"We're all good friends here. Equals among peers. You guys are awesome, and I have tremendous respect for what you guys are doing. Except that Jack Dorsey, what an asshole! Sad!"
This is all very congenial and friendly. But how much you want to bet that, if there is ever a public disagreement between these companies and Trump, he'll suddenly decide that the non-existent chain of command is going to suddenly turn into a twitter barrage along the lines of "do it my way, you big meanies!"
The worst a trump presidency means for the US is another foreign war, market deregulation, and more class warfare from the 1%. main street will have the same pot-holes in 8 years that it has today.
I could think of other things to add to your list. A trade war that ignites a recession. Further delay, or even backward progress, in combating climate change and developing a cleaner economy. An unrestrained, reactionary judiciary that will last for a generation. Privatization of Medicare and Social Security that breaks a multi-generational social contract and leaves seniors in abject poverty. The loss of insurance for millions of Americans due to the repeal, but halfhearted or non-existent replacement, of the ACA.
Really, I could go on, but that seems plenty. If you think that these things won't make the situation on main street any worse in 4 or 8 years, you are in for a rude surprise.
And even if you think my list is farfetched or won't have much of an impact, the things you list certainly will. Another foreign war can do plenty of harm: who do you think fights those damn wars? certainly not the ones that start them. Market deregulation lead to the 2008 Financial Crisis, which resulted in plenty of pain for ordinary Americans.
Either we see inflation — as Trump's government prints money to finance the feared "binge" (which is oh so different from the wise Government Spending of the Obama era).
Lots of otherwise "serious people" have been warning about soaring inflation as a result of fiscal proclivity for the whole of the Obama administration. This was a major argument against further stimulus spending, even during our lackluster recovery, and against investments in infrastructure. Guess what: rampant inflation hasn't happened, in large part because the dollar is still considered a haven against the rest of the world's crummy currency and economies.
that said, this situation probably won't last forever (economic situations never do), and inflation and servicing the debt will probably become problems to worry about eventually. And Trump's projected deficit spending dwarfs anything put forward by any president, ever, which will probably hasten any eventual reckoning.
I wouldn't personally place any bets on Bitcoin being a refuge, however.
I'm confused, is Trump draining or trying to fill up the swamp
If he fills it enough, it'll be an ocean.
A beautiful ocean; best in the world; believe me. And do you know what stimulates a real estate economy? Seafront property! America is going to have so much new seafront property, everyone will be able to have some. You will all win! You will win so much you will get tired of it. And when you get tired of winning, enjoy sitting on the beach. No need to thank me.
People who actually believe it are in the minority and are simpletons or mentally ill.
I wouldn't be so sure of that: there are plenty of intelligent and sane people that believe all manner of demonstrably false bullshit. Unfortunately they vote, too.
If this was the case then a slightly physically smaller battery would have solved the problem.
you are probably right. Speaking from experience, however, it is no small task to design, test, and certify a new battery design, let alone ramp up production to crank out a few million perfect copies. It's a months-long task, even for a company with the resources and experience of Samsung. When you've got a crisis going on right now, a solution 3-6 months out isn't going to save you.
The cost of electricity on a remote island is very different than just the cost of the fuel on the mainland. You have neglected the cost of getting the fuel there and the cost-of-ownership for the diesel generators.
Another approach to costing this system out, since sadly the article itself gives no numbers, is to consider the retail cost of the electricity. A handy comparison is Hawaii - another island location that, until recently anyway, generated almost all of its electricity from diesel shipped from the mainland. In Hawaii, the typical household electric rate is $0.33/kWh, or about $330/MWh. The array is 1.4 MW. Let's say that it has a capacity factor of 25% (i.e., in a 24-hr day, one could expect a total output of 1.4 MW * 24 h * 0.25 = 8.4 MWh). Over one year that's about 12,000 MWh of electricity, which would have a retail value of $4 million.
