Plus the council is arguing that they don't have the authority to dig up the landfill either - they are bound by the rules issued in their environmental permit for the landfill. Another issue I don't see mentioned here - there are hundreds or thousands of damaged hard drives in this landfill. Within each of these harddrives is a multitude of irrelevant data. So you're looking for a specific part of a specific needle in a haystack containing many needles.

This compressed air storage system also stores the thermal energy of the compressed gases to improve the round-trip efficiency. https://www.wired.com/story/hy...

Relevant YT Video "The Hidden Engineering of Landfills" by Practical Engineering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44

"Of course, we have a lot of room for improvement in how we think about and manage solid waste in this world. Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water."

You wouldn't feel so helpless when you look at other countries and realize they can make it work. It's not like a working government is a pipe dream.

You are making a couple of bad assumptions

- Charging load is evenly spaced in time (no, peaks are likely. You see them all the time in traffic patterns)
- Convenient charging won't increase load on average (no, it will - more roads means more cars. More convenient EVs means more people drive them).

You've also neglected the key issue with power generation and transmission. It's not actually about average most of the time, it's about peaks. It's about instantaneous demand RIGHT NOW and about switching generation on and off as those peaks change. The shorter the EV charge cycles, the more "bursty" the power grid needs to be. Fast charging (20 minutes) is already very bursty, so making it more so creates transmission challenges to the chargers and potentially wider grid challenges.

That said, I love EVs and am excited about the potentials here. Most likely we'll just need to start adding more storage to our chargers in the form of similar batteries or super capacitors or similar. We can engineer around these challenges. But they ARE real challenges.

I agree with you, but the pedant in me wants to point out that your 172 GWh figure is likely "power used" and I'm not sure if it includes transmission losses and generation losses. But I bet the total is <300 GWh.

Uranium is very common, especially per Joule (Watt/second) of energy. It's refining it into usable fuel and creating reactors which is hard. That would have become easier and cheaper just like solar panels had we pursued Fission as a civilization.

The SpaceX Raptor used in Starship now uses torch igniters which are like amped up sparkplugs.

Perhaps you'd get excited (like me) about this thin, light, solid state cooling technology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdD0yMS40a0

Oh, actually Google search might also close down once AI chat-bots (now with helpful product placement!) completely fill this role.

Unfortunately - if it's not google search, expect Google to close it down eventually.

Any device that will keep working after it's parent company fails and their servers go down is "safe." At least you'll always have the functionality you had when you bought the thing, though you may struggle to get parts for repair.

However devices which rely on the parent company providing servers - these are far more dangerous.

It's OK to be an early adopter of smart home tech that has a very long service life without repair and talks using open-source protocols, integrating to a standard smart-home system. However if you expect the company to look after you for years, they better be a stable company with a good track record of doing that.

Don't worry. Industrial foods use the iodized salt. So while you might avoid iodine in your organic home-cooked meals, you'll still get it in your bread, your bacon and your fast-food.

Such a system shouldn't reveal where you are logging on to the Government. The design should mean that the user can verify without exposing themselves.

For instance

1. User signs up and proves their identity.
2. They want to sign on to an adult site, or prove their identity for some other purpose.
3. They ask the ID site to sign a token that proves they are over 18 (or 16+ or 13+ depending). The token does not contain name or identifying information, perhaps it only lasts a few minutes. This is probably done by a browser extension.
4. They provide this token to the PornHub server or similar
5. That server has a server-side API that checks the signature of the token really was published on the government site, without sending another request to the govt.

Step 3 doesn't need to tell the government why you want the token. Step 5 doesn't need to reveal your identity, just that you meant the legal restrictions.

https://xkcd.com/632/