The LWR is a difficult case for xenon poisoning (compared to other reactors) because of the thermal spectrum and the lack of homogenization (it's not just a temporal problem but a spatial problem) but if you add reactivity swing it can be managed. It's a problem for going from 0-100% quickly but not a problem for following loads across the day, see
This already makes a large assumption about the type of reactor you are using. For example, a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) does not suffer from the xenon poisoning issue, as do many other designs.
It's an interesting thing that pro-nuclear people always talk about "Gen X" power plats with no issues and just a big fat gogo stamp on them, but when you ask about any commercial examples they all come up short.
I'm pro nuclear, but I don't think using hypotheticals and futures is how to convince people nuclear is good, it's good because it works and it doesn't poison the planet (Yes there have been accidents and they have been dramatised but count deaths and it becomes as irrational as being afraid of flying)
Molten Salt reactors are designs from the 60s-70s and afaik no one ever built on commercially. No one was willing to take a gamble on building a new design when we had working reactors already and approval for those was already difficult enough.
AFAIU the corrosion problems are still not solved from a commercial PoV. Ie, without having to shut down and replace piping too often for it too be viable.
I had not, but TIL about xenon poisoning and that it was a major contributing factor in the Chernobyl accident (the tl;dr is they did a test where they reduced the fission rate; there was a buildup of Xenon 135 because of that, which caused the reaction to not start back up as fast as the operators thought it should. They removed the control rods almost completely, and when the Xenon stopped doing its thing they had a runaway reaction on their hands.
The xenon poisoning is why they took the control rods all the way out, but the runaway reaction was probably caused by the graphite tips on the ends of the control rods. As the control rods were scrammed these tips passed through areas of high neuton flux and caused a spike in power which probably caused the explosion.
There were a lot more factors at play in the chain, but the burnoff of the xenon wasn't itself the proximal cause of the explosion.
Complex or not, it's doable as the nuclear power plants in France are doing. Germany used to do it as well, until they shut down all their nuclear plants.
Though due to the xenon poisoning, they apparently use the reactors which at the moment have the freshest fuel for the load following, as they have more excess reactivity available to overpower the xenon. They can ramp at something around 5% of rated capacity per minute between around 30-100% of full power.
Most other countries with nuclear power plants have a much lower share of nuclear in their grids, so they haven't needed to do it, as due to the economics of nuclear it makes the best sense to run flat out as much as possible in order to recoup capital costs.
Natural gas, from the Slochteren gas field, was the cheapest way to heat a home for the past 60 years. It's probably not so anymore, considering the Slochteren field is mostly shut down.
The city heating network operator is a monopoly, that is why the price is capped.
Even though city heating networks utilize 'waste heat', the capital cost of the network is significant. The price cap and the capital costs (especially now with higher interest rates) led to many proposed projects being cancelled in recent years.
> The imported junk we get from Netherlands is abysmal compared to anything grown locally, and the reality is that we want the good stuff for ourselves, not the tourists.
This hurts, and it's absolutely true.
Makes me wonder why we spend so much in subsidies for the dutch tomato growers, if nobody actually likes eating them.
For what it's worth, I get them in the supermarket, grown in spain, if at all possible.
Maybe the Netherlands are different, but I find it's usually not that specific countries make trash fruits and veggies, but export-bound fruits and vegetables have transport concerns that require them to be picked before they reach their peak. Here, american blueberries and strawberries are big, bland and watery, local ones are juicy, sweet, tart and delicious. Or corn, theirs is bland, ours is sweet. But I'm not convinced that americans that live near those farms have the same experience at all.
When I grow my tomatoes, they are usually picked at their peak ripeness, they were being pumped full of sugar and nutrients by the plant until the last second when I picked them and cooked with them. The ones that have to travel are picked before ripe, and "ripen" sad and alone in a truck with no extra nutrients, and when they reach me looking "ripe", it's usually a facade. Local market fruits and vegetables stand somewhere in between, depending on volume and channel it's being sold in.
There is a difference though between fruits and vegetables imported for year round availability, and those imported as a seasonal bounty; the later ones maintain quality as it sells relatively quickly in season and doesn't need to be picked as much in advance.
Maize starts converting sugars into starches the moment it's harvested. That's why fresh-picked is so important: even within a few hours, the flavor changes.
