Japan Airlines flight collides with Japan Coast Guard aircraft in Tokyo
Scientist Adelbert Ames created the mind boggling ‘Ames Window’ (1951)
The brainchild of one ambitious American astrophysicist during the course of U.S. nuclear tests yielded the first manmade object in Earth’s orbit. The four foot round steel cap was launched into orbit in late August 1957 by the United States, beating the USSR’s Sputnik 1 to orbit by one month and nine days, scoring a major victory in the space race for the Americans. This feat has gone largely unrecognized by most historians. //
Operators
United States – Originally launched from the Nevada Test Site in 1957, the Pascal B Cap remains in service in Earth’s orbit despite its unknown location. //
A manhole cover launched into space with a nuclear test is the fastest human-made object. A scientist on Operation Plumbbob told us the unbelievable story. //
Robert Brownlee was on the Operation Plumbbob team that launched an object in space before Sputnik.
They put a manhole cover above a nuke underground, and the explosion shot the iron cap into space.
The fastest human-made object was part of the US government's nuclear testing in the 1950s.
But the very first underground nuclear tests were a bit of an experiment — nobody knew exactly what might happen.
The first one, nicknamed "Uncle," exploded beneath the Nevada Test Site on November 29, 1951.
Uncle was a code for "underground."
It was only buried 17 feet, but the top of the bomb's mushroom cloud exploded 11,500 feet into the sky. //
The underground nuclear tests we're interested in were nicknamed "Pascal," during Operation Plumbbob in 1957. //
Brownlee said he designed the Pascal-A test as the first that aimed to contain nuclear fallout. The bomb was placed at the bottom of a hollow column — 3 feet wide and 485 feet deep — with a 4-inch-thick iron cap on top.
The test was conducted on the night of July 26, 1957, so the explosion coming out of the column looked like a Roman candle. //
Brownlee wanted to measure how fast the iron cap flew off the column, so he designed a second experiment, Pascal-B, and got an incredible calculation. //
Brownlee replicated the first experiment, but the column in Pascal-B was deeper at 500 feet. They also recorded the experiment with a camera that shot one frame per millisecond.
On August 27, 1957, the "manhole cover" cap flew off the column with the force of the nuclear explosion. The iron cover was only partially visible in one frame, Brownlee said.
When he used this information to find out how fast the cap was going, Brownlee calculated it was traveling at five times the escape velocity of the Earth — or about 125,000 miles per hour. //
Pascal-B's estimated iron cover speed dwarfs the 36,373 mph that the New Horizons spacecraft — which many have called the fastest object launched by humankind — eventually reached while traveling toward Pluto. //
"After I was in the business and did my own missile launches," he told Insider in 2016, "I realized that that piece of iron didn't have time to burn all the way up [in the atmosphere]."
Mere months after the Pascal tests, October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. While the USSR was the first to launch a satellite, Brownlee was probably the first to launch an object into space. ///
Now exceeded by the Parker Solar Probe...
At its closest approach [to the sun] in 2024, its speed relative to the Sun was 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph) or 191 km/s (118.7 mi/s), which is 0.064% the speed of light.[7][9] It is the fastest object ever built on Earth.[
Most everyone, other than the liberal arts faculty in most major universities and a disturbing number of high school history teachers, is familiar with Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on the night of December 25-26, 1776, and the stunning surprise victory that ensued in the streets of Trenton, New Jersey.
What is often lost in the telling of the narrative is the tactical sophistication that George Washington was developing by the winter of 1776-77 and a little-known battle, one which I think shows Washington at his finest, that took place on January 2, 1777.
TexasVeteran
2 hours ago edited
So I guess this means Huckelberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird will be back in Illinois libraries?
GregInFla TexasVeteran
an hour ago edited
And the Bible must be allowed. You cannot block a book based on doctrine, the law says.
anon-vujo
an hour ago
Public libraries should be able to have whatever books they choose, it’s school libraries(elementary especially) that shouldn’t be carrying certain books because they’re not age-appropriate. It’s the same reason they don’t show 50 Shades or porn to kids in the classroom but Dems are too busy being dishonest and call them book bans. The only true bans are by Dems who don’t have To Kill a Mockingbird and other books in their libraries due to racial content.
