I really wish them luck, but there have been so many false dawn's on fusion...

The problem with fusion is that until someone demonstrates a practical way to sustain it and produce energy, it's probably not going to get the kind of funding needed to demonstrate a practical way to sustain it and produce energy. At least not in less than several decades, and we don't have that long.

Like fossil fuels and nuclear, it is competing for funding with renewables. Renewables are mature, are cheap, and the market is growing. Because we are all capitalist societies, that's the only way we can address climate change.

I'd love to see fusion reactors in my lifetime, but nobody has a path to them that isn't full of huge challenges and unknowns.

It's not necessarily dangerous. We can start small, and anything you put up to block the sun is going to be pushed away from it by the pressure of the photons, or you can stick it in a decaying orbit so it has a limited lifespan.

As long as it is designed to have a limited lifespan and clear itself out naturally, like the tens of thousands of LEO satellites we are throwing up now without much care, the damage that can be done is negligible. Once proven safe we can look at scaling it up, in a way that means if we stop replenishing it, it just goes away by itself after a while.

The cost of electricity in the UK is dictated by gas prices, and despite having our own North Sea gas we pay the international market rate. That went up when Putin started his war in Ukraine. The faster we get off gas, the sooner the bills can come down.

Before then we really need to break the link between gas prices and electricity prices. Currently the way the auction works, everyone gets paid the amount offered to gas generators (nuclear has a special deal that is insanely expensive but doesn't set a price floor).

We don't have to make everything domestically. It would be nice, but right now we should just import the turbines we need and get them deployed. The climate can't wait, and we shouldn't wait to start raking in that cash.

Hmm, I think that book has been discredited. Either way, there is a massive amount of wind energy available to the UK. We have the best wind resources in Europe, we could be raking it in from exports.

We should have a sovereign wealth fund based on wind power.

https://claverton-energy.com/t...

It's actually much more than 20x for just all available offshore wind, but if you restrict it to just the most economically viable parts and including onshore, it works out at around 20x. I've lost the reference I had for that.

Indeed, and the environmentalists are on board with it because although it will disrupt the local wildlife, it will create new habitats, and in the end the reduction in damage from not using fossil fuels to generate that energy far outweighs the downsides.

There has never been a point in recorded history when the British Isles and territorial waters were windless.

And yes, we have hydro, we have storage, and we could have a hell of a lot more.

Actually the former head of the National Grid said that. The guy running the UK's grid said that the concept of base load was obsolete, and he was right.

The UK has at least 20x as much wind power available than its current electricity consumption. Energy independence is entirely possible, if not particularly desirable.

The UK could be a massive exporter of clean energy. Scotland in particular could be getting rich off it, but like with the oil they aren't seeing as much of the benefit as they should be seeing.

I'm not really clear what it even does. You get an @thundermail.com address I think, probably blocked or assumed to be spam by many systems. Anything else?

The containment buildings didn't contain the meltdown, and the emergency cooling system that was supposed to let them use external pumps diverted the water into holding tanks instead of the cores. There were many screw-ups, and even now they are behind schedule with the decommissioning and clean up.

Chernobyl and Fukushima had the same root cause - too expensive. Chernobyl skimped on not bothering to build containment buildings or train people properly. Fukushima didn't build the necessary tsunami defences, despite being warned.

It's nuclear's Achilles' heel. Costs too much to be commercially viable, can't afford to be properly insured, and doesn't get the necessary level of investment once it's running.

I think there is some confusion here. They don't seem to have disabled it on older chips, only on new laptops, before sale, where AV1 is supported.