These days the cost of a large grid-tied PV system is about $2/W. Installation on Ta'u is undoubtedly more expensive, so let's roughly triple that price to $6/W. By that estimate. the panel array would have cost $8.5 million to install. The Tesla Powerpack costs about $250/kWh. Again, installation on a remote island costs more, so let's double it to $500/kWh. Their system has 6,000 kWh, representing a cost of $3 million.
By these estimates, their system cost was $11.5 million. Rated against the electricity cost, the breakeven period is just a few years. Maybe I'm off in my estimates here or there by a factor of, say, 2. But even under worst-case assumptions, I would hazard that the total cost over 20 years is lower with PV than diesel, and with far fewer long-term risks.
I guess it's easier to believe that people bought the clickbaity fake news about lizard people than to admit that you lost the election because people are sick of being lied to
Can't both be correct statements? I get that lots of people in the election were fed up, bring the roof down on their heads, and voted that way, come what may. But I also think that there were plenty of people who based that choice in no small part on things that they thought were true, but that with a small amount of critical thinking and investigation, could be demonstrated to be false.
Maybe. However, to use examples from the Donald Trump campaign, when confronted with clear cut evidence that something he said was factually incorrect, The Don would usually double down; never admit that his original statement was mistaken, or exaggerated, or simply wrong. And his supporters would take his side, and continue not only spreading a fact that was demonstrably not true, but wholeheartedly believing it themselves.
And so the American populace ends up making decisions based on Truthiness, rather than Truth. I would not be so naive as to say that this was a one-sided phenomenon, but it certainly reached new heights of boldness and baldness in the Trump campaign.
Marketing to various demographics based on race is indeed widespread, and generally valid. However, the financial services industry, have very specific laws to follow about that kind of thing, based on a long history of discrimination and abuse. Even if Facebook wasn't originally aware of that (which, frankly, they should have: every advertising and media company are aware of them, and that's what Facebook is), the people actually crafting the ads should have known.
Actually, first priority will be packing up the statue of liberty and shipping it back to France with a rude note and a poop emoji.
Why do that? It's worth a few hundred thousand dollars as scrap metal. Given the rhetoric, I expect the copper will pretty quickly turn into cartridges and bullet casings; the iron into rifle barrels.
And the plaque with the inscription "Give me your tired, your poor huddled masses..."? They can remake it into a nice "No Vacancy" sign. Gold-plated, of course, I hear Trump's got a thing for gold.
JWST will launch on an Arianne V rocket. That is one of ESA's contributions to the program.
And even if it were to be launched on a "domestic" rocket, it is far, far too late in the program to launch on SpaceX. The choice of launcher gets decided very early on in a program, because the size of the rocket (payload capacity, payload fairing size, flight characteristics, etc.) has to be accounted for during the design of the telescope. By the time they are assembling the telescope, it would be very, very difficult and expensive to switch to a different launcher.
Although superconductivity is a a binary effect - resistance is either identically zero or some positive value - there are practical limits. The critical temperature is one such limit that could be "boosted" - raising the temperature at which you can get superconductivity.
Another limitation that could be boosted is the current limit: although superconductors exhibit zero resistance, they cannot conduct infinite amounts of current. Try to move too much current through the material and you'll eventually have the superconductivity suddenly stop.
A third limitation of superconductors has to do with magnetic strength: a superconductor will stop being a superconductor in a sufficiently high magnetic field. I do not know for certain (I am not a solid-state physicist), but I suspect it is related to the limitations on current density.
One very practical result of these limitations is that the main magnet of MRI scanners remains quite large. They have gradually been able to increase the strength of the main field - 3 Tesla is pretty standard these days - but the magnets themselves are still really big, have relatively small (claustrophobic) bores, and are cooled using liquid nitrogen. "Boosting" conventional superconductors to be able to handle higher temperatures, higher current densities, and greater magnetic fields would presumably allow MRI's main magnet to be physically smaller, have a larger-diameter bore, be cooled with something other than helium, while maintaining or increasing the field strength.
