You need to read precisely what's happening. Ontario wants to front finance all refurbs and SMRs instead of spreading the financing over years like it's usually done.
BWRX is expensive for sure. It'll cost more per GW than the failed french FLA3 or Vogtle. To me this seems a mistake considering Canada had Candus, an own authentic design that doesn't rely on enriched fuel and they did some very serious refurbs recently on time and on budget. On the other hand, bwrx is american tech and needs enriched fuel and SMRs will always have worse economics than large units, there's a reason humanity scales everything up, be it nuclear, be it wind turbines or solar fields
Again. Refurbs are extremely cheap. At 1-3bn/unit you get 1GW of firm power. That would be vastly cheaper vs deploying say solar, that would have the same TWh/y averaged even with China's costs. And this doesn't even account for firming.
Heck, even Barakah built as new by Korea is competitive vs renewables in the west. And it's understandable considering they spent per unit 1/3 of what FLA3 did cost... In under half of the time
The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt
> The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt
I assumed it was, like the UK, because it let them avoid committing to a specific price like all the other competing technologies so they could raise the price later once the project was too far along to cancel.
Maybe for smr, but for refurbs it doesn't make sense - all recent refurbs were either on time or ahead of planned timeline and on budget. Heck, even if refurbs would suddenly triple in price it would still be dort cheap vs any alternative for 1GW of firm power.
And they kinda committed to a price with Hitachi, that's why we can say it'll be worse even than recent failed big projects.
UK has other problems to tackle, mostly heavy overregulation. UK's HPC and french FLA3 are very different in many aspects, ranging from more concrete &steel use, up to a parallel analog system on top of a parallel digital system because UK regulation is 'special'. Maybe things will change, we'll see
To me this front financing looks like a cash grab from political entities since nobody guarantees money will be used in this direction, especially with current Ontario's 'governor', that dude is local trump equivalent but maybe a bit more tempered. Another possible reason is political - this frontload means project can't be easily cancelled if relationship with US gets even worse, since Hitachi GE is an US company. So who knows. Either way, IMO bwrx decision wasn't smart and front loading isn't smart too. But this has nothing to do with refurbs cost which are dirt cheap
I know about it, affected components were replaced. They still built it relatively on time and on budget
"On 7 February 2014, the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission declared that its investigation since mid-2013, they found eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents."
Those processes have to be eliminated, yes. Now let's get back to talking about long term grid storage. Piggybacking storage on emissions that have to be eliminated obviously isn't a solution.
Keep some of the existing natural gas plants around as an emergency reserve. Run them on hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives for zero carbon fuel, if the emissions are large enough to matter.
Not really. That’s more science fiction than reality. You should try some Kerbal Space Program and explore how orbits are affected by thrust = collisions, in different directions.
As soon as a satellite is hit the rest of the fleet can start thrusting and raise their orbits to create a clear separation to the debris field.
Following such an attack the rest of the fleet would of course spread out across orbital heights and planes to minimize the potential damage done by each hit, leading to maximum cost for the adversary to do any damage. Rather than like today where the orbits are optimized for ease of management and highest possible bandwidth.
You're right that all the fragments will pass roughly through the impact point in orbit. But it's not always the periapsis.
1. The normal or anti-normal delta-v imparted by the explosion/fragmentation (i.e, the velocity imparted perpendicular the plane of initial orbit) will cause the orbital plane of the fragment to change. The new orbit will intersect the old orbit at the impact point. Meanwhile, the eccentricity (the stretch of the orbit), semi-major axis (the size of the orbit) and displacement of periapsis from the impact point (the orientation of the orbit) remains the same as the initial orbit.
2. The prograde and retrograde delta-v (velocity imparted tangential to the orbit) will cause the diametrically opposite side of the orbit to rise or fall respectively. Here too, the new orbit intersects the old orbit at the point of impact. But since the impact point isn't guaranteed to be the periapsis or apoapsis, the above mentioned diametrically-opposing point also cannot be guaranteed to be an apsis.