Why is this nuclear fission disrespect from Cipher important enough for such a long post?
Cipher’s “About” page includes this self-description “Cipher covers the technological innovations we need to combat climate change and transform our global energy systems.” The publication’s executive editor is @AmyAHarder Cipher is sponsored by Breakthrough Energy.
Cipher’s fission “coverage” slows global progress in combating climate change. Fission is an incredibly powerful natural reaction that serves as an easily controlled heat source for the most productive, cleanest and safest power plants on Earth. It will play an increasingly important role in addressing energy sufficiency for all, energy abundance for most, energy security and energy cleanliness.
Of course nuclear is a “controversial topic.” People have been carefully taught to fear fission. They have rarely been taught much about the technological details of the power plants. Publications like Cipher that point to accidents almost never mention the statistical evidence accumulated over >6 decades that shows nuclear fission is one of our safest forms of energy production.
It’s logical to have some trepidation and concerns about the unknown, especially when fear messaging has been so prevalent.
There is also the competitive factor. Nuclear energy production takes markets away from all other power sources. No business likes to lose sales and revenues. All businesses strive to beat their competition. Talking trash and going negative are frequently used techniques.
But journalists shouldn’t pick sides.
Cipher should adhere to its mission of covering [all of] “the technological innovations we need to combat climate change” and the rest of our energy challenges.
Rod Adams says: December 15, 2023 at 10:13 AM
I believe that many (perhaps most) observers are confused about the economies of scale and believe that the term only applies to ever larger machines.
Scale is also related to the enterprise that develops the power plant and the supply chain that produces the parts for the machines. If the power plants are so large that all of their components are produced in limited quantities, their supply chain never has the chance to develop economic scale.
NuScale’s system includes many simplifications that might enable it to achieve competitive pricing, especially when the kWh that they sell get appropriately differentiated and valued as superior to similar units of electricity that do not include valuable characteristics like cleanliness, reliability, stability, inertia and power factor.
As I pointed out in my post, the $89/MWh price tag for NuScale output is competitive in a number of different markets. Their mistake was trying to sell to reluctant customers in a place where power is generally cheap and where the customers have no real reason to take risks and bet on FOAK technology.
My sources tell me that the fatal decision to focus on UAMPS as the initial customer was a result of strong pressure by INL to host US’s the pioneering SMR.
That might have worked if NuScale had planned to offer a single 50 MWe module. That power output that could be handled by INL, perhaps with the help of Idaho Power. But NuScale decided they needed to achieve scale more quickly and chose initially to build a 12 unit, 600 MWe power plant in the middle of a vast, nearly unpopulated desert. (The initial plan was rescaled to 6 units of 77 MWe each, but that is still a 462 MWe facility on an 860 square mile site with a total local consumption of roughly 80 MWe.
Consuming the power from their proposed plant required a much larger customer base, but the only utility available was a consortium of 40+ small town cooperatives.
Abandoning the UAMPS project before wasting any more money was a good decision. NuScale has a number of additional potential customers in its pipeline, though it still needs to overcome the FOAK challenge.
Yesterday (Nov 8, 2023), an expected shoe dropped. NuScale and UAMPS (Utah Association of Municipal Power Systems) announced that they had decided to abandon their Carbon Free Power Project. The press release stated, “Despite significant efforts by both parties to advance the CFPP, it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment.”
A chorus of commentary has erupted on social media. Some are cheers from the usual suspects who have never met a nuclear reactor that they like. Others are from people who ardently support different designs that range from different water reactors to gas-cooled, molten salt or liquid metal reactors that don’t use water cooling and moderation.
Some believe that the decision proves that NuScale Power Modules are hopelessly uneconomic and that the CFPP cancellation proves that NuScale is on shaky grounds as a company. Self-admitted short sellers are doing everything they can to undermine investor confidence so that the company stock price falls quickly and profitably for those betting on that behavior.
