ncmncm

69 ms·

751.
by ncmncm 4y ago
I found it surprising how little lithium goes into an electric car, vs. e.g. copper, nickel, and graphite, and how much zinc goes into a wind turbine. The zinc is for corrosion control. The place of soybean and pork production, vs. the rest
752.
by ncmncm 4y ago
That happens in Italy?
753.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Global solar potential is badly skewed: deserts are a lousy place to put solar panels. Their only advantage is that overcast is rare. The best sites are tropical and sub-tropical calm fresh water with limited overcast, to float panels on. I
754.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Importing raw materials and exporting finished goods made from it falls under "markets". But they also import a lot of oil and coal for purely domestic use. Not clear what else.
755.
by ncmncm 4y ago
That is a lot like a hurricane or tsunami. The rest of the world seems able to ignore those. Unless of course it hit (e.g.) TSMC.
756.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Everything needed to go from Q > 1 to actual electric power is nonexistant, not even being worked on, and far beyond the resources of these companies. Nobody knows how to produce the tritium needed to operate, or to extract it at ppb con
757.
by ncmncm 4y ago
What does China depend on from the rest of the world, other than markets and oil?
758.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Russia carried it from 1917 all the way to the 1950s, and even defeated Nazi Germany almost alone (albeit with substantial late manufacturing help from the US). China has way better mechanisms available to it than the SSRs did, and doesn&#x
759.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Probably the most stark fact within that group is how the US has very deliberately abandoned most of its population to all the storms blowing through. That the worst-abandoned reliably vote to be abandoned just tells us how effective system
760.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Those look serviceable, but it is impossible to be sure with only a single top-down view. A spoon should have an ovoid bowl, and the handle must not be heavy enough to cause it to flip out of a small dish when bumped.
761.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Article is from 2021. It ends with "Currently, there are four other floating solar panel projects underway in Singapore." Of course more projects may have been initiated since then.
762.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Not many of those get billions of dollars, year in and year out.
763.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Taking British ministerial announcements at face value has not worked out well for many, over recent decades.
764.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Battery cost per unit of energy stored has fallen very fast for years. What Tesla charges to replace batteries is a whole other matter. They charge what they think they can get.
765.
by ncmncm 4y ago
It ought to interest securities fraud investigators, anyway. Anyone else, not so much.
766.
by ncmncm 4y ago
In other news, the UK government revealed it is wholly disconnected from reality.
767.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Let us just observe that securities fraud is very unevenly enforced. None of these startup companies will ever produce a lone kWh of commercial power. But they will very diligently spend every dollar they are handed by VCs. The VC brokers k
768.
by ncmncm 4y ago
You need to start these things with a hard vacuum inside before you inject your fusile material.
769.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Some people quite reasonably object to spending billions of dollars every year on a project with a vanishingly small prospect of success, and of exactly zero practical value if it ever did succeed. There will never be so much as a single kW
770.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The plasma had better not touch the wall, becuase then no plasma. But the wall would be heated by the neutrons hammering it. Nobody has identified a material to make this wall out of. It has not even been worked on in decades.
771.
by ncmncm 4y ago
There is no expectation that the steam would be released. That would be terribly wasteful, and it is not done in existing plants, whether coal or nuke-fired.
772.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Unpleasantly, molten lithium metal corrodes steel. Glass, too. Making the blanket out of molten metal would be a problem anyway because it is conductive, and you are trying to control a magnetic field inside the reactor chamber with coil
773.
by ncmncm 4y ago
How to extract bred tritium at parts-per-billion concentration from hundreds or thousands of tons of "blanket" material quickly enough to cycle back into the plasma has not been studied, and might not be possible. Furthermore, nob
774.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Getting to net Q leaves you very, very far from useful fusion. Structural material that can stand up to the neutron bombardment has not been identified; no one has worked on it in decades. No one knows how to breed enough tritium to fuel it
775.
by ncmncm 4y ago
True, retrofitting will always cost more than outfitting during original construction, and having the builder involved enables economy of scale when many (near-)copies of the same house design are built.
776.
by ncmncm 4y ago
But prices have fallen sharply in recent years, and may continue on down. 2016 is two generations back, in battery years. Probably future decreases will come from better power density, requiring less physical material for a given capacity,
777.
by ncmncm 4y ago
I had a hard time getting past the "399" out about 43. I wanted to round it to "4". But these days I would rather memorize tau: 6.28318530717958647692528676655900576839433879875021 It has that "00" at 27
778.
by ncmncm 4y ago
At issue is that a residential roof is no bigger than the residence. That does not make residential installations a dumb idea. They just cost more than alternatives. On very large commercial buildings, a project may claim economies of scale
779.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Wow, that slide deck makes fusion look even worse that I had thought. "40 years away and increasing" is an eye-opening admission. They have no plan for how to produce more tritium than they consume, never mind any way to collect
780.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Code for any that lacked features would still build on a more complete implementation. This is fundamentally different from the Pascal case where extansions absolutely necessary for the compiler to be useful at all differed radically from o

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