The US provides about 9% of the funding for ITER, nowhere near half. That funding is subject to political infighting -- for example the US wanted the ITER prototype to be built in Japan, the rest of the consortium other than the US and Japan wanted it built in Cadarache in France. When the invasion of Iraq kicked off and France refused to support Bush's Excellent Arabian Adventure the US government shut down funding contributions to ITER and bailed from the consortium but rejoined later. Currently the US is in arrears with its payments to the ITER project.
From Physics Today: "Since rejoining ITER in 2003, the US has never come close to providing annual contribution levels commensurate with its 9% ownership share. Through FY 2017, it has contributed a total of $1.1 billion. ITER spokesperson Laban Coblentz says the US made no cash contribution to support operations at the French site in FY 2016 or 2017, and the unpaid balance for the two years stands at $65 million. In addition, the US in-kind contribution in 2017 fell short by about $50 million.
Five member nations - China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia - have the same ownership share as the US, and Coblentz says those countries are pulling their weight. As the host, the European Union is paying nearly half of ITER's cost."
America's political instability with its whipsaw changes in government makes it a liability in long-term international scientific collaborations for this reason.
ITER isn't a demonstration fusion power reactor, it's a fusion testbed built to power-reactor scale in terms of dimensions and energies. It's expected to show energy returns of 10 to 1 (so-called Q factor) sustained for hundreds or thousands of seconds. Whether it succeeds or not in an unknown, in part that's why it's being built. One school of thought says going big simplifies things and makes sustainable plasma fusion easier, another more pessimistic school says going big reveals more problems. The "E" in ITER stands for "Experimental" after all.
If ITER shows tokamak fusion is practical then comes DEMO, a fusion reactor that will produce electrical power. Once the bugs are shaken out of that hardware then comes PROTO, the first-generation commercial fusion generating plant. That's the current road-plan, whether it survives reality is another matter.
ITER's "first light" should be in 2025 or so if all goes well. It probably won't though.
You may be the only person on the planet left with a working XP 64-bit system because for sure MS sold damn few of them. As for "software that issues TRIM commands" that sounds awfully like a third-party bodge since TRIM was never part of the XP file system for either 32-bit or 64-bit versions.
Theses are things that can be fixed without bloating the entire OS though.
MS tried that, to make a MkII version of XP to fix a number of problems including user space control, security enhancements, improved networking etc. It was called Vista. What a dog.
The real replacement for XP was "bloated" Win 7. Funny thing though, when folks tested Win 7 against XP, despite the claims of "bloat" they found that on similar/identical hardware Win 7 ran a little faster or about the same as Win XP, ditto for programs written for XP run under Win 7 but it had TRIM, it had usable user control and privilege elevation, 64-bit internals, better USB support, better everything really. Time moves on and patching and plastering over the cracks in old beloved code that is no longer fit for use gets to be a waste of time and resources.
The Windows XP filesystem doesn't support TRIM for SSDs to allow for wear levelling so it will tend to write specific sectors at fixed addresses repeatedly causing the SSD to wear out prematurely. WinXP has a maximum disc volume of 2TB and 32-bit XP has a maximum RAM utilisation of under 4GB. There are reasons other than problems with security to move away from XP.
I've put Windows 7 on a couple of netbooks after adding SSDs to them. They have limited RAM (which I also maxed out) and low-power CPUs but they run quite well, leveraging the SSD's speed even though the HDD controller only supports SATA1. I tried putting Linux on them (Cinnamon and Xubuntu among others) but there was a problem with the GMA945 graphics drivers that meant they ran in emulated VGA mode, not a pretty sight. Win 7 just worked.
Actually GMT is consistent and doesn't change. It's not UTC but it's close (insert smiley emoji here).
Britain, the home of GMT is currently, at least for the next 12 hours or so, on British Summer Time (BST), an hour ahead of GMT and UTC. The "clocks go back" Sunday 28th October at 02:00 in the morning resulting in a return to us being on GMT.
George Webb's story is that all of the Russian HEU was actually used in naval reactors
That would be a neat trick since the HEU was downblended to low-enrichment uranium (LEU) in Russia before it was shipped to the US. America paid for this to be done in-situ in Russia, mostly to take the HEU out of possible black-market hands. Nice conspiracy theory though.