My conclusions from the project cancellation are different. There is no doubt that a smooth first-of-a-kind demonstration of a 6-12 unit NuScale power plant would have been better for the company’s prospects in the short term. That result would have also helped to increase interest in new nuclear power projects and would have increased investor FOMO (fear of missing out.) //
UAMPS member power systems have ready access to local coal sources.
The UAMPS-served areas are close to productive oil shale formations that contain substantial quantities of associated natural gas. Sometimes North Dakota gas is almost given away – even in the dead of winter – because it is an annoying byproduct of oil production. //
The CFPP was an important project for NuScale, but it is not the only sale that the company is working on. UAMPS is not the only customer attracted by a passively cooled, light water reactor using established fuel forms, materials and chemistry refined through many decades of operation in large fleets of nuclear power plants.
NuScale’s power modules have been issued a design certification at a time when none of the alternative choices have submitted an application for review. Submission is needed to start a regulatory calendar that moves at an excruciatingly slow pace. Though we hope the next review will be quicker, it took more than six years from the time NuScale submitted its Design Certification Application until the 5-member commission issued the final document. (Dec 31, 2016 – Feb 21, 2023)
According to Fluor, which still holds its large stake in NuScale, 18 active and signed Memorandums of Understanding from 11 different countries were in effect at the end of 2021. //
Blue Energy is “productizing” nuclear fission by manufacturing pre-certified light water small modular reactors in shipyards as fully-completed, transportable nuclear power plants that are leased to industrial facilities and countries seeking energy security, price stability, and turnkey decarbonization. We leverage existing oil & gas platform manufacturing infrastructure and a simplified plant design to shrink the construction schedule from 10 years to 24 months and the overnight capital cost from greater than $6,000/kW to less than $2,500/kW while putting nuclear on a learning curve down to $1/W.
-- CERAWeek presentation “Blue Energy | Offshore Nuclear Power” Mar 7, 2023
your post helped me to arrive at the solution with just .htaccess and .htpasswd files without editing Apache.
In the root PrivateBin folder I have the following .htaccess code added by me:
Require method GET OPTIONS
Require valid-user
AuthUserFile /home/panelusername/public_html/domain.ext/.htpasswords/ PrivateBin/.htpasswd
AuthName "POST PASS"
AuthType BasicThen outside of the PrivateBin folder I created an .htpassword file located at /home/panelusername/public_html/domain.ext/.htpasswords/PrivateBin/.htpasswd with the encrypted username and password.
This worked so now when user press "send" need to know credentials to see data successfully saved. ///
pastebin stikked
This is a neat and effective way to restrict paste uploading using NGINX without breaking anything and without modifying PrivateBin.
Approach
An authentication page is created using NGINX, which, if provided with the correct credentials, will set a cookie with a secret key. All POST requests to the server are restricted using NGINX and only allowed if this secret key is provided. This allows viewing pastes by anyone but not uploading. ///
pastebin stikked
Do Dubai delegates propose to reduce supply or demand? //
After two weeks of negotiation, the United Nations climate conference in Dubai agreed last week to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Left unanswered is whether governments are supposed to do that by reducing supply, reducing demand or both. A lot rides on the answer, but neither would affect the climate much.
One of our AIS-receiving station operators in South Africa shares his true story of captivity and talks about his experience with MarineTraffic //
I noticed, to my surprise, that there are clearly-defined shipping lanes, and the lane heading up and down the east coast of Africa converged with the shipping lane from the Malacca Straits just offshore from my house. I realised my location is perfect to monitor shipping movements.
I’m also possibly one of the few station owners who had misfortune in their sailing experience. Back in 1990, my yacht ran aground during the hours of darkness. My family and I were captured and held hostage for 49 days by a then terrorist group, called Renamo, in Mozambique.
Apart from all the trauma of becoming embroiled in a very active civil war, the trauma of knowing we had disappeared and no one knew where we were, was profoundly disturbing. That happened in pre-GPS and fledgling-sat nav days.
