Posts by cyberdemon

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Long-term profit opportunity???

Yes, exactly because of daft laws like this one!

Re: Think of the Grid!

Well, the sort of fan oven that I cook my turkey in has various elements. The one around the fan is 1400W, and the grill has 1x 1400W + 1x 800W. But in normal "fan oven" mode, it uses only the one around the fan, and to stay at 170C, it's less than 50% duty cycle at steady-state.

I expect that your 5kW "American Oven" only uses that much if cooking in several compartments at once, and even then, not for a high duty cycle

Privatise the roads

Because privatising the railways worked so well!

You forgot the joke icon.

Re: Think of the Grid!

Yep! I²R strikes again!

230V cables just weren't designed to carry tens never mind hundreds of kilowatts!

I'd live to see the IET pull their finger out and raise the threshold for domestic voltages, i.e. a 1000VAC standard specifically for EV chargers would be nice, but as it stands we have nothing between 400V and 11kV

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

And whilst cabling for street lighting is often oversized, no street lamp is going to have the capacity for 4x2kW trickle chargers, when the cabling was designed for a 200W bulb at most

Re: The really big picture

Yes, and it doesn't want to stump up for grid connections and substations for these rural new builds either.

(How can a new build estate where every house must have a 7kW charger and a 5kW heat pump put 100 houses on one 500kVA transformer.. The answer is it's called Diversity. The statistical likelihood of them all being used at once. Diversity factor is low for something like a 40A electric shower or a cooker. But given the long lengths of time that EV chargers and heat pumps are switched on for, the diversity factor for these loads is going to be much closer to 1. I don't know if this is reflected in the electrical codes yet..)

Nor does the government stump up for proper sewerage for new builds. The developers are told to put in separate surface water and foul drains but then these just flow out into the same main pipe ..

Re: The really big picture

Unless you're Lord Muck

Re: Hmmm..

> Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand? The first reputable article I find for this says that average used car price (including the trifling number of EVs) is £17,815.

Who in their right mind would buy a second-hand EV? You have no guarantee that the battery hasn't been 'abused'.

But yes, it should have been new vs new comparison, excluding subsidies and loss-leaders

> Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight.

Most people who drive more than 10-30 miles a day DON'T DRIVE AN EV, so this argument doesn't stack up

> Vast majority of EV charging will be overnight, which will be fine.

No, because as soon as people making longer journeys and vans/HGVs are forced to be electric, we will need a LOT more public fast charging

Re: Think of the Grid!

A fan oven element is 1500W and it is on for about 50% of the 4 hours it takes to cook a turkey. That's 3kWh.

A car is 60-100kWh.

If you read today's Private Eye you'll find that the National Audit Office report (on whether Biomass is carbon neutral or not, whether CCS can work at all, and whether BECCS really is "negative emissions") is overdue, while Drax is fervently lobbying everyone in government to continue its subsidies that it collects for chopping down forests in Canada and South America, milling and drying the wood into pellets at great CO2 cost, shipping the pellets to the UK in diesel-powered ships, and burning them in their old coal power station at a fraction of the MWh/MtCO2 efficiency even of the coal that it replaced

Drax knows that the government's targets cannot be met without them, which gives them a lot of lobbying power, but nobody knows if Drax's carbon capture technology works at all, because it doesn't exist yet

We could have cars powered by steam engines billowing black smoke wherever they go, but as long as we shovel imported wood chips from foreign felled forests into the boilers, it would be counted as "zero emission" under the rules currently applied to Drax, and you should be subsidised for it!

Re: Hmmm..

1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.

2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.

After you uprate the home distribution boards you'll need to uprate the underground cabling and put in more local 11kV transformers - not cheap! And then you'll find the 11kV local distribution system is overloaded and need to build more 33 and 66 kV mini substations. Really not cheap! Then lo and behold the 33/66kV grids are overloaded and we need more 132kV subs. Only Then will we suddenly realise the 400kV national grid can't take it. Too late, the lights just went off!

We are decommissioning two out of our three energy distribution networks (the gas grid and road-hauled petroleum) and placing their combined loads onto the one which is already the most overloaded, most expensive, unreliable, difficult to restart, and vulnerable to attack ...

Are we so sure that this is the best thing to do given the state of the world? Suppose our enemies turn round and say Thanks for getting to net zero by destroying yourselves for us, we'll burn all the fossil fuels from now on, btw it was all a big hoax from our propaganda dept.

