For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

The WTO found that China cornered the market with illegal dumping. Of course the investigations and punishments are too little too late.

> If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers.

That buys you days, not weeks.

The smoothing out things also have kind of an ugly failure mode. People set their cars to sell power into the grid if the price is X% above normal, but that prevents it from getting to be 2X% above normal on the first day, and then fewer people choose not to run their dryers. The batteries get exhausted sooner because their own existence prevented the price from going up very much at first, but that's the profit-maximizing strategy because nobody knows exactly how long the shortfall is going to be and the shorter ones are more common. Then the batteries get depleted quickly and when the shortfall lasts for more than a couple of days, you're not only low on battery storage, you now have more people whose cars have a charge gauge pointing to E and they need to get to work in the morning.

> The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary.

It isn't a regulatory restriction. It's, where are you setting your thermostat if electricity hits $5/kWh today?

> At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.

The problem is that it's occasionally neither and that doesn't have to happen very often to cause a lot of trouble.

Most of Europe drinks water from underground aquifers, which could not be affected by Chernobyl. Even breathing with air with radionuclides from Chernobyl in far distance from Chernobyl power plant didn't cause much radiation dose to the population. It was eating contaminated food and drinking contaminated milk that cause most radiation dose for population.

The precise mechanism was: radioactive particles fall to ground, or are washed to ground by rain, which concentrates them on vegetation with a lot of surface especially leafy vegetables, grass. Leafy vegetables are eaten directly by humans. Grass is eaten by cows, which again concentrates the radionuclides in milk. Humans drink milk, eat cheese concentrated from milk.

Not all radionuclides produced in nuclear fission have the same health impact on population in case of a nuclear disaster. To have a significant health hazard a radionuclide needs to have 3 properties: volatility, half-life, bioaccumulativity.

Volatility - some radioactive elements (heavy metals) are not moved far away by air, some radioactive elements like radioactive noble gases dilute very fast.

Stuff with a short half-life will transform into stable elements before migrating far. Stuff with with very long half-life will not produce much radiation during human lifetime.

Bioaccumulativity, radioactive stuff needs to stay in body to do damage. If it's eaten and then pooped out next day it usually doesn't cause much damage.

Most dangerous for general public in case of nuclear disasters are:

Iodine-131 (half-life 8 days): Iodine is stored in thyroid gland and stays in for long time in body. Especially children need a lot of iodine per kilogram of body weight. In regions where there is not enough of iodine in food (lacking seafood, table salt without added iodine), human body will try to get every bit of iodine from environment and hold it in body as long as possible.

Cesium-137 (half-time 30.04 years) : Alkali metal that forms salts. Has tendency to accumulate in soft tissues.

Strontium-90 (half-time 28.91 years) : Chemically similar to calcium. Has tendency to be incorporated into bones, teeth and stay in body for very long time.

https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q10097/

Big part of radiation dose to the population could be prevented if the Soviet state didn't tried to cover up the Chernobyl and would prevent people from eating local food and milk, because most of the damage is done by eating iodine-131 in the first weeks after accident. Timely administration of potassium iodide tables would also help.

Chernobyl liquidators were affected with much broader range of radionuclides (radioactive stuff that did not migrate far) and with much high concentrations (radioactive stuff was not diluted much).

Direct deaths: 2 killed by debris (including 1 missing) and 28 killed by acute radiation sickness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

There many estimates about impact of Chernobyl disaster. I think the most comprehensive study is from Chernobyl Forum.

"On the death toll of the accident, the report states that 28 emergency workers died from acute radiation syndrome and 15 patients died from thyroid cancer. It roughly estimates that cancers deaths caused by the Chernobyl accident might eventually reach a total of up to 4,000 among the 600,000 cleanup workers or "liquidators" who received the greatest exposures."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Forum

Aluminum smelters are something like 4% of global electricity consumption and 60% of them are in China. In general industrial is less than a third of electricity consumption in the US, not even all of that can be curtailed, and that number is only going to go down if we electrify heating and transportation. It's pretty hard to curtail heating and cooling by more than a minor amount. It's easy to do with transportation over the course of hours or days, but not weeks or months.

Batteries work great to let you generate power at noon and use it at dusk. They're not so great at letting you generate power on days with a surplus and then use it later in the year when there is a multi-week or seasonal shortfall.

For comparison the Bhopal disaster (which is much less known in the West) that occurred on 3 December 1984 in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India caused deaths in the range 3928 to 16000.

A government affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125 injuries including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster