Posts by itzman 1904 posts • joined 28 Jun 2011
Yup. Sure its a faff when you get a null pointer returned from a function and apply a test to it and the compiler says 'but its not an integer' BUT if you explicily cast it to one, the next bloke along compiling onto a 16 bit integer target with a 32 bit address bus at least knows what you were TRYING to do...
"If you stop measuring light, does it stop moving? Or perhaps head off in a random direction till you measure it again?"
The fact that anything not directly observed even exists, is in the end only an article of faith.
You appear to be blind to the Materialist worldview which you assume to be true, for no other reason than it vaguely explains your experience.
Once you confuse models in your mind with the RealWorld™, you have stopped learning anything.
The answer is simple. Heatpumps will cool the citries, and circulate the working fluid to mountain tops where extremely hot heat exchangers will radiate earths surplus heat to space.
What do you mean that's what clouds do?
Is that teh scientist has this Geat Idea, and announces it to the world 'it Could Work!' while the engiuneer grabs his slide rule or equivalent, starts calculating costs efficiencies , automatically thinks of safety, and worst cases and concludes 'No, it's worse then the mousetrap I already have' and goes back to reading 'Biggles'
Well you should be. The national grid is about to lose its independence and be nationalised, bringing it under full political control.
Anyone who murmurs that it can't be done will be sacked for 'negative attitudes'.
Name one big government sposnsored infratstructure project that has actually delivered what it was supposed to, on time and on budget, if at all..
The benefits of the small modular reactors being developed worldwide are eaily listed
1. Small reactors can use the cube-square law of heatloss versis size to be safe under passive cooling in SCRAM conditions. At a stroke the cause of the only two core meltdowns of PWRS is eliminated
2. Small reactors can be assembled in factories under controlled conditions and then shipped out for installation, massively reducing build inspection and certification times.
3. Larger outputs can still be achieved by use of multiple units
4. Water coooling may not be needed for smaller units making siting less of an issue.
5. Although less efficient in the use of uranium and especially when compared to fast breeders, there is no shortage of uranium at the moment and its dirt cheap.
Although the bogeyman of man made climate change is pretty much dead in the water in scientific circles, the fact remains that fossil fuel costs both in terms of cash and energy required keep on rising as the low hanging fruits of mining and drilling have all been plucked, and the massive propganada campaign about CO2 has left the ill informed public thinking they need alternatives, and renewable energy - which was esily provable over a decde ago to be unsuitable and not fit for purpose - is now undergoing subsidectomy, there remains only one viable and poltically acceptable alternative - and that is nuclear power of some sort..
And whilst not intrinsically ideal from an overall efficiency and engineering perspective, factory built type approved mass produced small (350MW ) modular pressurised water reactors would use thoroughly known and proven technology - the only thing different is that they would be factory built - and can couple up in as many uniyts as are needed to bog standard steam turbines up to a gigwatta mecahnical output or more. Rolls Royce Trent gas turbine units are already used in multiples in gas power stations feeding steam boilers to drive additional generation capacity in CCGT power stations so the modular technology already exists.
What the public probably thinks (or has been told to think) it wants , is a Heath Robinson array of windmills, solar panels, hydrogen production, grid scale batteries made of unobtanium, transcontinental interconnectors and BEVS using lithium sourced from the imagination - there not being that much around to mine...
What it needs however, is a couple of hundred small modular reactors, driving the grid and synthetic hydrocarbon plants. Nothing in the chemical table beats hydrocarbons for energy density and safety in off grid power.
Except uranium and plutonium of course, and how far we will have nuclear ships powered by very small modular reactors plying the oceans remains to be seen.
Nuclear waste.
1. The longest lived nuclear isotope in the world today is the natural uranium we burn to make nuclear power, thus reducing the total amount of radioactivity in the world.
2. There are ~4 billion tonnes of it in the worlds oceans, yet people get excited when a few pounds of radioisotopes were released into the sea at Fukushima.
