Are you serious? I mean, we're on/. - the home for geeks and nerds - and you ask who the FUCK is Sir Ian McKellen? Only the greatest wizard of all time, Gandalf! And if you thought - for one second - about Harry Potter when I said wizard, we're going to banish you to theverge.com or some other godforesaken corner of the Internet!
So man is natural, but the things man makes are not natural. Birds, monkeys, beavers, etc. are natural, and things they make are natural too. In other words - we're screwed, we can never do anything that is "natural".
Digging in, I can see they rate PV as lower. But something isn't adding up to me... Check table 1A. Nuclear has 40% more capital cost - sounds reasonable. It has about 75% more fixed operational costs. But check the next column - apparently PV has ZERO variable operational/maintenance costs? And the first column - capacity - has nuclear at 2.7 times that of solar. Yet somehow PV is cheaper? Something's not making sense at all with those numbers...
As far as transmission of power, the cost of transmission for solar is ~3.7 times that of nuclear, per that report. Again, something is pretty wonky there - they should be about the same (one major grid-tied point versus several major grid-tied points, for a grid with hundreds of thousands of existing tie-points).
No, it's because trials in China are NOT decided by a jury of your peers, but three Government-appointed judges. China has a massive taxation issue - it doesn't know how to collect income taxes, etc. very well at all, and even the VAT tax system between businesses is easy to game. China - being a fascist oligarchy which has 100% control over the Court system - simply arrests you and the presumption is guilt. And the number of people getting out of arrests without some form of punishment is essentially zero.
So if you're an AirBNB exec or employee, the LAST thing you want is your company to NOT play by the rules of China, because if you're ever found IN China, you stand a good chance of being arrested, tried, sentenced, and shipped off to prison - and it all happens in typically less than 3 weeks.
PS: If you want legal representation in a trial in China, you are 100% entitled to a Court-appointed defense attorney. You want your own, private defense attorney? You have to petition the Court for the right to do so, and there is no appeal if the Court decides you do not get your own private attorney. So you WILL end up with a Court-appointed underling who will simply plead for mercy/a light sentence because - obviously - you are guilty in the first place, or why would you have even been arrested?
For offshore wind or solar, no, nuclear is still cheaper on a levelized cost of energy. And that is just for generation, it does NOT include the cost of the backup needed for "always available" power, which nuclear pretty much guarantees. Solar should be dropped until its costs come down quite a bit, and wind should be used for intermittent things like desalinization to refill reservoirs and such - things where a 1 to 100 hour interruption is a non-issue.
Consider that all of the US is dark for several hours at a time, every day. We need several hours of storage capacity at a minimum, especially since the current mantra is for everyone to recharge their cars at home, overnight - when it's dark.
Personally I believe we should be pursuing next gen nuclear right now. Storage requirements and mass of deployments required to make wind/solar a tenable solution are simply fantastical at this point. Nuclear could easily do it - we'd need about 100 of the Kashiwazaki plants in Japan, to provide 100% of our needs, and it would be, effectively, 100% reliable (due to the always-available nature of nuclear plants). Each plant occupies a little more than 1 square mile, meaning we'd need about 30 or so Ivanpah-sized plants around the US to provide all that power. To me, that makes much more sense. Modern society pretty much demands constant, reliable power and without massive storage options renewables simply are not tenable.
Look again - solar is more expensive than advanced nuclear. Onshore wind is the only "renewable" that beats advanced nuclear (in many places, like California, hydro is considered non-renewable and geothermal is typically not allowed either as it requires expensive, damaging drilling and pumping). Wind and solar actually lag advanced nuclear in terms of levelized-cost-of-energy.
Assuming we bought Ivanpah-equivalent systems? It would get us about 20% of our electrical needs. And basically non of our pharmaceutical, industrial, or petroleum-based transportation needs.
Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this.
This page which references the EIA's numbers, says you're wrong.
Just need to destroy the Salar of Atacama in Chile for your lithium! Pump the dirty water bearing lithium from a few hundred feet underground, let the water evaporate in the sun, scrape up the residue, and ship it across the ocean on big freighters! Definitely friendly...
On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.
And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.
Ahh, yes the clean solar thermal plants like Ivanpah which consume tens of billions of BTUs per month from its natural gas generators required to get it running each day!
We use about 18 TWh per day, worldwide. That means we'd need at least 9 TW of generation capacity (13.5 TW for the 150% case) for any arbitrary 50% of the Earth. That's quite a bit away from where we're at...
They also consider a farmer who harvests trees from a few acres and turns that land into productive farmland as making the land "losing some of its functions". It used to be forest, now it is farmland, we're doomed!
If the underlying report is so different than the summary, then why did the summary get up-voted and on the/. home page? Because if the underlying report isn't so sensational, then no one will care, and thus no eyes drawn. So I guess it's the fault of those who read the summary and say "no freaking way that report can even be close to correct" and forgo the entire thing, rather than those who completely twisted and misrepresented the report. Or, you know, you could provide a quick sentence about WHY the summary was wrong...
Note that they consider land that was changed to forest to farmland as "broken". I guess changing land to feed more people is a bad thing? Back to hunter-gatherers for all! Oops, we can't hunt, that's cruel and inhumane, so just gatherers from here on out...
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I think it may have been by design. Test a null entry, it does what it was supposed to - act as a wildcard...
Check the spec - perhaps it was by design or not called out to ignore empty entries?
Are you serious? I mean, we're on /. - the home for geeks and nerds - and you ask who the FUCK is Sir Ian McKellen? Only the greatest wizard of all time, Gandalf! And if you thought - for one second - about Harry Potter when I said wizard, we're going to banish you to theverge.com or some other godforesaken corner of the Internet!
