banneryear1868

Fuck yeah was going to order a new one soon

They're just being capitalists. Having 80% of your portfolio in a single entity isn't smart.

Not that fossils/natural gas are required per se but their capabilities. Some places like Norway and Quebec are geographically blessed with distributed hydro that can fill a lot of that need. The variable load for a nuclear in that case could be many times larger than the generator itself but I'm not aware of any studies on that. Kinetic storage with massive flywheels is maybe the closest thing to that, or even batteries. You can ramp nukes by venting steam but that heat can cause environmental issues. Similar to hydro how their capabilites are reduced based on environmental factors like handling spring runoff.

There are some very recent reports out of the Ontario regulator who are dealing with this exact issue right now. Long term demand increasing for the first time vs carbon legislation, and the mandate to have a reliable grid.

I think Matt Christman said it best that "Trump is a tumor made out of America."

Yeah it was winter 2015 when the bi-partisan media began covering Trump as a frontrunner. It wasn't even conservative media Trump's cult was sharing as memes online either, it was compilations of liberal news anchor's with "shocked" faces at every stupid Trump tweet. Washington Post (I think?) even had the infamous Trump lie tracker. Some people still gaze at his two impeachments, legal troubles, moral failings, health issues, and despite this in relation to his current position keep obsessing about the next big thing right around the corner.

Nuclear vs fossil gets in to why you don't/can't run all nuclear, else things would be very easy. Nuclear's capabilities are best suited to supplying the base load/minimum demand but they can't be ramped or dispatched, reactors basically run most efficiently at their designed output levels, so you can't use them to balance supply and demand. The use of fossils for base load is more a thing in countries with lower regulations, usually because of things like a growing manufacturing economy (ie "global south"), but also in some extraordinary regulatory circumstances (Germany) or just because of when fossil was brought online/refurbished. Fossil's capabilities are like the opposite and they are most efficient and economical used for load-following, which is even more important with renewables you can't dispatch.

So fossil is still the main control lever for reliability, and that's the crux of why a suitable replacement technology isn't available yet. If it was simply a matter of output level then we'd have no problem. Mitigations to reduce use of fossils when demand is high can even be things like a demand response/dr program for transmission-connected facilities, where they are incentivized to reduce their use during times of high demand. Basically instead of having a higher energy price and all this generation online, you take a bit of what that price would be and use it to incentivize consumers to reduce their demand. Smart stuff but fossils are still a thing with that and if storage could replace them we could easily just have nuclear+storage, even smaller nuclear like those SMRs/small modular reactors.

Another massive consideration with all of this is the logical location of each type of generation at the transmission level. In the event you might have to bring the grid back from 0, or even just handle expected equipment failure, the specific location in the logical grid where types of generation is attached has to consider the capabilities of each type of generation. For example in a blackout situation you can't just start a nuclear generator when the demand is effectively 0, you have to bring generation and loads online from scratch in very increments initially. During the 2003 northeast blackout there were opinion articles complaining about how the casinos were online before neighborhoods, ignorant to the fact those casinos were instrumental in providing an initial load on the transmission grid.

Depends on how much there is, what level of the grid it's connected to, and what the overall supply mix is. Without adequate energy storage yet, a lot of times it's fossil fuels filling the gap between renewable output and peak demand.

One of those articles that's been on repeat since 2015.

How many times does this meme have to get posted until people realize it's not changing any votes lol

Nah this is backwards, Democrat voters need to get behind the left. If the left aligns with Democrats we continue to ratchet to the right. If everyone did what the left wants there is a way out. Either get behind the left or support the right either directly or indirectly, that's the choice right now.

Democrats try to shame the left into supporting them, blame them for the failure, then call you a fascist because you didn't vote for one. Fuck that, Democrats don't have the high horse to say that from anymore except to each other. Democrats who support the left can do it by voting that way, otherwise they're enabling the current system just as much as Trump supporters. The conditions that give us Trump don't go away without a socialist project.

The left doesn't really have any political power under capitalist hegemony where there's economic consensus in the political and ruling class. There are many leftists but essentially no political left, and at the same time politics can no longer impact our economic arrangements, irs basically a spectacle we react to from different angles. What we have are centrist liberals both portrayed as "far left" by the right, some who ignorantly react to that with "yes, I am far left!" And those who actually have a visceral hate for capitalism have almost always been dealt with on common ground between centrist liberals and the right.

Not wholly opposed to that, markets can serve the purpose they're designed for, and I could see an evolution of cybersyn that helps run the economy using simulated markets.

Worked pharmacy delivery for years starting in high school, just before smartphones, and I still don't use GPS. Basically just map to nearest main intersection and remember their street name and the one before it.