This might surprise you, but Haskell can do IO. It even has a name. It's called "IO". Shocking, I know. (IO happens to be a monad, which I'm sure someone will point out soon, but that's not important right now.)
"For CD [control diet], the source of carbohydrate included corn starch, sucrose and maltodextrin. In contrast, the HFCS-MFD contained HFCS as the primary source of carbohydrate at a level of 26% of the diet by weight. The HFCS-MFD also was comprised of 38.6% kcal from fat while the CD sourced 10.3% kcal from fat. The sole source of fat in the CD was soybean oil while the HFCS-MFD contained multiple sources of fat including palm oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, lard, beef tallow, and anhydrous milk fat in addition to soybean oil. Moreover, HFCS-MFD contained reduced levels of fiber and increased levels of sodium and cholesterol."
This is not a study about (only) the effects of HFCS. Everything observed could equally be blamed palm oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, lard, beef tallow, milk fat, fat in general, sodium, cholesterol, or lack of fiber. The only thing nothing can be blamed on is carbohydrates, including sucrose, because the control group received more of them. Oh, all all that in mice.
Frankly, I don't think anything can be learned from a study that varies so many variables at once.
It might be because managers talk all the time while saying nothing. So nobody really listens anymore. It was certainly true in most meetings I experienced.
And all that greed, corruption, corner-cutting resulted in two major accidents, which killed fewer than 60 people in total. What a condemning track record!
One of these accidents happened in the Soviet Union, in a reactor type that could never be licensed in the US. The principal cause was operators ignoring safety regulations under political pressure. Do you really think, whether the US builds or doesn't build PWRs and BWRs would have impressed the SU one way or another?
The other accident happened in Japan. The principal cause was a rather extreme tsunami. What turned it from a minor mishap into a major accident was that modern politics invalidated the original safety concept. (The BWR's containment has to be vented before core damage occurs, but that was no longer politically acceptable in 2011.)
The lesson to learn from both accidents is that politicians have too much power and engineers have too little.
> People will either pay more or save money by changing their lifestyle to match the weather and seasons.
Absolutely. People will soon adapt to Renewables by heating their homes only in summer, when electricity is cheap, and not in winter, when it is expensive. They will also use electric lights more during the day, when electricity is plentiful, and not at night, when it is scarce. This isn't really new; after all, for millenia, people responded to droughts by simply eating less in the years with bad harvests, and they were happy, weren't they?
In a world powered by Renewables, electricity in worthless during summer days and priceless during winter nights. What a glorious future indeed!
How come? Conventional electricity plants also convert heat to electricity. That doesn't sound fundamentally different from your business.
Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and need much bigger machinery for the same output.
That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the thermodynamic limit is in the billions of Kelvin, but a practical power conversion system will operate in the range of 500-1000 Celsius.) But for the foreseeable future, it won't be competitive.
Our heat sources were typically in the 500-600C range, with plant exhaust flows containing about 80-150MW of energy. Current tech can convert that with about 20% efficiency.
Not at all like conventional electricity plants, the heat is already being created in industrial processes and is a waste product.
We're familiar with delta-T and thermodynamics. Current off the shelf technology can easily hit half of the Carnot limit at most delta-Ts. That's not the point, the point is the "fuel" was free, and the price was "close" to existing sources as these things go (about 2x the price of natural gas) and even with a carbon market and climate mandates, it's impossible to get investment.
If you go to an existing power market, there is generally already enough supply for the existing demand. And all of that supply is a sunk cost. The plants are already built. They're not going to get shut down unless the price falls below solely the operating cost.
Building more capacity can cause the price to decline. In some cases by quite a lot. So nobody is going to want to finance it unless they see that either demand is about to increase or supply is about to decrease.
Which is potentially true in the future. Electric cars will need more generation capacity. A carbon tax that causes existing fossil plants to shut would reduce existing supply.
But it's also potentially not true. Maybe the demand for electric cars will be satisfied by an increase in rooftop solar and not an increase in utility-scale generation plants. We don't know when, or if, a carbon tax will happen in a given market.
You guys also had a specific problem. If you're getting waste heat from natural gas plants, and then carbon prices increase to the point that people stop burning natural gas and switch to alternatives, you're not the ones absorbing that demand, you're the ones getting shut down.
So you're in a different market position than would be the case for fusion after the introduction of a carbon tax.
Wait, what? Coal plants operate with an upper temperature of under 600C, and they approach 40% efficiency. Why do you say it's only 20%?
Either way, it sounds as if a coal plant without the furnace wouldn't be able to compete with "conventional electricity". What is "conventional electricity" then? Open cycle gas turbines? Are they that much cheaper, even including fuel cost?
Those temperatures will also be at higher pressures, while the waste heat I mentioned is at atmospheric pressures. 500-600C is the "crossover zone" where ORC versus steam cycle really depends on the details.
The plants we were looking at were either open cycle turbines (which means turbines in mechanical duty such as compressor stations, since all new turbine power plants are combined cycle) or other industrial processes such as cement production and steel manufacture.
> I do believe we should have built more nuclear plants 20 or 30 years ago
Would you like to know why we didn't?
Because climate activists told us 20 years ago that
- [a nuclear power plant] takes 30 years or more to build one
- [a nuclear power plant] usually costs twice as planned
- [nuclear power is] way more expensive than renewables
- renewables can be deployed now
Then we (Germany) wasted 20 years building renewables, and now we are nowhere close to fulfilling our Kyoto commitment, and got the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world. Well done, climate activists!
I do wonder why and how green parties were able to get everyone else to retire nuclear plants but then nobody (green, blue, red, etc.) set plans in motion to replace it.
Your first question has a simple answer: by law. New nuclear plants haven't been licensed in Germany in, like, forever. Currently, the law explicitly states that no new nuclear power plants will be licensed.
How they got the operators to agree to the early shutdown is less clear. By offering a good deal, I guess. It's only taxpayer money, after all.
Why nobody set plans in motion to replace it? I don't know. My best guess is, because politicians are unbelievably stupid. They really don't know anything about electricity. They really don't get that excess electricity in Juli doesn't help you in cold, dark January. Annalena Baerbock stated publically: "The grid is all the battery we need." At that level of incompetence, who knows why anything happened.