So man is natural, but the things man makes are not natural. Birds, monkeys, beavers, etc. are natural, and things they make are natural too. In other words - we're screwed, we can never do anything that is "natural".
Does a bird's nest count as artificial? Does a beaver dam count as artificial? How about a coral reef? Or a groundhog burrow?
Digging in, I can see they rate PV as lower. But something isn't adding up to me... Check table 1A. Nuclear has 40% more capital cost - sounds reasonable. It has about 75% more fixed operational costs. But check the next column - apparently PV has ZERO variable operational/maintenance costs? And the first column - capacity - has nuclear at 2.7 times that of solar. Yet somehow PV is cheaper? Something's not making sense at all with those numbers...
As far as transmission of power, the cost of transmission for solar is ~3.7 times that of nuclear, per that report. Again, something is pretty wonky there - they should be about the same (one major grid-tied point versus several major grid-tied points, for a grid with hundreds of thousands of existing tie-points).
No, it's because trials in China are NOT decided by a jury of your peers, but three Government-appointed judges. China has a massive taxation issue - it doesn't know how to collect income taxes, etc. very well at all, and even the VAT tax system between businesses is easy to game. China - being a fascist oligarchy which has 100% control over the Court system - simply arrests you and the presumption is guilt. And the number of people getting out of arrests without some form of punishment is essentially zero.
So if you're an AirBNB exec or employee, the LAST thing you want is your company to NOT play by the rules of China, because if you're ever found IN China, you stand a good chance of being arrested, tried, sentenced, and shipped off to prison - and it all happens in typically less than 3 weeks.
PS: If you want legal representation in a trial in China, you are 100% entitled to a Court-appointed defense attorney. You want your own, private defense attorney? You have to petition the Court for the right to do so, and there is no appeal if the Court decides you do not get your own private attorney. So you WILL end up with a Court-appointed underling who will simply plead for mercy/a light sentence because - obviously - you are guilty in the first place, or why would you have even been arrested?
For offshore wind or solar, no, nuclear is still cheaper on a levelized cost of energy. And that is just for generation, it does NOT include the cost of the backup needed for "always available" power, which nuclear pretty much guarantees. Solar should be dropped until its costs come down quite a bit, and wind should be used for intermittent things like desalinization to refill reservoirs and such - things where a 1 to 100 hour interruption is a non-issue.
It's not as clean as you think...
Consider that all of the US is dark for several hours at a time, every day. We need several hours of storage capacity at a minimum, especially since the current mantra is for everyone to recharge their cars at home, overnight - when it's dark.
Personally I believe we should be pursuing next gen nuclear right now. Storage requirements and mass of deployments required to make wind/solar a tenable solution are simply fantastical at this point. Nuclear could easily do it - we'd need about 100 of the Kashiwazaki plants in Japan, to provide 100% of our needs, and it would be, effectively, 100% reliable (due to the always-available nature of nuclear plants). Each plant occupies a little more than 1 square mile, meaning we'd need about 30 or so Ivanpah-sized plants around the US to provide all that power. To me, that makes much more sense. Modern society pretty much demands constant, reliable power and without massive storage options renewables simply are not tenable.
Look again - solar is more expensive than advanced nuclear. Onshore wind is the only "renewable" that beats advanced nuclear (in many places, like California, hydro is considered non-renewable and geothermal is typically not allowed either as it requires expensive, damaging drilling and pumping). Wind and solar actually lag advanced nuclear in terms of levelized-cost-of-energy.
Too bad you only get to generate solar for - at most - 12 hours a day, and a conservative estimate for wind is about the same...
Assuming we bought Ivanpah-equivalent systems? It would get us about 20% of our electrical needs. And basically non of our pharmaceutical, industrial, or petroleum-based transportation needs.
Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this.
This page which references the EIA's numbers, says you're wrong.
Just need to destroy the Salar of Atacama in Chile for your lithium! Pump the dirty water bearing lithium from a few hundred feet underground, let the water evaporate in the sun, scrape up the residue, and ship it across the ocean on big freighters! Definitely friendly...
On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.
And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.
Ahh, yes the clean solar thermal plants like Ivanpah which consume tens of billions of BTUs per month from its natural gas generators required to get it running each day!
That's a load of horse manure. Solar energy and Wind energy are currently cheaper than coal and are about to beat gas for electricity production.
All your /. links aside, the levelized cost of energy shows wind and solar as on the upper end of the spectrum.
We use about 18 TWh per day, worldwide. That means we'd need at least 9 TW of generation capacity (13.5 TW for the 150% case) for any arbitrary 50% of the Earth. That's quite a bit away from where we're at...
Typical AC, build your own strawman to attack! It's not unexpected when 25% of the world's energy is consumed creating 25% of the world's GDP...
They also consider a farmer who harvests trees from a few acres and turns that land into productive farmland as making the land "losing some of its functions". It used to be forest, now it is farmland, we're doomed!
And interestingly enough, the US is about 25% of the world GDP...
If the underlying report is so different than the summary, then why did the summary get up-voted and on the /. home page? Because if the underlying report isn't so sensational, then no one will care, and thus no eyes drawn. So I guess it's the fault of those who read the summary and say "no freaking way that report can even be close to correct" and forgo the entire thing, rather than those who completely twisted and misrepresented the report. Or, you know, you could provide a quick sentence about WHY the summary was wrong...
Note that they consider land that was changed to forest to farmland as "broken". I guess changing land to feed more people is a bad thing? Back to hunter-gatherers for all! Oops, we can't hunt, that's cruel and inhumane, so just gatherers from here on out...