On this planet, in this reality, it's Pu created by the US government for military purposes and now surplus to requirement due to a massive downsizing of the nuclear weapons it possesses and has ready for use or stockpiled. The Russians are dealing with their own overstock of Pu-239, they have a reactor and existing reprocessing lines that should be able to turn it into usable fuel to burn it.
Soviet-era weapons-grade Pu isn't particularly radioactive, any more than US weapons-grade Pu is. The USN uses a slightly higher purity grade of Pu-239 since SSBN missiles share working spaces with sailors compared to siloed missiles and free-fall bombs operated by the Air Force.
The US doesn't buy Pu244 from anyone. It did source some Pu238 for RTGs from the Russians a while back but the Russians stopped selling it after existing stocks of US-made Pu238 were redirected to military/spook use. The US is restarting the manufacture of Pu-238 in new safer facilities compared to the older deathtrap production lines which were shut down a while back.
Pure Pu-239 is noticeably radioactive with a half life of about 86,000 years, active enough to be warm to the touch. It will quite happily make a Geiger counter rattle.
Candu is magic, it can do anything. Making oddball fuel like MOX for a Candu or any light-water reactor is a nightmare of regulatory oversight, delays, cost escalations and regular lightly-enriched fuel which meets current regulations is cheap as chips now and for the forseeable future.
The perfect solution would be a reactor that can be fuelled with metallic weapons-grade plutonium without reprocessing it, downblending it or converting it to an oxide formulation. The BN-800 fast-spectrum reactor the Russians are operating can theoretically use metallic fuels including Pu-239 but it's in Russia, there's only one of them, it could only burn a few dozen kilogrammes of Pu-239 per operating cycle of a few months and did I mention it's in Russia?
Construction of the MOX plant was started a long time back, Google Google... The project started in 2000, construction was started in 2007 under Bush the Younger. I recall that Congress pulled the plug on financing it a couple of times before restoring the funding keeping it limping along, probably for pork reasons -- South Carolina where the plant was being built has two Republican Senators. The project was doomed from the start pretty much.
The 34 tonnes of surplus Pu is US-made, it's not Russian despite what someone further down in the comments suggests/insists. The ex-Soviet highly-enriched uranium downblended and purchased in the Megatonnes to Megawatts project was easy to deal with but there was no intention to buy in weapons-grade Pu from the Russians. The deal with them was that both sides would work to take their stock of surplus weapons-grade Pu out of possible use permanently and making MOX fuel and burning it in commercial reactors was the best option agreed by both sides. The US had no experience with MOX, no facilities to make MOX and no commercial customers for MOX even if it could be produced. They couldn't even give it away...
I'm sure that you don't obsess about filling your car with extra passengers and luggage and making sure that you burn all of your fuel when you go on a car trip, right?
I don't hire a 38-tonne 18-wheeler to move some furniture, I'd hire a box van instead. It's cheaper. I don't own a car and if and when I do hire one I get something that fits my needs of the moment, not a BFO pickup truck to go to the supermarket. In the same way the DoD buys rides, not rockets and chooses from a golfbag of available launch vehicles. Smaller DoD satellites go up on Falcon 9 and Atlas and Deltas (assorted variants). The biggies go up on the Delta 4 Heavy and eventually (maybe) the Falcon Heavy.
There isn't a singular payload existing or planned, either military, commercial or scientific that the Falcon Heavy and the BFR is the only choice for due to throw weight. Building packages to fit into a 20-tonne-to-LEO straitjacket means multiple launchers from multiple sources can do the job.
Too Much Rocket means a fifty-tonne-to-LEO capability when the DoD's payloads top out at 24 tonnes, a fuelled-up spy NRO satellite basically. It's what the Delta 4 Heavy was designed to launch, pretty much. It's possible that Falcon Heavy might get some of those 24-tonne contracts and fly with recoverable boosters but the DoD/NRO only launch one large satellite a year at most.
It might be possible to ride-share a NRO bird with other satellites on Falcon Heavy to use up the surplus capacity but that leads to security issues at the payload integration stage of the launch process.
I bet they have mapped out portions of the ocean, but it is portions of the ocean where the subs want to hide.
