The man-rated Dragon capsule (and the Boeing Starliner too) is a spam-in-a-can space-Uber only capable of delivering people to the ISS. It doesn't have the capability to support EVAs or to carry out Hubble repairs and it doesn't have enough fuel to reach the Hubble's orbit and then return to Earth safely, not without modifications.

It is possible to build something that could allow people to go EVA at the Hubble Space telescope but it would probably require two or three Falcon 9 launches, one to put a custom-built module with an EVA airlock and support equipment in orbit, a second launch to carry the crew and recover them afterwards and maybe a third launch to provide an in-orbit manoeuvering module for the Dragon and its docked EVA module and carry the parts for the repairs to the Hubble.

The much-maligned Space Shuttle had all this capability in one package but it is no longer available.

China is building a Hubble-sized telescope at the moment, the Xuntian telescope. They plan to launch it next year in 2023 but no date has been confirmed.

The Xuntian will be in the same orbit as the Chinese space station, although not connected to it. This is being done so that it can be retrieved and serviced by the space station crew if necessary. It does mean it's in a noticeably lower orbit than the higher-flying Hubble.

The IEA report I referenced was published in February 2020 and refers to Germany's energy usage portfolio at that time.

https://www.iea.org/reports/germany-2020

"Beyond transport, heating - which accounts for over 50% of final energy consumption and around 40% of emissions - remains a sector in which the government is still in the process of formulating a decarbonisation plan. Germany's heating sector is highly dependent on fossil fuels (25% oil heating in the residential sector, in part due to low taxation on heating oil), and a large share of co-generated district heating is produced from fossil energy sources."

Most of France's nuclear power plants are on the coast where there is no water shortage. Some reactors are sited on rivers where, in the summer it's possible to exceed the temp rise limits for cooling water for the reactor condensers so the reactors shut down (and often go into a maintenance and refuelling cycle). When winter comes those limits are not exceeded and the reactors can run normally.

France uses "inefficient" non-fossil-carbon electric heat for most domestic heating because nuclear power is cheap. An IEA report I read a little while back said that, as of 2020, a quarter of Germany's domestic and business heating is from kerosene or fuel oil. I expect most of the rest of the German domestic heating load will be gas-fired with very little of it provided by non-fossil-fuel sources such as renewables or nuclear, in part because German electricity is very expensive.

Germany also generates a lot of electricity from lignite, aka dirt. The German government is thinking of shutting down its dirt-burning power plants some time in the future but not any time soon because they need that electricity. They are not building out renewables such as wind generating capacity at anywhere near the rate they need to replace dirt-burning any time this decade. France burns only a small amount of thermal coal to generate electricity and is on schedule to remove that generating capacity from its grid, although it will keep some coal-fired plants in reserve.

The electricity import-export process between France and Germany has been that France exports lots of mostly-nuclear electricity to Germany during the winter (as well as to other countries such as Italy, Switzerland, Britain etc.) During the summer it shuts many of its reactors down for refuelling and maintenance and imports dirt-burning electricity from Germany when electricity demand is lower.

Summer is ending and France is facing delays this year bringing most of its reactor fleet into service hence renewables-rich Germany is desperately scrabbling to find alternate sources of dependable electricity in a Europe-wide market which is constrained by the loss of access to Russian fossil fuels.

Viewing it that way the Vatican and Monaco get a pass on climate change because they emit almost no CO2, right?

China is still rural and primitive in many areas, a bit like Alabama, but it's trying to develop its infrastructure with clean running water, flush toilets, washing machines, Netflix and all the other markers of modern civilisation. That takes energy, a lot of it and, sadly, they can only get that energy securely within their own borders by digging up and burning coal, mostly.

The weird thing is that if you do the math China actually burns similar amounts of coal per head of population annually as America does, and Green Germany too.

China is building out various non-fossil fuel options such as solar, wind, nuclear and hydro but they still have to provide more electrical power year on year for their consumers, to cover the increasing numbers of electric vehicles appearing on the streets of China every day if nothing else.

India has a population that is expected to exceed China's numbers in the near future, but it is more energy-poor per capita than China and has further to go to catch up. They do burn significantly less coal per capita than China, America and other countries though.

Who exactly do you want to reduce their emissions, and by how much? Just give the top 5 or 10.

Per capita, the US is near the top of the table at about 15 tonnes of CO2 per person each year. China lags well behind at around 11 or 12 tonnes of CO2 per capita -- as an industrialised nation with over four times the population of the US it does emit more CO2 in total but per capita, not as much.

I don't know if it's still a thing but Apple used to give academics big discounts on hardware and software. Long time back I had to help my brother, a chemistry professor working at an American university, set up a desktop Mac he had got for (IIRC) 40% off list price.

I think Dell and HP offer(ed) similar discounts though.

