom?
Enjoy bankruptcy.
> The experts are not saying that it is 100% from her plane
You're of course referring to the "experts" from Gillespie's TIGHAR group, which contains no actual experts.
They did, however, contact *actual experts* shortly after they found the piece in 1991.
Those *actual experts* flatly stated it is 100% NOT from her aircraft.
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-03-30/news/vw-278_1_amelia-earhart
"Not by any stretch of measurement or the imagination, they claim, could the piece be from Earhart's airplane."
> 1500km? that'd be barely enough to cross France
But you don't have to. There's lots and lots of networks already in place. What's still needed is a group of relatively shorter but very high capacity backbones to get the power from one regional grid to another. And a lot of THOSE are already in place too.
> Miami to Houston and Dallas won't give you a US wide HVDC grid
For sure, and yet one can already get power between those places already.
Your definition of "painstaking" may be different than mine.
Mine is something like "lots of actual work".
To be accurate to the article, your definition would have to be something like "We made up some shit in 1992 that turned out to be totally wrong and wouldn't stick when we threw it at the wall. We also had plenty of technical experts tell us we were full of crap, but we conveniently forgot to mention this to anyone. So we kept coming up with new shit for the last 25 years and repeatedly threw that at the wall to see if we can get it to stick. And here we are, with a sum total effort of taking some photos and looking at them, while making up new shit about stuff that we have no evidence ever existed."
One wonders how much they sweat during all this painstaking detective work.
> Isn't that kind of how rivets work?
Not if you pull them out, which would be required if the stringer isn't on the back of the plate. Which it isn't.
Just look at it. That clearly did not "tear off" anything, at least along the lines in the middle. Here's what a piece of metal torn from an aircraft actually looks like:
http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/sme/interactive_resources/tutorials/FailureCases/images/CM11ALYP7.jpg
Note that the rivet holes along the tear lines show very clear signs that the rivet was pulled through the metal - they are large and have a somewhat ragged outline - this is especially noticeable on the left side.
Here's another example:
http://www.oocities.org/capecanaveral/lab/8803/p5cyp10a.jpg
Again, you can clearly see where the rivets failed at the left side. The parts where they did not fail still have the circumferential attached on the back.
And although I can't find the image of it any more, when a piece of aluminum actually is riveted to a stringer, it leaves a VERY OBVIOUS mark on the back. This isn't the one I'm looking for, but look at the main image here on the extreme right along the rivet line:
http://www.rense.com/general31/CONFIRM.htm
Do you see the "stripe" where the stringer used to be? And the large size of the holes left behind? You can see the same on the highest part on the left too.
Now compare and contrast this with the image on their web site. Do you see any sign of stress or failure along any of the lines? I don't. And there's no sign of either the rivets or the stringers.
I conclude that this piece of metal was likely not connected to anything, and may have been spare material. Considering it was found *at a 1960s construction site on a pacific island*, water tanks and aluminum motorboats seem like as reasonable guesses as theirs.
> they matched it to her plane
No they didn't. They made up a bunch of crap about how it might be matched to the aircraft if they did this, that, the other thing, none of which is known to have happened. Moreover, they make a bunch of claims about how it was installed, all of which they invented. They also completely fail to explain why the holes show no sign of failure and the stringers they claim were riveted to this metal are not there in spite of there being no evidence they were pulled off.
Now, to put this to bed, I want to point out a very important statement made elsewhere on their web page. This piece of metal was found at the end of a channel that was blasted into the island in 1963. In fact, there used to be a building at that location, and they found it after the building collapsed (if I understand their web page correctly).
So, hmmm. They didn't happen to use common aircraft aluminum for other tasks in the pacific, did they? You know, like a water tank, or something like that? Something that might be located near a building? That might be used in construction efforts?
What twaddle.
Here, go read this: http://web.randi.org/swift/-group-obsessed-with-finding-amelia-earharts-plane
"The rivet pattern and other features on the 19-inch-wide by 23-inch-long Nikumaroro artifact matched the patch and lined up with the structural components of the Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR detailed the finding in a report on its website."
What sort of BS is this? Just look at the images right in the article:
1) they DON'T line up. look at the guy holding the plate in front of the stringers. They're not even close!
2) the holes in the plate are *clearly* smaller than the rivets. They look smaller than any rivet I've ever seen on any aircraft, and I've seen/flown a lot of aircraft.