Apple just made a really good implementation that didn't suck so badly that people just ignore it
Which is why GP referred to it as "the biggest breakthrough". Making "a really good implementation" ain't nothing, as evidenced by the fact that so many companies do it so poorly. The same was true with the iPod and the original iPhone: they weren't the first, but Apple's were a damn site better than what consumers had been told to accept.
I thought targets were things that were supposed to be passed - i.e., the target stays where it is and I pass it. Instead, Target passes you! Is this Soviet Russia?
That may be the average retail rate paid by you and me. But as for what the generator can sell the electricity at, you need to look at the wholesale rates. Squinting at this graphic from the EIA, you can see the wholesale rates tend to hover at around $50/MWh, or a bit less than half the figure you were using. Because nuclear tends to supply baseload, rather than peaking, power, it may even be less than that. So you should figure only about $400 million of power generated per year.
Secondly, you have neglected operating costs: those nuclear engineers don't come cheap, and neither does enriched uranium. This table from the EIA tabulates the operating cost of various power plants, priced in $/1000 ("mils") per kWh generated, which is the same as $/MWh. Operation and maintenance for a nuke plant in 2014 ran about $18/MWh, and from the table seems to be increasing pretty quickly. For the 1 GW plant you hypothesize, the operating costs end up at about $140 million / yr.
So the net revenue for the plant may only be about $250 million/year, not $947 million/year. Over the lifetime of the plant, that gets you maybe $10 billion of net revenue. That's perhaps 2x the initial investment and doesn't take into consideration things like Net Present Value, etc. All in all, it doesn't look so rosy from an investment standpoint.
There's also the cost of decommissioning, which is a number that's hard to pin down, since very few plants have been fully decommissioned. Some poking around gave me figures anywhere from 10%-100% of the initial cost. Nuke plants are supposed to be setting aside that decommissioning cost during the life of the plant, so it may be baked into the operating cost numbers already. On the other hand, those decommissioning funds, like public pensions, are generally believed to be vastly underfunded. Leaving aside the externality of sticking the cost to the public, one should assume that, in year 40 (or 60), you'll need to cough up another $500 million to $5,000 million.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is: windmills do not work that way!
Good night.
"We're all good friends here. Equals among peers. You guys are awesome, and I have tremendous respect for what you guys are doing. Except that Jack Dorsey, what an asshole! Sad!"
This is all very congenial and friendly. But how much you want to bet that, if there is ever a public disagreement between these companies and Trump, he'll suddenly decide that the non-existent chain of command is going to suddenly turn into a twitter barrage along the lines of "do it my way, you big meanies!"
come on, now. Uncle Billy ain't all that bad.
It's already working, then!
I could think of other things to add to your list. A trade war that ignites a recession. Further delay, or even backward progress, in combating climate change and developing a cleaner economy. An unrestrained, reactionary judiciary that will last for a generation. Privatization of Medicare and Social Security that breaks a multi-generational social contract and leaves seniors in abject poverty. The loss of insurance for millions of Americans due to the repeal, but halfhearted or non-existent replacement, of the ACA.
Really, I could go on, but that seems plenty. If you think that these things won't make the situation on main street any worse in 4 or 8 years, you are in for a rude surprise.
And even if you think my list is farfetched or won't have much of an impact, the things you list certainly will. Another foreign war can do plenty of harm: who do you think fights those damn wars? certainly not the ones that start them. Market deregulation lead to the 2008 Financial Crisis, which resulted in plenty of pain for ordinary Americans.
Lots of otherwise "serious people" have been warning about soaring inflation as a result of fiscal proclivity for the whole of the Obama administration. This was a major argument against further stimulus spending, even during our lackluster recovery, and against investments in infrastructure. Guess what: rampant inflation hasn't happened, in large part because the dollar is still considered a haven against the rest of the world's crummy currency and economies.
that said, this situation probably won't last forever (economic situations never do), and inflation and servicing the debt will probably become problems to worry about eventually. And Trump's projected deficit spending dwarfs anything put forward by any president, ever, which will probably hasten any eventual reckoning.