Services such as AIS ensure this would not happen today, and therefore I applied to become a station owner to add to the security of all ships, but especially yachts, as they round the southern tip of Africa. //
I had to write a book to cover all the takeaways from our time of captivity but let me highlight just two:
Few emotions are more disabling than hopelessness. We had our two children, aged 5 and 8, with us, so we resolved early on that we had to do all we could to protect them from the reality of the war. We did this by assuming a nonchalant air that these weird happenings and people were all just a rather strange and exciting deviation in our holiday plans, and nothing to worry about.
This was not easy to sustain as deep feelings of guilt, hopelessness and despair often overcame us. We spent seven weeks living in a bush camp with the Renamo boy soldiers (aged 10 to ~20) before we were rescued. //
The second takeaway is related. It was frightening to witness how fragile social order can become. At that time, Mozambique was the poorest nation on Earth and a country in ruins due to unwise political policies, destabilization from neighbours resulting in the civil war, and the country becoming a theatre for the fighting of a proxy war between the east and the west. //
Our release required a cease-fire to come into place between Frelimo and Renamo. It did. I’ve since returned to Mozambique five times with a mission group from my local church. We attempted to help local communities with economic development and medical aid. These visits were emotionally exhausting for me, but I was amazed to discover how quickly the local people had placed the war behind them.
So the second takeaway is, people are extraordinarily resilient, and it’s vital for our mental and physical health to do all we can to place harmful events behind us and avoid giving or feeling blame. //
And, as a footnote, because you are probably wondering; our children grew up as happy kids and teenagers. Both are now young adults, both married and both with jobs that contribute directly to society. If asked, they would tell you they only have good memories of the time spent as hostages.
Welcome to the world of shipping containers.
These marvels of modern logistics have revolutionised global trade, making the transportation of goods over long distances easier and more efficient than ever before.
From perishable goods that need to be temperature controlled to heavy loads that require extra reinforcement, there’s a container type for every shipping need.
In this article, we explore the various types of shipping containers available on the market today and detail their key stats, like capacity, weight, dimensions and more.
Removed (Banned) Dec 31, 2023
Comment removed
Colin Hunt Dec 31, 2023
"Degrowth has many great ideas that would correct social injustice."
Please explain who is expected to die off for everyone else. Also please explain how you expect this to be enforced. //
Removed (Banned) 22 hrs ago
Comment removed
Colin Hunt 15 hrs ago
Typical ad hominem from people like you trying to avoid the fact that your recommendations will result in more poverty and death in developing nations. And you still refuse to answer the questions put to you.
The trick to developing immunity to misinformation
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ― Isaac Asimov, 1988 //
You’re probably thinking “it’s just a meme”, but it is illustrative of a wider problem where information is presented in this manner: as if the truth is subjective. I only need to open any social media app to see that ‘subjective truth’ seems to be everywhere, and every day there is new questionable information to think about (this assertion isn’t only anecdotal, but is also supported by research). //
As social psychologist Dr. Sander van der Linden points out in his book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity, misinformation is not new. Previous large-scale examples of misinformation taking hold in populations include Nazi propaganda, which heavily relied on the printed press, radio and cinema, and misinformation campaigns that have been traced back to Roman times when emperors used messages on coins as a form of mass communication to gain power. //
Many vested interests and those who believe misinformation themselves use these biases to their advantage. If this was a war, I would argue that the other side is winning. Thanks to some of these people being convincing communicators, and using storytelling that plays on these biases to their advantage, they have been able to influence what wider populations believe on multitudinous topics ranging from gene-editing to nuclear energy to degrowth as a solution to climate change (it’s not). //
The greatest irony is that anti-nuclear activists have also been able to convincingly embed their unscientific position within environmentalism, even though nuclear energy is the cleanest and most environmentally friendly energy source available to humankind, with the smallest land footprint of all energy sources.
Slogans and stories are sticky, but they may not be true or helpful. Hence I’ve argued before that catchphrases and slogans used by activists are often convincing and successful, even when they are inaccurate. Stories, however, are essential to communicating scientific matters, and we need more people to tell them.
