Nuclear can be ramped up and down. It's not as fast as a natural gas plant but it can do fast load-follow especially if the load is highly predictable. Even modern coal power plants can do it to a degree and theoretically a coal gasification plant could ramp up and down as quickly as a natural gas power plant.
https://www.dissentmagazine.or... To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that could have backed up wind and solar are being shuttered, additional coal and gas plants must be built to take their place—as we see happening now. Those coal and gas plants will emit large quantities of greenhouse gases even when idling in standby mode.... Onshore wind is currently guaranteed at least €89.3 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for the first five years of operation, after which the tariff resets to about €49, a little above market rate. Offshore wind will get €150 per MWh for the first twelve years before a downward reset, with long extensions if the facility is located more than twelve miles from shore or where water is at least twenty meters deep. Photovoltaic solar gets roughly €120-180 per MWh, depending on the size of the rig, for a full twenty years. The tariffs are funded by a “renewable energy surcharge” added to electricity bills. A utility will pay a FIT of, say, €180 for a megawatt-hour of solar power; it will then sell that electricity on the wholesale market for perhaps €45 and charge the difference to the renewables surcharge. ... Even as the Energiewende staggers under exorbitant costs, renewables boosters tout its success in lowering electricity prices. The strange truth is, they’re not wrong. Tides of wind and solar electricity are forcing down prices on European wholesale markets and eroding the profits of conventional plants. French business leaders have complained about the competitive advantage their German rivals get because their renewable power is now cheaper than France’s nuclear electricity. Is renewable power winning a price war with Big Fossil and Nuclear? Not really. Germany’s feed-in tariffs disguise the fact that intermittent wind and solar power isn’t cheap at all—although it is often worthless. German grid operators are legally required to buy all the electricity wind turbines and solar panels produce, demand or no demand, at prices far above market rates. Having bought it, they then have to get rid of it, because an excess of electricity supply will crash the grid. So they dump it on the wholesale electricity market at bargain-basement rates. Midday solar dumps in sunny weather particularly eat into the profits of conventional plants by pushing down prices during times of elevated demand. These subsidies and market distortions do not yield a systemic lowering of electricity costs. They are simply transfers from German households that drastically overpay on surcharges to renewable generators—and to electricity-hogging industries that are exempt from surcharges but benefit from lower wholesale electricity prices when wind and solar flood the market.
The delays in China were basically one-two year delays while all the new reactors being built were reviewed post-Fukushima. It had little to do with construction problems. There is only one reactor family with major construction delays which can be imputable to the design and construction right now and that is EPR.
In Ancient Athens quite a lot of the population owned slaves and the town had silver mines so the government had plenty of income. People got paid, among other things, for attending the Agora i.e. the parliament every day or to judge cases (back then the judges were chosen by random lots).
So why not pay people to attend some kind of new lower chamber of parliament, like online, every day or something like that instead of the UBI?
The only problem I have is games. The rest of the stuff I use is usually also available on Linux (on purpose, I choose OSS applications wherever I can). Like Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, VLC, etc.
There are radiation resistant electronics but it isn't something you'll find off a shelf. Plus if its a hot neutron source pretty much no electronics they I know of are going to work properly.
Still one would expect they had a more accurate and cost effective way to measure the level of radiation before sending an expensive robot in.
Lies. "nuclear in Europe" is not "insanely expensive". It's just EPR that's the problem. The remaining 2nd generation nuclear reactors work just fine and cheap thank you. As should a decent design like AP1000 once they get experience building them. EPR is just too complicated (too many parts) and people already knew it when the design was announced.
They had nothing to do with the accident per se. But they certainly inflated and hyped the problem way beyond reason and caused Japan's economy to sink deeper into depression as a result for the (needless) total shutdown. Yet the reactors are being restarted. It's not like there are a lot of economically viable alternatives for a country like Japan.
Tell that to Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. They have a lot of solar exposure, sometimes they even flare their natural gas, and they are still building nuclear reactors. Last I heard the Abu Dhabi reactor construction was also on schedule and they should start operating this year.
The difference? They subcontracted the construction to the South Koreans, who actually have recent experience building reactors, compared to other countries which haven't built one in decades and lost a lot of the know-how (leading to mistakes and missed estimates).
There was also a tendency for huge enclosed landed estates before the Roman Empire fell. The thing is, if the collapse is large enough, it doesn't matter where they run to, because the shit will hit them there as well.
