Except we don't. Where's my single-core 100GHz processor?
Improvements still happen, but not always in the same way. If you implemented an application in 2003 assuming we'd have such a processor you'd be very disappointed. Counting on exponential improvements to continue is risky bet.
Scaling may take us to some strange places, but it's worth noting that an Apple M1 chip has >100x the transistors of a 2004-era Pentium 4, and achieves ~500x the FLOPs at a fraction of the power draw.
Yes this isn't single-threaded performance, but I think we should keep in mind that exponential improvement in price/performance over many decades is possible, if never certain.
> Before you try to sink billions into nuclear energy, explain why we can't do it with solar + storage alone? Just one good reason. I've yet to hear anything substantive.
The fact that storage at anywhere remotely close to the required scale doesn't exist is a very good reason.
Waste is easily the biggest straw-man concern there is against nuclear. The entirety of the nuclear waste produced by US nuclear grid electric power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. We test waster supplies for uranium already because naturally occurring uranium sometimes gets into drinking water and it has to be filtered out [2].
Burying spent nuclear fuel in bedrock, with no aquifer poses zero risk. The only way it's getting out is by deliberate human intervention. Any nefarious group that has the capability of doing this could inflict far more harm by conventional means. And even if it somehow, by some mysterious force, leaks into the water supply we have infrastructure to detect it and filter it.
We dispose of materials far more toxic than nuclear waste on a regular basis.
> The entirety of the nuclear waste produced by US nuclear grid electric power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high
No, this is just spent fuel. There's a lot more to nuclear waste than spent fuel.
Correct, the bulk of nuclear waste is from nuclear weapons development and manufacture. In power generation the containment vessel and cooling water also get irradiated. But that's not persistent waste, and doesn't require long term storage.
How dangerous is low level waste? Based on what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem super radioactive in itself, but it sounds like some of it may have a lot of “problematic” material like dust.
I agree that nuclear waste is probably a manageable problem, but not for the reasons you say. "Zero risk" is not a thing that actually exists anywhere ever. "Bedrock with no aquifer" is a thing that exists, but it's not what you're looking for: the rockhead under a desert, for example, is bedrock with no aquifer, and it's commonly very porous and water-permeable. What you want is impermeable rock that will stay that way, like a salt deposit, which is indeed pretty safe—many salt domes have successfully kept petroleum or natural gas from leaking to the surface for 300 million years or more.
The special difficulty of nuclear waste is not that it's especially toxic—far more toxic materials certainly exist, even commonplace materials like hydrofluoric acid, hydrazine, and tetraethyllead. But if you pour hydrofluoric acid on the ground in most places, it becomes completely nontoxic within a few minutes. Hydrazine loses most of its toxicity if you just set it on fire, although burning it to totally nontoxic materials requires a little more care. Tetraethyllead also loses most of its toxicity when you burn it, though the resulting lead compounds were still toxic enough to cause a worldwide crime wave lasting decades.
What's special about nuclear waste is that no such simple means of detoxification exists. The only way to detoxify nuclear waste is with another nuclear reactor—and that's not only in need of additional development to bring it from the laboratory to production, it's also commonly prohibited because of proliferation concerns.
The real risk with nuclear waste, though, is not that disposing of it safely is rocket science; it's that the people who are in charge of it in countries like the US are the same ridiculous bumbling assclowns who've bungled the covid pandemic so badly. (Did you know that, though China was vaccinating college students last July, 1000 people a day are dying from covid in the US?) Have you read about the cat-litter explosion at WIPP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20... Someone used "an organic cat litter" in place of "inorganic cat litter" to immobilize the nuclear waste, so it caught on fire.
Fortunately, all of this is moot; as I said, nuclear energy is now so much more expensive than solar energy that there's no longer any reason to use it except in a few special niches, and that's unlikely to change for decades. Enjoy your Video Toaster.
The comment said that solar powered trains would only be able to run at night if wind generation is sufficient to power them in the absence of solar power - at least not without massive amounts of storage to account for this intermittency.
Regardless, I'm not sure why the inability to detoxify waste is such a concern. First of all, we do have the ability to reclaim >95% of it through reprocessing. This isn't detoxification per-se, but does represent a sizeable reduction in the amount of waste. And the remaining waste is stored underground. The danger of uranium entering the water supply already exists from naturally occurring uranium. The additional risk presented by waste buried in a known location, with no groundwater contamination risk is zero. Sure, if you want to be pedantic, it's not exactly zero: some nefarious group could dig it up and use it as a weapon. But any group with that level of capability could easily deal more damage through conventional means - so for all intents and purposes the risk is zero.
I think probably trains will have an easier time carrying batteries than electric cars do: a one-tonne diesel internal-combustion-engine car might get (in medieval units) 40 miles per gallon of fuel, while diesel freight trains routinely get 480 miles per tonne-gallon. Teslas need to recharge about every 500 miles, so we should expect battery-powered electric freight trains with the same battery mass fraction as a Tesla to need to swap batteries roughly every 6000 miles or 10000 km. A night train making it through the night isn't going to be a problem.