They map everywhere underwater on the off-chance that a blue-water sub could end up in that region sometime in the future. The idea is not to hide the sub among sea-bottom features but to allow the sonar operators to figure out exactly where the sub is by comparing what's below the sub to the maps without coming to the surface to get a GPS lock. Inertial navigation systems lose accuracy over time, the sea bottom shapes don't change quickly.
The main line between Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland has recently been converted to overhead-electric track. Previously diesel multiple unit (DMU) trains ran on this busy service.
Electrification of this service ran into problems with several tunnels on the line originally bored in the mid-1800s for smaller steam traction. The innovative solution was to lower the floor of the tunnels to take the taller train-plus-pantograph and accommodate the overhead catenary structures. It was still a significant engineering task but much less than raising the height of the tunnels or boring new tunnels in their place.
The result is faster and cleaner trains and shorter journey times.
"Wet and windy" tends to be in the spring ("March winds and April showers") and autumn here in the UK. We often get long lulls with little or no wind in the mid-winter when it's dark eighteen hours of the day. A quick check on the Gridwatch site's records for 30 days between mid-December 2017 and mid-January 2018 shows peak wind generation of about 9.7GW (at 2017-12-31 13:15:33) but there was a lull lasting about 30 hours when the wind contribution to the grid was less than 1GW (2018-01-11 through 2018-01-12). During that dip the lowest wind-generated output was about 280MW.
Hope and wishful thinking doesn't keep the lights on.
A number of river-sited reactors have curtailed output recently because they have limits on how much they can raise the river water temperatures with their condenser loops. This is also true for coal-fired and even solar thermal plants which use river water for a cold-sink. It's possible to use land-based evaporative systems for the cold-sink condensers but that uses up water and costs more so it's not common except in desert conditions where solar thermal generating plants like Tonopah deplete the local aquifers for that purpose.
Britain has about 15GW or so of grid-connected wind generating capacity, including the new offshore wind farms being fellated in the press recently. Via an online monitor I've seen these grid wind turbines peak at 10GW at times (usually when storms are blowing through). I've also seen it produce only 50MW total for several hours at a time when a lull settles across most of the country. It averages about 3GW over a year but that's an average, it swings a lot and there's no certainty that it will produce lots of electricity when we need lots of electricity. Vast overcapacity of wind would help alleviate that risk. Several hundred GW of turbines would be a good start but that would cost a lot of money to build and maintain and replace after a couple of decades.
And it cannot be throttled up or down to match need quickly.
I don't expect the two reactors at Hinkley C to be throttled at all, they'll run flat out 100% of their uptime since they'll only produce 15% of Britain's electricity demand at its lowest point (midsummer Sunday nighttime). There are a few other existing reactors providing a predictable 7GW or so but most of the on-demand generating capacity is met by fast-start combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) which can be brought on-line quickly to meet demand. Most of that 7GW of existing nuclear capacity is going away in the next ten to twenty years as the older AGRs are taken out of service -- there will be a single 1100MW PWR built in the 1990s left operating after the AGRs are shut down until Hinkley Point C comes on-line.
Having too much capacity is a totally different and much less serious problem than having too little (blackouts, rationing etc.) and weather-dependent renewables can't guarantee sufficiency to the same level that nuclear can.
I live in Ireland and don't want any radiation in the sea here.
News that may shock you, I know but seawater is naturally radioactive, more than 10,000 Bequerels per cubic metre. Most of that activity is due to naturally-occurring potassium-40, the rest tends to be from various decay products from uranium-bearing rocks and other natural materials. A couple of Bq per cubic metre in seawater is from man-made sources, usually remnants from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Some more is waste isotopes dumped into the sewers by hospitals, ending up in outfalls near the coast in places like Boston (there was a panic by some people when I-131 was found in Boston harbour soon after the Fukushima reactors overheated and leaked radioactive material into the Pacific. It turned out to come from a hospital which didn't have to sequester radioactive waste the way a nuclear power plant legally has to).
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, (etc.)
Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
Offshore wind farm power availability is about 30% of dataplate so this new facility will produce, on average about 250MW, not the headline attention-grabbing absolute maximum of 659 MW. Some days it will produce a lot more, some days a lot less even if we need the electricity right then. The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions. Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.