After all, it’s much easier and faster to respond with “what about the waste?” when I mention nuclear energy, than for me to explain why spent fuel isn’t the problem many people think it is, which takes time and isn’t as catchy or simple as the aphorism “what about the waste?” (I have covered the waste argument in detail in this article.) In my work tackling misinformation, I have honed some of these detailed responses to convey them through catchphrases that have also been popularised, such as “it’s only waste if you waste it” (in reference to being able to recycle spent fuel) and “meanwhile fossil fuel waste is being stored in the Earth’s atmosphere”, which is both true and a sticky idea. //
Although no one has studied it directly, I feel sure that coining and popularising terms like “nuclear saves lives”, “energy is life”, “nuclear energy is clean energy”, and “rethink nuclear” has helped to combat the misinformation we’ve heard about nuclear energy for so long. //
People often ask how I stay calm when countering constant ad hominem attacks, gish-galloping and sometimes outright insults. As Mr Spock once said, “Reverting to name-calling suggests that you are defensive and, therefore, find my opinion valid.” My answer is that I don’t take people’s biases personally - after all, I used to believe misinformation myself. We have all done so at some point in our lives, and we are all susceptible to believing misinformation in the future. While it’s worth learning to identify the few people who hold fundamental beliefs on a topic that simply cannot be changed, to save wasting your time debating them, remember that for most people these messages do have an impact. It took me years to change my mind from being against nuclear energy to being in favour of it, and every person who took the time to dispel the misinformation I believed, and provide better sources for me to read to counter my viewpoints, had an impact on my beliefs.
While it may not seem challenging to you, remember that when you engage with someone on a wedge issue, you are making a worldview-threatening correction. It is no different than learning that the Earth is spherical when you’ve grown up believing that it is flat. ///
Evangelism takes time and repetition.
The Gordian Knot Group is pushing Sigmoid No Threshold (SNT) as a replacement to the Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation harm model. SNT requires dividing an individual's dose rate profile into repair periods (currently set at a day), fitting an S-shaped response curve to the dose in each repair period, and treating each repair period as an independent event. Once you have an estimate of the daily dose rate profiles and a computer, SNT is as easy to implement as LNT.
In our last post, we pointed out LNT failed the Huxley one-ugly-fact test. LNT's prediction of bone cancer incidence in radium dial painters who had received massive doses over a ten year plus period is off by orders of magnitude. Therefore, LNT is wrong and must be rejected. It is only fair that we subject SNT to the same test.
Unlike LNT, SNT does not ignore how rapidly or slowly the dose was received. SNT requires a daily dose rate profile. Radium dial painting started about 1915. In the late 1920's, the ladies were advised to stop licking the tips of their brush. That pretty much put a stop to the bone cancers.
If we assume the ladies received their dose evenly over 10 years, which is almost certainly conservative, then we can add an SNT prediction to the picture, Figure 1. //
SNT claims we should have seen nearly no cancer up to about 2 mSv/day, but then the prediction turns sharply upward. The actual jump upward takes place at about 20 mSv/day. Moreover, at 20 mSv/d, SNT predicts a 99% incidence rate when the observed was less than 30%. However, unlike LNT, SNT avoids the absurdity of a cancer incidence greater than 1.0.
The charitable view of this is SNT is conservative by a factor of ten, in predicting the point at which dose rates become seriously harmful. This is close to a factor of 100 better than LNT. //
My takeaway is SNT is wrong; but it is a qualitatively different wrong than LNT. Furthermore, it is quantitatively acceptable at dose rates up to 1 mSv/day, even when that daily dose is repeated for years. Fortunately, the dose rates experienced by the public in a nuclear power plant release are almost never above 1 mSv/day and then only for a few weeks at most.
If we use SNT in a compensation scheme, the few people who do get hit with more than 1 mSv/day will be over-compensated. From a societal point on view, this is bad. Not only does this represent an inefficient allocation of resources; but it will cause unnecessary psychic trauma in the over-compensated. In the wrong hands, it could lead to unnecessary evacuations. But perhaps this is a price worth paying for SNT's simplicity and its multi-order of magnitude improvement over LNT. //
Jack Devanney 19 hrs ago Author
LNT (like SNT) bills itself as a model that works for ANY radiation exposure. But the BEIR7 fit is based mainly on the bomb survivor (RERF) data which is a single acute dose. It is not a good fit to the RERF data. No smooth curve could be since the RERF data bounces up and down in a very weird way., which should tell you something about the quality of that database.