3. the longer lived the isotope, the less active and the less dangerous it is. If the Romans had had reactors by now they would have decomissioned themselves.
4. If the Romans had had reactors, their Empire would not have collapsed
5. The science now tells us what we didn't know in the Cold War period, that chronic exposure to low level radiation up to 200msV/year has absolutely no discernible effect on cells. And total dose is not what counts - peak dose is what counts.
6. If reactors were built and waste dispaosal were done to reflect what we now know about radiation - that its about 1000 times less dangerous than those old cold war regulations suggest - as evinced by the zero death count from radiation at 3MI and Fukushima and the piddling death count at Chernobyl - less than a hundred people, all exposed to massive single doses fighting fires - then most of the cost would vanish.
Nevertheless this project is, while sexy, not really commercial. We dont need advanced reactors, we need cheap reactors, and that means trying to meet regulatory ratcheting driven by anti-nuclear sentiment paid for by other energy interests with simple cost effective boring ordinary 50 year old technology that is developed to be quick to manufactire and install, and cheap.
If the nuclear industry spent one percent of the money it spends on trying to meet insane and ever moving safety goal posts, on educating people on how safe it was...
https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/bdfff1aa-1a50-4793-9362-a95119b2307d/recalibrating-risk-report.pdf.aspx
Having said that, heatbanks as a way of storing heat energy before conversion to electricity are interesting and may be more cost effective at supplying peak demand than building either pumped hydro (if handy nesaby mountains and water exist) than overcapacity of reactors running below full capacity much of the time.
What is disppointing in reading posts by El Reg readers is that one would have expected the readership to be both techically savvy and capable of researching what this project actually is, and yet the majority of comments betray utter ignorance of either.
a molten salt heat bank is not lightning fast load following since it will still be used to generate steam for a turbine.. unless they use flash steam...which no other power station to my knowledge ever has.
It will ramp up and down as fast as a coal burner, maybe even a CCGT, but not as fast as hydro.
A well manged PWR is almost as fast.
Natrium isnt a molten salt cooled reactor.
Its a molten sodium cooled fast breeder reactor plus a heatbank that stores thermal energy in molten salt to allow it to modulate its output above and below the reactor output in order to provide dispatchable load following without having to have a pumped storage hydro scheme coupled up. Batteries of course are completely unsuitable for grid scale storage
At an intelligent guess I would say it will mostly work eventually long after small modular reactors of bog standard design have become the de facto standard, and more money than even Gates can afford has been spent on it.
Really there is no need to invent or develop massivly new reactor designs.
What Rolls Royce and others are doing - production engineering small, and hence passively coolable under Scram, bog standard type approved pressurised water reactors for mass production at low cost with lifetime storage of used fuel (until polticians can decide what to do with it) is the low cost low risk option - is by far and away what we need right now.
Natrium is a complex liquid sodium cooled fast breeder. Dounreay effectively. Expensive, technically tricky, and full of the same problems as Gen II reactors.
Throw enough money at it and I am sure it will work eventually, but it seems to be repeating the same mistakes that the UK nuclear power program made - letting scientists create a better mousetrap rather tnan letting engineers cost reduce and streamline production of a perfectly adequate one
The golden rule is always to hand it over to an ArtStudent™ for testing.
Not only do they not think like you, what passes for thinking is more like random radioisotopic decay. They can break anything without even putting a mind to it.
Then hand it over to the most evil hacker you can find.
My experience is quite the reverse. Openreach respond to established faults reported by the ISP. My ISP was brilliant, Openreach spend days fixing faults and did fix all of them.
My supicion is that some ISP's hide behind openreach to escape responsibility.
Befire I went FTTP I had Open Reach out 6 times to fix my copper pair. Each time it was in fact a different fault. (Bad or corroded connections in water filled conduit and a couple in the overhead link)
Fortunately my ISP (IDNET) simply would not give up until all the issues were fixed, It then performed brilliantly until replaced with fibre.
