𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

The tiny fraction of output on overcast days is negligible.

Well, on overcast days most solar panels these days still produce up to 25% of their normal output. Nothing to sniff at I’d think. Perhaps not enough, but certainly not nothing.

I doubt that we can bridge it with power from intercontinental transmission lines, given how the politics look like today and how much they need to change first + then actually starting to plan and build it… In 50 year perhaps.

I think you may be a tad pessimistic here. Consider Europe, even during a Dunkelflaute not the entire continent is without renewables, only a region of it. If northern Europe has one, southern Europe is very, very unlikely to have one as well for example. And inter-continental power lines aren’t as rare as you might think! I believe the UK is currently building one to Morocco, and there’s plans to build one via Greece and Cyprus to the Middle-East.

Batteries are not relevant now and won’t be in the foreseeable future due to monetary, resource and manufacturing bottlenecks. Storage of electricity to later use it as electricity is simply not feasible right now, apart from the minutes you get from existing hydro storage.

I don’t fully agree here. Certainly on a more household level battery storage is already perfectly feasible and being installed a lot these days. The growth of this sector is also staggeringly high. Year-on-year the sector nearly doubles, as costs are coming down quite quickly and the economic picture starts to maie more and more sense. We don’t produce enough now, but in 10 years that picture might be radically different.

Right “now”, so in the next decade, if we push modern nuclear instead of fossiles (which we need to keep building due to said fluctuations) we will get far less CO2 quickly.

Experience learns that new nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, from planning to end of construction. If the focus is on nuclear, any CO2 savings will likely come too late. And then there’s still the economic problem of nuclear being far too expensive compared to solar/wind. Barely any investor is willing to touch it unless the government super-heavily subsidises it, resulting in expensive power and higher taxes (e.g. what happened in France). And then there’s the issue that we don’t have enough expertise and rare materials to build enough reactors to cover enough of the world’s production. We have a hard enough time building just a couple reactors, let alone thousands. And having poorer 3rd world countries finance their own reactors also seems unlikely.

I believe I saw research that suggested the fastest route to net zero, whilst still being affordable and feasible without emitting too much CO2 in the meantime was a very heavy push for renewables, investments into energy infrastructure (which are mostly required regardless of the route taken) and research into battery tech so that in 25-30 years we may have enough storage to ditch the last fossil fuel plants. In the meantime keeping gas power plants open seemed the least polluting backup method in case of power generation dips, plus potentially shutting off heavy industry during those periods to save power (fairly cheap, requires little investment to do). Nuclear doesn’t have to disappear, but the cost-benefit analysis just didn’t tilt in its favour. But it might make sense on a more local level perhaps, that’s always an issue with those super macro-economic studies.

I was hoping to find it but I’m having a hard time doing so. If I find it I’ll link it to you, it was an interesting read.

Why would you even say something so stupid? I highly doubt that you are interested in a discussion.

Please keep it civil. You provided very little context in your original argument, which made it very hard to give you a meaningful response.

Your link regarding Dunkelflaute helps to provide context, thanks for that. I had not heard of this phenomenon before. The research paper in the citations does mention that while it occurs somewhat regularly for an area e.g. the size of a country, it rarely happens simultaneously for say the EU-11 mentioned (most of northern Europe). The page also mentions importing power during these periods from other regions would mostly resolve this problem. Seems important to take into account, but not an impossible problem to deal with, especially given that it already happens and we already use inter-grid connections to handle it? What’s your perspective on this?

People spend their whole career figuring this out, it is obviously not as simple as you make it out to be.

I certainly don’t mean to pretend this is a simple problem by any means. Conceptually, sure, it’s “simple”, but bringing it to practice is much harder. It’s also why I’m perhaps more pessimistic about the timeframe in which we can execute these plans, particularly also because we need to scale up battery production by a factor of at least 10. It’s why I think we also need to invest in research regarding higher-capacity batteries made from easier to procure materials. Certainly a difficult endeavor by the way, but absolutely necessary. We’ve made promising progress on that front at least, but we’ve got a long way to go still.

In my opinion, focusing on renewables + storage has the highest long-term chance of success combined with manageable costs. If you’re willing to up the chance of success offset by incurring higher costs, adding nuclear to the mix is perfectly acceptable to me. But even longer-term (especially post net-zero) I think it’s almost inevitable that fission reactors will end up not economically competing with alternatives.

Hey thanks! I certainly don’t claim to know everything here, but I mostly dislike how the discourse regarding clean energy, nuclear etc… has… devolved so much. You always hear the same fairly boring catchphrases, arguments and rebuttals, but there’s genuine issues and questions that need all of us to come together and find the answers to. It’s developed its own little “politics” almost.

