I thought that the most interesting bit was that it was discovered by speleology team 702, so that implies there are at least another 701 teams out there, or not, as the case may be...

That is all very well but what about the non-techie who just clicks through everything, i.e. everyone who has not got a /. user ID. iOS is great for that at the moment because almost everything is off by default, there is vetting of apps plus they can get pulled for bad behaviour.

Out of those who got an iPhone or iOS device knowing about the restrictions it came with, who wants lots of alternative app stores and payment methods? I certainly do not, this is one of the positive features that attracted me to it in the first place.

It is sort of weird that in the process of trying to give everyone choices, the choice that a lot of people in the end want, a locked down and comparatively safe place to have your personal data, might be denied to you in the name of competition. That is totally fucked up IMO.

Trouble is, a tonne of anything has a certain cost of which transport is significant, and even if you are making it on-site, binders, fixtures, labour, cables, motor/generators, etc. all have to be taken into account. Making a structure capable of supporting all this mass is not going to be a cheap endeavour either, and that is all it is doing, not contributing towards storage. The higher you build, the more expensive it becomes per metre as you need more structure to support what is on top of it.

With batteries, you just need a container which is mostly battery plus control electronics, which you would also need for gravity storage.

According to TFA, the tower is 70m tall. Assuming all 70m is used for storage, that gives a maximum potential energy density of ~700J/kg before efficiency losses. That is 1/250th of a lead-acid battery and 1/700th of a modern flywheel system or compressed air storage. A Li-ion battery has >1,000x greater energy density.

Built cheaply and easily? Concrete is what, $100 a tonne or of that order? That is the equivalent of 700kJ of storage, which is about 15 18650 Li-ion cells, which you can get for well under $100 on Amazon. So just the cost of the concrete is more than the cost of batteries - it is not a realistic proposition.

Agreed. Some years ago there was an article about someone who had invented a gravity-powered light for domestic use. Unfortunately, although it seemed like a good idea, the calculations (arts student) were several orders of magnitude out, so instead of hours of output it would have been a few seconds.

This project sounds fairly similar. The energy density is far too low to provide much utility, especially when construction costs are taken into account.

..and needs some pumping before he can dump!

I think there are several things being conflated here. A competitive runner/biker and a hunter in the savannah are both trying to maximise their efficiency in locomotion, and as the study shows they use less energy for the same result after training. If you are trying to lose weight, you need to burn calories, either by being inefficient in technique (like my skiing) or by climbing hills, lifting weights, resistance training, etc. that needs a defined minimum energy expenditure to comply with the laws of physics. A 100kg human that walks up a 1,000m mountain uses >235kcal; they have to.

Are they *more* expensive per pair than the $6-$9 billion build estimate for a 1.1GW normal plant? IDK but it seems unlikely. If it needs surrounding with water (why?) then surround it with water, like on the coast. As long as there is accessible coolant, where is the problem?

As for secrets, the US, Russia, China, etc. all have sea-going reactors, so what is the point? If it really is a showstopper, get the Armed Forces to run them on military land and export electricity.

Russia has been using some of its nuclear-powered vessels to provide electricity for remote settlements, and they have reactors on barges as well that can be towed to where they are needed.

People seem to focus on giant GW installations as though they are the only way of generating power. Considering some of the naval designs are over half a century old there must be room for improvement...

Given that aircraft carriers and submarines have to operate anywhere in the World, like the Persian Gulf where water temperatures can go >30C in the summer, it seems to be a more difficult environment than next to a large river, or on the coast somewhere in temperate latitudes. These are all solved problems since nuclear power became a thing, anyway.

The naval reactors must be able to be ramped up and down over quite a wide power output, or even shut down, otherwise they would blow up every time you docked and started boiling the water around you.

If you can successfully design something that fitted inside the pressure hull of a submarine, whilst leaving room for everything else, in the 1950s, surely we could do better than that now?

I am always amazed that conventional nuclear generating plants take so long to build, cost so much and have difficulties when operating, when compared with the large number of reactors installed in ships and submarines that seem to be able to just get on with it.

They are also much, much smaller, last decades without refuelling and the bigger ones produce up to 500MW. What not to like? Well, they get decommissioned by removing the reactor core and putting a new one in, so the old one has to be stored somewhere, but that is a trivial problem compared with cleaning up an old nuclear plant on land with orders of magnitude more material.

IDK how long it takes to make a new ship reactor, but given there is no concrete, land moving, planning, huge infrastructure, etc. it must be a short time compared with land-based ones. If we really wanted to, we could just use some old ships, put reactors in them, moor them in estuaries and run power lines onto the land. Why is this not looked at more closely?

Also, do people think that if Apple had gone OK, tell you what, we will take our commission down to 20% or even 15%, that any of that money now going to developers would be passed on to consumers in terms of cheaper apps?

If it is a fight over profits between suppliers (Apple with the Store, developers with the apps) that has little chance of altering things significantly for the customer, why do governments get involved? If they make a law that pretty much specifically affects Apple over other businesses, why the surprise when Apple complies with it technically but does an end run round the intent? Would any other company do it differently?

1. Set up crypto-something using other peoples money.
2. Tell them you got hacked.
3. Profit!!

No need for a ??? step...

Quantum warp blockchain pico-battery NFTs FTW!

I agree. As it was *with* COVID, we do not even know if the virus caused the death or whether it just happened to be present by coincidence.

I get the feeling that although the public statement was literally true, a lot of what we are hearing from the Govt. is to try and coerce as many people as possible to get vaccinated/boosted so we can return to some semblance of normality. If I was in charge, I admit I would be giving serious consideration to these kind of tactics. Also, will Omicron be the last variant of concern? Who knows, but the better vaccinated a population is, the more likely it is to be able to withstand any further epidemics...

OK, I do not run a battery recycling company, but I would have thought that having all the ingredients in the correct proportions to make new batteries delivered to you in bulk (which is what old batteries are) would make the business pretty profitable.

The alternative is to dig the precursors out of the ground and go through all the refining stages, which on initial inspection appears to be more energy/cost inefficient and reliant on third parties than plain recycling?

Put it this way, if a inexhaustible deposit of lithium, cobalt, iron and other ingredients, in the sort of concentrations you find in batteries, was discovered somewhere on the Earth, people would be fighting over it...