Fully agreed. I have never seen a programming language which is so badly designed as Wolfram. I really wish there was another way to access all of Mathematica's functionality with a more sane interface.
If a nuclear reactor was bombed during the war, would the resulting deaths be counted as a nuclear disaster and used as argument against it, or just another war crime? Depends who you ask I'd say.
Does that really matter? The cleanup costs are still socialized.
It is time we move on from the fossil tradition of socialized losses on private profits [1] and instead let the nuclear industry bear their true insurance cost.
Then I suppose nuclear power is also a scam given thant 45% of the capacity in Sweden was out last week and we all know how it went for the French during the energy crisis. [1]
The electricity grid is fundamentally running on marginal cost. How will you force everyone with rooftop solar and home batteries to buy horrendously expensive new built nuclear power when they can supply their own electricity?
I am just correcting misinformation and disinformation.
And no, you suppose incorrectly.
Intermittent renewables are a scam, because they get to privately reap benefits and socialize their costs, particularly their intermittency.
They can be useful, as long as they have to bear the costs of being intermittent. That means at minimum no feed-in priority and no fixed and/or guaranteed feed-in prices. Ideally, they would be required either (a) provide guaranteed power or (b) only be allowed to feed in after all the reliable plants.
This tells me you don't know how a grid works. You do know that the demand is variable right?
With the same reasoning nuclear power is a scam because it can't adapt to the grid demand and forces gas peakers to sit in standby. Socializing the losses, to use your words.
In California the grid shifts between ~15 GW at the minimum and 52 GW at the peak.
When studies have looked at the difference in dispatchable power required comparing majorly renewables or nuclear powered grids when meeting true a grid demand the difference is quite small.
It does favor nuclear power but the differences are not significant in the grand scheme of things when factoring in the absolutely stupid cost for new built western nuclear power.
These studies of course did not take into account 45% of the nuclear fleet being offline, they modeled it based on their average ~85% capacity factor.
Or are you suggesting that we should have peaking nuclear plants to match grid demand? So it isn't a scam for the ratepayers?
The one who doesn't know how the grid works is you.
Some demand is variable. But a lot (usually most) is not. So having reliable base generation is highly valuable and not having that base-load generation ramp up and down is a feature, not a bug.
Intermittent generation is not variable, it is intermittent. Whereas to meet variable demand it would need to be dispatchable. Look it up.
Intermittent renewables are not dispatchable. Not even a bit.
The US nuclear fleet's CF has hovered over 90%. France's is only in the high 70s or low 80s because they do extensive load following (the stuff you say nuclear can't do...they've only been doing it for four decades or so).
France took its fleet offline in the summer of 2022, because that is where demand is lowest and generation from intermittent renewables is highest, for example Germany typically has to give away lots of electricity (or even pay consumers to get rid of it) because of their guaranteed feed-in.
In the end, France had to import only 4% of its electricity even in 2022, and most of that was in the summer, again where electricity prices are lowest because of high generation and low demand. And during all the other years it tends to be largest exporter of electricity in Europe if not the world.
So it is apparently fine to balance a nuclear grid with fossil fuels????
Just pretend that the fossil fuels doesn’t exist by exporting the nuclear electricity and have someone else build them and balance both grids!
What do you think would happen if you tried sticking two French grids with an over supply of nuclear powered electricity when no one wants the electricity next to each other?
You mean the brownouts storage and renewables have now completely fixed?
Yeah, way faster than handouts to new built nuclear power and waiting until the 2040s for the solution!
> Sweden just approved new nuclear construction, after rescinding a nuclear exit.
Yes. The current government has spent soon four years pushing paperwork around. They want nuclear power without having to accept the costs.
They seem to not want to have the costs associated with new built nuclear power subsidies on their political records for their entire careers.
I bet they will push through a monstrous handout package the final weeks before the election next September and then spend years crying about it being cut.
TeX is written in a literate programming style which is more akin to a math textbook than ordinary computer code, except with code blocks instead of equations. The actual programming language in the code blocks and the OS it runs on matters a lot less than in usual code where at best you get a few sparse comments. Avoiding bit rot in such a program is a very manageable task. In fact, iirc the code blocks which end up getting compiled and executed for TeX have been ported from Pascal to C at some point without introducing any new bugs.
The C version of TeX is also terrible code in the modern day (arbitrary limits, horrible error handling, horrible macro language, no real Unicode support, etc. etc), hence LuaTeX (et al.) and Typst and such.
The backward-compat story is also oversold because, yes, baseline TeX is backward compatible, but I bet <0.1% of "TeX" document don't use some form of LaTeX and use any number of packages... which sometimes break at which point the stability of base TeX doesn't matter for actual users. It certainly helps for LaTeX package maintainers, but that doesn't matter to users.
Don't get me wrong, TeX was absolutely revolutionary and has been used for an insane amount of scientific publishing, but... it's not great code (for modern requirements) by any stretch.
A 1 MWh battery isn't actually that big. There's electric trucks on the market right now with 600 kWh batteries sitting on the frame between the front and rear axle. That would easily fit into a basement room.
I wouldn't want a battery in my basement. if there is a fire in the battery your house will turn into a smoking hole, in the literal sense. Maybe if it was an iron-air battery or something safe, but not the current generation chemistry batteries.
Seems like the peak was around 2017 but they never performed particularly well?[1]
The problem is if the promise from the name was true, they'd be everywhere - they're not, so invariably much like vanadiun-redox or iron-flow batteries it turns out all the other details make them more expensive and less performant.
" if the promise from the name was true, they'd be everywhere"
Not necessarily.
Lithium is still quite cheap, safety is not the number one demand - and it is mainly about optimizing production to achieve competive pricing.
So yes, mabye there are some blocking details I am not aware of, but otherwise I expect their time will come.
Even if it was a safer chemistry, I would still put it outside of my house, likely in a dedicated structure. Its a shit ton of energy potential regardless, and it can make maintenance and modification down the line way easier.
Most grid-scale batteries that large will have bigger inverters (usually it'll be inverters that can dump that energy in 2-6 hours so 500-150 KW for 1 MWh of battery) and require cooling systems and such, but if you're putting that in your home then cooling will be negligible and the inverter will remain small. The batteries themselves are fairly compact, it's the support systems that get large.
We can roughly estimate lithium ion batteries as 500 watt-hours per liter. Which makes a million watt-hours 2000 liters, which is two cubic meters. Add in extra overhead and it's still not all that much.
They are cheaper to run almost everywhere (depending on the cost of electricity versus gas of course). No breakthrough in battery technology needed for that.
They don't run everywhere though. They run until the fuel runs out. At least with
liquid fuels that just needs a short stop to refuel, and stations are everywhere. a recharge takes longer and places to do it are not as common. If you are towing there are places you can't get.
I have never seen a conductor on a metro/subway system in Europe. Mainline trains often have one, but not always. I've ridden trains on small branch lines in Germany which were operated by a driver only.
Range is somewhere between 350 and 600 km depending on conditions. Aerodynamics, weight, weather all have an influence as well as the battery size and efficiency of the specific model of truck. The guy on the youtube channel has driven most of the selection of currently available long haul electric trucks in Europe under a variety of conditions, so this seems fairly representative.
The trucks are all designed to be driven for the legally mandated maximum of 4.5 hours at highway speeds and to be recharged sufficiently in a 45 minute break to be able to do that again for another 4.5 hours. In particularly adverse conditions a little less driving time before recharging is possible but for an average load the currently available tech works just fine and it is mostly the charging infrastructure that limits adoption.
Although that paper even made it to PRL. I guess I should have written up some similar nonsense and sent it to PRL, might have improved my career chances.