It then mentions that these things should be used to avoid complexity in certain situations. goto -- error handling
Exceptions do this better if your language supports them. multiple inheritance -- is generally too useful to give up. implement with interfaces and be careful
Languages like Java don't support class multiple inheritance only interface multiple inheritance yes. For a reason. Class multiple inheritance is bonkers. eval -- JSON, HTML, math...
It has its uses but it's a security hazard. recursion -- trees, some list algorithms... recommend to implement imperative style mostly though (article assumes the language can't handle recursion) Recursion can provide an easier to read algorithm which is good for prototyping but typically it uses too much stack memory and its better to manually handle the stack yourself if you need one. On modern pervasively MT architectures you should minimize the amount of per thread memory to keep the program running inside the processor caches and typically recursive algorithms are a bad idea because of this.
In the long run if your product isn't good enough you'll lose in the overall computing market. It doesn't necessarily mean your company won't be profitable. IBM has been with us for God knows how long and Microsoft is headed the same way.
They don't pay the whole taxes on the profits they made in the countries where the business was conducted. They basically claim an outrageous amount of money on bogus "IP licensing" expenses to reduce their stated profits, paid to some other corporate shell entity they also own, which they then funnel through a place like Ireland where the "IP license" shell company is supposedly located which might have like a lawyer on retainer and a PO box.
Corporate income taxes are paid on profits. If they actually paid high salaries and made a lot of investments (i.e. expenses) there wouldn't be much profits.
The tax rates for the rich back then were a whole lot higher than they are today. Plus GDP increases when doing a lot of construction like highways. It's one reason why the Chinese GDP keeps growing to quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear can be ramped up and down. It's not as fast as a natural gas plant but it can do fast load-follow especially if the load is highly predictable. Even modern coal power plants can do it to a degree and theoretically a coal gasification plant could ramp up and down as quickly as a natural gas power plant.
https://www.dissentmagazine.or... ... ...
To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that could have backed up wind and solar are being shuttered, additional coal and gas plants must be built to take their place—as we see happening now. Those coal and gas plants will emit large quantities of greenhouse gases even when idling in standby mode.
Onshore wind is currently guaranteed at least €89.3 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for the first five years of operation, after which the tariff resets to about €49, a little above market rate. Offshore wind will get €150 per MWh for the first twelve years before a downward reset, with long extensions if the facility is located more than twelve miles from shore or where water is at least twenty meters deep. Photovoltaic solar gets roughly €120-180 per MWh, depending on the size of the rig, for a full twenty years. The tariffs are funded by a “renewable energy surcharge” added to electricity bills. A utility will pay a FIT of, say, €180 for a megawatt-hour of solar power; it will then sell that electricity on the wholesale market for perhaps €45 and charge the difference to the renewables surcharge.
Even as the Energiewende staggers under exorbitant costs, renewables boosters tout its success in lowering electricity prices. The strange truth is, they’re not wrong. Tides of wind and solar electricity are forcing down prices on European wholesale markets and eroding the profits of conventional plants. French business leaders have complained about the competitive advantage their German rivals get because their renewable power is now cheaper than France’s nuclear electricity.
Is renewable power winning a price war with Big Fossil and Nuclear? Not really. Germany’s feed-in tariffs disguise the fact that intermittent wind and solar power isn’t cheap at all—although it is often worthless. German grid operators are legally required to buy all the electricity wind turbines and solar panels produce, demand or no demand, at prices far above market rates. Having bought it, they then have to get rid of it, because an excess of electricity supply will crash the grid. So they dump it on the wholesale electricity market at bargain-basement rates. Midday solar dumps in sunny weather particularly eat into the profits of conventional plants by pushing down prices during times of elevated demand.
These subsidies and market distortions do not yield a systemic lowering of electricity costs. They are simply transfers from German households that drastically overpay on surcharges to renewable generators—and to electricity-hogging industries that are exempt from surcharges but benefit from lower wholesale electricity prices when wind and solar flood the market.
I've been hearing that for two decades now. It still isn't true.
Yet nuclear is still subsidizing the renewables in Germany and elsewhere last time I looked at it. Funny uh?
The delays in China were basically one-two year delays while all the new reactors being built were reviewed post-Fukushima. It had little to do with construction problems. There is only one reactor family with major construction delays which can be imputable to the design and construction right now and that is EPR.