Which has its own quirks. Cant explain why, but often trying to contact a web site there is a distinct pause beoire data starts flowing
The average persons is not that great at understanding complex stuff, but sky fairies and Illuminati are much simpler, conceptually.
To fake the moon landings and never a word leaked out nor a single mistake made is actually harder than landing on the moon. If you understand special effects etc.
The twin towers collapsed exactly according to their fire rating. 45 minutes fire protection then kiss the steel frame goodbye.
And what is more they don't need first party cookies either, You can maintain state across a session using post or get variables..
Only if you want to login and stay logged in is it almost impossible without a cookie, at least if you want to close the browser in between visits. Browsers store persistent cookies, but not POST variables...
But in the end the answer is extremely simple and in user control.
Never buy anything that is 'pushed' at you, online.
Look at what costs money. The laying of the links to you and the cost of back-haul to handle, not average traffic, but PEAK traffic.,. is what needs income.
Once the infrastructure is in place, only the central part of the ISP runs on aggregated traffic. the last 30 miles are all pretty peaky.
You are paying for an empty road, not the petrol...
No, we have in fact retrogressed. Today web sites are written by art students using 'frameworks'.
Commercial websites of tier one banks are fatally flawed. No one cares. Bugs are never fixed. It took me over a year to get one bug fixed in a major high street bank so that I could use it without invoking Windows XP in a virtual machine. It still has the same bug, but only once, not twice. It features amazing minimalist graphics of light grey on white, but a marvellous picture of a black man looking like a happy investor. It tells me and has told me for over 18 months I have two messages. There are none.
It has less functionality and runs at half the speed of the site it replaced.
But it is fwightfully 'artistic'
I tried apple. I really wanted to love it. I hated it.
If you spent loads of money keeping hardware and software bang up to date you could get about 1/4 the performance of anything running Linux or windows.
This will be the death knell of Apple as a power workstation machine. Unless they keep intel for that.
It's more about battery powered toys for consumers
There never would have been an EU!
What is the 27th letter of the alphabet? Or is it 26 since Brexit? ZZZZZZ
Do people REALLY believe in numerology?
AHAHAH. Oops. I must be a neo Nazi! Too many AHs.
Hard pencils are now BANNED.
BLACK LEAD MATTERS!
No more 18SWG sheet metal for sale!
Oh what a gay day! Here in my little cottage! Oops. I can't say that, it means something else now.
Talk about dog whistles. The Left is one huge echo chamber tuned to dog whistles. Blown by seriously large corporate interests pretending to be democrats and liberals, who are - gaspo - actually BELIEVED by the useful idiots of the suburban middle classes!
..for any real software engineering.
I rewrote yards of it into C so that I could actually get code to work. It was so strongly typed that things like reading two bytes of a comms stream that might be a bit field, two bytes of data or a particular error code was almost impossible without creating a union of every possible thing it might be.
And if you were stuck at the coal face nested 15 levels of subroutine deep and you encountered the sort of 'line's dropped on you mate' error the inability to 'go directly to jail without passing GO' with a lon gjmp() produced a nightmare of messy code .
Academics loved it. Engineers avoided it.
Of course the fashion is now to type overloading, leading to an equal mess.
Academics should be banned from writing languages
I'm somewhat surprised by the choice of countries. For instance, why is a country like Namibia (with its fairly large mining, manufacturing and banking sector one of the rising stars of the continent) not included whereas a non-African country like Oman is?
Namibia has good fibre links to South Africa, and not a lot of population. Its also a hard country to get power to and from
Oman is full of rich people needing to play online video games.
I am sure that people laying this cable have done a full market survey of the data requirements of every place versus the cost of connecting to it.
'Offline' is a moveable feast.
Backup is a copy . Where it is and how connected it is are very variable things.
I do auto backup. If my data were corrupted the backup would be, if I didn't notice for 24 hours.
But I am protecting against hardware failure, not malware.
If I were concerned about that, I would do a check on file/backup and if the difference were massive abort and notify.
I don't consider that this particular malware is a serious threat on Linux.
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