rgmerk

50 ms·

601.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Sure. I should have been more precise and differentiated between "viable replacement for diesel generators" and "viable supplement to diesel generators".
602.
by rgmerk 4y ago
How about this one: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-U...
603.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Yep, absolutely. But there are plenty of other people, notably here on HN, who get very excited about grid-connected SMRs. It's also worth noting that the majority of people living without access to grid electricity are in sub-Saharan
604.
by rgmerk 4y ago
There is no way in the world this is going to be economically competitive to connect to big electricity grids any time soon. Even taking into account the cost of extra transmission and storage (and to a certain extent, building extra storag
605.
by rgmerk 4y ago
There are plenty of studies of near-100% renewable energy grids and the electricity comes out similar to long-term wholesale trends (pre-Ukraine), even taking storage/transmission into account.
606.
by rgmerk 4y ago
They say they envisage delivery of the whole system on four trucks. Not single family home (unsurprisingly, the economics of very small scale nuclear are awful even ignoring the safety concerns), but night and day compared with conventional
607.
by rgmerk 4y ago
For things like mission-critical logging, having time jump around, or even skew, is a real PITA.
608.
by rgmerk 4y ago
In the United States, you can't, at least at a federal level, nor across most of the red states.
609.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Fair point, but the EU ETS took many, many years to have any serious effect as I understand it.
610.
by rgmerk 4y ago
If by “people” you mean “Americans”, they buy F-150s to go to the grocery store, and they vote out governments that threaten their ability to do so. Taxing pollution, particularly consumer-facing taxes, has a long history of political failu
611.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Nah. The sports car market has long relied on cross-subsidy from mass market vehicles. Ferrari was dying until Fiat bought it. Lamborghini would have died without Audi. Porsche would have died multiple times without VW - and relied on VW
612.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Going to rehash debates that we've been having for many years, but the short answer is yes. Existing renewable tech + storage will do the job just fine in most of the world, and at lower cost than nuclear.
613.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Pretty difficult but not impossible. Spent nuclear fuel rods are among the most dangerous and difficult to handle materials available, and ones that have been sitting in a power reactor for years are far more radioactive than ones that spen
614.
by rgmerk 4y ago
1) My point is that the actual market cost of desalinated water includes the energy cost - and probably more expensive energy than a dedicated desal plant for hydrogen production would because both run at times and in places where energy is
615.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Water availability is a red herring IMO. Desalination is expensive, but even desalinated water would add very little to the cost of green hydrogen. A high-end cost estimate for desalinated water is about $1.50 per kiloliter / metric to
616.
by rgmerk 4y ago
H2 energy density is better than Li-Ion batteries, particularly by weight, but: * Hydrogen is very light but takes up quite a lot of volume so it needs to be either liquified or compressed to very high pressures (and even then it's con
617.
by rgmerk 4y ago
One key lesson from these kinds of stories - money gives you options. Pile that money up high (in something like index funds) while you're earning the big bucks, and there comes a time where you can choose whether you want to keep doin
618.
by rgmerk 4y ago
I haven’t found a good, well-referenced article on this topic, but the short version seems to be lobbying of state governments by car dealers back in the 1930s, and continued lobbying since. Incumbent car manufacturers had no particular inc
619.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Not as much as you'd think. A modest amount of storage (for which there are a variety of options including conventional batteries, flow batteries, and pumped storage), as well as demand management (run your heat pump hot water and char
620.
by rgmerk 4y ago
My point on the "sci-fi scenarios" was more for crewed exploration and settlement of space in the medium and long term future. While there are plenty of other reasons to be skeptical about that, the ability to supply them with som
621.
by rgmerk 4y ago
While these might be new to Cree’s offerings, LED grow lights have been widely available for a few years now. They’re even used in “vertical farms” to grow herbs (other than cannabis) hydroponically indoors, exclusively in artificial light,
622.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The only place this might make sense is at high latitudes where solar power is essentially unavailable for months on end when demand is highest. In temperate and tropical latitudes it’s unlikely to be economically competitive with solar pan
623.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Not disagreeing with any of that but it’s still incredibly ugly. Just a planter box or two would be a massive improvement!
624.
by rgmerk 4y ago
I think there’s an adage of urban planning that the median commute is always 30 minutes independent of how much transport infrastructure you build.
625.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Paris, London and New York - the key points of comparison - aren’t exactly known for their spacious housing. One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more tha
626.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Waiting for the solution that involves transforming Python code into an encoded Turing machine and implements a minimal UTM in some tiny subset of Python.
627.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Hydroelectricity is unfashionable because: a) there aren't that many places left to build conventional hydro. b) of the places that are left, there's been a lot of (IMO justified) opposition on the basis that flooding wilderness a
628.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The fact that it might be 20 million rather than 40 million Americans who might die immediately doesn’t exactly fill me with comfort.
629.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Or more housing. Or virtually anything else would be a better use of land than parking lots. The amount of valuable land that widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles could unlock is just staggering. Not to mention the avoided costs o
630.
by rgmerk 4y ago
But how useful would a mechanical general-purpose digital computer have been? Even if a competent project manager had been in charge, steam-driven mechanical computers would have been extremely expensive, physically large, and very slow. Mo

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