But the point is that LNT it is off by orders of magnitude when you try to apply it to chronic doses received over protracted periods such as the dial painter data. A regulatory model cant change every time you get a new exposure data. We must have ONE model that does a reasonable job both on large acute doses and large chronic doses. LNT cant do that. SNT can.
The simple truth that a single solid counter-example destroys any scientific hypothesis has been phrased many ways, none more memorably than Thomas Huxley in 1870 talking about how Pasteur took down Buffon and Needham's theory of spontaneous generation with a single experiment.
But the great tragedy of Science --- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact --- which is constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers, was played, almost immediately, for the benefit of Buffon and Needham.
Pasteur himself put it more prosaicly, ``Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment."
The Linear No Threshold (LNT) hypothesis of radiation harm is the theory upon which our radiation protection regulation is based. In its pure form, LNT could be called beautiful in its simplicity. LNT is the theory that harm is strictly additive in the dose, the joules of radioactive energy deposited in a kilogram of tissue. One of the guys who pushed this idea was Harold Gray. We use his name as a shorthand for joules absorbed per kg tissue. Under LNT, we don't have to know anything about how slowly or quickly the dose was received. The only thing that counts is total dose in grays. This requires that the harm be linear in the total dose. //
he deeper you go the messier LNT gets. LNT no longer looks beautiful in its simplicity. It looks more like an ad hoc kluge. But the real problem with LNT is not its ugliness. The real problem is it's flat wrong. Like Pasteur, we need only one experiment to demonstrate this.
Between 1915 and 1950, numerals on luminous watch dials were hand painted using radium paint for the most part by young women. Prior to the late 1920's, the ladies used their tongues to form the tip of the brush into a point, sipping radium into their bodies. Chemically radium is similar to calcium and accumulates in the bones, where it has a 40 year biological half-life. The total skeletal doses varied by over a factor of 1000. But the maximum cumulative dose was an incredible 280 Gy.\cite{henriksen-2013}[p 276]
The Argonne National Lab did an extensive study of the results. 64 bone cancers and 32 head carcinomas were diagnosed. Reliable dose measurements were available for 2,383 women. All the 64 bone cancers occurred in the 264 women with a bone dose of more than 10 Gy.\cite{rowland-1994}[page 107] No bone cancers were found in the 2,110 women with less than 10 Gy dose. //
At a total effective dose of 7 sieverts, LNT predicts every dial painter should have bone cancer. In fact, no cancers were observed in the 2,110 women who received up to 160 sieverts. If we asked the computer what are the ratios of the LNT cancer incidence to actual incidence, the answers would range from 168 to NaN (I don't have a number that large). In the rich history of bad predictions, this has to rank in the top ten.
64 preventable bone cancers is a terrible tragedy. But the ability of these women to handle massive amounts of radiation is a testament to our bodies' ability to repair radiation damage. That's a beautiful thing. I submit this is a case of an ugly theory being shot down by a beautiful fact. Regardless of the aesthetics, as soon as the dial painter data emerged, LNT, like spontaneous generation, should have been tossed immediately on the scrap heap of ideas that simply don't work. But that's not what happened.
We know why LNT does not work. The fundamental reason that LNT performs so abysmally for the dial painters is it denies the ladies' ability to repair radiation damage to their DNA. DNA repair takes time. But for LNT the time dimension is irrelevant. LNT claims whether these women received their dose in one day or spread over 15 years makes no difference. LNT squashes decade long exposures into a single day.
This is Flat Earther level nonsense. Search ``DNA repair" on google scholar and you will get more than three million hits. DNA repair has been studied in mind boggling detail. We know an enormous amount about how DNA is repaired and how long it takes. LNTers simply refuse to accept any of this. This raises the question: why?
Almost all LNTers fall into one of two groups.
