Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"They’re in it for the money - dressing this up as politically-motivated is purely cynical"
The ONLY reason they're able to operate is that they're closely related to (or paying off) politicians at medium-to-high level
As soon as they touch russian-local infrastructure (even accidentally) they get offed. It's happened a few times
The non-binding referendum was 8 years, 3 general elections and 5 prime ministers ago
Britain has a fine tradition of incoming governments not being bound by their predecessors
It also has a fine tradition of allowing voters to change their minds - something that the Gammonati seem firmly opposed to
History will show that Britain was bad for the EU
It's already becoming obvious that there are a lot of Brexit benefits accruing to various parties - but not to Britain
It'll be a long time before Britain can reenter the EU, even if there was a 100% referendum tomorrow. Copenhagen Criteria are going to be particularly jarring to the establishment - especially the (currently unelected) House of Lords and will take a long time to enact because of the entrenched resistance to change
"China is burning more coal than ever"
Except it isn't. It's burning more coal for electricity than ever before but a lot of that generation is replacing smog-generating inefficent coal-fired apartment/household heating systems or car exhausts
The overall carbon equation is a decrease in output and it's clear they've been building their recent coal plants with an eye to alternative heat sources (ie: molten salt nuclear)
"If the EU are not serious about the green transition"
I think the EU and others are finding out the hard way that they haven't invested enough into infrastructure upgrades to cope with the added demand of EVs _and_ migrating most domestic/commercial heating systems from gas/oil to electricity
It's not just the distribution grid and local feeders. Net Zero requires 6-8 times more annualised electrical generation than currently exists and those power stations are hellishly expensive no matter what technology is used, whilst dicking around the edges with "small modular nuclear" and other bullshit generation systems(*) is driving up the costs even more
(*) If your thermal sourced generator can't provide at least 1GWe then it's uneconomic. It doesn't matter what the heat source is, this is just simple math on the steam loop side
"What are they mining for PV cells/panels"
The OP is referring to China's rare earth mining. They cornered the world market because all the others shut down due to costs of thorium sequestration (thorium is the single largest component of monazite ores, greater than everything else combined)
China's been buying that thorium for the last 20+ years, which greatly reduces the waste processing costs. If thorium powered LFTRs are sucessful (China's pouring billions into researching this, based on US ORNL's MSRE) then rare earth mines become thorium mines with rare earth side gigs - and Chinese LFTRs are likely to become the default power source for 4-6 billion people across the planet
"That'll be down to Chinese mining (hideously environmentally-unfriendly) "
Chinese rare earth mining is viable because the Chinese government is buying up the thorium being produced. Elsewhere it's an unwanted slightly radioactive waste product that's EXTREMELY expensive to get rid of
The question is WHY the Chinese government is buying thorium and the short answer is that they're anticipating the TMSR-LF series reactors to be sucessful designs for the 2030s - renewables are many things but capable of driving full net zero they are not - merely an interim step whilst better nuclear power is readied
"Net zero ain't popular!"
Anything which adds costs isn't. But there's a social cost for carbon burning which is hard to escape
The methane seeps in the Leptav Sea are a warning sign.
There's ~20GT of methane which _will_ bloop out eventually (9 months of human emissions in an afternoon) and if more than a couple more such methane clathrate beds blow out there's a high risk of repeating the Permian extinction (oxygen levels dropping from 20% down to 11-12%)
No surprise there. Follow the money
I was very loudly razzed back a decade or so back when I said that flavoured vapes were being specifically marketed to entice children and recounted encounters with "free samples" being handed out by "big name" brands in UK poor area retailers (Tescos/One Stop) - but not in wealthy area ones
History has a knack of repeating. Flavoured cigarettes were banned in the 50s-60s for exactly trhe same reasons as above. Menthol cigarettes and "rum" tobacco were allowed because those were considered "adult" flavours that wouldn't appeal to children. (Both of these have been banned in the EU as part of encouraging smokers to quit)
"The EU appears (and to some extent is) a squabbling shambles but like most apparently dysfunctional families when push comes to shove they will show a unified resolve in dealing with the adversary."