3) in order for this plate to detach, it would have to pull out the rivets, which either leaves the rivet in the plate or the stringer. There's none in the plate so it would have to be in the stringer, which would mean the rivet head would have to pull through the plate (this is the normal failure mode BTW). yet this clearly did not happen to this plate, the holes remain perfectly formed.
This is complete BS.
> around the world flight were of Earhart and Noonan getting out/in on the port side
I recently wrote an article on a radar set from WWII and wanted to find images of aircraft with the system. The main antennas were located on the starboard wing. Oddly, almost every image I found, at *least* 80% of them, were taken showing the port side. I found this very odd. In this case, the hatch was on the right, so that doesn't explain it.
It is. Doing some quick math on the USDA site, it's more like 1,000, so it might just be a typo. Specifically:
707 lb fruits and veg
75 lb of fat and oil
600 lb of dairy
200 lb of meat
1600 lb totalling just these, so when one adds fibre and straight carbs and such you're looking around the 1000 kg range.
BTW, interesting points I found in this document:
1) red meat consumption has only gone up a bit since the 50's. chicken has over tripled!
2) fruit and veg has fallen slightly
3) dairy has almost doubled
4) grains are up 45%
So, doesn't this seem like the best systematic long-term argument against the south-bay type diets you've ever seen? In comparative terms, the US *has* switched to a high-protein, low(er)-carb diet. Clearly it's not working, I say over the large bulge of my stomach.
http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf
> My parents have a feed in system that pays 50c / kwh. That is more than double what they pay for electricity.
So yeah, you left out all the important bits of that statement.
Most FITs in Oz work on a net metering arrangement, which means that they get paid the normal retail rate, about 24 cents, for the power they use, and then get paid the FIT rate for net exports. So in this case, I strongly suspect your parents are actually getting a net rate somewhere around 30 cents, which doesn't seem at all out of line with a retail rate of 24, does it?
But governments do odd things all the time, and judging the success or failure of a technology by how the government handles it seems like an idea no one here would take very seriously. So why don't we look at the underlying technology on the commercial side and see where that gets us?
PV in Oz for anything larger that 50 kWp probably has a LCoE around 10 to 15 cents. Actually forget guessing... PVWatts says Sydney gets 1400 MWh/kW/year. There's 8550 hours in a year, so that's a CF of 16.4%. A trip over to the LCoE calculator with a 16.4 CF, zero fuel costs, $25 O&M and a CAPEX of $1.75/W (the average US rate for 2013) gets you...
10 cents/kWh
Which means that rooftop residential, which is around $4/W, would be...
20.4 cents/kWh
Which is cheaper than the retail rate. Paying people 10 cents/kWh to use their capital to put up PV instead of public funds seems like a pretty f'ing great deal for everyone.
Let me guess, you don't believe me. Fine, you can do the math yourself - although in my considerable experience on this point, I've found that less than 2% of the people reading this will click the following links, let alone do the calculations. Nevertheless, here are the three sources you need:
1) current CAPEX for PV plants, see page 11: http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
2) to calculate the insolation, go to this page and select the location on the right: http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/pvwatts/version1/
3) to calculate the LCoE that results, divide the result from PVWatts by the number of hours in a year and type that in as the input here: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
And if you really do want to do this, complete instructions are available here, using Apple's PV installs as an example:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/green-apples/
> I really doubt Denmark is just going to dismantle them
That's precisely what they did in Ontario. We got rid of all our coal plants, and started dismantling them. Actually, one was turned to biomass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview_Generating_Station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearn_Generating_Station
> You can but that costs many billion dollars
Lots of things do. Olkiluoto 3 is currently budgeted at over $10 billion, about the same as Flamanville. To power Europe to the level we're discussing here, it would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars. Renewables plus the network would probably cost about the same. Doing the same with coal or NG would cost maybe half that, or maybe a bit less because you wouldn't need as much transmission (you can locate the plants closer to the loads).
> To do a continent wide HVDC network ...currently costs about $2,000 to $2,500 per GW km. You might need 1500 km of 10 GW total, so 1500 x 10 x 2500 = 37 billion. If you want to add an Iceland link, add 2000 km to that, but all of that is cable which is less expensive. Some good reading here, you can do your own calcs:
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/sites/climatechange/files/files/reducing-carbon/APPENDIX2-AEMO-transmission-cost-assumptions.pdf