They are essentially printing money to fund the government.

All governments print money to fund the operation of the nation-state, including the USA. That money enters circulation among the people in that nation-state, going from military paychecks to supermarket tills to supermarket employees to gas station tills to gas station workers to cinemas and burger shops and round and round the dollars go. Basically the money tokens issued by the government are IOUs which end up being traded between third parties in exchanges of value.

The way governments maintain a balancing act and prevent rampant inflation is by taxation to remove those IOUs from circulation -- tax monies don't pay for anything, they're "destroyed" on receipt because it was the government that wrote those IOUs in the first place to fund their operations.

Many countries with rampant inflation have ineffective tax collecting services, bureaucratic corruption and other factors that means the government can only keep on printing money to keep things running and so more and more IOUs circulate, each of which is worth less and less over time as prices denominated in the local currency increase.

Galaxies at the furthest distances the JWST can image are more likely to have a massive stellar object or group of objects closer to us in line of sight, hence their images are more likely to be affected by gravitational lensing than what we've seen before from observations made by telescopes previously with less "depth of field".

That's odd. Here in the UK the few open-cycle gas plants left in service only get run for a few hours a year, to test them and keep them operational just in case they're needed because of grid trips or loss of other generating plant. In contrast to open-cycle generators we've got about 32GW of CCGT capacity with some more being built. Some times in winter when electricity demand is at its highest, as much as 30GW of that CCGT capacity can be online at one time.

Open-cycle generators produce less electricity per tonne of gas consumed than CCGT due to their lower thermal efficiency hence the gradual decommissioning of open-cycle gas plant and replacement with more modern CCGT. Saying that most of Britain's CCGT fleet was built out to replace coal-fired power stations which have nearly all been shut down and decommissioned over the past twenty years or so.

CCGT is being built around the world -- I happened to read a report recently in "Power Technology" news about Vietnam starting to build a two-generator CCGT plant to burn LNG, part of the country's move away from coal for electricity generation. As far as I can tell few if any new open-cycle plants are being built anywhere in comparison.

CCGT plants aren't used to "back" renewables, they're one of several methods of generating electricity to meet demand and in many places the principal method.

Thermal efficiency of CCGT plants is around 60% once they're up to temperature -- the hot exhaust gases from the ca. 45-50% efficient turbine are used to raise steam to drive a small steam turbine to generate "extra" electricity. That's a lot better efficiency than the best coal-fired plants.

it's easy to pipe gas from producer plants direct to a CCGT generating station. That's a lot cheaper than coal transport and there's no solid ash to deal with afterwards. CO2 is still a problem but if the price of gas stays low then it's cheap electricity. If the price of gas goes up for some reason then, not so much.

Combined-cycle gas turbine generators ARE being built and deployed widely. They burn gas and emit CO2 and add to climate change. They're the anonymous grey buildings with a funny-looking exhaust stack close to a grid interconnector that keeps the lights on when the Green wind turbines and solar panels that get all the public attention don't generate much electricity (which is a lot of the time).

There are modern coal-fired power plants that can manage up to 46% efficiency, so-called ultra-supercritical boilers which operate at much higher temperatures and pressures than their progenitors. The Chinese are building more and more of these types of coal-fired power stations because they need the electricity.

ultimately the customer had a clear preference for bigger screens especially for folks like me with trashy eyesight).

I think that the younger people (under 40 years of age) at Apple never considered that everyone, including much older people would want to buy a smartphone with a screen-only interface, so they thought that a small display (sub-10cm) was fine. Myself I use a Samsung phone with a 14cm diagonal display and I still have to squint or take my glasses off to read stuff on it sometimes because my eyeballs are over 60 years old, like the rest of me.

"Natural" uranium is unenriched uranium, a mixture of U-235 which can be fissioned to provide energy and U-238 which is inert and can't be fissioned. CANDUs fuelled with "natural" uranium burn U-235. A small fraction of the U-238 content is bred up into Pu-239 and a fraction of that is fissioned during a fuel cycle. 90% of the total energy produced comes from the 0.6% of the fuel which is U-235.

Most if not all CANDUs actually use slightly enriched uranium since it provides more energy per fuel load so it lasts longer and makes each MWh of electricity produced a bit cheaper.

The Fine Article from NEI Magazine you link to talks about experimental fuel loads for a Chinese CANDU reactor, using a blended mixture of enriched fuel extracted from spent fuel recycling processes and "tails" of depleted uranium resulting from enrichment operations. It's a complicated method of making "natural" uranium from two sources of waste materials. The CANDU connection is based on the CANDU reactor fuel elements being quite small and easy for experimenters to fabricate and run in a reactor to test out their ideas. AFAICS this was a one-off experiment, it's not anything anyone is doing commercially or operationally.