Makes sense. Attempting to replace physics with economics is indeed somewhat warped magical thinking. On the other thread where you are asking for an answer could you please explain WTF your actual question is - I can't find it for the noise.
Please rephrase it into a sensible question I can understand instead of the tangential ramblings you have a few posts above. Take things seriously and you'll get serious answers.
or their refugees which are likely to head south, not north to China
There are already a lot of NK refugees in China and they have been going there for many years. I've spoken to one. There's an entire "state" of people who speak Korean next to Russia and NK. When 1970's China is the promised land of plenty you know that the place they came from is well and truly horrible.
With respect, we've had almost free fuel with coal and oil for a long time but other issues of course arise. Please take things seriously instead of going off into fantasy land.
Then you could acheive the same end by having a sprawling field of 'cargo container' style datacenter organization
Yes. Now you are getting the idea on how that big empty space with used as a slow chimney can be modelled. The temperature difference is going to be of the order of 10C between the back of the servers and ambient - it's going to slowly rise without heating up much and with all that empty space it may as well be outside.
So not a disaster - but I never said it was a better idea than just sticking the things in a row with a roof over the top. That "chicken coop" server farm mentioned here some time ago is more practical but redrawing old ideas is unlikely to win awards for concept drawings:)
If it was me I'd probably have some layering to avoid long runs of stuff and it would be a big ugly vertical rectangular or square thing without much depth (instead of a big ugly cylinder), but I'm an engineer not an architect.
Are you really going there? Are you really trying to suggest that fuel is the only issue? How about I hold off the deserved torrent of insults and let you get back within the vicinity of reality and then we can continue.
I only have that service in the middle of the night because we have a base load model with big thermal units. It does not make sense otherwise because a lot of that heat is lost before I wake up and use hot water. It is a case of wasting energy for the sake of convenience. Hot water on demand requires less energy and is more convenient but costs more due to the incentive designed to encourage people to use electricity at times of low demand. As smaller units are becoming more viable that model is challenged. Base load is just an artifact of an economy of scale that relied on huge units and tried to fit demand to a square wave instead of a curve from whenever people actually wanted to use electricity.
So to sum up, that entire usage model is already being "rethought" and that has been in progress for probably most of the life of this website.
It's all electricity consumption. Currently my domestic electricity consumption is shaped to match supply because the water is heated in the middle of the night due to a need to give a large thermal base load power station something to do in the middle of the night. I get a discount due to allowing this shaping.
The maths is incredibly rubbery since it depends on choosing one of some very different reactor designs with very different fuel needs and a lot of the calculations get based on estimates of reserves from as far back as the 1960s. I doubt that any of the "decade until depletion" numbers are worth anything since most were worked out before some very major reserves such as Olympic Dam were even roughly explored. So personally I think the numbers are a case of using the fuel consumption of reactors worse than we would ever bother to build to reserves that are less than have already been explored. If we are ever going to build a lot of reactors it's going to be based on a series of improving prototypes and not the 1970s crap we have now. Why bother building a thousand TMIs painted green? We can do better given a few pilot projects.
On the other side, while there is a lot of Uranium in the ground a great deal of it is very deep - bottom of the crust deep. That's never included in the reserves number but is in the % of the element in the crust number.
Keep in mind that such storage systems are incredibly lossy so such a suggestion of buffering all production is not something that can be taken seriously. Yes I know about pumped hydro. I have worked with pumped hydro. It is a very lossy system since those pump motors are nowhere near 100% efficient.
The GP is suggesting following the demand instead of shaping demand to match supply. Everything else is your own baggage taken to a ridiculous extreme.
Even if thermal coal for electricity generation goes away the home market is still likely to get enough cheap coal for those boilers, stoves etc from lower grade metallurgical coal. As probably a lot of people here (but not all) would know, coal is used in steelmaking not just for the heat but for the chemical reaction with the iron ore. There is no easier or "greener" way to do it since using hydrogen or whatever to reduce the ore isn't going to add carbon to turn iron into steel. In Brazil a wood burning blast furnace ran for a while and consumed astonishing amounts of wood - not "green" at all. Most comparable metals require a lot more energy to produce than steel, so forget aluminium and titanium etc for general use.
