Oh no, they're not just going to let it happen. They'll actively stop us from solving it.
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The Radeon 500 series has great support in Mesa so there should be absolutely nothing unusual in terms of compatibility with that GPU.
One is that nuclear plants are, among other stuff, massive heat engines. Because all the steel, tubes and whatever expands when it is heated up, switching it on and off stresses the material. This can be improved on by design but such design has extra costs and has its limits.
Yeah, and this is something that has been improved on for modern reactor designs precisely so that they can operate in load-following mode. There's essentially no impact on operational lifespan (typically 60 years for modern reactors), because the impact has already been factored into the operational lifespan.
The second is that when you turn down your plant to half the output, you spend essentially the same money to get half the result. Which means you have just doubled the cost per kilowatt hour. And this with the background that nuclear is not any more cost-competitive to begin with.
This is mostly an opportunity cost thing. The actual running costs, e.g. the fuel, make up a negligible part of the €/MWh of nuclear. Most of the cost comes from the construction of the plant, which should be publicly subsidized the same as other clean energy is. Lack of subsidies and other public support is one of the main reasons nuclear is relatively expensive, though it is still the cheapest ecological method for meeting base load that we have, besides geothermal which is not feasible in most locations.
In the result, a fleet of wind power plants plus battery or hydro storage is cheaper than such a nuclear plant.
The thing about battery storage is that it doesn't exist yet and may never exist in an economical way. Hydro power and storage, on the other hand, is absolutely devastating for ecosystems, clean though it may be in terms of carbon emissions. It would be preferable if hydro dams did not exist. Now of course you could build a hydro storage system in a completely artificial pair of reservoirs, but that will be incredibly expensive compared to natural reservoirs (read: flooded valleys) so I am skeptical that it would be feasible at scale.
No one is suggesting to get sloppy with nuclear material or advocating for some bizarre Fallout-style radium cola society. What I am advocating for is a world where people know that getting a chest X-ray or eating a mushroom in Eastern Europe does not increase their risk of cancer from radiation exposure.
For example, maybe you've forgotten, but the radiation psychosis when Fukushima happened was insane. We had loads of people in Europe, which is just about as far away from Fukushima as you can get, poring over those ocean radiation heatmaps for years -- when in reality Fukushima released so little radiation that not even the people in Fukushima were at any real risk. This is a direct consequence of unscientific, alarmist policies and messaging poisoning public perception.
People should not be made afraid of radiation, because them "respecting it" gives them absolutely no benefit. There isn't really anything anyone can do in their daily lives to meaningfully avoid it regardless of how aware they are of it.
This is why it is an organizational responsibility of society to create an environment where people can live their lives without ever thinking about radiation hazards -- which is what we have successfully done. Scaremongering contributes nothing to that except give people mental health issues and cause them to vote for insane policies that shut down clean, carbon-free nuclear plants in order to replace them with coal and LNG (which, ironically, contribute more to radiation hazards than nuclear does).
Cancer rates are not 1 in 1000. Something like 40% of people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives.
In comparison, nuclear has quite constant generation, but demand varies more strongly compared to it. This is why in reality it needs coal in addition, to adjust for deman
In theory, one could adjust a nuclear power plant by switching it on and off once in the morning and once in the evening, and sometimes in winter. But that "filling up of the mix" with nuclear would just not be economical - nuclear is already by far the most expensive energy source and one can better spend the money by installing battery storage and improving the grid.
"Modern" (newer than the 90s) nuclear plants can do much more granular load following than that, and it's what they already do in France and Germany: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf (see figure 2 for an example from Germany). Or it's what they would be doing in Germany if they hadn't been shut down, heh. The French in particular are masters of nuclear load-following, because they use so much of it.
That's not the message here at all. The message is that this overly cautious policy contributes to the public's poor understanding of the risks of radiation, which in turn causes harm e.g. in the form of overreactions when things go wrong (see the section from 20:50 onwards). For example, with the benefit of hindsight, evacuating Fukushima likely did much more harm than good, and the actual health effects of Chernobyl are to this date widely grossly overestimated.
Honestly OP this is such a weird message to be pushing. Are you heavily invested in nuclear or something?
What is so weird about pro-nuclear messaging on a green energy forum? Dispelling myths about nuclear is just as important as dispelling myths about renewables. And while I am not monetarily invested in nuclear, policy-wise I am heavily invested -- like anyone who cares about sustainability should be.
Thousands or tens of thousands of people is not statistically insignificant.
I found this very compelling, but when he started praising the current presidential administration it began sounding more like libertarian anti-regulation propaganda than a legitimate critique.
Contain your zealotry. It's possible for the bad guys to be correct sometimes.
We increase the background rate in a city of 10 million people to say, 200 mSv/year for five decades and do the experiment to see if their genetics can handel it to get statically meaningful data?
As the video points out, there already is such a city of Ramsar, Iran, though it's not 10 million people but rather some thousands or tens of thousands. It's one of the places used for these studies.
That makes sense, though I'd still be concerned about the nails breaking when having to manipulate wet (and therefore quite heavy) clothes.
Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. For example the 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.
I'm supposed to believe they were somehow wearing gloves and dyeing clothes with those nails?
The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It's about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions
No it doesn't. And yes, it does account for the decommissioning costs of everything on the chart. See table 1 on page 3, column "One-Time Downstream".
The links I added above about France tell another story.
The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they're doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.
On the other hand, Greenpeace's idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.
That's what I was comparing it to. The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to solar panels and geothermal energy, and higher than hydro and wind power (though not by so much that it would really matter): https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem. The amount of long-term waste produced is minuscule: the US powers about 70 million homes with nuclear energy, which generates about 2000 metric tons of high-level waste annually -- 30 grams per household, about the volume of a marble (and keep in mind these are US households which consume 3 times the power of other western households). Storing it away permanently is... well, not easy, but relatively easy: just do what Finland does and put it underground. The main difficulty with it has always been scaremongering and NIMBYism.
Not an expert on this topic but I've read about it a fair bit and tinkered around with image generators:
You don't post them, basically. Unfortunately nothing else will really work in the long term.
There are various tools -- Glaze is the first one I can think of -- that try to subtly modify the pixels in the image in a way that is imperceptible to humans but causes the computer vision part of image generator AIs (the part that, during the training process, looks at an image and produces a text description of what is in it) to freak out and become unable to understand what is in the image. This is known as an adversarial attack in the literature.
The intention of these tools is to make it harder to use the images for training AI models, but there are several caveats:
- Though they try to be visually undetectable to humans, they can still create obviously visible artifacts, especially on higher strength levels. This is especially noticeable on hand-drawn illustrations, less so on photographs.
- Lower strength levels with fewer artifacts are less effective.
- They can only target existing models, and even then won't be equally effective against all of them.
- There are ways of mitigating or removing the effect, and it will likely not work on future AI models (preventing adversarial attacks is a major research interest in the field).
So the main thing you gain from using these is that it becomes harder for people to use your art for style transfer/fine-tuning purposes to copy your specific art style right now. The protection has an inherent time limit in it because it relies on a flaw in the AI models, which will be fixed in the future. Other abusable flaws will almost certainly remain and be discovered after the ones currently used are fixed, but the art you release now obviously cannot be protected by techniques that do not yet exist. It will be a cat-and-mouse game, and one where the protection systems play the role of the cat.
Anyway, if you want to try it, you can find the aforementioned Glaze at https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/. You may want to read one of their recent updates, which discusses at greater length the specific issue I bring up here, i.e. the AI models overcoming the adversarial attack and rendering the protection ineffective, and how they updated the protection to mitigate this: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/update21.html
I mean, the number of logical qubits has gone from basically zero not too long ago to what it is now. The whole error correction thing has really only taken off in the past ~5 years. That Microsoft computer you mentioned that got 4 logical qubits out of 30 physical qubits represents a 3-fold increase over the apparently previous best of 12 logical qubits to 288 physical ones (published earlier the same year), which undoubtedly was a big improvement over whatever they had before.
And then the question is FOR WHAT? Dead people cant make use of quantum computers and dead people is what we will be if we dont figure out solutions to some much more imminent, catastrophic problems in the next 10 years.
Strange thing to say. There's enough people on the planet to work on more than one problem at a time. Useful quantum computing will probably help solve many problems in the future too.
Even if it's 8 physical qubits to 1 logical qubit, 6100 qubits would get you 762 logical cubits.
All I'm saying is that the technology seems to be on a trajectory of the number of qubits improving by an order of magnitude every few years, and as such it's plausible that in another 5-10 years it could have the necessary thousands of logical qubits to start doing useful computations. Mere 5 years ago the most physical qubits in a quantum computer was still measured in the tens rather than the hundreds, and 10 years ago I'm pretty sure they hadn't even broken ten.
Nuclear's stagnation has more to do with short-sighted financial incentives and public backlash from people acting as either useful idiots or paid shills of the fossil fuel lobby than anything else.
Thankfully the world is gradually realizing this mistake and investment in nuclear is improving again.
I have a vertical scar across my eyebrow where hair doesn't grow. It's not anywhere as noticeable as, say, Benn Jordan's, but it's pretty evident up close.
The cool story behind it is that I hit myself in the face with a car door.