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Submission + - Computer experts: Ditch Georgia's voting machines (hotair.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A group of computer and election security experts is urging Georgia election officials to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots ahead of the November midterm elections, citing what they say are “serious threats” posed by an apparent breach of voting equipment in one county.

The 13 experts on Thursday sent a letter to the members of the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’s a non-voting member of the board. It urges them to immediately stop using the state’s Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines. It also suggests they mandate a particular type of post-election audit on the outcome of all races on the ballot.

The experts who sent the letter include academics and former state election officials and are not associated with efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Comment Re:The simple fact is.... (Score 1) 141

The wires leaving a solar power plant will be built for the maximum power output, and the output would presumably be at or near zero at night. Converting this to nuclear means the power plant can provide maximum output at any time of day. This means more energy can be sold over the year on the same wires.

The maximum output of just about any solar power plan tends to be significantly (~a order of magnitude) less than that of any (current) nuclear plant - hiwhc would mena that upgrades would be needed... (Smaller reactors are closer though)

Fuel cells are a horrible idea for grid scale storage. Just burn the hydrogen in a turbine or something. There's no need to get expensive fuel cells because there's no need to save on weight or volume. On top of that a fuel cell produces DC so there would have to be inverters to use this electricity on the grid. The energy density of hydrogen isn't much of a concern at a power plant, they have room for low pressure tanks.

Fuel cells have significantly better efficiency than burning it and converting motion to electricity. (The inverters would take some of that, but there are large scale solutions from things like HVDC transmission lines)

Nuclear with storage makes a lot of sense. With current, running almost all the time reactors (which does not have storage available),solar can reduce the demand on peaking plants. (I'm mainly thinking PV, since that is the only solar that is relatively cheap)

This is a load curve for my country for yesterday. Around 21GW of nuclear (the current, no-storage type) would make sense, with enough solar / wind / dispatchable peaking (the main current options here is likely diesel and coal) to get to around 30GW or so... (If nuclear with storage, like Terrapower's planned design is used, you could probably install around 24GW or so of nuclear and do quite a bit of the peaking with that (which is currently done with some PV, diesel OCGT, pumped storage and coal (and some wind that seems to peak around the evening peak))

Comment Re:The simple fact is.... (Score 1) 141

A lot of the cost of rooftop solar often gets carried by people willingly installing it - it competes with the retail price of electricity, while utility-scale solar competes with the wholesale price... On cloudy days that increased demand tends to be a lot less, since a lot of that is driven by air-conditioning, which is driven by the sun. (absorption chillers using solar as a heat source might make more sense for new AC installs though) (For raw output solar is quite cheap, but getting it at specific times increases the cost a lot) (In places with huge amount of hydro / pumped storage that is less of an issue - whether such a grid needs extra power is debatable though) (I'm not in such an area though)

The molten salt stuff works for better load-following yes. (With the current reactors there is more load-following than you would expect, but it mainly seems to work by dumping energy instead of using it to generate electricity (which means that the cost per kWh is double if the plant is running at 50% output compared to full output))

The problem with converting solar thermal stations to nuclear is that there might not be sufficient water available for cooling n some of the areas (if they are using steam to convert the heat to electricity, that is likely less of an option though)

(Hydrogen might make sense as one synthetic fuel and can also be used for storage. The electrolysis and fuel cells seems to need a lot of tuning for that to be viable at large scale) (and the energy density (by volume) is terrible for H)

Comment Re:The simple fact is.... (Score 1) 141

Rooftops are the logical place for solar panels - the environment was already destroyed when the structure under the rooftop was put up...

(Many of the dessert environments where they are being installed were previously mostly undisturbed due to its unsuitability for agriculture. Desserts still have ecosystems that suffer if solar farms are built.)

(Land-based wind can do with some clear numbers on the impact it has on raptor and bat populations. Offshore wind have a lot less of those issues and dead seagulls are a win)

Rooftop solar (potentially some with tracking or on East and West facing parts as well) can likely provide almost all of the increased energy demand during the day, which means that the nuclear that should be dealing with the constant demand doesn't need to dump energy to vary its output.

(here (in ZA) the peaks are in the morning and evening though, when storage, hydro or wind are the only real carbon-free options) (natural gas is not really an option here and is still not carbon-free. Synthetic hydrocarbons would be an interesting option though)

Comment Misleading headline (Score 4, Insightful) 106

The summary is better at least...

New capacity added - not total installed capacity as implied in the title... (And certainly not share of total generated energy)

The capacity is also misleading - it might make more sense to use annual average output power capability instead of peak values... With the current ratings 1GW of nuclear would generate a lot more power than 1GW of solar / wind, but it seems equivalent...

Comment Absorption chillers (Score 1) 161

Solar-driven absorption chillers should be the standard for cooling... (Solar heats something, that heat is used to run the chiller)

(Solar for air-conditioning is ideal - the sun is mostly the reason that the cooling is needed)

(It would also be interesting to see how large a solar water heater is needed to provide most of a house's heating needs - the problem is that it will generate a lot more heat in summer, which needs somewhere to go (maybe an absorption chiller))

Comment Re:Systemd is Awesome! (Score 1) 148

It is not horrible as an init system, but it tries to be much more, which is what I dislike... E.g. systemd-resolved attempts to fix the problematic DNS caching (which likely belongs in nscd) in the completely wrong place (the right place would be in libc / nscd or systemd-resolved own nss module (which exists, but is mostly not used)) breaking DNS tools (by specifying resolved in /etc/resolv.conf and then messing with the requests, which results in things like dig +trace only working with explicitly specified DNS servers)

Comment Re:Bury the Lede Much? (Score 1) 250

The vast majority of the problematic waste is also usable as fuel for other reactors (the ones with half-lives in the thousands of years. (the stuff with shorter half-lives decay in reasonable times, the ones with half-lives in the millions / billions of years are not very radioactive - similar to the ores that the fuel was made from in the first place)) (The problem is that several places refuses to do reprocessing and the it is currently quite expensive)

Comment Re:Where did everyone migrate? (Score 2) 43

My plan was FastMail (not free though). iCloud+ (with the custom domain option) also seems like an option in some cases. Zoho is free, but the UI might take some getting used to....

Office 365 is the other non-free option, but like iCloud, you might already be paying for parts of it...

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