3. The radial and anti-radial delta-v (this is in the third perpendicular axis) will cause the orbit of the fragment to either dip or rise radially at the point of impact. Again the impact point remains the same for the new orbit. So the new orbit will intersect the old orbit either from the top or the bottom. The new orbit will look like the old orbit with one side lowered and the other side raised about the impact point.
So none of three components of delta-v shifts the orbit from the impact point. You can extrapolate this to all the fragments and you'll see that they will all pass through the impact point. The highest chance of recontact exists there. However the perturbation forces do disperse the crossing point (the original impact point) to a larger volume over time.
Edit: Reading the discussion again, I get what you were trying to say. And I agree. The lowest possible altitude of the fragments in orbit (i.e the periapsis) is the same that of the impact point. So if the impact point is low enough to cause drag, the orbit will decay for sure. There is nothing that demonstrates this better than a Gabbard plot [1][2] - the best tool for understanding satellite fragmentation.
>But since the impact point isn't guaranteed to be the periapsis or apoapsis, the above mentioned diametrically-opposing point also cannot be guaranteed to be an apsis.
You're correct on the generalized case of the math here, no argument at all, but this also feels like it's getting a bit away from the specialized sub-case under discussion here: that of an existing functional LEO satellite getting hit by debris. Those aren't in wildly eccentric orbits but rather station-kept pretty circular ones (probably not perfectly of course but +/- a fraction of a percent isn't significant here). So by definition the high and low points are the same and which means we can say that the new low point of generated debris in eccentric orbits will be at worst no lower then the current orbit of the satellite (short of a second collision higher up, the probability of which is dramatically lower). All possible impact points on the path of a circular orbit are ~the same. And in turn if the satellite is at a point low enough to have significant atmospheric drag the debris will as well which is the goal.
No worries. I think I could have been more precise in my wording. :)
My comment is based on the hunch concerning physical calculations and interactions from an engineering physics degree and way to many hours in kerbal space program a decade ago.
Thanks! I figured that you had a reasonable understanding in this subject. But I still couldn't help just laying it out. I have some background too - as a professional.
Previously Sweden was much tighter coupled to German prices, but since fossil fuels were cheap people didn’t really notice.
Today due to CO2 cap and trade fossil emissions are expensive. [1]
Couple it with a massive renewable buildout leading to a decoupling of the prices that didn’t happened before.
We now have maximum volatility. Jumping between expensive fossil prices and an absolutely mindbogglingly large surplus leading to essentially free energy.
As Germany, and the rest of Europe, transitions to renewables we will spend less and less time on fossil fuel marginal prices and see our energy systems stabilize on renewable and storage prices. Outside of emergency reserve style situations.
Europe is energy poor. We will never be able to compete on raw cost with the US, China and similar.
Our path forward are through renewables, which today are vastly cheaper than fossil fuels.
We decide the speed of the transition to green cheap energy by how much we tax fossil fuels. Low taxes = slow transition. High taxes = fast transition.
No, the cause is structural. Even if one could identify the sources of rot (money in politics, an outdated electoral college, the collapse of our information environment, whatever), Congress would deadlock, the Courts would block any meaningful reform, and the President would be left trimming the blight while the rot festered underneath.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people. The incumbents have no incentive to do it.
I agree the cause is at least partially structural but I'd argue that congress deadlocking is generally an intentional feature not a bug. Meanwhile the courts on the whole seem quite reasonable to me. Disliking what the rules say should never turn into lambasting the ref for making calls consistent with those rules.
That said, it doesn't seem to me that reform has been meaningfully attempted yet. It isn't reasonable to blame the establishment for blocking a reform that never got organized to begin with.
Presumably if there were concrete proposals with broad popular support intended to fix lobbying, gerrymandering, first past the post, and the information environment in general then we should see them implemented at the state level here and there. But we don't.