I wouldn't personally place any bets on Bitcoin being a refuge, however.
If he fills it enough, it'll be an ocean.
A beautiful ocean; best in the world; believe me. And do you know what stimulates a real estate economy? Seafront property! America is going to have so much new seafront property, everyone will be able to have some. You will all win! You will win so much you will get tired of it. And when you get tired of winning, enjoy sitting on the beach. No need to thank me.
I wouldn't be so sure of that: there are plenty of intelligent and sane people that believe all manner of demonstrably false bullshit. Unfortunately they vote, too.
you are probably right. Speaking from experience, however, it is no small task to design, test, and certify a new battery design, let alone ramp up production to crank out a few million perfect copies. It's a months-long task, even for a company with the resources and experience of Samsung. When you've got a crisis going on right now, a solution 3-6 months out isn't going to save you.
It visited where? This city in the middle of South Carolina, 100 miles from the ocean? That IS impressive!
Oh! Some country in South America, you say? Then you must mean ColOmbia.
My kingdom for some mod points!
Always reassuring to know that the back of the envelope got pretty close.
The cost of electricity on a remote island is very different than just the cost of the fuel on the mainland. You have neglected the cost of getting the fuel there and the cost-of-ownership for the diesel generators.
Another approach to costing this system out, since sadly the article itself gives no numbers, is to consider the retail cost of the electricity. A handy comparison is Hawaii - another island location that, until recently anyway, generated almost all of its electricity from diesel shipped from the mainland. In Hawaii, the typical household electric rate is $0.33/kWh, or about $330/MWh. The array is 1.4 MW. Let's say that it has a capacity factor of 25% (i.e., in a 24-hr day, one could expect a total output of 1.4 MW * 24 h * 0.25 = 8.4 MWh). Over one year that's about 12,000 MWh of electricity, which would have a retail value of $4 million.
These days the cost of a large grid-tied PV system is about $2/W. Installation on Ta'u is undoubtedly more expensive, so let's roughly triple that price to $6/W. By that estimate. the panel array would have cost $8.5 million to install. The Tesla Powerpack costs about $250/kWh. Again, installation on a remote island costs more, so let's double it to $500/kWh. Their system has 6,000 kWh, representing a cost of $3 million.
By these estimates, their system cost was $11.5 million. Rated against the electricity cost, the breakeven period is just a few years. Maybe I'm off in my estimates here or there by a factor of, say, 2. But even under worst-case assumptions, I would hazard that the total cost over 20 years is lower with PV than diesel, and with far fewer long-term risks.
Can't both be correct statements? I get that lots of people in the election were fed up, bring the roof down on their heads, and voted that way, come what may. But I also think that there were plenty of people who based that choice in no small part on things that they thought were true, but that with a small amount of critical thinking and investigation, could be demonstrated to be false.
Maybe. However, to use examples from the Donald Trump campaign, when confronted with clear cut evidence that something he said was factually incorrect, The Don would usually double down; never admit that his original statement was mistaken, or exaggerated, or simply wrong. And his supporters would take his side, and continue not only spreading a fact that was demonstrably not true, but wholeheartedly believing it themselves.
And so the American populace ends up making decisions based on Truthiness, rather than Truth. I would not be so naive as to say that this was a one-sided phenomenon, but it certainly reached new heights of boldness and baldness in the Trump campaign.
And the admins aren't responsible, nor have oversight of, the content created and executed by the schmucks at the mouse?
Marketing to various demographics based on race is indeed widespread, and generally valid. However, the financial services industry, have very specific laws to follow about that kind of thing, based on a long history of discrimination and abuse. Even if Facebook wasn't originally aware of that (which, frankly, they should have: every advertising and media company are aware of them, and that's what Facebook is), the people actually crafting the ads should have known.
Does this imply that such a feature was actually available up until now? Who the thought that would ever be permissible?
Why do that? It's worth a few hundred thousand dollars as scrap metal. Given the rhetoric, I expect the copper will pretty quickly turn into cartridges and bullet casings; the iron into rifle barrels.