Heisei calendaring appears on official documents, train tickets etc. (quick check, a Japan Rail reserved-seat ticket I was issued back on the 12th of May this year has the date of issue as 30.-5.12, that is Heisei year 30, month 5, day 12). Nearly all common date expressions in Japan use Christian Era numbering though.
The Ariane 5 that launched four Galileo satellites yesterday is the ES variant, capable of putting about 21 tonnes into LEO. It's only flown that particular profile for ATV service missions to the ISS. This is the second ES-variant Galileo mission flown, putting a carrier with four satellites in elliptical orbit which is then circularised at GPS altitude (about 20,000km). Originally the Galileo satellites were being launched two at a time by Soyz-Fregat rockets but one launch went wrong and ESA decided to take the rest of the launches "in-house". It worked out cheaper to fly four satellites at a time on the heaviest-lift variant of the Ariane V compared to two at a time on the less-capable ECA variant.
As for the Falcon 9 FT it can only, IIRC, deliver 20-odd tonnes to LEO if it flies without recovery in mind -- no landing legs, no first-stage fuel reserve for landing etc. This makes for a more expensive launch cost.
Burning fossil-carbon-derived plastic adds CO2 to the atmosphere. Burying it in landfills unburnt means it doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere. Saying that it's likely that the plastic will decompose slowly underground but it will take decades or centuries to form methane and eventually CO2 and escape into the atmosphere which is a good thing in the medium term. We're still heading for 450ppm CO2 and beyond in a couple of decades time.
We have trillions of tonnes of fossil carbon we can dig up and burn in the form of coal and lignite which can't easily be turned into plastic, assuming we want to continue committing slow suicide by fossil carbon combustion. Burning fossil-carbon plastic as well just speeds things up.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Landfill would be a better bet. Most packaging in recycling bins is either made from fossil-carbon sources like oil or natural gas or from trees and plants like paper and cardboard. Burying it sequesters that carbon and doesn't immediately add to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere whereas burning it does.
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The US provides about 9% of the funding for ITER, nowhere near half. That funding is subject to political infighting -- for example the US wanted the ITER prototype to be built in Japan, the rest of the consortium other than the US and Japan wanted it built in Cadarache in France. When the invasion of Iraq kicked off and France refused to support Bush's Excellent Arabian Adventure the US government shut down funding contributions to ITER and bailed from the consortium but rejoined later. Currently the US is in arrears with its payments to the ITER project.
From Physics Today: "Since rejoining ITER in 2003, the US has never come close to providing annual contribution levels commensurate with its 9% ownership share. Through FY 2017, it has contributed a total of $1.1 billion. ITER spokesperson Laban Coblentz says the US made no cash contribution to support operations at the French site in FY 2016 or 2017, and the unpaid balance for the two years stands at $65 million. In addition, the US in-kind contribution in 2017 fell short by about $50 million. Five member nations - China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia - have the same ownership share as the US, and Coblentz says those countries are pulling their weight. As the host, the European Union is paying nearly half of ITER's cost."
America's political instability with its whipsaw changes in government makes it a liability in long-term international scientific collaborations for this reason.
ITER isn't a demonstration fusion power reactor, it's a fusion testbed built to power-reactor scale in terms of dimensions and energies. It's expected to show energy returns of 10 to 1 (so-called Q factor) sustained for hundreds or thousands of seconds. Whether it succeeds or not in an unknown, in part that's why it's being built. One school of thought says going big simplifies things and makes sustainable plasma fusion easier, another more pessimistic school says going big reveals more problems. The "E" in ITER stands for "Experimental" after all.
If ITER shows tokamak fusion is practical then comes DEMO, a fusion reactor that will produce electrical power. Once the bugs are shaken out of that hardware then comes PROTO, the first-generation commercial fusion generating plant. That's the current road-plan, whether it survives reality is another matter.
ITER's "first light" should be in 2025 or so if all goes well. It probably won't though.
You may be the only person on the planet left with a working XP 64-bit system because for sure MS sold damn few of them. As for "software that issues TRIM commands" that sounds awfully like a third-party bodge since TRIM was never part of the XP file system for either 32-bit or 64-bit versions.