The world coal price and a pile of other things confirms it. While it may be due to temporary economic factors or who knows what the current reality is that China is both importing less coal and digging less of the stuff up. Next year - who knows - but the GP is correct. Take it from someone who's job depends on coal and oil production and exploration.
The glut is primarily Saudi politics attempting to economically weaken Iran
And to weaken the United States shale oil production. Isn't it funny how they waited until so much money was invested before undercutting shale oil to less than the cost of production. Shale oil costs a LOT more to extract than the oil the Iranians are producing. The USA is getting hurt a lot more by this than Iran and Russia.
That's what an "A.I." made of lookup tables or pattern matching a pile of data does. I really cannot understand why they are putting this stuff forward as if it is ready to be more than just a more complicated "Eliza" toy. Use it to look stuff up ot have simple questions and answers - fine. Use it to have a conversation and expect perfect results - not a chance.
Instead of pretending to be stupid or drunk, consider that I was referring to the line "but in practice, engineers think and reason very different from scientists". What is it about you that makes you suggest such a thing? From your earlier posts I get the impression that it may be because you hate scientists intensely but maybe not engineers - how about you supply the real reason behind your strange comment so that we don't have to guess based on your posting history. How about an answer this time instead of running away rubbery figures boy?
What does that have to do with it? There's been some massive leaps forward in genetic engineering over the past five years, climb out from under that rock and you may find out enough things about the topic you are discussing that we will cease laughing at you. Never heard of Sagan - WTF? That's like never hearing of Reagan.
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Makes sense.
I've seen a runway site sitting under huge amounts of dirt to compress it for a year or two.
Makes sense. Attempting to replace physics with economics is indeed somewhat warped magical thinking.
On the other thread where you are asking for an answer could you please explain WTF your actual question is - I can't find it for the noise.
Please rephrase it into a sensible question I can understand instead of the tangential ramblings you have a few posts above.
Take things seriously and you'll get serious answers.
There are already a lot of NK refugees in China and they have been going there for many years. I've spoken to one. There's an entire "state" of people who speak Korean next to Russia and NK. When 1970's China is the promised land of plenty you know that the place they came from is well and truly horrible.
Sneezing maybe, but they've fired shells into SK and kidnapped Japanese in the past :(
No.
Why are you bothering to comment on this? You are wasting your time and the time of others with ignorant idiocy.
Magic?
With respect, we've had almost free fuel with coal and oil for a long time but other issues of course arise.
Please take things seriously instead of going off into fantasy land.
Yes.
:)
Now you are getting the idea on how that big empty space with used as a slow chimney can be modelled. The temperature difference is going to be of the order of 10C between the back of the servers and ambient - it's going to slowly rise without heating up much and with all that empty space it may as well be outside.
So not a disaster - but I never said it was a better idea than just sticking the things in a row with a roof over the top.
That "chicken coop" server farm mentioned here some time ago is more practical but redrawing old ideas is unlikely to win awards for concept drawings
If it was me I'd probably have some layering to avoid long runs of stuff and it would be a big ugly vertical rectangular or square thing without much depth (instead of a big ugly cylinder), but I'm an engineer not an architect.
Are you really going there? Are you really trying to suggest that fuel is the only issue?
How about I hold off the deserved torrent of insults and let you get back within the vicinity of reality and then we can continue.
I only have that service in the middle of the night because we have a base load model with big thermal units. It does not make sense otherwise because a lot of that heat is lost before I wake up and use hot water. It is a case of wasting energy for the sake of convenience. Hot water on demand requires less energy and is more convenient but costs more due to the incentive designed to encourage people to use electricity at times of low demand.