1) Anti-nukes. //
2)The LNT dependents. These are people whose livelihood depends on people being scared of radiation. This group comprises not just the radiation protection establishment, including the regulatory bureaucracies; but also the multi-billion dollar radiation clean up industry, the massive national labs researching solutions to all the LNT-inspired dangers associated with radiation, and the government agencies charged with doling out taxpayer dollars to pay for those solutions. Most importantly, it includes the industry incumbents. //
The motives of the anti-nukes are obvious. Their claims automatically trigger scrutiny. But when an industry agrees with its opponents, case closed. LNT has no effective critics and survives, a triumph of self-preservation over Huxley's well deserved tragedy. //
Anton van der Merwe Dec 31, 2023
While I agree 100% with your views on the LNT model, it is noteworthy that even that model values a life lost to radioactivity at least 100 times more than a life lost to air pollution (PM2.5 and PM10 particles).
This is based on consensus data on the mortality rates and the regulatory ‘safe’ levels.
I have never been able to find any justification for this.
IBM found themselves in a similar predicament in the 1970s after working on a type of mainframe computer made to be a phone switch. Eventually the phone switch was abandoned in favor of a general-purpose processor but not before they stumbled onto the RISC processor which eventually became the IBM 801. //
They found that by eliminating all but a few instructions and running those without a microcode layer, the processor performance gains were much more than they would have expected at up to three times as fast for comparable hardware. //
stormwyrm says:
January 1, 2024 at 1:56 am
Oddball special-purpose instructions like that are not what makes an architecture CISC though.
Special-purpose instructions are not what makes an architecture RISC or CISC. In all cases these weird instructions operate only on registers and likely take only one processor bus cycle to execute. Contrast this with the MOVSD instruction on x86 that moves data pointed to the ESI register to the address in the EDI register and increments these registers to point to the next dword. Three bus cycles at least, one for instruction fetch, one to load data at the address of ESI, and another to store a copy of the data to the address at EDI. This is what is meant by “complex” in CISC. RISC processors in contrast have to have dedicated instructions that do load and store only so that the majority of instructions run on only one bus cycle. //
Nicholas Sargeant says:
January 1, 2024 at 4:00 am
Stormwyrm has it correct. When we started with RISC, the main benefit was that we knew how much data to pre-fetch into the pipeline – how wide an instruction was, how long the operands were – so the speed demons could operate at full memory bus capacity. The perceived problem with the brainiac CISC instruction sets was that you had to fetch the first part of the instruction to work what the operands were, how long they were and where to collect them from. Many ckock cycles would pass by to run a single instruction. RISC engines could execute any instruction in one clock cycle. So, the so-called speed demons could out-pace brainiacs, even if you had to occasionally assemble a sequence of RISC instructions to do the same as one CISC. Since it wasn’t humans working out the optimal string of RISC instructions, but a compiler, who would it trouble if reading assembler for RISC made so much less sense than reading CISC assembler?
Now, what we failed to comprehend was that CISC engines would get so fast that they could execute a complex instruction in the same, single external clock cycle – when supported by pre-fetch, heavy pipelining, out-of-order execution, branch target caching, register renaming, broadside cache loading and multiple redundant execution units. The only way that RISC could have outpaced CISC was to run massively parallel execution units in parallel (since they individually would be much simpler and more compact on the silicon). However, parallel execution was too hard for most compilers to exploit in the general case.
The most common argument is that wind and solar power are the cheapest clean energy sources and that nuclear power plants are the most expensive. Taken at face value, it is true that a single solar photovoltaic (PV) panel is cheap, and that a single wind turbine is cheap, while on the other hand, a single nuclear power plant costs billions of pounds. Technically, measured one-on-one, it is correct that wind and solar are cheaper. But is it useful to compare them in this way? //
To understand why people argue that wind and solar power are cheaper, we need to examine the basic economic metric for assessing a generating power plant: the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). This metric provides what is essentially a banker’s number that covers the total amount of power over the lifetime of an energy source, divided by the lifecycle costs over the lifetime of the same energy source.
But there’s a problem: LCOE is a terrible metric for assessing cost-effectiveness because it doesn’t include several crucial factors. For example, it ignores costs and benefits at an energy system level, such as price reductions due to low-carbon generation and higher system costs when extra interconnection, storage, or backup power is needed due to the variable output of wind and solar power.