And the plaque with the inscription "Give me your tired, your poor huddled masses..."? They can remake it into a nice "No Vacancy" sign. Gold-plated, of course, I hear Trump's got a thing for gold.
JWST will launch on an Arianne V rocket. That is one of ESA's contributions to the program.
And even if it were to be launched on a "domestic" rocket, it is far, far too late in the program to launch on SpaceX. The choice of launcher gets decided very early on in a program, because the size of the rocket (payload capacity, payload fairing size, flight characteristics, etc.) has to be accounted for during the design of the telescope. By the time they are assembling the telescope, it would be very, very difficult and expensive to switch to a different launcher.
Although superconductivity is a a binary effect - resistance is either identically zero or some positive value - there are practical limits. The critical temperature is one such limit that could be "boosted" - raising the temperature at which you can get superconductivity.
Another limitation that could be boosted is the current limit: although superconductors exhibit zero resistance, they cannot conduct infinite amounts of current. Try to move too much current through the material and you'll eventually have the superconductivity suddenly stop.
A third limitation of superconductors has to do with magnetic strength: a superconductor will stop being a superconductor in a sufficiently high magnetic field. I do not know for certain (I am not a solid-state physicist), but I suspect it is related to the limitations on current density.
One very practical result of these limitations is that the main magnet of MRI scanners remains quite large. They have gradually been able to increase the strength of the main field - 3 Tesla is pretty standard these days - but the magnets themselves are still really big, have relatively small (claustrophobic) bores, and are cooled using liquid nitrogen. "Boosting" conventional superconductors to be able to handle higher temperatures, higher current densities, and greater magnetic fields would presumably allow MRI's main magnet to be physically smaller, have a larger-diameter bore, be cooled with something other than helium, while maintaining or increasing the field strength.
Which is why GP referred to it as "the biggest breakthrough". Making "a really good implementation" ain't nothing, as evidenced by the fact that so many companies do it so poorly. The same was true with the iPod and the original iPhone: they weren't the first, but Apple's were a damn site better than what consumers had been told to accept.
In other news: water is wet. I would like to sell you an umbrella in case you get rained on.
I thought targets were things that were supposed to be passed - i.e., the target stays where it is and I pass it. Instead, Target passes you! Is this Soviet Russia?
That may be the average retail rate paid by you and me. But as for what the generator can sell the electricity at, you need to look at the wholesale rates. Squinting at this graphic from the EIA, you can see the wholesale rates tend to hover at around $50/MWh, or a bit less than half the figure you were using. Because nuclear tends to supply baseload, rather than peaking, power, it may even be less than that. So you should figure only about $400 million of power generated per year.
Secondly, you have neglected operating costs: those nuclear engineers don't come cheap, and neither does enriched uranium. This table from the EIA tabulates the operating cost of various power plants, priced in $/1000 ("mils") per kWh generated, which is the same as $/MWh. Operation and maintenance for a nuke plant in 2014 ran about $18/MWh, and from the table seems to be increasing pretty quickly. For the 1 GW plant you hypothesize, the operating costs end up at about $140 million / yr.
So the net revenue for the plant may only be about $250 million/year, not $947 million/year. Over the lifetime of the plant, that gets you maybe $10 billion of net revenue. That's perhaps 2x the initial investment and doesn't take into consideration things like Net Present Value, etc. All in all, it doesn't look so rosy from an investment standpoint.
There's also the cost of decommissioning, which is a number that's hard to pin down, since very few plants have been fully decommissioned. Some poking around gave me figures anywhere from 10%-100% of the initial cost. Nuke plants are supposed to be setting aside that decommissioning cost during the life of the plant, so it may be baked into the operating cost numbers already. On the other hand, those decommissioning funds, like public pensions, are generally believed to be vastly underfunded. Leaving aside the externality of sticking the cost to the public, one should assume that, in year 40 (or 60), you'll need to cough up another $500 million to $5,000 million.