spartanatreyu @ spartanatreyu @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

Looking back at history, it would lead to more propaganda and more support for going to war.

A population getting attacked only leads to that population wanting to an us vs them mentality and emotional knee-jerk reactions over rational responses.

Okay that's good, spaces for hydro storage isn't an issue.

The only problems/questions left are:

• Are the spaces spread out in the right areas, and can they be chosen in the right combination that won't lead to problems down the line? (I think that's beyond the scope of that document, but we'll assume it is all good for now)
• Time (let's just assume it's faster to get it all built than nuclear so we can examine hydro storage more)
• Cost. Looking at the link I find:

Thus, the expected cost of a 1,000 megawatt pumped hydro energy storage system with a head of 600 m and 14 hours of storage is about $1.8 billion.

1000 MW = 1GW : $1.8B

And your quote says we need 450 GWh of storage.

So 450 x 1.8 = $810B

(I'm assuming I haven't made a mistake about the 14 hours of storage and the converting between GW and GWh).

Our current GDP is 1.6 trillion.

So we could do it, but it would cost us half of our GDP for one year (but we'd be spreading it out over multiple years).

I'm assuming economies of scale would come into effect, but how much more efficient can you be at making and pouring concrete.

I haven't found any source on the fiscal cost of the Coalition's plan (I doubt they even know, and I suspect that they're just trying to extend the life of coal by relying on delays), but it begs the question:

Would their seven proposed nuclear stations be cheaper than $810 Billion?

Nuclear plants have really really long spin up/down cycles so when it's on, it's on for a while. It's not like solar, gas, wind where you can just stop it on a whim. So if you go nuclear, it's already running for a long time, and if they're running for a really long time they're also essentially running as baseload production.

As for the cost for emergency power, yeah it'd be great if it's cheaper. But the worse the emergency becomes, the less the cost matters. If I had to choose between coal or nuclear for emergency power, I'd probably choose both. Coal (which can be started and stopped quickly) just to cover the spin up time for the nuclear power, then nuclear for the rest of the emergency (and during spin down as whatever the emergency was is in the process of being resolved).

The cost of nuclear is only at the commissioning and decommissioning of the plant. But during the runtime of the plant is remarkably cheap. People just balk at the initial price because so much of the cost is up front.

Another thing to remember about recycling is that we as a species were producing nuclear waste before we had reactors that could use recycled waste so globally speaking we currently have a surplus of waste. Recently the US had to restart a reactor because they didn't have enough materials to use for powering deep space probes. It's not implausible that we could run out of waste to use and have to produce more fresh fuel.

On the topic of safety though, modern reactor designs require power coming in to keep the fissile material frozen to continue the reaction.

As soon as the power is cut, the coolant is cut, part of the plant is destroyed, or something else goes wrong, the plant stops working. If the plant stops working, there's nothing to cool down the fissile material.

The fissile material's own radioactivity heats it up to the point that it melts and pours away over what's essentially a pyramid plinko drain splitting up the liquid into many separate pools. (If it helps, think of your bath's drain if the pipe splits into two, which split into four, which split into eight, and on and on until a bath tub's water has been separated into an ice cube tray the size of a tennis court.)

Fissile material only reacts when it's next to enough fissile material.

And since it's separated and spread out, there's more reaction.

If you cut the power for the coolant pumps, the fuel melts, separates (by the power of gravity) and the reaction stops.

If the coolant leaks, the fuel melts, separates and stops reacting.

If you crash a plane into the reactor itself, the cooling mechanisms don't exist anymore and the fuel melts and pours out the nearest holes (either the drain or spilling outside the reactor into the containment structure, or even outside if need be), spreading out, separating, and reacting no more.

Modern reactors have more in common with an ice-cube hoisted above the great pyramid of giza than they do the fukushima or chernobyl plants. Both of those were designed to require power to prevent a dangerous meltdown which turn into a runaway reactions, whereas modern reactors make it so a meltdown prevents reactions.

That source doesn't have a link to their paper that works.

But based on what was stated just in your link, they say if we build enough storage then we wouldn't need any baseload generation, which is technically correct.

In particular, they're relying on hydro and gas storage.

(specifically renewable gas and not natural gas, because natural gas is still bad)

But as far as I know we can't build anywhere near enough hydro in Australia. Gas storage could technically work, but you'd have to build a ludicrous and economically infeasible amount of gas storage, or pump it into empty spaces underground (but I don't think we have enough of those in Australia either).

I'm under the impression that modern nuclear plants as baseload production would still be cheaper than the renewable gas storage we would need to maintain power.

Do you have a working link to the original paper or a study into how much renewable gas storage we'd require and the costs associated with it?

Energy generation is not an issue at all. It's a completely solved problem.

It's energy storage that is the problem, and that's why we need nuclear.