If that's true, then why haven't batteries already replaced diesel engines in diesel-electric locomotives? I suspect it's a matter of battery costs and network effects. A gallon of diesel is 146 MJ, so a tonne-mile on a freight train costs 300 kJ, or 189 kJ/tonne/km in non-medieval units. Lead-acid batteries only give you roughly 20 kJ/US$, and low-power lithium-ion batteries are usually more like 10 kJ/US$. You get a multiplier of about 3 because diesel engines are typically about 35% efficient and electric motors are about 95% efficient, so you only need 70 kJ/tonne/km. But 500 km of range would still cost you 175 grand of lead-acid batteries for every 100-tonne railroad car in the train, which more than doubles the cost of the train. If you use lithium-ion instead, it's twice that: US$350k a car. So, expect this to take a significant amount of investment, and therefore take a couple of decades—if it happens at all, because quite possibly it's all-around cheaper to use cheap solar energy to produce ammonia or hydrocarbons and burn those on the train.
The inability to detoxify waste is a concern because detoxifying is what we normally do with hazardous waste. Learning to handle hazardous waste in a different way is risky and will involve some accidents. I mean, it already has.
> The comment said that solar powered trains would only be able to run at night if wind generation is sufficient to power them in the absence of solar power
To be perfectly fair, while that's presumably what you meant—and it's a sensible point—what you said was, "making it so that trains only run at night and on windy days".
Yes, trains can only run at night when it's also windy. I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that solar powered trains can only run at night, short of willful misinterpretation.
Well, if something runs only at night and on windy days, that means it runs at night, regardless of whether there is wind, and that it runs on windy days—which might mean "24-hour periods that have a lot of wind", thus also including the night, or "non-night periods that have a lot of wind", due to the semantic ambiguity of the English word "day". In this case, though, the ambiguity doesn't matter; it comes to the same thing. But the meaning is different from your intended meaning.
A different way of stating the meaning of "only at night and on windy days" is "always, except in the daytime when it isn't windy". But of course the daytime when it isn't windy is precisely when it's actually possible to run solar-powered trains without batteries, at least if you run overhead powerlines or a third rail down the whole train track.
What you meant was "trains run at night only on windy days", which could also be validly phrased (at the cost of some ambiguity) as "trains only run at night on windy days". But the extra "and" that you inserted in the middle of the phrase made it impossible to read the phrase as having your intended meaning. Perhaps you hadn't noticed the extra "and" when I quoted it in my earlier comment above, accounting for your confusion. Or perhaps you just don't speak English very well. Which is okay! I'm a second-language speaker too, and it's hard at times! But it's not a valid reason to accuse people of willfully misinterpreting you.
Why on earth would it make sense to think that someone is saying solar powered trains only run at night? I'm a native English speaker so I don't think you're in any position to try and lecture me.
It's absolutely a valid reason to accuse you of willful misinterpretation, especially when you bring this up more than a month later in an unrelated topic. Your reply was downvoted with good reason.
I brought it up precisely because what you were saying didn't make sense, because what you were saying in this thread didn't make sense either. The reason I thought you were saying what you, in fact, said, even though it wasn't what you meant, was that it appeared on this website under your name.
It seems like you have a long history of not worrying about whether the things you're saying don't make sense, and you're continuing it. Instead of responding, "Oh, I see what you mean, you're right, I actually did say the opposite of what I meant—thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify and taking so much time to explain at such great length what was in the end very simple and obvious," you're responding with some kind of chimpanzee status hierarchy nonsense about being "lectured" and what "position" I'm in. Instead of responding, "Oh, you're right about the 'bedrock with no aquifer' thing, that was totally wrong and didn't actually make sense," you just ignored it.
I guess you're just trying to score some kind of points rather than learn what is true and help others do the same?
The above comment didn't say CO2 emissions, it said that coal use is "down enormously" with a "tiny bit of gas generation growth". The reality is that overall fossil fuel use remains largely the same, coal reductions were matched by natural gas increases.
"Healthcare for all" and "single payer healthcare" are two very different things. Most countries still have private health insurance companies, but the government subsidizes healthcare.
The main blocker of doing this in the US is that the focus tends to be on building a single payer state. ~80% of the population already has insurance through private companies, and they're mostly pleased with it.
What percentage represents “mostly” here? We’re solidly upper middle class and I can’t think of many people who are. The only time I was when I worked for a California startup and that was like magic compared to insurance in New Hampshire.
Because then you end up with a ministry of truth that has to determine what speech is "clearly false". E.g one could make the argument that "nuclear power is unsafe" is "clearly false" given the facts based on deaths per watt-hour generated. You've already highlighted examples where partisanship breaks this down, in the case of BLM.
What happens under this setup when, say, a Republican president wins under an extremely narrow margin and subsequently suppresses discussion of electoral fraud? If in 2000 the government cracked down on people claiming Florida was fraudulently tipped towards Bush, would you support such a system?
