QKD is only safe against MITM if you have pre-shared keys between the parties. At that point you might as well use symmetric cryptography which is immune against hypothetical quantum computers and infinitely more efficient than QKD.
Some of the regional elections in Germany have comically large ballots with dozens of options and a very complicated counting system (16 votes that can be split between individuals or party lists). The hand-counted results are generally available by the next morning. There is really no excuse for using electronic voting. In Germany it has been ruled unconstitutional since it cannot be checked by the voters.
* M24 erroneously claims that the EHTC methodology does not account for the point-spread-function (PSF) of the observation. In fact, the EHTC hybrid imaging approach explicitly corrects for the PSF through the CLEAN algorithm. Other algorithms implicitly incorporate PSF effects into the reconstruction algorithms. Furthermore, non-imaging (e.g., model fitting) methods confirm the ring-like structure is the most likely simple model that fits the data. Note that the EHTC methods recover non-ring structures in both synthetic data tests as well as real data that has the same PSF, for example when imaging the non-ring-like polarization of the black holes M87* and Sgr A* (10).
* M24 erroneously claims that the EHTC did not release uncalibrated raw data. In fact, all of 2017 EHTC raw and calibrated data have been publicly available since May 2022 (11).
I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?
You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put that one in, but there's some important results in lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category for.
It was better search than other search options at the time, but was quickly an advertising company. It's also too bad that that it was so dominant early, because there used to be 4-5 search Enginess and their results were very different and you could find things in non-google results that you couldn't get from google (and vice versa).
You're not wrong, but it didn't last. Google jumped the shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the screen real estate in a Google search result was actually search results.
Spanner is one thing I'd say they invented but they built a whole bunch of really neat stuff in order to be able to run search, back in 1998. that they're this behemoth conglomerate that it's cool to hate on doesn't erase the fact that they had to build all sorts of new things when they were just starting out.
The explosion of Chernobyl released a few thousand PBq of activity. Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of Bq/kg. You would have to burn something like 50 times the world coal reserves (and make sure not to use any exhaust filters) in order to match the radiation release of Chernobyl.
> Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of Bq/kg
Presumably these are from very long-lived isotopes, so will continue to emit at this rate for the forseeable future.
In contrast, the fission products (from Chernobyl) tend to have short half lives of the order of a few days, giving a short burst of radiation. Caesium 137 looks to be the most troublesome isotope in the long term (with a half life of 30 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...
Yet we've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and many others (military ones too). Unforeseen accidents happen. Wars too, which tend to destroy safety equipment.
Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blowing stuff up. Because they don't have containment vessels.
And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It feels like playing with fire.
I love it, we went from "it's impossible" to "it's not happening", to "it's happening but it's too early to waste money on it", to "it's happening but it's too late".
> externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
is this the "nuclear would take 20 years" we've been hearing for the last 60?
Fukushima also released more radiation than all the coal that has ever been burned (a few hundred PBq, ignoring the thousands of PBq of Xe-133). The amount of radiation created by a nuclear power reactor is on an entirely different scale than any natural source of radiation.
Are there safer plants still, that focus on eliminating the daughter nuclei?
I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles, because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel. Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
While I like nuclear on the paper and its theoretical env impact, this one is hard to ignore. Add costs of current projects which became ridiculous in reality. Plus as we see with various wars nuclear powerplants would be a prime target for terrorists or even state actors, they are certainly not considered as excluded from wars, in contrary.
If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
Do pray tell calculate a world's energy system looping back while running purely on renewables, with electric powered mining, transport of ores, refining, panels production...
You will find that you cannot, cheap (for now) fossil fuels are subsidising solar panels and wind farms massively.
The mining for renewables would be a small fraction of the mining for industrial society as a whole.
So, if electrification cannot be done on this, industrial society as we know it is doomed, and nuclear cannot save it. Unless you're thinking we're going to have nuclear reactors in our mining vehicles...
On site mini reactors with directly wired machinery isn’t entirely inconceivable but would require a massive restructuring of industrial layouts and processes.
SMRs are being touted now, but (1) they aren't that small, and (2) they have to be grouped together or else fixed labor costs become unacceptable per unit of power output. The result is a collection whose power output isn't too different from conventional large reactors.
It really makes me so sad to see that some people can be so confidently so wrong.
