caoilte

11 ms·

61.
by caoilte 5y ago
it's a bit like not scrapping 747s after their maiden flight. brings the costs down a bit
62.
by caoilte 5y ago
yep. $1.5billion in 2010 prices per flight including r&d. 1.2 without. which is still 1.5 billion per flight in 2021 prices. So Elon needs to get the price down to $15mil to hit his target. 5% is still pretty good tho. And it may go low
63.
by caoilte 5y ago
Max Payload to LEO 8,200kg. Max payload of falcon 9 is 22,800kg. Looks to me like falcon 9 is considerably better value on those numbers even at twice the price.
64.
by caoilte 5y ago
I see research from 2012 showing it's 10x the price of current methods but maybe the price could come down and then.... the usual nothing useful that ever comes of Nuclear research.
65.
by caoilte 5y ago
The funniest thing is that climate change is now unavoidable and will make nuclear meltdowns even more likely because of the extreme weather events it will trigger. Now seems like the worst possible moment to remove safety restrictions...
66.
by caoilte 5y ago
a lot of land can be dual use (eg reservoirs / building roofs) or is of negligable value for anything else (desert)
67.
by caoilte 5y ago
France has all sorts of problems and their grid would break regularly if they couldn't import energy during the Summer when their cooling water sources get too hot and they have to shut down all their reactors.
68.
by caoilte 5y ago
We don't need to switch summer production to winter if we keep improving grid inter-connectors. We will still need a lot more storage though. And insulation.
69.
by caoilte 5y ago
You make a good point about nuclear potentially requiring less storage since it (in theory) provides a constant power. Unfortunately, whilst nuclear power tends to be constant while it is on, it still goes down a lot either for servicing (p
70.
by caoilte 5y ago
They make you feel safer because you're in a bigger vehicle and higher off the road. Ironically they tend to roll more easily so are often more dangerous.
71.
by caoilte 5y ago
yes. plenty. north america, europe, china - to name three examples. The larger your grid, the more reliably you can source renewables. It's not cheap to install the necessary high frequency inter-connectors but it is still waaaay cheap
72.
by caoilte 5y ago
This is for America, I don't have anything to hand for Europe https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/study-transmiss... Also, this is with technology we have right now that we know works. The problem wi
73.
by caoilte 5y ago
It's negligable at current levels, but at some point in the next 40 years we will start to run short of easily mineable uranium. Some of the other ways we might have to mine uranium then are carbon intensive. But research is being done
74.
by caoilte 5y ago
the only time you ever see these facts creeping out into the light of day is when politicians are attacking Iran for wanting to develop its nuclear programme. They all know that Iran's programme only makes sense to make nukes and they
75.
by caoilte 5y ago
How about 3 mile island or Fukushima or countless other times where we got lucky. Nuclear disasters are an inevitability with such a complex technology. I'm all in favour of more research into MSRs, but it could easily not work out to
76.
by caoilte 5y ago
nuclear has always been more subsidized than wind/solar. It isn't enough. It's just crazy expensive.
77.
by caoilte 5y ago
yeah, you need a supergrid and to import the electricity from southern spain during low wind periods in UK. France goes through similar bouts of having to import because so many of their nuclear plants keep having to offline at the same tim
78.
by caoilte 5y ago
even then it's still a shit show because someone has to play for cleanup and storage and the nuclear company usually goes conveniently bankrupt soon after they stop producing energy.
79.
by caoilte 5y ago
this does the sums with storage (for a Georgia nuclear plant) https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-... massively over provisioned PV+Storage is still half the price of Nuclear. It even
80.
by caoilte 5y ago
in theory SMRs don't need much maintenance so could work in these situations. And on the plus side, when they do melt down - not many casualties.
81.
by caoilte 5y ago
> Nuclear fits in locations with insufficient wind and solar resources and provides reliable base supply. So remote islands basically (places not worth adding to a super grid). Fair enough. That's a very small niche though.
82.
by caoilte 5y ago
dunno why this got down voted. Nuclear is a terrible peaker tech and yet pairing it with solar/wind requires it to be flexible and so you end up overproducing. There isn't a perfect scalable peaker / clean generation tech unf
83.
by caoilte 5y ago
Yeah. We need a better transmission grid before we can go to 100% renewables (balancing out Scottish wind with Spanish solar). But a better transmission grid is miles cheaper than nuclear, so it's still a no brainer.
84.
by caoilte 5y ago
wind/solar/battery projects are very fast to spin up. That's another thing which makes them attractive over nuclear.
85.
by caoilte 5y ago
windfarms need someone to check any migrating birds aren't near and someone to man the control room (can and is job shared with other windfarms). So one and a tiny bit people. Plus occasional inspections i suppose.
86.
by caoilte 5y ago
It's completely separate things. They think they've found a way to market 2-3 year old cars as new. It's a good idea, most cars lose a third to half of their value in the first two years. Anything they can eat out of that by
87.
by caoilte 5y ago
Reduce transmission. Nobody serious ever said they would stop transmissions because they were found not to during their testing last year.
88.
by caoilte 5y ago
That's an unhelpful thing to say. Most people agree that the Spark scala DSL is functional style. It's not as advanced in the style as other scala ecosystems but it has been a very good on ramp for people discovering functional st
89.
by caoilte 5y ago
The future is unevenly distributed. There are plenty of companies where everyone has a very mature understanding of monads and where new joiners are coached to reach that level of understanding. And there are plenty of places that aren&#x27
90.
by caoilte 5y ago
I think cost of installation / maintenance per sq meter is the real kicker. There's actually a lot of still available space for solar panels (reservoirs being the favourite one I just discovered).

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