Theses are things that can be fixed without bloating the entire OS though.
MS tried that, to make a MkII version of XP to fix a number of problems including user space control, security enhancements, improved networking etc. It was called Vista. What a dog.
The real replacement for XP was "bloated" Win 7. Funny thing though, when folks tested Win 7 against XP, despite the claims of "bloat" they found that on similar/identical hardware Win 7 ran a little faster or about the same as Win XP, ditto for programs written for XP run under Win 7 but it had TRIM, it had usable user control and privilege elevation, 64-bit internals, better USB support, better everything really. Time moves on and patching and plastering over the cracks in old beloved code that is no longer fit for use gets to be a waste of time and resources.
The Windows XP filesystem doesn't support TRIM for SSDs to allow for wear levelling so it will tend to write specific sectors at fixed addresses repeatedly causing the SSD to wear out prematurely. WinXP has a maximum disc volume of 2TB and 32-bit XP has a maximum RAM utilisation of under 4GB. There are reasons other than problems with security to move away from XP.
I've put Windows 7 on a couple of netbooks after adding SSDs to them. They have limited RAM (which I also maxed out) and low-power CPUs but they run quite well, leveraging the SSD's speed even though the HDD controller only supports SATA1. I tried putting Linux on them (Cinnamon and Xubuntu among others) but there was a problem with the GMA945 graphics drivers that meant they ran in emulated VGA mode, not a pretty sight. Win 7 just worked.
Actually GMT is consistent and doesn't change. It's not UTC but it's close (insert smiley emoji here).
Britain, the home of GMT is currently, at least for the next 12 hours or so, on British Summer Time (BST), an hour ahead of GMT and UTC. The "clocks go back" Sunday 28th October at 02:00 in the morning resulting in a return to us being on GMT.
I can finally run all the tabs I would ever want!
Firefox sez: "Hold my beer and watch this!"
George Webb's story is that all of the Russian HEU was actually used in naval reactors
That would be a neat trick since the HEU was downblended to low-enrichment uranium (LEU) in Russia before it was shipped to the US. America paid for this to be done in-situ in Russia, mostly to take the HEU out of possible black-market hands. Nice conspiracy theory though.
On this planet, in this reality, it's Pu created by the US government for military purposes and now surplus to requirement due to a massive downsizing of the nuclear weapons it possesses and has ready for use or stockpiled. The Russians are dealing with their own overstock of Pu-239, they have a reactor and existing reprocessing lines that should be able to turn it into usable fuel to burn it.
Soviet-era weapons-grade Pu isn't particularly radioactive, any more than US weapons-grade Pu is. The USN uses a slightly higher purity grade of Pu-239 since SSBN missiles share working spaces with sailors compared to siloed missiles and free-fall bombs operated by the Air Force.
The US doesn't buy Pu244 from anyone. It did source some Pu238 for RTGs from the Russians a while back but the Russians stopped selling it after existing stocks of US-made Pu238 were redirected to military/spook use. The US is restarting the manufacture of Pu-238 in new safer facilities compared to the older deathtrap production lines which were shut down a while back.
Pure Pu-239 is noticeably radioactive with a half life of about 86,000 years, active enough to be warm to the touch. It will quite happily make a Geiger counter rattle.
Candu is magic, it can do anything. Making oddball fuel like MOX for a Candu or any light-water reactor is a nightmare of regulatory oversight, delays, cost escalations and regular lightly-enriched fuel which meets current regulations is cheap as chips now and for the forseeable future.
The perfect solution would be a reactor that can be fuelled with metallic weapons-grade plutonium without reprocessing it, downblending it or converting it to an oxide formulation. The BN-800 fast-spectrum reactor the Russians are operating can theoretically use metallic fuels including Pu-239 but it's in Russia, there's only one of them, it could only burn a few dozen kilogrammes of Pu-239 per operating cycle of a few months and did I mention it's in Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Construction of the MOX plant was started a long time back, Google Google... The project started in 2000, construction was started in 2007 under Bush the Younger. I recall that Congress pulled the plug on financing it a couple of times before restoring the funding keeping it limping along, probably for pork reasons -- South Carolina where the plant was being built has two Republican Senators. The project was doomed from the start pretty much.
