I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.
And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.
When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used
Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.
At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating
Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday. I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.
I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.
Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.
I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.
And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.
When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used
Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.
At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating
Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday.
I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.
I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.
Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.
Am I taking crazy pills here? They were suing Apple. The entire lawsuit was against Apple, not Google.
They sued both over the same issue.
Apple won, Google lost, in spite of the fact that Google had the more open ecosystem and the better case.
Just because we can't magically address all causes of CO2 and pollution in general doesn't we should blindly ignore the issue.
Indeed. We should also, however, recognize that emissions reductions can never get us to net-negative CO2 and that is where we need to get. We should be investing heavily in research into carbon capture and sequestration, because it is the ultimate long-term solution to greenhouse gas emissions, the thing that will allow us to actually reverse global warming.
In the meantime, as you say, we should start by looking at the CO2 emissions sources that allow us to most quickly and cheaply reduce our emissions. The easiest area is electricity production... made even easier by the fact that wind and solar are the cheapest technologies we have for producing electricity, in many cases even when the cost of battery storage is included. And of course as we convert electricity production to non-emitting sources, we should electrify as much as we can the other areas where we burn fossil fuels.
But we also need to be investing in carbon recapture, because some things are going to be hard to convert and, as I pointed out, only recapture can get us to net-negative. We should also be researching geoengineering techniques, such as methods of reducing insolation. Geoengineering isn't a solution (e.g. reducing insolation does nothing to fix ocean acidification), but it may be a necessary short-term measure, and we should be prepared, having already done what we can to understand it in case we need it, and before we need it.
Carbon reduction is good, but it's insufficient and I worry that we're not putting enough into other approaches. A large part of the reason is that people are afraid that attention on anything other than carbon reduction will harm the emissions reduction efforts. That's not a ridiculous concern, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scale and scope of the problem.
The advantage of small reactors is that (in theory) you could build a plant with 20 or so of them. This would make them less expensive because they would all share the support infrastructure. The reason this would be less expensive than a single big reactor is that they can be individually shut down for maintenance, so a SMR that only works 50% of the time is useful, while a big reactor has to work 99.9% of the time. Obviously as you stated they also have to make SMRs work at all and at a price that is less than 1/20 of a big reactor, which has not been proven yet.
The fantasy that towns would put a single SMR in their town square or a data center will put it in their basement are just that, fantasies. But clusters could be a deal changer for nuclear.
But I do see quite a few low user id folks posting
Slashdot is still part of my daily reading habit, after all these years. It's the one site I've always read every day.
The only way it could work fairly is by having an independent unbiased group making the determination on what was clearly misinformation.
That would be ideal, but I don't think it's really necessary. Just keeping the list a subject of public debate is sufficient to prevent things from getting too skewed.
That basically all of the people in the Western governments turned out to be raping minors and eating children
There is zero evidence of this, and the fact that you seem to believe it makes me dismiss everything else you might say out of hand, because you clearly either lack or don't engage critical thinking skills.
Yeah the tiny little bump down is not the start of the AI bubble bursting, not just yet. The little blip on Tuesday got wiped out on Wednesday and it's back to normal with some reshifting of investments in Asia.
Except for SpaceX which is now dropping back to its $150 opening IPO price to the public. It's going to bounce back up but once again in insignificant single digit percentage increases which means that even with the upcoming increase just by a few percentage points, it makes no difference to retail investors since you can't swing enough volume to actually make a reasonable profit on it.
When I was younger watching the Dow Jones industrial average hit 10,000 was a massive event. And then it hits 20,000 followed by $30,000 and now it's at 51, 000. So if I took the money that I had when I was younger and working and saving money and just left it invested in that index? Or just a total stock index? Or even a technology index? I could have retired by now but that money got used on life and other things and and it didn't stay invested. So compound interest and all the growth in the last few decades didn't happen.
It's transaction fees that are the problem with credit cards.
"Now that same mob has blocked me for trying to bring an intellectually diverse group of thinkers and editors to the site," Translation: "That mob blocked my mob!!!!". Sorry he lost me there, I was sympathetic earlier, but he blew it with that.
That's the thing though. The biggest source of misinformation in ol' Blighty is Nr.10.
I don't think that would matter in practice. This law wouldn't let them specify what *news* is allowed, only what news sources, and there would be a huge stink if they tried to block the major real news outlets. They'd like to, I'm sure, but I really doubt that they'd succeed.
It does demonstrate the problem with "misinformation" though. Some people will continue to insist it was true even years after it was proven false.
Russiagate was absolutely not "proven false". Mueller's report and both the House and Senate reports (from committees led by Republicans) thoroughly verified it.
. If you look at how fast renewables are growing
Solar is, by far, leading the growth of renewables. Solar is not a good source of energy in Canada, due to their high latitude (the angle of the sun is much less thus passing through more atmosphere), the disparity in amount of daylight received from season to season, and then the amount of snowfall they get, which covers solar panels.
Nuclear is one of the better sources of clean energy for a country like Canada.
The reward for working hard is more hard work.