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

No doubt they will row back on white vans, HGVs and sports cars at some point

Every postie or parcel driver I have seen in an EV when I have asked what the electric van is like has told me: It's shit. Has to recharge all the bloody time

A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Stop being paranoid

Rather than pissing about with all this high tech smart bollocks, how about subsidising double glazing? There's a massive amount of houses that still have old single-glazed sash windows. It's low-hanging fruit that will make a far bigger difference. Yet it gets ignored. Why?. I suppose the AC troll will dismiss this as "whataboutism"

Agree with your post except the bit about refrigerants which is just troll-bait. I don't think propane in a heat pump is more dangerous than gas in a gas boiler, and CO2 refrigerants are great because as we know, CO2 is a very weak GHG!

Re. Insurance, my house insurance hasn't asked if I have an EV or not. But I do know that Car insurance is becoming exorbitantly expensive for EVs due to the cost of replacing the battery after the most minor of prangs

Re: Stop being paranoid

Who wants a freezer that starts defrosting whenever the wind stops blowing and then goes back to deep freeze when the wind picks up again, thermally cycling and ruining the food inside?

Or a heater that only heats when the sun is shining?

An EV that may-or-may-not be charged in the morning when you need to go to work? Or one whose battery is shot through repeated cycling as it has been commandeered by the smart grid to provide inertia..

This is being forced onto us, through taxes and subsidies at first, and mandate later

Re: Stop being paranoid

- it allows to predict demand fluctuations in real time and adapt power generation accordingly

That can be easily done at substation level, no reason to do that at individual household level, unless you are trying to work out how many occupants each household has, to check they are paying the right amount of tax for example

- it allows to send price information to households and to appliances depending on offer and demand (as opposed to depending of time of the day) and therefore to make the best of low cost renewable when there is a lot of it.

It shifts price fluctuation risks onto consumers instead of the energy companies

- it allows demand shaping at the local level instead of at the national level. This is mandatory when power generation is much more distributed.

It allows consumers to be disconnected for arbitrary reasons: forcing people into pre-payment mode can be done without a court warrant to enter the property. Rationing can be established. Tiered service models can be established: Pay us extra otherwise you'll be the first to be disconnected in a load shedding event.

It's also a cyber-attacker's dream

Nanofluid flow batteries

> I'm fascinated by nanoflow liquid batteries. Especially for things like cars, they seem to be extremely well suited since they're not a fire risk, you can "recharge" them in about the same time as it takes to pump gas into a car today, and the energy density is already around that of Li-Ion and it's only like 50% of what it's capable of. You'd probably be able to quickly and easily convert existing gas stations for use with this new fuel which would make it a lot cheaper to roll out compared to setting up EV charging stations everywhere and running high voltage, high capacity, lines to them.

Interesting technology. Using nanoparticles instead of solvents to reduce flammability. But I have my doubts..

I'm not sure what actual cell chemistry this is, i'm assuming it's a Vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB).

Vanadium oxide is pretty toxic, carcinogenic, deadly if inhaled, and a nanofluid is essentially an extremely fine powder.

I'm not convinced that a crash involving a VRFB-powered car would be any safer than a crash involving a Lithium EV, especially when considering environmental impact. Also, assuming this stuff can be manufactured on the scale needed to replace a billion gallons of petrol a day, how would you feel about a supertanker full of Vanadium-oxide nanofluid, (or any other metallic nanofluid), sinking, compared to an oil spill or, or a ship full of lithium batteries such as the subject of this article? Personally, i'd be quite concerned about the release of metallic nanofluids into the oceans. It won't float to the surface like oil does, so would be hard to clean up. I guess it would eventually sink to the bottom though.

VRFBs also require very high purity fuel, so the sustainability claims have to assume that we can engineer a solution that allows the reagent to be recycled with no risk of it becoming contaminated. If a small amount of "crud" were to get into your fuel nozzle, then it would severely bork both car and "petrol station". So no, I disagree that you'd be able to quickly and easily convert existing gas stations. If anything, compared to this, Hydrogen Fuel-Cell powered cars look more feasible.

VRFBs show some promise for stationary storage, but I can't see them in EVs any time soon.

You missed the "allows them to [...] in future". It's a thin-end of a wedge. The UK and other countries are moving steadily closer to mandatory smart metering, because it gives them surveillance and taxation opportunities.

Re: "its crew handled the situation admirably"

Remember this video from LG?