The 34 tonnes of surplus Pu is US-made, it's not Russian despite what someone further down in the comments suggests/insists. The ex-Soviet highly-enriched uranium downblended and purchased in the Megatonnes to Megawatts project was easy to deal with but there was no intention to buy in weapons-grade Pu from the Russians. The deal with them was that both sides would work to take their stock of surplus weapons-grade Pu out of possible use permanently and making MOX fuel and burning it in commercial reactors was the best option agreed by both sides. The US had no experience with MOX, no facilities to make MOX and no commercial customers for MOX even if it could be produced. They couldn't even give it away...
I'm sure that you don't obsess about filling your car with extra passengers and luggage and making sure that you burn all of your fuel when you go on a car trip, right?
I don't hire a 38-tonne 18-wheeler to move some furniture, I'd hire a box van instead. It's cheaper. I don't own a car and if and when I do hire one I get something that fits my needs of the moment, not a BFO pickup truck to go to the supermarket. In the same way the DoD buys rides, not rockets and chooses from a golfbag of available launch vehicles. Smaller DoD satellites go up on Falcon 9 and Atlas and Deltas (assorted variants). The biggies go up on the Delta 4 Heavy and eventually (maybe) the Falcon Heavy.
There isn't a singular payload existing or planned, either military, commercial or scientific that the Falcon Heavy and the BFR is the only choice for due to throw weight. Building packages to fit into a 20-tonne-to-LEO straitjacket means multiple launchers from multiple sources can do the job.
Too Much Rocket means a fifty-tonne-to-LEO capability when the DoD's payloads top out at 24 tonnes, a fuelled-up spy NRO satellite basically. It's what the Delta 4 Heavy was designed to launch, pretty much. It's possible that Falcon Heavy might get some of those 24-tonne contracts and fly with recoverable boosters but the DoD/NRO only launch one large satellite a year at most.
It might be possible to ride-share a NRO bird with other satellites on Falcon Heavy to use up the surplus capacity but that leads to security issues at the payload integration stage of the launch process.
I bet they have mapped out portions of the ocean, but it is portions of the ocean where the subs want to hide.
They map everywhere underwater on the off-chance that a blue-water sub could end up in that region sometime in the future. The idea is not to hide the sub among sea-bottom features but to allow the sonar operators to figure out exactly where the sub is by comparing what's below the sub to the maps without coming to the surface to get a GPS lock. Inertial navigation systems lose accuracy over time, the sea bottom shapes don't change quickly.
The main line between Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland has recently been converted to overhead-electric track. Previously diesel multiple unit (DMU) trains ran on this busy service.
Electrification of this service ran into problems with several tunnels on the line originally bored in the mid-1800s for smaller steam traction. The innovative solution was to lower the floor of the tunnels to take the taller train-plus-pantograph and accommodate the overhead catenary structures. It was still a significant engineering task but much less than raising the height of the tunnels or boring new tunnels in their place.
The result is faster and cleaner trains and shorter journey times.
"Wet and windy" tends to be in the spring ("March winds and April showers") and autumn here in the UK. We often get long lulls with little or no wind in the mid-winter when it's dark eighteen hours of the day. A quick check on the Gridwatch site's records for 30 days between mid-December 2017 and mid-January 2018 shows peak wind generation of about 9.7GW (at 2017-12-31 13:15:33) but there was a lull lasting about 30 hours when the wind contribution to the grid was less than 1GW (2018-01-11 through 2018-01-12). During that dip the lowest wind-generated output was about 280MW.
Hope and wishful thinking doesn't keep the lights on.
A number of river-sited reactors have curtailed output recently because they have limits on how much they can raise the river water temperatures with their condenser loops. This is also true for coal-fired and even solar thermal plants which use river water for a cold-sink. It's possible to use land-based evaporative systems for the cold-sink condensers but that uses up water and costs more so it's not common except in desert conditions where solar thermal generating plants like Tonopah deplete the local aquifers for that purpose.