I hope we can breathe some new life into the discussions, as it’s a super-interesting problem to think about and I certainly hope we as a species find a solution.

I doubt that’s true. Especially no sun sounds highly dubious, I don’t think the Earth stops spinning every now and then. Oh, and do note that solar panels are still producing even in cloudy conditions.

There’s no period during which renewables stop producing. “6 hours” refers to the capacity if renewables stopped producing entirely, but in reality this never happens. At worst efficiency drops far enough to dip below demand, at which point the storage would have to kick in to make up the difference.

Building that much storage still costs a lot of money. I haven’t seen many cost estimates actually, probably because the market is developing at a very quick pace at the moment, driving costs down. A decent home battery solution costs 4000-10000 euros per household, but doing it at a larger scale may be cheaper.

SMRs (or small-scale nuclear plants in general) solve some problems with nuclear power. If you were to build a single design very often, the principles of economies at scale would apply and drive down costs.

I like the theory. But in practice there’s a couple problems that so far I’ve not seen addressed very often. First is the issue that not all costs of building a nuclear power plant can be brought down by simply having more of them. Particularly infrastructure costs can rise significantly, because instead of building one large plant with a connection to the grid, necessary buildings for operational control, infrastructure for the coolant water, roads, security etc… you have to build several instead, which multiplies the costs of these.

Then there’s the issue of personnel. You need people to operate and maintain the plant, security, management, etc… Per reactor you may need less people, but because you have so many reactors you end up needing more people overall. Most countries have a hard enough time as it is to get enough qualified staff, you’d also need to heavily invest in education for the next generation of nuclear engineers.

You also have these container-sized reactor concepts that basically promise to run themselves, requiring almost no maintenance other than the occasional refueling. But those are very much still in the concept-stage and also need to address the security issue. An unmanned container with nuclear fuel and expensive equipment inside could very well make a worthwhile target for criminals.

I like the utopian vision that nuclear promises but I worry the path to get there is full of pitfalls. I also don’t see the cost of nuclear coming down any time soon, and if we want to remain competitive in manufacturing for example, cheap energy is absolutely key.

Personally, I prefer investments in renewables and battery tech. Particularly battery tech I’m hopeful about. In theory there’s so much to gain still on that front, and it has the potential to improve so much other technology, from phones to drones to pacemakers to reliable, decentralised power. Nuclear tech is cool, but it only really promises to result in more nuclear power, rather than improvements in other areas as well. Fusion is interesting (and almost worth investing in just for the cool “it can be done”-factor) but at the same time still so far away. Too risky to rely on for now.

Especially since a lot of states turn the land surrounding the power plant into wildlife sanctuaries since nothing can be built in the safety zone anyway.

It’s like bird watching heaven at the power plant near me. I guess I just really like the idea of a power source that also incidentally protects forested areas.

Haha, I can see why that makes you more inclined to support nuclear! Though it does make me a little sad that in order to protect our forests and wildlife we first need to build a nuclear reactor next to it. Can’t we just designate them wildlife sanctuaries regardless of that power plant being there or not?

Batteries are becoming less expensive every day. The market doubles almost every year, which is impressively high-paced.

You also don’t need battery storage to last a day. Most places only need approx. 6 hours, with particularly sunny countries being able to get away with having only 4 hours.

You maybe also be confusing local generation with centralised power generation. Nuclear is local, but also extremely centralised. Solar/wind transfer is very decentralised, same goes for battery storage.

Hydrogen is in its infancy. The tech is promising but whether or not it will prove its worth is still to be seen.

You don’t need to install X-amount of global demand. Battery/hydrogen storage can solve the issue as has been demonstrated repeatedly in various research. And with home battery solutions you can even fully decentralise it.

I don’t understand your centralisation argument, nuclear is about the most centralised power source there is. And it can be threatened, as seen in the current Ukraine-Russia war.

Solar and wind can scale up to the demand. Nuclear actually has a much harder time doing that, as materials are far more rare and expensive, and it takes much longer to build. If anything, the time argument works against nuclear, not in favour of it.

It’s a poor solution for what people like to call “baseline power”.

The argument goes: solar and wind don’t provide consistent power, so there has to be some power generation that doesn’t fluctuate so we always have X amount of power to make up for when solar/wind don’t suffice. Nuclear is consistent and high-output, so it’s perfect for this.

Unfortunately, reality is a little different. First problem is that solar/wind at scale don’t fluctuate as much. The sun always shines somewhere, and the wind always blows somewhere. You have to aggregate a large area together, but that already exists with the European energy market.