The idea that Congress deadlocking is somehow a feature is a relic of the Republican party's destructionist agenda of the past four decades. In reality, this dynamic is what caused so much power to accrue to federal agencies, which they then proceeded to bemoan and go to work tearing down as well. Their goals were kind of understandable when they represented US business interests, but it seems as of late they're under new foreign ownership.
> a relic of the Republican party's destructionist agenda of the past four decades.
I believe it goes all the way back to the founding of the country. Gridlock was viewed as preferable to tyranny. Failure to arrive at a compromise is supposed to mean that no one gets to proceed.
Of course times change and cracks show up in the system.
Maybe. As a libertarian I'm sympathetic to the concept. I would say that one of the huge founding assumptions which clearly no longer holds is that the federal government was meant to be a less-powerful mediator between states, with the individual states being more powerful. For example I'd imagine that the founders' solution to our current predicament would be individual states calling up their own sizeable militias to put down the lawless gangs (regardless of whether they were purportedly "authorized" by the federal government), only calling for federal government help if they desired it. Restoring order within a state shouldn't hinge upon Congress agreeing to do so, right? Of course the obvious inapplicability of that solution to the events of the Civil War demonstrates how we got to the point we're at. It looks like slavery is still on track to being the great stain that ultimately dooms us.
Yes and no. Because you can always go one level higher and ask:
Why are the US people the cause?
And then we will talk about structural issues, to do with social mobility, education, a dysfunctional journalistic landscape, a tribalization of the political landscape and so on.
But of course it doesn't stop there. You can go one up:
Why did these underlying causes came to be?
The simple answer is that a certain loose conglomerate of polticians, billionaires and CEOs thought it would profit them (it did). You can pick one of the issues mentioned above and go deep on why it is in the bad shape it is today and the answer will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.
This are the much more insightful reasons and you get there just by asking "but why?" two times like a yound child. Totally recommended.
> will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.
And here you take the easy way out. Just blame third parties. You should keep asking why to find the real cause.
My personal take, as someone who is European but has lived in the US, Texas metro areas specifically, is that first past the post elections sow division.
Choices are limited, political activity is neutered, and extremism builds until it finds an outlet through either of the two possible political choices. Taking over that side entirely.
Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.
Which finally leads to the people.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people.
> And here you take the easy way out. Just blame third parties.
(1) I did not say one needs to stop where I stopped and (2) I did not talk about how blame is distributed between those layers. Any view that only the root cause layers can be blamed is too simplistic, since you can always go one layer higher. In reality blame is much more complex and the layers are not clearly separable either, as they can have cyclic dependencies feeding into each other.
So in your example there is a design issue of a political system leading to an outcome, that produces a certain culture which makes it hard to change above mentioned political system. People are a part of that and it is true that if all people just were to know this and stand up for it that would be easily fixable. But in the same moment the people broadly are the way they are because of the systems they grew up in and if that system was different you wouldn't have the problem either.
So who is to blame? Depends on what you're after personally and whst you think an effective strategy for getting there is. I think getting rid of incentives that lead to negative political outcomes is a good thing and effective way to change society. Much more effective than begging people to think a certain way.
>Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.
Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Because I see it differently. Trump IS the frustration vent itself but people refuse to acknowledge this and look for something else to blame as if people shouldn't be allowed to use their vote for a crazy candidate as a vent of frustration, and the frustration vent should be a virtually inexistent token piece.
> Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Proportional representation definitely helps here. You could look at the UK as a good counter-example, where the UKIP (a Brexit supporting party) got like 15% of the votes in the 2015 election, and no seats. Where people see that voting doesn't change anything, they'll look for some other way to effect change.
That being said, PR doesn't really appear to be working that well. I (personally) think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it (regardless of how insane their ideas are).
But it's complicated, monocausal explanations are typically deceptive.