It overblows the hazard by claiming that it is dangerous to buy 18650s whether handled properly or not.. Also reminded me of the anti-piracy videos and the IT-crowd parody..

Most e-cigarettes have USB charging ports though, don't they? I don't understand why people need to swap the batteries on a regular basis. Especially if they can get one with USB-C fast charging.

Keeping them in your pocket with your keys.. you deserve to singe your chestnuts. You won't do it again after that.

Formal ban on ransomware payments? Asking orgs nicely to not cough up ain't working

Absolutely should be banned

Paying a ransom ought to be a criminal offence already.

Otherwise boards will think "Pay the odd ransom, or actually pull our fingers out of our arses and implement proper security?" Ah, the latter sounds like hard work. Who cares if some of our customer data gets leaked, we'll just pay the crooks to do their next job

US fusion energy dreams edge closer to reality, Congress permitting

"It's never been about fusion energy."

So what is it about then?

Perhaps it could serve as a high-intensity neutron source for sub-critical fission? But then I would have thought an accelerator-driven source (e.g. ESS) would be a lot easier.

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

political, i.e. power, control, and money.

Well of course with all renewables and no nuclear, we have reason for smart meters to become mandatory I expect, and a convenient excuse to keep burning gas, oil and coal at ever increasing prices. Trebles all round

Re: Fusion vs Fission

I got those numbers from a talk i attended by Roger Cashmore in 2015, the then UKAEA chair. The main focus of his talk was lamenting the cancellation of the Dounreay fast reactor, so he was talking about thermal reactors i.e. the majority of those in current service, not more modern designs that we COULD have built but were largely cancelled

Re: Nuclear is dirty! Cope.

The thing is, i'm not actually saying that nuclear is not dirty. It of course does produce some very hazardous waste. What I am saying is that we need some perspective! This article is talking about blotting out the sun, ffs.

You have massively inflated the amount of dangerous waste by talking about "millions of tonnes" of LLW as if it were all radioactive, when the vast, vast majority of it is not at all radioactive, and in practice anything that is measurably radioactive more than background gets treated as ILW, not LLW, The limits we discussed are upper limits, and they are set very low. No well-managed nuclear plant would try to smuggle anything out as LLW if it was anywhere near the limit. (and anything that is acutely, dangerously radioactive is obviously HLW, of which there is very little compared to toxic waste from other industries. And some of that HLW we can actually burn as fuel, in future, better designs of fission reactor)

Meanwhile Germany have shut down all their nuke plants on a complete knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima and replaced them with the dirtiest type of coal, dumping its waste straight up the smoke stack, and is allowed to do that.

Not all hazards are nuclear hazards, the only thing special about radioactive isotopes is they are detectable down to the tiniest amount, whereas we largely ignore other cancer-causing and general mortality-causing pollutants because we can't so easily test for them and see where they came from. Microplastics, plasticisers and PFAS are a big problem. Nanoparticulates are a big problem. Heavy metals are a problem. CO2 is, we are told, a huge problem.

But for some reason you are focusing on minute amounts of radiation to the exclusion of all other hazards and benefits, when we know the world is already covered in low levels of ionising radiation, most of it from nature, some of it from the bombs we detonated, a little from Chernobyl, which was the only really bad civil nuclear accident we have ever had (windscale was not civil nuclear, they were making bombs), and a really, really, tiny insignificant amount that you for some reason latch on to, from civil nuclear waste. This waste is handled incredibly well by modern facilities. The only facilities where it is not are historic horrors like Sellafield where they had no idea what to do with it except chuck it in a pond. Seagulls fly in and land on the pond. It's really, really bad by nuclear standards, yet I don't see a lot of evidence of its ill effects on the people of Cumbria.

When people bang on about Chernobyl and that it was the worst disaster humanity has ever had, I like to remind them of Bhopal. There's also some very nasty things to go wrong with Carbon Capture and Storage

Even the COP agrees: We NEED nuclear. Energy storage and renewables are NOT going to keep the lights on, because storage on that scale is infeasible, and makes even nuclear look cheap, safe and clean. If we continue to worry about near-background radiation levels in LLW, then we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. War is also a hazard btw, it causes lots and lots of deaths, and by cancelling the only reliable source of energy we have when the fossil fuels are running out or being banned, war is what you will get. Not every country will agree to stopping fossil fuels, and there will be a big fight over who gets to burn the last of it.