This is the standard thing about democracies that authoritarians dismiss at their peril.
Putin thought the squabbling would leave the EU paralysed when he moved into Ukraine. What he didn't realise what that the "squabbles" are arguements about the colour of the paint on the walls, not the house which was built already
"The upside was the producers were forced to diversify their markets."
Something that USA soybean producers SHOULD have done when China stopped buying their product for NON tariff reasons
The background: China's been fighting the spread of African Swine Flu and culled tens (if not hundreds) of millions of pigs fighting it, putting millions of farmers out of business. Unsurprisingly, farmers don't buy animal food for animals that don't exist and the vast majority of the food they were buying happened to be American soybeans
IOW what was declared to be the trigger for a trade war initiated by Trump, wasn't.
Ironically there was a massive market opportunity for American pork producers (3 times the size of the US domestic market) which would have more than absorbed the excess soybean production which got slammed shut in their faces thanks to Trump. Pork producers in other countries made out like bandits
"despite the lack of infrastructure to support them"
There's precedent for the increase in demand - the widespread adoption of air conditioning.
As long as demand increases no faster than the leccy network can be built out then it will work
UNFORTUNATELY the move away from oil/gas heating has to be factored into it too (nobody will buy reticulated hydrogen - it will be at least twice(*) the price of electricity vs current retictulated natural gas being 1/3-1/5 the price of electricity)
AND even if the distribution network is built out in time at both core and leaf level (street level infrastructure has about 1/3 of the needed capacity right now), there's a hellbent mentality of using "renewables" and resisting nuclear power (in particular, a marked lack of enthusiasm for alternatives to the weapons-derived/weapons-enabling uranium cycle we currently depend on)
Britain _alone_ needs at least 70 new GW-scale power plants for baseload (including replacing the aging out ones). Good luck doing that with wind and solar, no matter how many battery banks are used to balance their generation/non-generation abilities
(*) No matter how expensive electricity may get, "green/blue" hydrogen will always cost more. It's vastly cheaper to generate electricity from the energy sources involved than to make hydrogen. The safety concerns of hydrogen don't overly matter if nobody will buy it on economic grounds
Seeling out to "investors" is a standard problem. The first thing most of them want to do is find ways of repaying their purchase price as quickly as possible and this almost invariably results in driving away paying customers
This is why th'Interwebs are littered with corpses of once-useful or popular services
It's a trend that shown no sign of changing over the last 30 years
"There is no possible non-military purpose for this"
Apart from on aircraft and other suchlike applications. There are a huge and increasing number of airfields worldwide which are GPS-nav based in their precision approaches
On the other hand, if GPS-hardened military stuff exists and is widely distributed there's vastly less incentive to attempt to knock out/spoof/degrade GNSS systems in the first place
"a lot of satellites have just had a big top up in their rad count so far"
In reality, less than flying through the South Atlantic Anomaly gives them
Starlink birds are very low flying - below a large chunk of the ionosphere - and that gives them a lot more protection than most other devices up there
4: XYZ software only having a 5 year contract and there being a HUGE cost delta if you stick with 'em, vs incentives to jump ship
The issue of course being that those who sign off on it get congratulated for saving money without really caring if it costs more for those downhill to implement things and by the time things come to a head, they've moved onto new jobs
One of the problems is that there;s a mindset that "if it's expensive it must be better"
That and the Schmoozing that SAP/Oracle/MS/Goo all do has a corrosive effect. Even if XYZ outfit royally fucks up, they seldom find themselves on the "never do business with again" list and the supply contracts never have penalty clauses - something that will bounce back HARD on an overzealous salestwat
"it isn't worth putting in a traffic light"
The town where I was born replaced most traffic lights with roundabouts in the 1980s and crash rates dropped over 90%
Make of that what you will but there's a reason that one of the national laws is that a traffic light intersection reverts to roundabout rules if the lights fail
Traffic circles used to refer to the older "rotary"(*) style, with yield markings on the circle itself (give way to traffic entering)
These were an utter disaster and are why roundabouts were knee-jerk rejected my american traffic planners for decades
(*) Yes, there's a difference between rotaries and roundabouts
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