It really does appear that believing in renewables as a way to perpetuate industrial society at scale has become part of some people's identity, and regardless of any actual study on the subject, this belief appears to be a necessity to be part of non-deplorable human society.
Nuclear reactors are a safe way to electrify as much as can be and reduce the body blows societies are going to take in the coming decades. Some industry is not doomed, and social stability can be maintained, at some cost, if and only if we use all technologies at our disposal for what they are, and calculate the risks and rewards right.
Facts are sadly unmoved by any faith, and the real path forward as painful as it may be, is only open to those that accept that they can always be wrong, and will always have to learn more.
Please pfdietz cite your sources and please prove me wrong.
I note that your polemic is long on faith in nuclear but short on the same sources you’re demanding. Perhaps you could model the standard you expect from other people by providing sources and some analysis of the very sweeping assertions you’re making.
The one specific slide about the low EROEI of solar panel is in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJvoAm__WVtumohStkF4KwT66cS...
The 2.7 value is from 2019, as calculated for Spain, this one slide is in english. Panels have not made a x10 EROEI explosion in the past 5 years, a lot of the energy costs in that calculation are independent of panel technology improvements.
A typical game for making EROEI look bad is to expand system boundaries. That is, you say "we're paying these workers, and they're consuming products and services that use energy, so ascribe that energy use to this effort". Cast the net widely enough and all energy use in society can be included. But if you do that, EROEI converges to 1, since all energy that is produced is also consumed. And this is perfectly ok.
Elsewhere, with more reasonable boundaries, one finds EROEI is much higher, and has been found to be better than for fossil fuels. An EROEI of about 8 for PV in Switzerland, for example (and Switzerland is not the sunniest place on Earth; the EROEI would be even higher at those locations; it also becomes higher as renewable technology advances, for example with longer lifespans and thinner PV cells.)
That EROEI can't be bad should be obvious. Energy is only a small fraction of the cost of making renewable equipment. If EROEI were bad then renewables could not be as cheap as they are. That they are being sold so cheaply debunks the EROEI arguments directly.
No! China cornered the solar panel market through the use of megawatts of coal-produced electricity! Transportation for all the ores etc is not gaming the metrics.
It's certainly the case that China has been burning a lot of coal. But that doesn't mean China's PV depends on the existence of coal power to produce it. The objection here seems to be that a renewable economy is impossible because it hasn't sprung into existence fully formed.
And isn't coal responsible for all that concrete nuclear plants there are built with? The vision of a nuclear-powered world implicitly assumes concrete will produced in some other way; this is a harder task that replacing coal electricity with renewable electricity.
Where do you see a vision a nuclear powered world? No-one touts that. Look, if you have numbers, actual data, please provide it. So far all you provided pfdietz is sneer and words.
So, if the world isn't going to be nuclear powered, what is your alternative? Sticking to fossil fuels until we're in Permian-Triassic extinction 2, Electric Boogaloo?
If the world and industrial civilization are going to survive, it's either nuclear or renewables.
Why either-or? it's:
(1) a lot of sobriety
(2) any and all available technology with a well understood and well modelled risk/reward impact/scale plan
Also note that you seem to mean new-renewables (wind and solar) when you write "renewables". At this point and for a long time the large-scale and frequent renewables are hydropower and biomass, that are renewable, but are not new.
Well, my feeling it the exact mirror of that. It is you who I view as hopelessly wrong, someone who has cultish devotion to a failing technology.
What would a disinterested observer make of this?
They'd look for objective evidence to determine which of us is closer to reality.
For example, they might look at what the world is doing right now. What is being installed, renewables or nuclear? Presumably those who are spending money are trying to get the most bang for the buck.
If we look at that, renewables are soundly trouncing nuclear. Even in China, that country that is held up as the last best hope by nuclear advocates. New installs (which reflect the current conditions better than total installed capacity, which is a lagging indicator) are massively in favor of renewables there and elsewhere.
The nuclear advocate who explains away nuclear's troubles as due to the selective omnipotence of greens (selective, since they don't seem to be doing nearly as well on other issues) must really stretch their conspiracy theorizing to explain such a widespread result.
I will also note that you didn't explain how nuclear can power mining in a way that renewables can't.
Both are small compared to the mining needed for society as a whole. So why the hand wringing? You are desperately straining to make a mountain out of a foothill.