And I didn't call you a pathetic figure btw, I called your figures pathetic. Did you find those figures for other industries yet?

A troll for a troll: What do you think of "radiation hormesis"?

Re: Yes. Nuclear is soooo dirty!

Still here.. So are you apparently.

At this point, we all know you're a troll. And by replying I am only feeding the troll and spamming the thread. But sod it, I have little else to do on this wet and miserable bank holiday!

You could be a bot, for all I know... You work in IT, or are you a piece of IT?

What an utterly pathetic figure you have pulled out of the hat this time! So you're an epidemiologist now too, eh? I suppose you have figures for leukemia-rates for heavy industry in general? Magnet and winding factories for wind turbines? Or for people working at the top of them? Bit nearer the sun.. Have to take trips in helicopters.. Frankly, such a piffling increase in cancer rates could be attributed to the stress of working under an idiotic pig-headed pointy-haired boss like yourself. (I left my politeness in my coat pocket, perhaps)

The running joke among nuclear engineers is that the honest folk in the IAEA, NDA and AWE are outumbered 3:1 by CND fifth-columnists. It's one of those bad jokes that could actually be true. The AWE for example cannot open their X-Ray machines for several hours after use, "in case of residual X-rays"...

Your news about tritium keyfobs just confirms my assertion that these people are so inept that they must be either dogmatic, or malign, or both. Obviously a tritium keyfob is not dangerous. Even if the tritium was dangerous (which it isn't, not unless you burn it to make tritiated water which is mildly dangerous, but only in higher doses than you could produce from a keyfob, and water gets flushed out of your system very quickly even if you did drink a lot of it) So the safest thing to do would be to release the tritium into the atmosphere, where it will safely float up to the exosphere and be blown away by solar wind. (Unlike the radon from coal stacks, which does not float.) Perfectly happy for the empty fobs to be buried in my garden.

Anyway, new year or not, this is getting tiring. May you be squished by a falling blade of an exploding wind turbine. Those things kill a lit of people you know.. And how many of them do you need per cancelled/decommissioned nuclear plant?

Re: [MORE] Dishonest propaganda.

LLW is "anything that may be potentially contaminated", "not exceeding" a few gigabequerels per tonne. So it is everything that "has come from a controlled area/building and therefore might be radioactive, but isn't, otherwise it'd be ILW". It's gloves and overalls, it's hazmat suits, it's bricks, it's equipment, it's any and all "garbage" from any nuclear site and some hospital wards. It's ordinary stuff the rest of us simply throw in landfill. It's not worth anyone's time & money to classify as VLLW* because a banana would chuck it out. So of course it's millions of tonnes! Especially where the rules say everything must be single-use to minimise contamination risk. No rechargeable batteries in fred's radio which itself can never leave the controlled area. And if the nasty boss is on shift then fred's radio itself has gone in the LLW bin and he needs a new one.

So if my keyfob was in a 10kg bin, the bin would need to be treated as intermediate level waste. That's horrifyingly.. wasteful.

Why are these limits set so low, and why only for the nuclear sector?

* ok I just looked up VLLW. It was a proposal to test some waste (ordinary rubbish- crisp packets, water bottles etc.) down to the kilobequerel level and treat it as normal landfill waste, but it was withdrawn, presumably because testing for 10kBq/tonne is completely and utterly ridiculous, and the hippies wouldn't trust it anyway, no matter how low level it is. Even though it's literally just household refuse. It all just goes in the LLW bin. And then people like AC scream "but you're making millions of tonnes of radioactive waste! Millions!! Nuclear is soooo dirty!"

No, it's just that we need the bin men like everyone else, but they won't come cos they are scared of our bins :'(

Solar panels and powerwall -only-, eh? Good luck with that ;)

Well, may your 2024 be nice and sunny and your powerwall never run dry :D

Me, i'm on the grid. But I have a generator and a tank of propane, just in case.

I remain skeptical on the smart grid, renewables etc, but I shall keep an open mind and always happy to have a reasoned debate :)

Yes I remember that one. I don't go in for youtubers but IIRC they made their pretty picture from Train Simulator, and somehow conned investors to give them money, based on little more than a screenshot from a computer game showing a bright green train carriage that magically strips CO2 from the air ...

You say "most of it isn't" credible, implying that you believe some of it is. Can you think of any DAC scheme that actually does look credible? i'm just curious.

