Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722.full

France managed to go from nearly 0% nuclear power to ~75% in about a decade. Sweden took ~15 years to do about the same. Is that fast enough for you?

Now let's turn it around. Can you point to ANY nuclear power plant completed on-time and on-budget in the last 20 years?

Barakah (UAE): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Pakistan: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Karachi-unit-2-inaugurated-by-Pakistan-PM

There are also a whole range of finished VVERs in Russia and elsewhere.

Considering that China managed to build & connect two EDF-designed EPRs to their national grid in less than 8 years time and then had the audacity to hand EDF a list of improvements that EDF used for the EPR 2 design, I'd say that the problem is that the West hasn't been building large infrastructure for a while.

This is exemplified by e.g. Germany's inability to get its new BER airport completed within budget and within deadlines, let alone its Stuttgart 21 rail station project that's still far from finished.

Don't you mean 'graphite-moderated'? Graphite is a neutron moderator, whereas the helium in the case of HTR-PM would be the coolant.

Standard solution with a pebble-bed reactor when there's a loss of coolant is to inject neutron poison, and to release the pebbles into a containment area where the chain reaction is halted.

I do not see how your comparison with 'chernobyl' makes any sense here. These reactor designs couldn't be more different, and a Chernobyl-style event (positive void coefficient, massive reactivity spike & steam explosion) is therefore not even theoretically possible.

Why is this a bad idea? There's no problem with a positive void coefficient because there's no coolant water, but helium gas. We're also talking about a pebble bed reactor, not a channel-cooled reactor. There's also no zirconium fuel cladding, ergo no potential hydrogen formation. What are your specific objections here?

Did you bother looking up HTR-PM (High-Temperature gas-cooled reactor) at all before spouting off on that rant? The entire point of the HTR-PM project is to get the temperature and pressure to a level that is compatible with that of coal plant boilers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM

Coal plants can be replaced most ideally with nuclear power plants. That's why China for example is developing the HTR-PM small modular reactor that can be used as a drop-in solution for coal plant boilers. Effectively this would transform China's hundreds of coal plants into low-carbon nuclear plants while reusing most of the existing infrastructure.

Fossil fuels are still the most used fuel source today, but their days are numbered. The EU has announced that in its green taxonomy, nuclear power is to be promoted, whereas fossil methane ('natural gas') is to be treated as a temporary bridge solution at best. This is not the time to invest in natural gas, but to get rid of it as soon as we can.

And that's even ignoring lunacy like e.g. Belgium's plan to replace its seven nuclear plants by 2025 with 100% fossil methane plants while still selling it as 'green'. It's projected that this would make Belgium along with e.g. Germany the most polluting countries in Europe. Whether Belgium will really go through with this is still to be seen. Public opinion is against it.

If the AZ and J&J vaccines were the only option against COVID-19 they'd be a solid vaccine option. Kinda. The AZ vaccine seems to offer very little protection against the South African variant and highly reduced (~50%) against the Indian B1.617.2 variant according to an early UK study.

Meanwhile the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna) have none of these disadvantages. Yes, there's the myocarditis side-effect that's serious, and quite a few people develop a skin rash, but that's on a different level from having a blood clot or hundred forming in your body and ending up in places where they can kill.

Along with the much higher efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, it seems that the AZ and J&J vaccines are a stop-gap measure at most. With the B1.617.2 variant currently surging in the (mostly AZ vaccinated) UK, we'll find out soon enough whether they'll be rushing to get an mRNA booster in people's arms before long.

Variable power sources like wind and solar (VRE) cannot be relied on, as even the best weather predictions may be off by a lot. There's a reason why in the capacity market VRE has zero value, unlike thermal plants. For these one can say in advance (usually ~3 years) when and how much capacity will be available. Same for hydro plants.

VRE is an opportunistic power source that has to be used when it's available, or otherwise stored (not economically feasible) or discarded (standard procedure when thermal plants cannot be throttled back enough or VRE overwhelms the grid capacity).

These are basic realities of grid management, and for a politician to either feign ignorance about this topic, or lie through their teeth is... business as usual, I guess?

Good thing that we're not about to create another large waste problem in the form of all the wind turbine blades that are being increasingly decommissioned as they reach the end of their lifespan.

While it is technically possible to recycle composite materials (fiberglass, carbon fiber, etc.), the economic reality is that it isn't feasible to do so beyond grinding them up into bits that then get stuffed into concrete or so. This has been an issue with composite material boats for a while now, and is about to get much worse.

Prepare for landfills and burn pits 'taking care' of this waste problem as well. It's like nobody ever works through or cares about what happens at the end of any product chain.

According to the scientists of the Institute of Nuclear Power Plant Safety (IPBAE) of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences who are monitoring the situation, not a whole lot. Worst case is a small steam explosion as the remaining water (if any) in the room 305/2 gets boiled off. The NSC will likely contain any radioactive dust that might cause.

I covered this topic for Hackaday a few days ago: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/14/increased-neutron-levels-at-chernobyl-4-how-dangerous-is-corium/

This is a situation that has been (slowly!) developing over the past four years, ever since the NSC was put in place and was not unexpected. At this point the neutron flux density is still far below levels where one would raise alarm.

Swappable keyboards is a feature of Thinkpad laptops since forever, and even a common feature among other laptops.

Being able to upgrade RAM and CPU? Been there, done that. Upgradable storage? All yours even in slim-and-light models.So what's repairable? Does one get full board schematics and guaranteed access to replacement components and modules for the next N years? Doesn't seem like it.

So then these built-in dongles are what one is supposed to get excited about, I guess? Very Apple-esque, with just USB-C ports, but only now you can buy these proprietary dongles to get some useful ports.

It's like the ToughBook idea of swappable modules, only the lame and cynical capitalist version...

Nordstream 2 looks to be dead in the water, actually. With the Greens looking to become the new main party of Germany with the election later this year and ousting the Conservative party, Nordstream 2's days seem solidly numbered.

So far the Greens have advocated a strong line against Russia and Russian gas. Very likely they'll side more with the US than with Russia even on 'business' deals.

Where Greta and many like her are completely letting ideology overrule science and reason is however with exactly how climate change is supposed to be counteracted.

When Germany is removing another 6 GW of low-carbon power by the end of next year, that's enough to completely obliterate any gains that could be made by installing more wind and PV solar by 2030, even if installation of new PV solar and wind in Germany hadn't ground to a halt already.

And yet Greta et al. are against nuclear power, regardless of the fact that over 40% of all low-carbon in the EU comes from nuclear plants. Regardless of the IPCC making it clear that we need at least existing nuclear to stand a chance of coming even close to the goals of the Paris Agreement.

When youths like Greta are both complaining about adults not doing enough, while simultaneously supporting the climate vandalism of shutting down nuclear plants decades before they'd need replacing. One has to wonder what's truly the goal here, and how much of what they are saying is truly driven by science.

I accept apologies:

https://www.greenpeace-energy....