Britain has about 15GW or so of grid-connected wind generating capacity, including the new offshore wind farms being fellated in the press recently. Via an online monitor I've seen these grid wind turbines peak at 10GW at times (usually when storms are blowing through). I've also seen it produce only 50MW total for several hours at a time when a lull settles across most of the country. It averages about 3GW over a year but that's an average, it swings a lot and there's no certainty that it will produce lots of electricity when we need lots of electricity. Vast overcapacity of wind would help alleviate that risk. Several hundred GW of turbines would be a good start but that would cost a lot of money to build and maintain and replace after a couple of decades.
And it cannot be throttled up or down to match need quickly.
I don't expect the two reactors at Hinkley C to be throttled at all, they'll run flat out 100% of their uptime since they'll only produce 15% of Britain's electricity demand at its lowest point (midsummer Sunday nighttime). There are a few other existing reactors providing a predictable 7GW or so but most of the on-demand generating capacity is met by fast-start combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) which can be brought on-line quickly to meet demand. Most of that 7GW of existing nuclear capacity is going away in the next ten to twenty years as the older AGRs are taken out of service -- there will be a single 1100MW PWR built in the 1990s left operating after the AGRs are shut down until Hinkley Point C comes on-line.
Having too much capacity is a totally different and much less serious problem than having too little (blackouts, rationing etc.) and weather-dependent renewables can't guarantee sufficiency to the same level that nuclear can.
I live in Ireland and don't want any radiation in the sea here.
News that may shock you, I know but seawater is naturally radioactive, more than 10,000 Bequerels per cubic metre. Most of that activity is due to naturally-occurring potassium-40, the rest tends to be from various decay products from uranium-bearing rocks and other natural materials. A couple of Bq per cubic metre in seawater is from man-made sources, usually remnants from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Some more is waste isotopes dumped into the sewers by hospitals, ending up in outfalls near the coast in places like Boston (there was a panic by some people when I-131 was found in Boston harbour soon after the Fukushima reactors overheated and leaked radioactive material into the Pacific. It turned out to come from a hospital which didn't have to sequester radioactive waste the way a nuclear power plant legally has to).
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, (etc.)
Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
Offshore wind farm power availability is about 30% of dataplate so this new facility will produce, on average about 250MW, not the headline attention-grabbing absolute maximum of 659 MW. Some days it will produce a lot more, some days a lot less even if we need the electricity right then. The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions. Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.
Heisei calendaring appears on official documents, train tickets etc. (quick check, a Japan Rail reserved-seat ticket I was issued back on the 12th of May this year has the date of issue as 30.-5.12, that is Heisei year 30, month 5, day 12). Nearly all common date expressions in Japan use Christian Era numbering though.
The Ariane 5 that launched four Galileo satellites yesterday is the ES variant, capable of putting about 21 tonnes into LEO. It's only flown that particular profile for ATV service missions to the ISS. This is the second ES-variant Galileo mission flown, putting a carrier with four satellites in elliptical orbit which is then circularised at GPS altitude (about 20,000km). Originally the Galileo satellites were being launched two at a time by Soyz-Fregat rockets but one launch went wrong and ESA decided to take the rest of the launches "in-house". It worked out cheaper to fly four satellites at a time on the heaviest-lift variant of the Ariane V compared to two at a time on the less-capable ECA variant.
As for the Falcon 9 FT it can only, IIRC, deliver 20-odd tonnes to LEO if it flies without recovery in mind -- no landing legs, no first-stage fuel reserve for landing etc. This makes for a more expensive launch cost.
Burning fossil-carbon-derived plastic adds CO2 to the atmosphere. Burying it in landfills unburnt means it doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere. Saying that it's likely that the plastic will decompose slowly underground but it will take decades or centuries to form methane and eventually CO2 and escape into the atmosphere which is a good thing in the medium term. We're still heading for 450ppm CO2 and beyond in a couple of decades time.
We have trillions of tonnes of fossil carbon we can dig up and burn in the form of coal and lignite which can't easily be turned into plastic, assuming we want to continue committing slow suicide by fossil carbon combustion. Burning fossil-carbon plastic as well just speeds things up.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Landfill would be a better bet. Most packaging in recycling bins is either made from fossil-carbon sources like oil or natural gas or from trees and plants like paper and cardboard. Burying it sequesters that carbon and doesn't immediately add to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere whereas burning it does.
If you can't beat a spammer to death with it I won't type on it. Model M FTW.