Oh well, happy 2024, all! (see icon)

Especially you, my anonymous opponent. Macroecomomics visionary, health physics authority, electrical power systems genius, and IT bod by day. I hope your servers are all powered by solar panels and gerbil farts.

Re: Gigabequerels per Tonne...

Argh. This is why we can't ever have cheap and sustainable low emissions power, because any attempt to say Look, this stuff really is not as scary as you think it is, just look at the wildlife sanctuary that is Pripyat after all the humans ran away etc.. gets labeled as a Lame attempt to diminish the importance of radioactive hazards.

We let bombs off for goodness sake. Hundreds of them. In the open air. Squillions of times more radioactivity than the civil industry gets its knickers in its twist about. Yet the world is not a zombie filled wasteland

It's obvious what your bias is, would you like to remove your cowardly mask? I thought not.

Well, I think we'd better stop here before we invoke Godwin's law.

Re: Gigabequerels per Tonne...

Obviously I know that it is decays per second, I was trying to put it into perspective. For gamma it is literally photons per second

I am simply trying to make you realise how ridiculously small a billion decays per second is, even though it sounds like a huge amount to most people

Gigabequerels per Tonne...

You realise that Bequerels are photons-per-second..

I have a glow-in-the-dark keyring fob with 1GBq of Tritium in it, it glows dimly for the past 20 years..

a GBq is still a miniscule unit of radioactivity.

How many GBq/tonne in standard biological matter? I dread to think of Bananas or Brazil nuts, granite, never mind the dreaded coal ash??

See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/exemption-level

Can you, Mr. AC, tell me logically, why those double standards referenced above are just and fair?

Re: What is it with morons

I'd be perfectly happy to live next door to a nuclear waste reprocessing plant, if it weren't for the fact that so many people seem to be scared of doing so, and so the value of my house would go down..

Re: [MORE] Dishonest propaganda.

And bits of machinery, bits of demolished buildings, steelwork etc. But it has all been assessed as not radioactive, but "potentially contaminated" ie has been in the vicinity of something radioactive

Re: Dishonest propaganda.

And finally, may I recommend to you this book: Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

It's by a pair of paid-up card-carrying Greenpeace members, who have realised just how much damage the anti-nuclear movement has done to the planet, because the alternative has been to burn coal, oil and gas. I went to one of their lectures.

Re: Dishonest propaganda.

> This is the disingenuous part. Conflating coal plant trace level atmospheric release with millions of tons of radioactive nuclear waste from nuclear plants.

"Millions of tonnes of radioactive nuclear waste" is also disingenuous, is it not?

Fission reactors produce only a few tons, if that, of High Level Waste (HLW) i.e. Fission products. And even then, most of that is the vitrification glass used to passivate it so that it cannot leak when stored.

Intermediate-level waste (ILW) is irradiated metals i.e. old reactor casings, pipework etc. Fusion reactors will produce many hundreds of times more ILW than fission per MW. This I know from having spent 5 years working in Fusion at Culham.

The only thing that makes "millions of tonnes" is Low-Level Waste, which is not radioactive at all. It is simply single use gloves, overalls and other clothing used by nuclear workers, non-radioactive bits of machinery that has been inside a controlled area, which is tested regularly to show no trace of radioactivity, yet the rules are that it must be treated as nuclear waste.

Again, Fusion will produce even more of this LLW.

Re: Dishonest propaganda.

I'm quite prepared to change my views if you point out the nonsense logically.. What other nonsense would you like to disagree with?

I assume you meant to say "There is no fission reaction in a coal plant" rather than "There is no fission reaction in a nuclear plan."

I agree with your point, but it deflects from my argument that it is far worse to dump waste into the atmosphere than to safely store it underground. That's the whole point of Carbon Capture etc, isn't it?

As I said: Please explain what your ideal solution is? Perhaps it is Hydrogen or Gravity storage or perhaps it is Coal- and tree-burning?

Retracting part of my post

> Coal and Biomass plants emit far more toxic and radioactive waste (radioactive due to trace amounts of Radon etc in the billlions of tonnes of feedstock that they burn) than the entire nuclear industry, accidents included.

This came from my recollection of this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

"Accidents included" is complete bollocks, i hold my hand up. But I stand by the rest of my post.

My point is that the rest of industry seems to get away with murder, chucking whatever it likes into the atmosphere and waterways, but Nuclear is made a special case.

I think this is simply because nuclear emissions are so easily detectable, measurable and traceable, whereas other more toxic emissions from other industries are not.