Second issue is that solar/wind at scale regularly (or will regularly) produce more than 100% of the demand. This gives you two options: either spend the excess energy, or stop generating so much of it. Spending the excess requires negative energy prices so people will use it, causing profitability issues for large power plants. As nuclear is one of the most expensive sources of energy, this requires hefty subsidies which need to be paid for by taxpayers. The alternative is shutting the power plant down, but nuclear plants in particular aren’t able to quickly shut off and on on demand. And as long as they’re not turned on they’re losing money, again requiring hefty subsidies. You could try turning off renewable power generation, but that just causes energy prices to rise due to a forced market intervention. Basically, unless your baseline power generator is able to switch off and on easily and can economically survive a bit of downtime, it’s not very viable.

Nuclear is safe. It produces a lot of power, the waste problem is perfectly manageable and the tech has that cool-factor. But with the rapid rise of solar and wind, which are becoming cheaper every day, it’s economic viability is under strong pressure. It just costs too much, and all that money could have been spent investing into clean and above all cheap energy instead. I used to be pro-nuclear, but after seeing the actual cost calculations for these things I think it’s not worth doing at the moment.

As for what I think a good baseline power source would be: I think we have to settle for (bio-)gas. It’s super quick to turn off and on and still fairly cheap. And certainly not as polluting as coal. We keep the gas generators open until we have enough solar/wind/battery/hydrogen going, as backup. If nuclear gets some kind of breakthrough that allows them to be cheaper then great! Until then we should use the better solutions we have available right now (and no, SMRs are not the breakthrough you might think it is. They’re still massively more expensive than the alternatives and so far have not really managed to reduce either costs or buils times by any significant margin).

Maybe fusion in the future manages to be economically viable. Fingers crossed!

The Darkroom of Damocles.

The big “twist” in the book basically gets pretty obviously announced in the first chapter “oh this person is exactly like me but better in every way I can conceive, how vexing. Gosh would I like to be him”. It’s almost spelled out.

Once the twist is known, the rest of the book makes little sense. Sure, the main character becomes an unreliable narrator, but he’s not just twisting details; hugely important events can no longer happen if you assume the twist, because there’s no physical way of it happening, unless the narrator is so extremely unreliable that you might as well be reading Jurassic Park only to reveal it was actually Terminator or something.

And then the book tries to end all clever by dangling the whole “was this the twist? Was it all real? Who knoooowws” making the book feel like a massive waste of time. Clearly the author wanted you to doubt the narrator at the end so you’d go back and think “oh was this/that a hint?”, but with the twist being so painfully obvious it lands flat on its face.

I was hoping there’d be some clever ending that meta-played on the whole “the reader has been distrusting of the narrator”-ordeal, but there was nothing. Very unfulfilling reading experience.

Kickstarter does share it with the projects you back iirc, and those projects do occasionally sell that data to 3rd parties.

Could be an attempted Slovakian flag.

The Right Honourable Member of Parliament Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, King’s Council to His Royal Majesty Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Mann, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Anything less is offensive and requires a licence.

It’s gonna make fiat obsolete. Any day now!

Elected judges really isn’t all that common in the world. To me (Dutchman), electing judges/sheriffs sounds wild. Police does their own hiring, same goes for the judicial system. Judges decide who gets to be a high court judge, there’s no politics involved at all. That to me sounds like a massive violation of the trias politica.

Well, the numbers show otherwise.

Sorry, I don’t follow your question. Why can’t theists what exactly?

Death is still a process. You may not be scared of what comes after death, but can still be scared of dying itself.

a blank nothingness isn’t bad

That’s a matter of opinion. The fact you cease to exist may very well be considered scary, even by atheists.

Definitely do! uBlock Origin is the best one around, and it’s completely free. Even without configuring anything the defaults block 99% of annoying ads.

Music locker services are frequenly targeted and taken down, as GlitterInfection mentioned. There’s multiple cases on the Wikipedia page.

There is a jump between hosting and sharing, but that jump is very small. Share it with 1 other person, and you have made unauthorised copies of the licensed material, and are therefore acting against the law. That’s not FUD, that’s been reality for the past few decades.

Whether or not the illegal sharing of licensed material is done via a generic website, a federated service of even carrier pidgeon doesn’t matter, an unlicensed copy is an illegal copy. Rightsholders have pleny of avenues to force a takedown against specific instances. And if they can successfully argue that the primary purpose of this software is piracy, they may even have enough legal arguments to force a takedown of the sourcecode.

Of course, the main question is whether rightsholders will bother with this as long as it remains small-scale. Legal costs would likely outweigh the missed income. But that doesn’t actually shield you from legal liability.