You're aware that Diablo has been retrofitted with safety features that Fukushima Daiichi didn't even get because Japan was/is rife with corruption and kickbacks?

Feel free to take it up with the NRC, but they would just tell you in far more detail how Diablo Canyon won't ever turn into another Fukushima Daiichi. Heck, they have a lot of online documentation in the NRC library that can be read up on, and the certification for DC is freely available as well.

But good job with the FUD and other fear-mongering.

Germany also regularly has such spikes, which usually result in Germany paying the rest of Europe to take their power, while us consumers get shafted with the fees in addition to paying for more and more taxes to pay for for the 'Energiewende'.

Yet there's a reason why Nordstream 2 is such a big deal: the Energiewende is mostly about replacing nuclear with coal and gas. Coal (lignite) got a free pass until 2038, while new gas plants are popping up left and right.

Yes, there are a few days during the year when solar and wind manage to cover 90% of the electricity needs during part of that day, but outside of those periods, it's coal, gas and a dwindling level of low-carbon nuclear.

Add to this those Belgians who are also in the process of replacing nuclear with fossil methane plants, and if this is the 'green' future we can expect then I'd rather move to a place where the air isn't being blanketed with pollutants from fossil fuel plants.

California has no plan to get rid of its 200+ fossil methane plants, nor does Germany have a plan for its fossil methane plants. With the impact of fossil methane including the recovery and transport costs about as bad as that of coal, I'm not seeing how anyone is winning here, but the fossil fuel shareholders.

On which note, Greenpeace is literally selling natural gas in Germany. That should tell you all you need to know about this 'Energiewende'.

This is the kind of project that'd fit right in the world of Idiocracy. Anyone with two functioning brain cells knows that PV solar panels work best when a) angled, ideally following the Sun, and b) when cooled, e.g. by a draft along their backside in a roof-mounted configuration.

Much like with the retardation of Solar Friggin' Roadways or the disaster of the Dutch solar bike path, and the French PV solar road, flat on the ground is literally the worst way and location to install PV solar panels, except for maybe at the bottom of a deep ocean trench.

The irony here is that MSFT never bothered to offer C++ APIs, only the most horrible C APIs, between Win32 and MFC.

They probably reckoned that C# (.NET) would win out over C++, so when it didn't they're now trying to save face by jumping on a bandwagon.

What about that D or Ada API, Microsoft? :)

Solar power is meaningless when it's winter, dark and snowing and people are literally freezing to death inside their unheated homes. What's the upshot of this story, that more money is being wasted on unreliable, intermittent power that will be of no use whatsoever when it's really needed?

It's not allowed to restart the Indian Point reactors for a similar purpose, even though they do not emit any pollutants.

When California has over 200 fossil methane ('natural gas') plants and has even brought a couple of less efficient gas plants back online due to the frequent brownouts, this doesn't feel like it should be a priority at all.

Even better is that soon the last nuclear plant in California (Diablo Canyon) will be shuttered, which will remove another 1 GW of low-carbon power, to be compensated for by more gas.

What's California's plan for kicking the fossil fuel habit? So far there seems to be none, as the state is fully reliant on fossil methane today and looks to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Fact of the matter is that random mutations and 'weird' copies of genes are everywhere. We humans have taken advantage of this for decades, mostly in the form of mutagenics, where plant seeds are exposed to mutagenic radiation or chemicals, in order to boost the random mutation rate, and so develop new variants of e.g. apples. At this point most of the popular apple variants were produced through mutagenic means.

When a person smokes tobacco and drinks alcohol, they're introducing mutagenic (carcinogenic) chemicals into their body. This affects their reproductive system as well, which increases the rate of mutations in families where such mutagenic exposure is common.

If anything, gene editing is the much more precise version as you can actually focus on a specific part of the genome instead of flipping genes and causing DNA strand breaks at random and hoping for sweeter apples or so.

I tried to install Arch Linux a few years ago for the first time, after hearing so many good things about it, and being an avid user of MSYS2 with the same pacman package manager when I'm on Windows.

Long story short, I think that short of LFS I have never seen a distro require so much manual busy work as Arch does by default. Tedious things, things which have been automated or at least guided since I first used Linux (SuSE 6.3) back in '98. On that note, YAST for all its flaws along with the other tools in SuSE back then weren't bad at all for the time.

I have since discovered Manjaro and now use it instead of Arch, as I like the ecosystem, but I don't have the time or inclination to mess about with details like setting up a correctly sized swap partition and parameters of the bootloader.