I was actually more interested in fuzzy logic back then.
In Ancient Athens quite a lot of the population owned slaves and the town had silver mines so the government had plenty of income. People got paid, among other things, for attending the Agora i.e. the parliament every day or to judge cases (back then the judges were chosen by random lots).
So why not pay people to attend some kind of new lower chamber of parliament, like online, every day or something like that instead of the UBI?
Well the main reason is the desktop APIs are not good enough and the ABIs aren't stable.
But then again the Windows APIs are even worse and Microsoft doesn't respect backwards compatibility as much as they used to.
MS Office isn't even compatible with itself among different versions.
Really? Last I heard Apple applications break with OS upgrades quite easily.
The only problem I have is games. The rest of the stuff I use is usually also available on Linux (on purpose, I choose OSS applications wherever I can). Like Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, VLC, etc.
SAP is a piece of shit. That last I heard usually ran on Linux or UNIX based servers. So is your problem with a (probably) web based client?
If you think poorly written software won't crash in Windows I have a bridge to sell you.
What? Android rules the smartphone market, while Linux rules the server market, and the supercomputer market.
MS had to give Windows 10 away so people would use it.
What are you smoking?
Ever heard of an EMP?
There are radiation resistant electronics but it isn't something you'll find off a shelf. Plus if its a hot neutron source pretty much no electronics they I know of are going to work properly.
Still one would expect they had a more accurate and cost effective way to measure the level of radiation before sending an expensive robot in.
Lies. "nuclear in Europe" is not "insanely expensive". It's just EPR that's the problem. The remaining 2nd generation nuclear reactors work just fine and cheap thank you. As should a decent design like AP1000 once they get experience building them. EPR is just too complicated (too many parts) and people already knew it when the design was announced.
They had nothing to do with the accident per se. But they certainly inflated and hyped the problem way beyond reason and caused Japan's economy to sink deeper into depression as a result for the (needless) total shutdown. Yet the reactors are being restarted. It's not like there are a lot of economically viable alternatives for a country like Japan.
Tell that to Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. They have a lot of solar exposure, sometimes they even flare their natural gas, and they are still building nuclear reactors. Last I heard the Abu Dhabi reactor construction was also on schedule and they should start operating this year.
The difference? They subcontracted the construction to the South Koreans, who actually have recent experience building reactors, compared to other countries which haven't built one in decades and lost a lot of the know-how (leading to mistakes and missed estimates).
There was also a tendency for huge enclosed landed estates before the Roman Empire fell. The thing is, if the collapse is large enough, it doesn't matter where they run to, because the shit will hit them there as well.
It then mentions that these things should be used to avoid complexity in certain situations.
goto -- error handling
Exceptions do this better if your language supports them.
multiple inheritance -- is generally too useful to give up. implement with interfaces and be careful
Languages like Java don't support class multiple inheritance only interface multiple inheritance yes. For a reason. Class multiple inheritance is bonkers.
eval -- JSON, HTML, math...
It has its uses but it's a security hazard.
recursion -- trees, some list algorithms... recommend to implement imperative style mostly though (article assumes the language can't handle recursion)
Recursion can provide an easier to read algorithm which is good for prototyping but typically it uses too much stack memory and its better to manually handle the stack yourself if you need one. On modern pervasively MT architectures you should minimize the amount of per thread memory to keep the program running inside the processor caches and typically recursive algorithms are a bad idea because of this.
IMO class inheritance is useless. Interfaces and properties are a good idea though.
In the long run if your product isn't good enough you'll lose in the overall computing market. It doesn't necessarily mean your company won't be profitable. IBM has been with us for God knows how long and Microsoft is headed the same way.
They don't pay the whole taxes on the profits they made in the countries where the business was conducted. They basically claim an outrageous amount of money on bogus "IP licensing" expenses to reduce their stated profits, paid to some other corporate shell entity they also own, which they then funnel through a place like Ireland where the "IP license" shell company is supposedly located which might have like a lawyer on retainer and a PO box.
Corporate income taxes are paid on profits. If they actually paid high salaries and made a lot of investments (i.e. expenses) there wouldn't be much profits.
The tax rates for the rich back then were a whole lot higher than they are today. Plus GDP increases when doing a lot of construction like highways. It's one reason why the Chinese GDP keeps growing to quickly.