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Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

reuters.com

371–380 of 436 posts

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#371
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you experience blackouts that often your infrastructure is probably prepared for it. Most of Europe basically never has blackouts, so why spend money on backup batteries when they will be deprecated before they'll even be used once?

Canada/US learnt that lesson back in 2003 with the Northeast Blackout. Generators on cell towers where not fueled and some data centre’s caught fire when the cooling went down but the systems didn’t. Lessons where learned. Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.

> Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.

> Lessons were learned.

That's why our emergency services use Rogers as the main, and Telus as a backup - but only after the multi-day Rogers outage that took out payment processors and emergency services this year.

Lessons will have been learned instead of parroted when we have a crown corporation as the main, and a private corporation as the backup. We need cell service to be reliable and rock-solid, even if it's not always cost-competitive to be so. Same reason hospitals, fire, and police services are public: turning a profit is less important than availability.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what is sent to Seversk is not just the spent fuel, but also radioactive material that was used during the treatment of the spent fuel. No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk, the contract from EDF was signed in 2018 (and EDF says that nothing was sent yet) No, this is not even the fuel cycle, Orano signed a contract with Rosatom so that they could send spent URT and Rosatom uses it for their own reactors.…

>> No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk + "Literally selling spent fuel" (instead of burying it) well, if you put it that way, then the fuel cycle doesn't even exist at all, france just imports fresh uranium from Russia, Nigeria, Kazhakstan and Australia and sells spent fuel to Russia. > and EDF says that nothing was sent yet under that new contract maybe, here is an article from 2009 in which EDF "told news…

> we are talking a demand in the thousands of tons per year.

France has 56 nuclear plants in operation. A cursory web search puts a 1TW reactor at about 30 tonnes of processed uranium per year. 56*30=1680.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is a useful proxy when used to allocate resources to individual economic agents, but is not useful when analysing and coordinating an entire economy. In fact, the loss of fine-grained information and introduction of social subjectivity is often highly counter-productive.

I think I understand what you're saying? That money isn't a good proxy for issues of things like shared resources. A la tragedy of the commons types of issues? If that's what you're saying then I fully agree. Money has been a great tool for proxying local economic effects and facilitating trade but it is not nuanced enough to capture more long range phenomena like ToC. But I do feel like this is where governments are…

To briefly summarise my point, economic reality is determined by material factors, such as available physical resources and labour time, and money is a construct which controls access to those resources according to the society's power structures.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk + "Literally selling spent fuel" (instead of burying it) well, if you put it that way, then the fuel cycle doesn't even exist at all, france just imports fresh uranium from Russia, Nigeria, Kazhakstan and Australia and sells spent fuel to Russia. > and EDF says that nothing was sent yet under that new contract maybe, here is an article from 2009 in which EDF "told news…

> we are talking a demand in the thousands of tons per year. France has 56 nuclear plants in operation. A cursory web search puts a 1TW reactor at about 30 tonnes of processed uranium per year. 56*30=1680.

8200 tons per year according to: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

8700 tons per year according to: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264796/uranium-consumpti...

quite hard to find good numbers, but the size "thousands of tons" seems to fit. The thread starter proposed that Europa, not only France, should build more nuclear power plants, so we may even be in the tens of thousands of tons per year for the whole continent.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot see how one can claim that the US invasion of Iraq was less barbaric than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. >> Estimates of the total number of Iraqi war-related deaths are highly disputed. According to Keith Krause of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, "the consensus seems to be that around 150,000 pe…

Estimates of total deaths in Iraq due to the war generally come up with a figure of several hundred thousand. You can look at the page you linked to for examples of these studies. Iraq Body Count tracked 120k individually verifiable civilian deaths in Iraq through 2011 (a figure that has increased significantly since, due to the rise of ISIS, which was a side-effect of the Iraq War). But in a war zone, many (maybe ev…

While most estimates are between 150K to 250K, with at least one published estimate as high as 1.2M, the point of the quote was not to argue about causality numbers, but to demonstrate that numbers are "highly disputed," with an example of a lower estimate and claim of consensus.