Germany's CO2 output has barely budged over the past decade. When you look at the CO2 g/kWh and similar numbers, you can easily see that Germany has one of the dirtiest grids in Europe, currently only rivaled by Poland, and they're going nuclear within a decade.

Germany on a sunny day like today still has a carbon intensity of 174 grams right now: https://www.electricitymap.org.... Often Germany's carbon intensity is between 200-400 grams, so today is a pretty good day, relatively speaking.

France is 26 grams, and heavily exporting nuclear power to Germany. Germany is about to lose 6.61 GW of low-carbon nuclear power, which will be replaced with mostly gas.

Meanwhile, over in Europe we got the Belgians aiming to switch from nuclear (50% of electricity production today) to fossil methane ('natural gas') in a few years. Germany will turn off three more nuclear plants this year, and the remaining three next year, while leaving the coal plants running until 2038 at least.

It's reassuring to see that countries like Hungary, Poland and also the Netherlands are looking at nuclear power now to decarbonise their grids. At the current rate they'll have reached their climate goals while Germany will be struggling with a 100% fossil fuel (coal & gas) powered grid with no plans for getting out of it.

The cheap response there is 'build more solar and wind', but both have reached their limits in Germany and Belgium already, with almost no capacity being added, and older, less efficient turbines being torn down. The amount of land required for these compared to a thermal plant is just insane, not to mention the environmental implications.

I may have to migrate to the US, Canada or (soon) China to be able to breathe some fresh air instead of smog at this rate.

Using only wind & solar will mean the use of >280x more land just to cover the rated capacity factor of a nuclear plant, and that's without including the grid storage facilities needed to cover the days or weeks when there's inadequate power.

It's rather like what we saw in Texas this year. Even though it's not fair to blame solar & wind for what happened there, the fact of the matter remains that their output was very low (if higher than predicted) and the presence of solar & wind in Texas therefore essentially irrelevant.

Solar and wind are nice for investors who wish to make a quick ROI buck, but they are no good in a capacity market.

That is correct. Only Soviet RBMKs (rapidly being phased out today) and Canadian CANDU reactors (heavy water moderated) use a positive void coefficient.

The fact that almost nobody seems to know that Canada has a big nuclear power industry and has been designing and building CANDU reactors around the world (e.g. Pakistan & China) should indicate that negative vs positive void coefficient isn't a problem by itself.

Fukushima Daiichi uses GE's BWR reactors (Gen II). These have a negative void coefficient, like every LWR.

The only commercial reactor types to use a positive void coefficient are the Soviet RBMK (Chernobyl-type), which is graphite-moderated, and the heavy water-based Canadian CANDU reactor designs.

As noted in the Diet's 2012 report on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the plant's earthquake rating was too high, the sea wall too low, and the backup power options were inadequate, with even the external power socket option (which would have saved the plant) running into compatibility issues (i.e., it didn't fit). TEPCO also hadn't fitted the hydrogen venting feature that was required after TMI, as exposure of the zirconium fuel rod cladding to air results in hydrogen being produced.

The Diet pinned the blame on TEPCO, the weak regulator and the Japanese government.

The problem with metrics like $/MWh is that this is only relevant in an energy market, i.e. the speculative market which Texas had such an entertaining run-in not too long ago.

In a capacity market, however, energy is sold as a guaranteed N% availability within ~3 years. E.g. 75% up-time of a coal plant, with maintenance known in advance, or the ~90% capacity factor of a nuclear plant.

Of course, investors hate the capacity market, because it means having to provision over-capacity and such. Meaning assets which just sit there, doing nothing. This makes the capacity market a long-term investment, much like bonds.

In the energy market, on the other hand, one sells power when one has it, at the price that gets offered. Since for e.g. VRE (solar, wind) the up-front costs are relatively low, this makes them a solid investment, with quick ROI. No assets standing around, and rapid money flow into one's pocket.

The energy market is more akin to shorting stocks, however. After the mishap in Texas, many who gambled in the energy market are now bankrupt, while others struck paydirt by getting $9,000/kWh, assuming they had any generating capacity.

In the end, only the capacity market can provide any guarantee of power being available. Yet the transition to VRE means a shift from a capacity market to an energy market. This is the natural consequence of picking power sources which have a capacity factor of exactly 0 in the capacity market. VRE doesn't work in the capacity market. Not even with grid-level storage. Not at anything remotely affordable.