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Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

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Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#211

Post by m4rtink »

tablespoon wrote: post #115
Spooky23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!

> It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. > Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point! And also wildly over-optimistic (as is typical for SF). In the books, I think it took something like 10,000 years to loose the technical knowledge. I bet we could do it in 100.

Wasnt it rather that it would take 10,000 years to recover to restore the galactic civilization after the crash ?

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#212

Post by m4rtink »

lcvw wrote: post #105
mlindner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, but do people actually believe that? It sounds like a tactic by oil companies to sucker in gullible people in order to punt a problem down the road. It also acts as a great excuse by politicians to avoid having to deal with a problem. IMO, the reality is that these plants will never convert to anything other than natural gas and will eventually be shut down, still running on natural gas. Hydrogen is…

I seem to remember that you can’t even pump hydrogen through existing natural gas infrastructure because the smaller hydrogen molecules are more prone to leaking. I would imagine the equipment at a plant has a similar problem and combine that with lower efficiency from burning a fuel that the plant wasn’t designed for, and the abysmal efficiency from converting electric energy to hydrogen and it seems like pure snake…

Not to mention ignited hydrogen leaks being invisible in daylight!

You can walk right into one if you are not careful - which is why you might see people walking with brooms in front of them around hydrogen equipment. :)

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#213

Post by jacquesm »

Great article, this bit jumped out at me:

"the anti-truck-bomb obstacles (on the entrance only -- no self-respecting truck bomber would ever think of driving in through the exit, would they?)"

This is the sort of thing that never stops to amaze me, usually when visiting some installation or other there is a detail like this that jumps out. The best example that I have of this was a perfectly sealed isolation ward in a hospital that merged both intake and exhaust of the isolation ward with the general wards because they ran out of budget for another air system so they plumbed it into what was already there. It totally floored me that this was done consciously as a cost saving measure, I'll leave the failure modes as a homework exercise ;)

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#214

Post by kwhitefoot »

sovnade wrote: post #126
tda wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.

Except you lose a lot of that power through attenuation. You can't really send electricity from the sahara to europe efficiently. Even over relatively short distances (a few dozen miles), you're losing up to 10-15% of your overall energy. A thousand miles or more...and I can't even find numbers on that because nobody does it.

You lose a few percent per 1000 km using HVDC. Even AC transmission doesn't have the losses you describe.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#215

Post by grogenaut »

valarauko wrote: post #182
grogenaut wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its a bit of an over used trope in fiction to me that if you kill the one person inventing a thing you stop it. think t2 and the chip. most major discoveries i have heard of in important areas had multiple people running neck amd neck. when it comes to rebuilding a thing, i think whats important to wonder is would you even build it the same way? I remember seeing an article on ars about the engines for the Saturn 5.…

> That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while Roman concrete isn't some magical substance that we're hoping to replicate - we already know how it works - it just would really suck for the type of building projects we have now.

Aah, I thought we were trying to replicate it or one of it's properties still, maybe in the context of modern concrete. Would love to know more.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#216

Post by jacquesm »

cycomanic wrote: post #160
dimitrios1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my issue with the debate between Nuclear proponents and Renewable proponents (most of whom seem to be nuclear detractors): They usually compare what is possible in a future state with renewables to what is currently possible with Nuclear technology from decades ago. I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neit…

The problem with your argument that while there is currently more funding for renewables historically much more funding has gone to nuclear [0], and that is not even counting the significant military funding. In fact renewables got to the current state with much less funding, so why should we pour much more money into nuclear when the return on (research) investment is much better for renewables? [0] https://upload.w…

Not to mention operational losses of many nuclear plants already out there. Quite a few of them could not compete in the current market if not for massive subsidies.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#217

Post by koide »

yodelshady wrote: post #168
koide wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, according to some, here are a couple of sources: https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-win...

It can't, source, gas prices in Europe now . Which we are paying . To a dictator who's overtly planning to invade the East. Because the sun isn't shining and batteries are three orders of magnitude too expensive. Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its…

This is patently untrue. If you had followed some links there you would have seen that there are renewable plants today that are cheaper than fossil alternatives. The current gas crisis is, if anything, due to bad choices of electricity companies that tried to do financial games with gas prices. You can't win that game against a crooked political operator. Renewables can and do deliver winter heat too. Nuclear did and could have been something, but now it's not. We should build the best option for the future. And right now that's not nuclear for technological, political and technical reasons.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#218

Post by jacquesm »

yodelshady wrote: post #168
koide wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, according to some, here are a couple of sources: https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-win...

It can't, source, gas prices in Europe now . Which we are paying . To a dictator who's overtly planning to invade the East. Because the sun isn't shining and batteries are three orders of magnitude too expensive. Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its…

But neither can nuclear reactors that do not exist yet. Sure, there are a couple that got shut down, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to total consumption. If you want to get an alternative to gas in 15 years or so then maybe nuclear would work. But a better bet is to get people to install heatpumps and drive those with solar and wind in a few years time. Far more effective use of resources, and far quicker from start to finish.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#219

Post by jacquesm »

fredoralive wrote: post #76
jareklupinski wrote: post #48

"some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past" echoes of the Raspberry Pi camera flash reboot story, 13 years apart :) https://hackaday.com/2015/02/08/photonic-reset-of-the-raspbe...

Being apparently able to erase old style glass top EPROMs with a camera flash is perhaps a bit less surprising than random power components messing up. UV light exposure is how you erase them normally, although you normally use lower light levels for longer, not a short bright camera flash. I do think they need to buy higher grade sticky labels to cover the window with though. :-)

Enough bright flashes and it adds up. Musea tend to forbid the use of flash near paintings to avoid fading the paint.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#220

Post by jacquesm »

pavlov wrote: post #104

How does Torness compare to new European nuclear construction like Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, activated last month? Olkiluoto 3 is a 1600 MW reactor, so on paper it's a much bigger unit than the 600 MW reactor described here.

Totally different principle of operation (boiling water versus gas cooling).
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