Also, harassment is already prohibited. People mistake what harassment really is (people receiving speech they didn't consent to receive), with other people saying things they don't like between each other. For instance a university administrator claimed students bad-mouthing her on YikYak was harassment. It's not, since this professor could simply not use YikYak. Harassment protects against things people say to you, but not what people say about you between each other.
Terrorists are going to break into a government facility, go a mile deep, retrieve massive concrete cylinders, and transport them back to base. Just to get access to low level nuclear material? If they want to poison people en-masse there are way better options. Uranium is a relatively slow killer. And we test our water supply for it because it's a heavy metal like lead. So any real attempt to poison people with it will get detected pretty promptly.
Groups that have the expertise to covertly retrieve spent fuel could probably just buy guns and shoot up a stadium. And that would cause more damage. The relative risk presented by nuclear waste is trivial.
Storing waste in place is also hardly any risk. Are terrorists going to retrieve one of these [1], weaponize it, and then deploy it? If they have this capability, then they almost certainly have the capability of shooting up a mall. And the latter would cause more damage. I see effectively zero additional danger presented by nuclear waste in this regard.
Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. No, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a good candidate for this, since it's at very low concentration. Theoretically one could use biomass, but thats a very inefficient method of carbon collection.
Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient, just for the power-to-gas step. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.
> Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane.
Only if you want to produce syngas (methane).
If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed.
That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here...
Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane with CO2 neutral variants.
> Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.
Which is why there are proposals to go purely via hydrogen and reversible oxidation cells. That way you can get up to about 70-80%.
But again, we are talking about long term storage. ALL other options of energy storage are more expensive when you reach the "weekly to monthly" storage timeframe.
At that timeframe, the low efficiency becomes irrelevant, as storage cost ($/kWh) is dominating, and we are talking about renewables anayway.
The whole point of power to gas (methane) is that we can reuse the existing natural gas storage, distribution, and generation infrastructure. Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Namely grid scale deployment of energy cells, storing hydrogen. Basically it's swapping one set of challenges with a different set of challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.
> Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.
We do have a rather good idea. There are several studies and large test facilities both in Europe and the US.
Specifically in the area I was mentioning (salt caverns). From wikipedia on hydrogen storage: "Underground hydrogen storage is the practice of hydrogen storage in caverns, salt domes and depleted oil and gas fields. Large quantities of gaseous hydrogen have been stored in caverns by ICI for many years without any difficulties."
"Another study referenced by a European staff working paper found that for large scale storage, the cheapest option is hydrogen at €140/MWh for 2,000 hours of storage using an electrolyser, salt cavern storage and combined-cycle power plant."
> And the largest digital players have argued that they’re mere technology “platforms” rather than “publishers” to preserve the shield Section 230 provides them. This has helped stave off regulation and spared them the expense of complying with the corporate and social responsibilities that come with it.
No. No it does not. When will this canard end?
Section 230 means that users are responsible for their own speech, not the companies hosting the speech. Whether or not a website is a "platform" or a "publisher" has zero bearing on this [1].
The irony is that I almost certainly would have zero idea who this person was or the existence of this controversy were it not for this crackdown.
On one hand I can empathize with people seeing someone they know have negative press about them shared on a site they run and wanting to do something. But I thought the point of professionalism was refraining from this kind of behavior and applying rules consistently even when there is a personal connection. This kind of special-case behavior in favor of people with ties to the site is likely counter productive.
> The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information
Oh dear... I assume you're being sincere, so no shade or anything like that. I just realized exactly how old I am relative to you and the other person who posted the same sentiment. ;)
Both. She was a big big name of my parent's generation (think Rhianna version 2, Rhianna is version 3 or 4 or 5... if you go back to Maria Callas or Josephine Baker being version 1)
I've said many times on here, people seem to not believe it. Banning literally achieves the opposite of what it intends to do... hell, if I was a marketer I would use banning and censorship as a kind of promotion/campaign tool. But nooo, people think with feelings, and the word that needs banning just sounds so horrible and is so offensive, so lets iron fist everyone into forgetting it... lol.
I think you're seeing a bit of survivorship bias here. When you see something that has been banned you can say "ah huh! the ban didn't work, I still saw this". But you're not seeing the banned things you're not seeing.
no one will on here or reddit will remember this situation in a week.the only part of the internet that will care past a week is most likely the sites like gab, and we all know what they think of lgbtq+
banning definitely works, its not like reddit's reputation for mod abuse isn't unknown [1]
You're not wrong. But the person concerned is notoriously litigious, and their employer has a legal duty to protect them from harassment. (Because, AFAIK, they are British and employed in the UK by reddit.) So reddit has no good choice here.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I was fairly certain she left the UK sometimes in 2019 and was employed by Reddit in the US. (But is still a UK citizen and presumably has substantial British interests, so both the UKs notoriously intense libel liability and the USs [and some US state’s] workplace environment laws would both potentially be in play.)
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Improvements still happen, but not always in the same way. If you implemented an application in 2003 assuming we'd have such a processor you'd be very disappointed. Counting on exponential improvements to continue is risky bet.