Nobody wants energy stored for months. Whatever storage is used needs to get through temporary decreases in efficiency. In places that use solar, that means from one afternoon to the next morning. In places that use wind, it means until the wind picks up. We’re talking storage on the order of tens of hours at the most.

Connections
Puzzle #383
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Not could, will. These days it’s considered unethical not to debrief explaining any deceptive elements of the study. It can also be valuable because the people conducting the study can use it as a chance to find out if the participants knew about the deception, in case that knowledge might have affected the results.

Does this actually work?

The fantastic thing about renewables is how much they lend themselves to a less centralised model. Solar collector? Sure, why not‽ Rooftop solar on people’s houses? You bet! Geothermal? If local conditions are favourable to it, absolutely!

Instead of a small number of massive power plants that only governments or really large corporations can operate individuals can generate the power for themselves, or companies can offset their costs by generating a little power, or cities can operate a smaller plant to power what operations in their city aren’t handled by other means. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

This contrasts with nuclear. SMRs could theoretically do the same thing, but haven’t yet proven viable. And traditional plants just put out way too much power. They’re one-size-fits-all by definition, and only have the ability to operate alongside other modes with the other modes filling in a small amount around the edges.

• Tor, from Old English torr, meaning hill.
• Pen, from Celtic *penn, meaning hill.
• How, from Danish hoh, meaning hill.
• Hill, from English hill, meaning hill.

^{Unfortunately, it’s not actually a real official name for a hill, though it could be…}

fwiw I recommend stopping watching this once he starts talking about the hostile comments. It’s just pointless drama. But the first 13 minutes are good.

tetrapods are fish

I like this particularly because it allows you to tell people that whales are fish, which is generally going to get a much stronger response than if you said “people are fish”. Because in the latter, they know you’re up to something weird, but in the former they’re not sure if you might just be wrong.

Yikes, bitten by a wild animal? Did you see a doctor?

Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.

Not easily, for the reasons explained in my reply to @[email protected].

The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed

I doubt it, because the science itself is against nuclear. Evidence says it would be too expensive and take too long to deliver compared to renewables.

You can’t cut the red tape. The red tape is why we’re able to say nuclear is safe.

the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost

Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn’t have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn’t exist. We’ve never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as ‘input’ a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)

Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren’t cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It’s the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.

First, no, that’s not what I said. If you’re only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.

Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn’t scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can’t just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don’t want to be generating more than is used.

Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload “until we have adequate storage”, the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don’t already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.

I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I’d have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I’ve looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I’ve had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn’t be building nuclear; it’s just an inferior option to renewables.

Do you think Goodwin could treat the burns himself?

Safe, sure. Efficient? Not even close.

It’s far, far more expensive than renewable energy. It also takes far, far longer to build a plant. Too long to meet 2030 targets even if you started building today. And in most western democracies you wouldn’t even be able to get anything done by 2040 if you also add in political processes, consultation, and design of the plant.

There’s a reason the current biggest proponents of nuclear energy are people and parties who previously were open climate change deniers. Deciding to go to nuclear will give fossil fuel companies maximum time to keep doing their thing. Companies which made their existence on the back of fossil fuels, like mining companies and plant operators also love it, because it doesn’t require much of a change from their current business model.

By jove you’ve got it! I must make haste and alert the Director of this ingenuous new strategum at once!

is it only a Perth thing to do icecream in winter

I dunno about Perth, but it’s definitely not a me thing. Damn place is cold enough this time of year without consuming pure coldness.

That said, I’m big on cookies and cream or mango swirl. But not for the next 4 and a bit months.

Hmm. I recalled a story from 2 or 3 months ago about them having laid off the Flutter and Dart team. Looking at it more closely it looks like the story was actually just that they had laid off some staff from that team.

Personally I don’t have as much of an issue with when they’re poking fun at him per se, but when they denegrate or damage things he has clearly worked hard on and put a lot of passion into, that’s crossing a line for me. It becomes incredibly mean-spirited.

There are two examples in this compilation video. One at the linked time, and another at 6:33. Especially with how happy he is to see Leslie in the second clip until she destroys his art. It’s honestly heart-breaking. The pie to the face that came a little bit before that was also hard to watch and really felt mean. Dunno if that’s because of how cold and calculated it was (vs the more usual off-the-cuff comments), or because it was a physical act rather than verbal, or something else. But I didn’t like it.

Wow really, never‽ Where do you live, may I ask? Here in suburban Brisbane, if I looked out my window more often I would probably see one every night.

Oh wow thank you. This is genuinely excellent and immensely helpful. I think this bit:

A treadmill will only push an aircraft or whatever else along, with an acceleration that is equal to, or lower, than the rolling resistance. If you try to accelerate the plane faster, it’ll ‘slip’

As well as this video that I found where a pilot explains how under specific but unrealistic conditions you could construct a treadmill that does indeed prevent an aeroplane from taking off,

Really helped solidify my understanding of the problem. So you end up with a situation where the wheels are going to be slipping, just like the slippage created when your hand pushes a toy car on a treadmill.

Thanks!