IBC project in particular has issues, including accusations of internal anti-war bias and biased sources. IBC has been accused of both undercounting and overcounting. In any regard, due to so much criticism from all sides, other studies are probably more reliable, but even these do not agree.

My larger point was using the Iraq War in comparison to the Russo-Ukraine War to argue the US is no better than Russia, or vice versa, is tu quoque fallacy.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#376
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has nothing to do with my original comment. As a response to the Iraq war, pivoting to Russia as an energy supplier now looks foolish.

There was no turn to Russia, the USSR was a reliable gas supplier since the 60s and all the way through the Cold War...

It’s a matter of public record that France and Germany were aligning towards Russia and away from the US geopolitically. They referred to it as “the troika”.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#377
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And before we hear any cries of, "Iraq was different," recall that it was an illegal war of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, led to large scale torture, and generally caused a monumental societal collapse in Iraq. I've been trying to come to terms with this since the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the details on the ground are significantly different. But it doesn't change the legal r…

You’d definitely made the right decision for yourself, and possibly in the general case. I’d add that while the bursts of hawkishness in US foreign policy are awful, they pale in comparison to the barbarism of other past powers or modern regional powers. That isn’t meant to excuse anything, but look at the Russian invasion and the intentional atrocities being committed. Compare that to the invasion of Iraq and I thin…

There is no evidence that the Russian invasion is more barbaric than the US invasion of Iraq.

In fact they seem to show (to a certain extent) some restraint with regard to civilian infrastructure, while America bombed everything from the sky for 1 month before invading.

In terms of intentional atrocities every army has its bad apples, and I'm sure there is a Russian equivalent of Abu Graib. But there is no evidence there is a deliberate policy by the Russian military to commit war crimes.

The French sent an elite unit of the scientific police to investigate Bucha. They came back months ago with not a single press conference, audition, report. Nothing, nada. Why? Why aren't they telling the world about the alleged Russian war crimes they witnessed there?

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#378
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d definitely made the right decision for yourself, and possibly in the general case. I’d add that while the bursts of hawkishness in US foreign policy are awful, they pale in comparison to the barbarism of other past powers or modern regional powers. That isn’t meant to excuse anything, but look at the Russian invasion and the intentional atrocities being committed. Compare that to the invasion of Iraq and I thin…

I cannot see how one can claim that the US invasion of Iraq was less barbaric than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. The US practiced torture, as we all found out when the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. The US worked with Shiite militias that conducted ethnic cleansing and torture on a massive scale. The US put down uprisings in places like Sadr City, Najaf and…

The collateral murder video was a national scandal, people were appalled and it was fairly unique among a trove of videos and documents. Ukraine is unearthing mass graves on a daily basis full of mutilated civilians. The laundry list of confirmed war crimes including video is overwhelming. There’s loads of evidence of people all the way up the Russian chain of command encouraging atrocities. Moreover the conflict is less than a year old. For fuck’s sake the Russians intentionally bombarded a maternity hospital.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#379
post #30
post #8

I've been in South Africa for the last month, which has had an energy crisis since around 2007 and somehow they manage to keep mobile networks up during load shedding. There are 2:30 hour (sometimes 4:30 hour) blackouts daily and yet everything seems to keep chugging along. Mobile towers are probably have some of the highest electricity:benefit ratios out there, it would be silly to not prioritize them.

To be fair, if you experience blackouts that often your infrastructure is probably prepared for it. Most of Europe basically never has blackouts, so why spend money on backup batteries when they will be deprecated before they'll even be used once?

Japan too (except natural disaster) but most cellular towers have backup power source like battery or generator.

Re: Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

#380
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumped hydro is very limited and most resources are already exploited. Wind energy is not a solution because sometimes it just doesn't appear when you need it. Nuclear actually is a solution, in the sense that if you implement it, the problem will go away. Renewables are not a solution in the sense that even if you over-implement to an absurd degree, with present technology the problem will sometimes remain. The peop…

Cheap long time storage methods, like "Sand battery"[0], can change the equation. [0]: https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery

This is only really useful for low grade heat, but is good to add to the mix.
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