Thanks for link:

According the wikipedia article:
".. on a leveraged basis we expect EDF to earn a Return on Equity (ROE) well in excess of 20% and possibly as high as 35%. Having considered the known terms of the deal, we are flabbergasted that the UK Government has committed future generations of consumers to the costs that will flow from this deal"

Sounds like EDF pulled a really sweet deal that sold the British Government to pay way more than needed to profitably run the nuclear facility. Nice work if you can get it.

Gee, here's one very relevant point for the UK.

http://www.abc.net.au/environm...

Or wasting it on renewables....

In the case of the UK, this is absolutely incorrect. If it were there, would no need for the *substantial* subsides paid for renewable energy.

"It would require a huge amount of social engineering. Which is much harder than anything technical."

Yeah, well try changing the laws of physics and see how far you get.

That plus they didn't investigate a really obvious non-CO2 emitting technolgy that is a drop in replacement for coal-fired powered stations. Absolutely bloody obvious and no mention of it in the article at all.

You know there is a really simply reason renewable energy is more expensive (except hydro and geothermal in favourable locations).

It's the second Law of Thermodynamics. Solar and Wind power is diffuse. Hydrocarbons and particularly nuclear are far more concentrated, thus much easier and cheaper to draw power from. If Google had invested in a array of advanced Nuclear Power technologies, one or more of them may have come off and we'd have cheap CO2 free power for millions of years. If may still happen but it is very difficult and the sophisticated simulations of advanced nuclear IS something where Google could really contribute.

Oh well,

My submission of a couple of days ago.

"The EM2 corportation has submitted a paper to axiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133 describing their $10 million US Navy project to investigate Bussards Polywell fusion device. NBC has a report on the development http://www.nbcnews.com/science... . Quoting Nicholas Krall, a plasma physicist who has been working in the fusion field for more than a half-century and has been an adviser to EMC2 Fusion, "I think this is the most exciting experimental advance that I've been involved in," he told NBC News. 'I'm stoked.""

Plus there are 2-3 other concepts that gave got Venture Capital funding. Fusion is looking more interesting.

Thank you.
I just checked my LG Nexus smart phone.
It has hardware-backed security.

How do you know it is Cs-137? The TFA doesn't say.

The 700 Bg/ Kg seems awefully low.

Here in Australia you can wander into any local supermarket and buy "Lite Salt" wich is 50% Potassium Chloride. These typically have a mass of 170 gm and consequently an activity of 4000 Bg. So by German standards that is 23529 Bg/Kg and hence way above the legal limit.

I totally agree. Now the big difference is the cost differential between selling excess power back to the grid (feed-in price 8 cents) compared to purchasing from the grid at 25 cents per KWHr. The Tesla batteries are projected to cost $200 per KWHr of storage so for $2000 your average punter can get 10 KWHr of storage and likely never need to purchase electricty from the grid. So a $5000 5KW system plus $2000 for 10 KWHr of storage means no more $2500 bills per year. The system pays for itself in less than 4 years.

There is a truely massive market if Tesla can hit their production targets at the advertised price point. Which seems possible given the extreme amount of vertical integration in the plant. Even the energy costs are provided via renewable energy buffered by their own batteries. Feed in raw lithium, aluminum, human labor, out comes batteries.

This is rediculus. Any reasonable person would not have shot down a commercial plane killing hundred of innocenct people. Clearly the Ukrane insurgents are unreasonable terrorists who should be treated as such. Ukraine needs large amounts of western help to fight them.

The thing about OpenStack is that it has been under really heavy development for the past two years. Two years ago the product was buggy as hell. But they've made a series of 6-monthly releases since then. Each one of which offered substantial improvements. Its now pretty good and stable. There is really a incredible support for it. I heard of numbers of around 2000 developers so each release really is substantially better than the previous.

Now that it is basically stable, it will likely get real traction with users and there are big private deployments already. The Australian NeCTAR project will roll-out 30,000 cores by the end of 2014. CERN is looking at a huge deployment of over 100,000 CPUs.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...