That's also why frozen or canned corn is a good idea: picked at the peak of ripeness and almost immediately has its enzymes deactivated either by freezing or boiling. Aside from texture issues (which won't matter for many applications like soups and smoothies), frozen vegetables and berries have better taste than "fresh" from the produce department for most products, most of the year. Also why so many cooks swear by canned tomatoes for sauces: they're better quality tomatoes picked at peak ripeness, but the only way they can travel is frozen or canned. And nobody freezes tomatoes; it screws up the texture so badly that canning is no worse and possibly better, plus it's expensive to deal with cold chain (whereas a pallet of San Marzano tomatoes can sit on a shelf until it rusts through with little loss of flavor and no maintenance other than the shelf it sits on).
Yeah, eating local and in season fruits and vegetables should give you all the benefits. Eating imported/out of season fruits and vegetables will come but with worse taste and probably more expensive.
To be fair Looye honey tomatoes are tasty (and expensive), although I find them a bit on the "artificial tasty" side. Tasty Toms are quite ok. Snack tomatoes (snoeptomaatjes) are a hit and miss.
While I admire these successes, the hard truth is that 90% of the Dutch tomato produce is landfill material. Overall tomato cultivation in the Netherlands feels like a vanity project to prove the farming prowess of the country.
There was an item about this on the news where they interviewed a grower about this (it was strawberries in that item, but it's basically the same idea) and the grower was sad about it as well, because he hated the supermarkets for forcing them to sell inferior product.
The problem is not that they can't make delicious food, it's that no one is willing to pay for it. Strawberries are already expensive, and perfectly ripe strawberries would be even more expensive.
You have the slightly tastier "Tasty Tom" tomatoes that are 30% more expensive that are already a tough sell.
The harsh truth is that people keep buying the trash tomatoes, so the growers grow them.
There's also a weird spiral going on where life has become more expensive, which made things like farming good tasting tomatoes on a Croatian island infeasible, which in turn made good tasting tomatoes too expensive to buy for people living on a Croatian island.
The critical point of hydrogen is 33.2 K, that is Kelvin, or -240 degrees celsius.
Any higher temperature than that, hydrogen is not a liquid, and exerts pressure on the walls of its container.
...
so, you have the choice of making a very strong container, or a very well-isolated one, preferably both.
But probably not a lightweight container, which is what you'd prefer.
I thought that writing "liquified hydrogen" would adequately suggest that I was talking about hydrogen in liquid phase; maybe I needed to be clearer, and say that liquified hydrogen really is liquid, and not gas, but I still don't see why.
Aerogel is both very, very light in weight, and also extremely effective at isolating substances of very different temperatures such as LH2 and aircraft parts. Thus, practical LH2 tanks on aircraft would be insulated with aerogel.
Given a tank of LH2 insulated with aerogel, there would be no need for the tank to be "very strong", as it would not need to hold back any more pressure than the (very light) weight of the column of LH2 contained. Liquified-gas tanks are routinely equipped with fart valves to relieve any pressure that arises from heat leaking in and boiling the contained fluid.
For a fair number of these figures, there's not just the people they communicated with, the prior work they drew on, but often competitors, people they knew were working on the same or similar problems. This is particularly the case with technical inventions.
I don't understand what measure of efficiency you are trying to use, in which Diesel would end up being better.
In environmental discussions that measure is usually something of grams-of-CO2-equivalent emitted per km. One oddity is that the usually communicated figure is only that emittted 'at the tailpipe', which is obviously zero for full electrics. Often people try to compensate by taking the kWh-per-km figure and multiplying by the CO2-per-kWh figure for their environment. This is however still misleading if compared with the tailpipe CO2 for an ICE, because the production of gasoline or diesel are also fairly CO2-intensive.
The official term of use is well-to-wheel efficiency or emissions; there is no doubt at all that electric vehicles beat ICE vehicles easily, basically on account of the ICE being relatively inefficient because of size/performance constraints.
Obviously the actually interesting figure of merit is the lifetime emissions (and the 'useful work' gained from those emissions) and while methods and tools to compute this exist computing this in a reasonable way means making a lot of assumptions (such as the miles-per-lifetime), assumptions that will be easily attacked on internet fora, and assumptions that can easily be tweaked to show what you want to show.
The reality is that (full) electric vehicles are practical and efficient for most of the population today, if not in the very near future, and that it's hard to imagine that the current dependency on oil will last very long. Ten years is a long time.
But if you had been wrong and we would now have had superintelligence, the upside for its owners would presumably be great.
... Or at least that's the hypothesis. As a matter of fact intelligence is only somewhat useful in the real world :-)