Crucially, LCOE ignores the value of the plant’s output to the grid. For example, solar plants have a much more attractive production profile relative to wind farms because society needs most of the energy during the day when the sun is shining. So, even though the LCOE of solar power is higher than wind energy, it provides electricity that is more economically valuable. A paper found that ‘An LCOE comparison ignores the temporal heterogeneity of electricity and in particular the variability of VRE [Variable Renewable Energy]’. Therefore, the true economics of power generation can be very different to the ones predicted by the LCOE numbers.
Another issue LCOE ignores relates to different lifespans of technologies. Typically, a 20- or 30-year recovery period is accounted for, but what about when competing technologies last half a century or more? Then the comparison is faulty, as nuclear power plants can generate power for 60 to 80 years, sometimes longer.
Other factors that aren’t considered by the LCOE include:
- Cost of the land required
- Cost to the consumer
- Dispatchability, i.e. the ability of a generating system to come online, go offline, or ramp up or down, quickly as demand swings
- Indirect costs of generation, which can include environmental externalities or grid upgrade requirements
- Additional cost of integrating non-dispatchable energy sources into the grid
- Cost of disposal, which is usually built into the price of nuclear energy but excluded from the price of solar and wind power
- Subsidies and externality costs, such as the costs of carbon emissions
- The cost of backup or baseload power
Intermittent power sources like wind and solar usually incur extra costs associated with needing to have storage or backup generation available. LCOE ignores the cost of this unreliability, which can be as simple as keeping coal-fired power stations running in case they are needed to fire up and meet electricity demand when it becomes less windy or sunny. //
South Korea is our second example. In the mid-1980s the Korean nuclear industry decided to standardise the design of nuclear plants and to gain independence in building them. The country imported proven US, French, and Canadian reactor designs in the 1970s and learned from other countries' experiences before developing its own domestic reactors in 1989. It developed stable regulations, had a single utility overseeing construction, and built reactors in pairs at single sites.
The results were remarkable: between 1971 and 2008, South Korea built a total of 28 reactors. Due to the developments they made in 1989, their overnight construction cost fell by 50%. //
With nuclear energy, waste disposal and decommissioning costs are usually fully included in the operating costs, but they are not accounted for in wind and solar costs. Yes, a single solar panel is cheap. But what about disposing of it? Sadly, they often end up in landfill sites in poor countries abroad, where they leach toxic chemicals. Batteries are currently not recycled, and therefore this is another missing cost. Wind turbine blades face similar issues. And none of these elements will last more than thirty years before they need replacing. What will that cost? //
Oil and gas companies celebrate wind and solar power because they keep fossil fuels in business. Today, wind and solar are backed 1:1 by oil-and-gas-based generators, to fill the gaps when it isn’t windy or sunny, thus keeping the oil and gas industries in demand. In the future, solar purists propose mega storage, which means more batteries, and overbuilding (extra panels) as the solution. These extra costs aren't factored into LCOE. //
What I have tried to do here is trigger a thought experiment by illustrating how complicated these assessments are, that it is not a case of comparing one panel to one plant, and that the LCOE fails on all counts. Ultimately, the full cost of nuclear energy is an upfront investment for a long-lasting, reliable form of energy, which is not the cost people consider when arguing that solar panels and wind turbines are cheaper. Nuclear energy can get cheaper, or it can get more expensive, depending on how it is approached. //
I am of the opinion that we should build everything we need to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and reduce deaths from air pollution. Yet it is clean energy advocates who only like wind and solar power who argue against nuclear energy based on the myth that the latter is too expensive. //
Every time a nuclear power plant is replaced with fossil fuel generation, people die from the resulting air pollution, and more fossil fuel waste is stored in the Earth’s atmosphere. Every time a grid is made to support more wind and solar power without the baseload power to support them, fossil fuels win as they have to fill the gap. Every time a nuclear power plant isn’t built on the supposed basis of cost, the environment is further harmed and human progress takes a step backwards. Every time someone quotes the LCOE, they are either being misled, misleading others, or both.