But Dutton isn't pushing nuclear because he's being responsible. He's not actually pushing nuclear, he's just pushing a pipedream doomed project designed to take time/money/effort away from renewables, storage, and actual nuclear, all to keep money flowing to the coal industry shareholders.

The problem of nuclear waste isn't actually a problem, and the 1000 year thing is a bit of an outdated myth. I wrote more about it here: https://aussie.zone/post/10867702/9731416

Energy storage is actually the biggest problem in energy right now (save for a crazy discovery like perpetual energy, or cheap mass produced super conductors that could optimize the absolute shit out of our energy transmission infrastructure and reduce the amount of energy that we need to produce in the first place).

The energy storage problem is actually the biggest reason why we need nuclear with our renewables.

Nuclear can run our baseloads, renewables plus storage can run our peakloads.

It's renewables AND nuclear, not renewables vs nuclear.

Nitpick: Nuclear isn't obsolete, it's as modern as the design you choose.

Nuclear isn't a replacement for renewables (like the coalition tries to suggest), and it isn't evil (like an internal faction in the greens tries to suggest).

We need:

• Renewables: for the best power production we can produce (when available)
• Energy Storage: to store excess renewable power for when it's not available
• Nuclear: to maintain baseline power (as opposed to peak power) for emergency scenarios.

Sidenote: Since whenever anyone suggests that nuclear isn't to be abhorred whenever it's brought up, here are the 3 common things brought up so no one has to ask it.

1. Risk of meltdowns

• Modern designs are meltdown-proof with passive safety built in (as opposed to active safety where you need to keep providing power to keep things safe like Fukushima). You can fly a plane into a modern nuclear reactor and the reaction just stops.

2. Nuclear proliferation

• We have our own large amount of uranium on the continent. We don't need to encourage others to mine and sell it, and we don't need to sell it overseas ourselves.

3. Nuclear waste

• It's common practice today to simply recycle nuclear waste as nuclear fuel. That way you get many more uses out of with less overall fuel that needs to be produced. By the end of it you have a kind of nuclear waste concentrate that burns itself out much quicker (meaning you only need to store it for about 100 years as opposed to 1000s of years). Also, that concentrate itself can be used in things like betavoltaics (think weak but long lasting batteries in things were you don't want to have to replace the batteries, e.g. pacemakers, smoke detectors, scientific sensors, etc...)

First, AI is garbage at best, a shield to look busy, move money, and claim benevolence at worst.

Secondly, who is funding the AI?

If I were a company that makes more money the less people cycle or work from home, I'd rename one of my departments the AI consultant department. Then I could pay myself as much as I wanted, be able to spew buzzwords at investors/governments/naysayers, generate nothing of value (as intended), then say to all the governments and cyclists: "Sorry, we spent $X and it looks like putting more gas guzzling cars on the road is still the best solution".

Better to ask a rubber duck than an LLM.

It has better results, is cheaper, and makes has a positive compounding effect on your own abilities.

Except that there may be better ways to treat mental health issues in the future.

If future generations can revive someone, they've probably also cured aging. So for adapting they'll have all the time in the world, potentially more.

At least it was better than the developer survey that was only about AI. That one still makes me facepalm just thinking about it.

Because: "The dose makes the poison".

In other words, any chemical—even water and oxygen—can be toxic if too much is ingested or absorbed into the body. The toxicity of a specific substance depends on a variety of factors, including how much of the substance a person is exposed to, how they are exposed, and for how long.

Are you using the group policy editor?

Why would I leave windows if Linux isn’t offering anything better?

Because Linux offers an ad-free experience, whereas Windows offers a free ads experience.

No mouse and like games like MaM/Civ?

Recommendation for slower paced, top down strategy game:

• GBA emulator and the game Advance Wars 2

Recommendation for hard and fast paced game (audio required):

• Crypt of the Necrodancer

Recommendation for story based game:

• Undertale (avoid spoilers, this game will mess with you, only goes for 4 hours per playthrough but you will replay it for the different endings)

I'm not seeing anything in the data collected that I wouldn't want to be sent if the app crashed.

Presenting: an excerpt from my lua windows management script:

 lua

    
-- Exists because lua doesn't have a round function. WAT?!
function round(num)
    return math.floor(num + 0.5)
end

  

Yeah, not a fan.

The windows 11 teams runs better, but if you're using a school or work account, you need to use the old AngularJS+Electron version, or the new React+Webview2 version.

So for the time being, the Windows 11 teams is more catered for personal use only. It's kind of like a modern reboot of Microsoft's old MSN Messenger. It was included in Windows 11 (rebranded as "Chat") but it's been unbundled from Windows 11 installs and I think rebranded again. But not having the school/work account support means not a lot of people use it.

The transition between the AngularJS+Electron version and the React+Webview2 versions is happening now. At some point soon, anyone who is running an OS too old to run the new teams will be forced to use the browser version.

So after their transition, we'll have to wait and see if they add the school/work account support to the native version because everyone using teams right now only uses those accounts.