Well no, I am simply certain, from study, that the 100% renewables future being touted is a pipe dream at anything approaching mid 20th century energy consumption levels.
Show me one model that does work with any technology, please, any source anywhere I promise I will review.
Mining to get renewables to anything like the GWHours needed is very significant, look at the graphs in the data I provided
Instead of any kind of data that would show me how I am wrong, all the data I am getting is downvotes and wordage.
You may feel certain, but by the arguments you've given so far that belief does not appear to have any rational basis.
Are these arguments what led you to the belief, or are they rationalizations you've tried to construct after the fact? They don't appear to be things that a skeptical, rigorously rational person would have come up with.
ps. During the 2000s, around ten new copper deposits were discovered each year worldwide. In the 2010s, it was more like 3 to 4 on average. And over the past three years, there has been a total of... one discovery, according to Les Echos: https://t.ly/yhqQr
For copper, as with many other underground resources, discoveries eventually decline over time. It's similar for oil: the peak of annual discoveries of "conventional" oil fields—everything except shale oil—was 60 years ago, and 50 years ago for gas.
Additionally, the copper content in new mines tends to decrease: it is now about 0.5% on average (it was ten times higher a century ago). This means that to extract one kg of copper, you need to extract, crush, and process 200 kg of rock. The higher this number, the more energy is required for a mine to maintain the same production.
For the current production of 20 million tons of copper per year, a few billion tons of ore need to be processed annually—more than for iron! Incidentally, over a billion tons of rock is also processed annually to extract 3,000 tons of gold.
The International Energy Agency has long pointed out that copper production may start to decline in the coming years (even though more is needed in its decarbonization scenarios). A 15-year forecast is reasonably relevant because it takes this long—or even 20 years—to bring a new mine into operation after discovery.
It's not just about permits: roads must be built, a power network for high-power machines, water supply and wastewater treatment facilities, processing plants, etc.
Thus, the production from existing and planned mines is fairly predictable over the next one to two decades. Is it serious if there's less copper?
Maybe, for electrifying 1.5 billion two-ton vehicles. For having only half or a third of that fleet consisting of small vehicles (an electric bicycle requires 100 times fewer materials than an electric car, and there are, of course, intermediate possibilities), maybe not.
For energy, the economic world has not understood that the signal of its decline won't be an indefinite price increase but a contraction of "physical" production (happening in Europe since 2007). A decline in energy means a shortfall in production, hence incomes, leading to less energy but less solvent consumers, with a new price that could settle "anywhere."
For a systemic metal, it will be the same: reduced supply will result in decreased material production, but not necessarily an indefinite price increase. The economy is primarily about the physical!
> If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
Of course if we ignore the need for batteries. Renewable advocates conveniently forget to include that in the calculus (there’s active action in progress to strip mine the ocean floor creating untold ecological damage to try to keep up with requirements for batteries). And they also tend to ignore the fact that renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes. Nuclear fission remains the best option for large scale power and is still cheaper than directly comparable renewables with batteries included despite being divested from raising overall costs.
Hopefully we get fusion soon and renewables and fission become a thing of the past.
In the renewables case they’re needed for transportation AND grid. The dream that car batteries are used as grid storage afaict remains a dream with no forward movement on that front.
> In the renewables case they’re needed for transportation AND grid.
Indeed. So? There are more and more vehicles, and the average amount of electricity they store (reflected by their autonomy) grows. One of the reasons is well-known: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
The drawbacks section is pretty damming that this is unlikely to work:
> JB Straubel, then chief technology officer of Tesla Inc, discounted V2G, claiming that battery wear outweighs economic benefit.[87] A 2017 study found decreasing capacity,[88][89] and a 2012 hybrid-EV study found minor benefit.[90]
A 2015 study[91] found that economic analyses favorable to V2G failed to include many of the less obvious costs associated with its implementation. When these less obvious costs were included, the study reported that V2G was an economically inefficient solution.
This is true. However this is to put in perspective with the financial impact: batteries are (from a technical viewpoint) more and more able to cope with this and charging during cheap electricity times then partially discharging when electricity is expensive will reduce the overall cost of the vehicle.
None of the techniques achieve anywhere near the required performance metrics for useful QC. Improvements also appear to have slowed down accross the board despite massive investments. I would not hold my breath for QC to arrive anytime soon (if ever).
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