So I guess the next goal here is a startup to implement this as a smart contract to go full circle. The market will do it because any transaction fee is a hindrance to it's liquidity and is a possibility to undercut someone else.
It's really attempt 2.0 and some sprinkles of "you may get rich" on the steam market with a hugely more inefficient system, which you can't even showcase in game to your friends. All the while the gas fees causing a constant drain on any transaction.
Try looking how many pages you need click through before you emerge from the minimum $0.03. The market for digital "art" is a hard one, because scarcity can only centrally be enforced.
It's the "Electric cars will never work until I can drive across the country on one charge" argument all over that line of reasoning.
Different areas will require different trade-offs. Higher latitudes, excluding inside the polar vortex, tends to have larger amount of wind in the winter.
Currently storage does not make sense because the cheapest store of energy is a smart consumer. It will be very interesting to see if actual storage outside of governmental emergency backups will ever be needed in wind heavy deployments.
> CNN said French energy firm EDF, which helps run the site, had warned the US government that China's nuclear regulator had raised limits on permissible levels of radiation outside the plant to avoid shutting it down.
Hinkley Point C is looking to be an at least £50 billion cool transfer from taxes to private corporations. Renewables have also gotten way cheaper today compared to 2017.
> EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices),[20][77] which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021[71]) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved.[20][77] High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.[81]
> In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'.[82][83] In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'.[9]
The main reason is cost. Then gas plants undercut everything which had a steam cycle and the nuclear industry has been living on government handouts ever since. Alternating between "small and modular" and "big and efficient" to have something to try and hype with.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
> Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]
> Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[52] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt. Al Gore has commented on the historical record and reliability of nuclear power in the United States:
> Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.[53]
The source regarding actually seeing negative learning effects I linked in the original comment states in the abstract.
> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
Sure, a nuclear cycle without the use of a steam turbine may have a future. Similarly to how gas plants undercut coal, and nuclear. Simply due to the cost of the steam plant. I haven't seen any proposals though which is more concrete than a pie-in-sky powerpoint design though.
The other issue is that for wind you only need an axle and a generator, for sun it is solid state. It is hard to compete with the economics of solid state power generation.
South Australia is getting close. [1] Give it a year or two.
> Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh.
And say 3% makes the entire country renewable? What is the better use of money then? Energy is energy, and even better if it is vastly simpler to generate with less headaches to take care of afterwards.
South Korea had a run in with a ton of faked documentation and is essentially out of the game [1]. China likes to keep a finger in the nuclear jar for diversification but the current investments are minuscule, even though they look large from an outside raw numbers perspective. [2]
With government subsidies everything can be made to look cheap. Not saying we should not subsidize some energy production, but nuclear seems like a woefully inefficient use of it.
>In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[47][48][49]
> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[50] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[51]
Last time around it was negative learning by doing for France[1]. I wonder what magical efficiency gains they will manage to muster compared to Flamanville [2], Hinkley Point C[3] and Olkiluoto 3[4] which the state owned french nuclear industry is building. Well, more than magical "simplification", "cost cutting" and "modular design" shown on a powerpoint before reality hits again.
What you're describing is the American school system. As a Swede who spent an exchange year in an affluent Dallas suburb the systems couldn't be more different.
Going from Swedish to American high school felt like stepping back to elementary school in regards to personal freedom and trust.
First to set the base, in general in Sweden you have all your classes with the same 25-30 instead of different groups every period. From 7th grade we had our own schedule complete with periods without lessons where we would just hang out, walk around or go to the library and jump on the computer. In high school this ramped up even more. Loitering as a concept doesn't exist in Sweden.
To accommodate this the design of schools are completely different. The endless hallways don't really exist, instead there are areas between the classrooms with sofas, tables and whatever to enable people to hangout or study together. My school even had a café open all day. Doing group projects is the epitome of this, we'd show up at the start of the class for attendance and then take off to the library or some other place.
Contrast this with America. Hall passes to go to the restroom, hall monitors. We even had CCTV surveillance in the entire school building. If you would show up late you could be sent to the cafeteria and forcibly miss the class and have to write some essay about how wrong you were. How can a person learn to take care of themselves in such an environment?
This isn't even talking about the pledge or national anthem over the PA system.
Sorry for the rant.
Back to the topic on hand, from what I've read on Swedish news about it everyone involved generally was positive. No more the annoying wait while taking attendance. For the parents it was no different, even before this system they still immediately got a text if the kid didn't show up for class.
The questions raised by the DPA are relevant and my guess is that this will continue to be explored but with more caution towards how the data is processed to comply with this ruling.