As smaller units are becoming more viable that model is challenged. Base load is just an artifact of an economy of scale that relied on huge units and tried to fit demand to a square wave instead of a curve from whenever people actually wanted to use electricity.
So to sum up, that entire usage model is already being "rethought" and that has been in progress for probably most of the life of this website.
Sophisticated lookup tables then - consider what learning neural networks actually at when it gets down to it!
In a country with hundreds of millions of people there are a lot of "one counterexamples".
It's all electricity consumption. Currently my domestic electricity consumption is shaped to match supply because the water is heated in the middle of the night due to a need to give a large thermal base load power station something to do in the middle of the night. I get a discount due to allowing this shaping.
The maths is incredibly rubbery since it depends on choosing one of some very different reactor designs with very different fuel needs and a lot of the calculations get based on estimates of reserves from as far back as the 1960s. I doubt that any of the "decade until depletion" numbers are worth anything since most were worked out before some very major reserves such as Olympic Dam were even roughly explored.
So personally I think the numbers are a case of using the fuel consumption of reactors worse than we would ever bother to build to reserves that are less than have already been explored. If we are ever going to build a lot of reactors it's going to be based on a series of improving prototypes and not the 1970s crap we have now. Why bother building a thousand TMIs painted green? We can do better given a few pilot projects.
On the other side, while there is a lot of Uranium in the ground a great deal of it is very deep - bottom of the crust deep. That's never included in the reserves number but is in the % of the element in the crust number.
Keep in mind that such storage systems are incredibly lossy so such a suggestion of buffering all production is not something that can be taken seriously.
Yes I know about pumped hydro. I have worked with pumped hydro. It is a very lossy system since those pump motors are nowhere near 100% efficient.
The GP is suggesting following the demand instead of shaping demand to match supply. Everything else is your own baggage taken to a ridiculous extreme.
Even if thermal coal for electricity generation goes away the home market is still likely to get enough cheap coal for those boilers, stoves etc from lower grade metallurgical coal. As probably a lot of people here (but not all) would know, coal is used in steelmaking not just for the heat but for the chemical reaction with the iron ore. There is no easier or "greener" way to do it since using hydrogen or whatever to reduce the ore isn't going to add carbon to turn iron into steel. In Brazil a wood burning blast furnace ran for a while and consumed astonishing amounts of wood - not "green" at all. Most comparable metals require a lot more energy to produce than steel, so forget aluminium and titanium etc for general use.
The world coal price and a pile of other things confirms it.
While it may be due to temporary economic factors or who knows what the current reality is that China is both importing less coal and digging less of the stuff up. Next year - who knows - but the GP is correct. Take it from someone who's job depends on coal and oil production and exploration.
Not unless some untried designs are actually built and actually work perfectly first time :(
And to weaken the United States shale oil production. Isn't it funny how they waited until so much money was invested before undercutting shale oil to less than the cost of production. Shale oil costs a LOT more to extract than the oil the Iranians are producing. The USA is getting hurt a lot more by this than Iran and Russia.
That's what an "A.I." made of lookup tables or pattern matching a pile of data does. I really cannot understand why they are putting this stuff forward as if it is ready to be more than just a more complicated "Eliza" toy.
Use it to look stuff up ot have simple questions and answers - fine. Use it to have a conversation and expect perfect results - not a chance.
Just read a lot - you'll get better at it.
Attempting to just hunt down key words will lead to disappointment in the long run.
Instead of pretending to be stupid or drunk, consider that I was referring to the line "but in practice, engineers think and reason very different from scientists".
What is it about you that makes you suggest such a thing? From your earlier posts I get the impression that it may be because you hate scientists intensely but maybe not engineers - how about you supply the real reason behind your strange comment so that we don't have to guess based on your posting history.
How about an answer this time instead of running away rubbery figures boy?
What does that have to do with it? There's been some massive leaps forward in genetic engineering over the past five years, climb out from under that rock and you may find out enough things about the topic you are discussing that we will cease laughing at you.
Never heard of Sagan - WTF? That's like never hearing of Reagan.