Nuclear plants are made to count single Bequerels of emissions (a Becquerel is, in nuclear terms, like a grain of sand on a beach), yet as soon as someone lets off a nuclear bomb, that effort is dwarfed by unfathomable orders of magnitude. Like maintaining Clean Room conditions only to have Thames Water to pipe a sewer into it.

There are also plenty of powerful interests who stand to gain from throwing mud at nuclear, and thanks to the tight regulation and public fear, it is very easy to do

Re: Its pretty easy to

Seriously? That's a pretty well established fact, not propaganda.

Of course, it is talking about radioactivity released to the environment though. Nobody is saying that coal ash is more radioactive than a barrel of high level vitrified waste

What's your solution then, Mr. Coward?

Re: Hockey stick

Honestly Rik I expected better coming from you.

Supposing someone dug up an ice core or found other evidence that clearly showed CO2 levels higher than today, or perhaps a reverse causative link between CO2 and temperature - i.e. high solar radiation and wildfires causing CO2 rises, rather than CO2 (from where) causing high temperatures and wildfires.

Do you expect that this scientist would be respected and listened to, or do you think the peer reviewers would just say "Have fun with your denialist ramblings" as you just did, and dismiss it out of hand without bothering to consider it?

Worry ye not

A solution is in the works.

It's called WWIII

Re: Its pretty easy to

Rik, I think AC meant that one in six die of cancer, whether they ate a banana or not.

You know, like "over 50% of people who ate carrots in 1863 died". Of course that is true, because everyone from 1863 is dead, except for Jacob Rees-Mogg

Re: > The vast majority of biomass energy conversion would be from urban and rural waste

I agree (and have an upvote). Not burning stuff is the point. So why are we handing "green subsidies" to Drax?

Most of what you call "new biomass" though, takes up farmland and so is akin to burning food, which we are also short of. The same goes for solar panels in inappropriate locations (on viable farmland instead of on rooftops or in deserts)

Sadly, I think the only thing that is going to reduce our consumption of combustible fuel any time soon, is to drastically reduce the human population, either with a global pandemic (oops, tried that, didn't work) or WWIII.

As I said in another thread: If I were a billionaire, I'd be building my self-sufficient bunker. Ideally complete with mini nuclear reactor depending how many billions I have.

Re: Its pretty easy to

Nuclear CAN be clean. Just because the stuff we did 50 years ago was not clean, doesn't mean that modern fission isn't.

Sellafield frankly is a testament to just how safe nuclear is. We did about the worst possible thing we could do for nuclear safety (chuck a bunch of fuel rods into a wine rack with a big fan to keep them cool but they caught fire) and yet Sellafield is the worst we have to show for it. Yes, Cockroft-Walton saved the day with his electrostatic scrubber (branded "Cockroft's Folly" before the fire) but even worse disasters such as Chernobyl have not resulted in the mass destruction and zombies that we feared at the time.

Fukushima in particular gets labeled as a disaster, but as far as I can see, it is a triumph for nuclear safety. It was an old design of plant with what today are considered serious safety failings. It was hit by a tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people, yet the so-called "nuclear catastrophe" has killed nobody, except the few who died in the mass-panic that ensued. Even the 50 who went in on what they thought would be a suicide mission to stabilise it, are still alive and well.

Low-levels of radiation are not dangerous, yet the ridiculous "Linear No-Threshold Model" used by nuclear regulators makes the completely-unfounded assumption that any piece of radioactive substance that is enough to kill one person, will still kill one person if distributed across the globe. That's complete nonsense. Life on earth has evolved over millions of years to thrive in a constant low-level of background radiation.

What we have NOT evolved to cope with, are PM2.5 nanoparticles like those emitted from modern emissions-compliant diesel engines and coal/gas/biomass power stations.

Re: Ready in...

If you are talking about Fusion, it's still 50 years away, and always will be.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real..

We don't know who struck first, us or [the machines], but we do know that it was us, who scorched the sky..

Specifically on DACS

From the report you referenced:

For Direct Air Capture, you need between 1.6 and 6 tonnes of water (presumably fresh water) and around 1MWh of electricity, per tonne of CO2 extracted. To extract the required 100 billion tonnes, that's er, ~300 billion tonnes of water and 10 Terawatt-years of electricity. Are these guys insane?

Assuming you can even get all the raw materials together to build such a machine, and that the solvents used are not toxic and never leak, and that the CO2 stays in the ground, will it ever recoup the CO2 from its construction and operation? That's extremely doubtful.