With this logic doesn't the US have proportional representation as well? Didn't Trump win the popular vote and republicans the senate? The majority of voters won, end of story, and the ones who lost have another chance in 3 years to flip the board. Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
>think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it
Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
No. The US has a first past the post system that naturally forms two parties which in turn fuels further polarization. A rep runs in a district and it's winner take all. In theory (totally unrealistic in practice) you could have a single party win all the seats by achieving 51% in each individual election. The other 49% of voters (ie approximately half of the country) wouldn't receive a single representative.
Proportional representation has advantages but comes with its own complexities. However there are also other voting systems (such as ranked) that offer different tradeoffs independent of proportional representation. There are a lot of options out there and pretty much all of them would be more functional than what we use in the US.
About the only thing our system has going for it is that someone with an IQ well below 100 can still fully understand and even help audit it. (Or at least that used to be the case before electronic voting machines started appearing.)
> Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
This is a political choice that has been made by governments, and continues to be supported by governments. It's definitely helpful for capital to make people believe that it's a law of nature but capital controls existed in the US until Nixon removed them, and much later in other places.
> Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
So FPTP typically forces people into 2 parties because it's the only way to win enough power. So all the extremists (in terms of being far away from the centre of public opinion) basically have to join one of the two major parties and attempt to take them over, which is basically what Trump did with the Republicans and also what happened to the UK Conservative party post Brexit.
In a PR system, you'd end up with some compromise where the democratic socialists and the greens or MAGA or Libertarians held the balance of power in the house, and the Republicans and Democratic parties would need to negotiate with them on what they wanted to accomplish.
The benefit here would be that the voters of the smaller parties would get some of what they want, and the bigger parties would be forced to compromise with others rather than ruling all for the two years between mid-terms.
Look at the right wing parties in Europe. They have a decade or two headstart on the MAGA movement. They are getting real power, but it is also moderated by what their coalition can accept.
We are also seeing for example France and the UK dealing with the same problem as the US due to its lackluster electoral system. Not allowing any vents.
The UK venting became Brexit, and then never went away and is today Reform.
The venting becomes a spectrum. One extreme is the US with large constituencies and first past the post voting. Where any vote made by the heart is discouraged.
A little bit less extreme is Australia. Still single member constituencies but you are encouraged to vote first with your heart, and then with your brain. Leading to representation heavily weighted towards the incumbents but some representation for the issues people truly care about.
Then you have proportional parliamentary systems. Here you decide what level of venting you need based on the percentage requirements to enter the parliament.
In Sweden it is 4% of national vote or 12% of a constituency. Single question parties generally need to broaden their spectrum but will get in if enough people care.
In the Netherlands it is 0.67% and you have a flourishing of parties but problems forming coalitions.
Personally I would say - do local constituencies so geographical areas are represented and pick a percentage which works for you.
Pick 10% and you focus on executive action. Pick 1% and you focus on the town hall of messages. But don't pick something where no vent is possible, like first past the post systems.
That is a very simplified take. Congress has been locking up for the past decades and is now unable to do useful regulation for the people. Much of it is due to how the funding of candidates works and the feedback loop effect it had on the political culture.
Trump is a symptom of this failure of political culture too.
...A political culture the public has voted for by allowing it to continue despite being bound by a constitutional duty to prevent the same disenfranchisement you've described.
America will be judged by its own demonic standards. The standard by which they justified their participation in the Holocaust of Gaza ("they voted for it").
Foreign and Billionaire demonic interest have disenfranchised the people long ago. Luckily the people have a second-amendment constitutional duty to re-secure the free state. It's clear America is no longer a free state. One cannot be free in a panopticon.
Primaries are kinda insane though. It basically means that a small minority of voters control who actually is allowed to stand for election under a party banner. Like, I understand how it ended up this way, but it's having really bad consequences.
That being said, if you could fix gerrymandering, a lot of the issues with primaries go away, as there would be more competition in the actual election which would dis-incentivise proposing extremist candidates in the primary.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/ontario-utility-wants-to-double-...
New built nuclear power simply does not make any sense anymore given the costs and timelines involved.
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