Will be interesting to see how Australia goes. They have extensive rooftop solar already, and one of the major parties in the current election is proposing to build nuclear power plants rather than go farther with renewables.
FWIW I think the nuclear plan as proposed would be a flop, but given that there are currently zero nuclear power plants there and Australia has a strong track record of opposing nuclear power, it's interesting to note that the idea has even been brought up without becoming instant electoral poison.
The secret ingredient is millions of dollars from fossil fuel lobbyists, and the Murdoch media running a heavy propaganda/misinformation over the past year. Their only goal is to divert public funds away from solar/wind projects.
If voters choose to go down this path it'll be an absolute tragedy for the country and a huge missed opportunity.
I say this as an Australian realist living abroad who always was relatively pro-nuclear.
The more insidious will be if the government starts putting roadblocks in the way of solar expansion, like the UK government basically banning onshore wind turbine development (which is much cheaper than offshore wind). Absent government interference, solar already has good enough economics it's going to dominate without public funding (which may still waste a lot of time and effort on nuclear plants).
(I also see a big trend of objections to grid-scale solar deployments, which is nuts to me: why on earth do you care about living next to a solar farm? It's about the most inoffensive local development that could possibly happen)
Various state governments are already blocking solar projects.
I'm continually shilling Saul Griffith's work on here, I can't remember the particular piece but he calculated that by delaying the solar/wind transition, fossil fuel businesses would profit on the order of 100 trillion dollars.
My conspiracy theory is that Chinese development and proliferation of fossil fuel disrupting technologies is the root source of all of the current global instability. Only a matter of time until the petrodollar becomes obsolete.
I agree that the current nuclear proposal seems intended principally to extend the life of the coal and gas plants. It's likely born from a cynical attitude of 'who cares about how much the nuclear plants will cost when/if they do get built, just kick the carbon-neutrality can down the road another decade and let the next generation of politicians deal with it.'
I do wonder if there'll ever be a desire to build nuclear plants for baseload firming, though. What amount of excess capacity has to be built in to an all-renewables + storage grid to give the the same reliability as the current grid? Could nuclear power ever be cheap enough to compete on ROI with the marginal providers, the last ~5 gigawatts of wind or solar needed?
David Osmond work is interesting. He wrote last week: "Each week I run a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using rescaled generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with 24GW/120GWh of storage (5 hrs at av demand)
Results:
Last week: 98.6% RE
Last 187 weeks: 98.7% RE (1/5)"
The supercavitating supersonic submarine is a nice endpoint for the evasion discussion but I can't help thinking about the wake that would leave.
Yes it can depart the firing area quickly but if one wanted to find it again for counterfire, surely the point where the absurd wake turbulence ends is a suitable search datum.
More that they don't have it in the right places, or they don't have the ability to shift it temporally to when it's not so abundant.
Per the article they are forecast to add 300 GW of renewables each year, which is admirable. But they also started construction on just under 100 GW of new coal power plants last year, and granted approvals for yet more in the future. [0]
You could quibble at the margins (some of it will be replacing EOL coal plants, some of it is intended as firming capacity only, etc.). But in the big picture, it indicates that where the Chinese economy needs more energy supplied, renewables aren't yet suitable to fill a large portion of that need.
They do have the ability, though, via overbuilding and storage. It's not clear why you think they don't. Them not having fully done it yet is not evidence that they can't do it.
>I still get distracted and doomscroll sometimes, but usually those are planned sessions. Not reading the news or caring about strangers’ opinions has done wonders for my psyche.
n=2 is a poor sample set to develop strong inferences, but I definitely see the upside to this behaviour.
Once I made a conscious decision to become one of those 'low-information voters' you hear about, my mental health improved notably and my screen time dropped by a few hours per week.
> I even suspect that the current near-sightedness epidemic is caused by people spending too much time in dim lighting. Maybe if our indoor lighting was brighter our eyesight would not adapt to become near-sighted as much.
It's not that eyes are adapting to low light so much as the fact that exposure to 10k lux stimulates the release of neurotransmitters which prevent the eye from growing too quickly. Last I checked, the recommendation is for children to spend 2+ hours per day outdoors in sunlight. Morning and evening aren't sufficiently lit so it really comes down to school and after-school care scheduling enough outdoors time.
That's over 8,000 miles. An aircraft with that kind of unrefueuled range could go pretty much anywhere from New York, except Australia, SE Asia, or the tips of Africa and India.
"People scheduling their travel around limited flights" drove extra operational complexity and expenditure for Concorde; it's not a hassle-free business case.
BA and Air France understood that people paid extra to be able to quickly travel transatlantic[0].
That premium value proposition depends heavily on passengers' expectation that the flight WILL go at the scheduled time. The airlines had to invest significant extra resources in spare parts, additional staffing, and standby airframes to ensure on-time performance.
If the Concorde were to ever develop a reputation for six-hour departure delays or days of cancellations in a row, no one among their premium customer base would bother paying extra for it.
British Airways and Air France did profit from them prior to the 9/11 hijackings and the flight 4590 crash, so it's not an impossible hurdle to clear for Boom. But the value proposition for a new SST is going to be vulnerable to operational concerns that don't affect the rest of an airline's fleet.
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[0] https://omegataupodcast.net/166-flying-the-concorde/ - "Every now and then they'd have a survey amongst the regular passengers [...] 'What do you think you paid for your Concorde flight today?' These people haven't got a clue what they paid for their Concorde flight today. They just tell their secretary, 'book me on tomorrow's Concorde, I need to get to New York in a hurry!'"
How reliable do you find the calories-burned data from fitness trackers to be? Are there any brands that have higher accuracy than others? Are there any hardware features like pulse monitoring that improve the accuracy?
I find that the raw step count varies up to 66% between my phone and my wrist-worn tracker and I can't close that gap just by making sure my phone is never left behind.
Not great! We have to "correct" them mathematically. Some can be crazy off until you calibrate them, for instance my husband's then-new Apple Watch was 2X off for months until he transitioned from winter indoor treadmill running to an outdoor run where it can calibrate. But even Garmin/Whoop/Oura can be substantially off, 50% easy. A "fun" simple way you can test yourself: do the exact same weight lifting workout but at + or - 10ºF between the two replicates. Guarantee you'll get dramatically different "calories burned" when in reality they are more similar. Your heart beating faster to cool you off in the hotter environment even though you're doing the same amount of (physics definition) "work" is NOT burning 50% more calories. Heart Rate is just a proxy for "work" and is confounded with other causes of heart rate change, such as ambient temperature/cooling.