The only credible "benefit" that I can see in the report is "Jobs". Jobs for the Boys, basically.

Re: Its pretty easy to

> Nuclear power is wonderful if it wasn't for the fact that no one has worked out how to make it finantialy viable if you include the costs of dealing with the waste and decommisioning of the plant. Private industry is happy to build and run them as long as government (you and I) pay for end of life.

The reason that it's not "finantialy viable" as you put it, is because certain people have regulated nuclear to within an inch of it's life, and have spread fear and disinformation about it. Basically Greenpeace and the CND were played for fools by big oil, and now there's a new renewables lobby that doesn't want to see nuclear power become a reality either.

Coal and Biomass plants emit far more toxic and radioactive waste (radioactive due to trace amounts of Radon etc in the billlions of tonnes of feedstock that they burn) than the entire nuclear industry, accidents included.

Nuclear plants have to waste masses of money to ensure that emissions are "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (which means that there is no upper limit on how much they have to spend - ii someone can say that they have a method to reduce emissions from sod all to bugger all, then the nuclear plants are legally obliged to adopt it at any cost, even if they are already below background)

Privatisation and the short political cycle hasn't helped either - nobody is going to take the plunge to build a plant if in 4 years time the next government might pull the rug out from under it.

Re: Its pretty easy to

WTF?

These clowns talk about Direct Air Capture, etc. How can you say that is credible?

These guys are scientists, (likely paid for by a system of funding bodies with vested interests), they are NOT engineers. Just because something looks like it might work on paper or in a lab, doesn't mean it can work on the scale needed to make a dent globally.

And as for CCS: If you think that we can't store a tonne of nuclear waste safely, what makes you think we can store a Billion tonnes of CO2 safely??

> The vast majority of biomass energy conversion would be from urban and rural waste

Is that what Drax told you?? Drax's "waste wood from industrial logging" is whole trees that have been sent to the pellet mill.

Sorry, but you just can't get to Gigawatts from burning waste.

And if you did burn a Gigawatt of waste, the stink would be enough to kill anything except rats, cockroaches and seagulls.

The other point about Biomass is that it produces more CO2 per MWh than the dirtiest of dirty brown coal. (and nano-particulates, heavy metals etc from all the crap that is in the waste that you add)

Fusion vs Fission

> Are they making progress?

No, they are not. not really.

A summary of my previous posts on the subject:

It's horrendously difficult to get energy out of a fusion reaction. Mostly because fusion produces its energy in the form of Neutron radiation, which destroys and makes radioactive almost every material there is, and because it has to happen at temperatures and pressures even higher than in the sun to achieve a decent power density. (the Sun has a power density of a few hundred watts per cubic metre. It's similar to that of a garden compost heap. Whereas fission reactors have nearly a factor of a million higher density than that i.e. 100MW/m3)

Because of the neutron radiation and low power density, fusion reactors produce much, much more nuclear waste per MW than fission reactors do. The only advantage is that the waste is slightly less long-lived i.e. it's hot for 100 years instead of 10,000 years.

However, there are some really interesting new fission designs that we could have built by now if we weren't spending all our nuclear engineers' time pissing about with Fusion.

Traditional Fission reactors only use ~2-3% of their fuel before it is considered "spent". Whereas Thorium reactors and sub-critical fission reactors (using a controllable neutron source to burn low-enriched uranium or old weapons plutonium) can use more than 50% of their fuel i.e. 10-20 times more, and are intrinsically much safer than the old fission reactors. They are also much better for non-proliferation because they don't involve high-enriched fuel.

And whilst Fission fuel is technically finite, it isn't really. There is so much of it in "waste" from old reactors that could only burn 2% of their fuel, and from old warheads from the stockpile which can supposedly annihilate the earth 10 times over, that we shouldn't need to mine Uranium at all. Much better to peacefully and safely burn that stockpile than to use it for its intended purpose.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

Re: They wouldn't have done this 60 years ago

You assume that it is possible to find the crooks.

Obviously, they are behind seven proxies etc, and they are shielded by a nation-state that disagrees with your nation-state.

Even if you offered a bounty, the gangsters could simply find some desperate stooges to offer up who would love to confess all for the reward of being sent from their torturers to the relative safety of an American prison.

Meanwhile the real gangsters are still at large having collected both bounty and ransom, and the cycle continues.