Boris Johnson Set To Step Down With Tech Legacy in Tatters (theregister.com) 96
Lindsay Clark, reporting for The Register: Surprising no one who witnessed the politician back cable cars as a revolution in river crossing or a garden bridge as an innovation in inner-city expansion, the outgoing Prime Minister leaves behind a set of science and technology projects which are either yet to be completed or completely off the wall. Dangling plans include his ambition to accelerate the arrival of productive nuclear fusion -- a technical breakthrough which always promises to be 20 years off. In 2019, Johnson praised the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxford, only for others to reveal the organization benefited from large chunks of funding from the European Union, the powerful political and economic bloc Johnson so passionately persuaded the UK to leave.
Fission is also a favorite. Johnson has been vocal in backing small modular reactors, a technology from jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce. A study has claimed some miniaturized fission units produce as much as 35 times more waste to generate the same amount of power as a regular plant. The UK is also in the throes of an attempt to mimic the US's success with DARPA -- the defense-led science unit which played a role in the development of the internet. As of last year, Aria -- the Advanced Research and Invention Agency -- hadn't even begun to happen despite five years passing since the UK decided to leave the EU. Now reports suggest the launch of the agency will be delayed until at least the end of this year. Meanwhile, UK scientists are being cut off from European funding, post-Brexit.
Fission is also a favorite. Johnson has been vocal in backing small modular reactors, a technology from jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce. A study has claimed some miniaturized fission units produce as much as 35 times more waste to generate the same amount of power as a regular plant. The UK is also in the throes of an attempt to mimic the US's success with DARPA -- the defense-led science unit which played a role in the development of the internet. As of last year, Aria -- the Advanced Research and Invention Agency -- hadn't even begun to happen despite five years passing since the UK decided to leave the EU. Now reports suggest the launch of the agency will be delayed until at least the end of this year. Meanwhile, UK scientists are being cut off from European funding, post-Brexit.
If you are anti-nuke, you are not green (Score:1, Troll)
Simple truth to power here - if you are not fully backing nuclear energy at this point, you are not green and want the planet to die.
It is the ONLY source of CO2 free power that can work at scale.
The waste problem is a non-issue because we already know how to handle it properly. When is the last time you heard of any issues around used nuclear waste? It's not an issue, and can be stored safely (and in the future probably re-used).
Johnson may have had some issues but for the good of the UK, they had better
Too weak (Score:2)
You're a flaming faggot
If you are going to troll can't you at least try? For instance, you could say "glowing faggot" to at least add a topical twist, though personally I would advise that being any-gay in todays climate will bring fewer, not more supporters to your side. Regardless, you need to put more effort into your attacks.
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personally I would advise that being any-gay in todays climate will bring fewer, not more supporters to your side. Regardless, you need to put more effort into your attacks.
In today's climate you should say you are a flaming white male. That is the proper insult to be in good graces with the woke folk. Not sure if the word folk offends anyone. Probably does.
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Nuclear is far too expensive. Look at the price tag of Watts Bar as an example. Who is going to drop $10 billion on building a plant that won't be finished for a decade and still needs subsidies to stay operating?
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It's only expensive because of regulatory BS, most of which are unnecessary for safety.
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Yeah let's do away with building codes too. The concrete doesn't need that rebar or those expensive alloys in the reactor head. Let's not do yearly inspections either, That's just money losing downtime.
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The French are going full on nuclear. The Germans are going full on renewable. Looks to me like Europe has a healthy power mix going on. No need to fight. Once fossil fuels have been fully phased out, time will tell which path is the safest and most cost-efficient.
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It's only expensive because of regulatory BS, most of which are unnecessary for safety.
Sooo, you think Fuckushima and TMI would not have happened with less regulation? Which is basically all about safety?
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TMI was a big panic but it came to nothing much otherwise.
Fukushima was a matter of ineffective regulation coupled with an emphasis on following the rulebook rather than doing what needs doing.
Re:If you are anti-nuke, you are not green (Score:4, Interesting)
Always the same disconnected excuses with the nuke-fanatics. Well, same old, same old.
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Perhaps you'd like to share why you think my post was incorrect? Got any good glowing cow pix? Any evidence that the regulation on Fukushima was anything like proper of any stories of innovative ways the techs went around the rule book to solve problems?
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Nope. You are just looking for some points to spew some more lies on. One difference between me and you is that I actually do tech audits in regulated industries and have a clue what regulation does and does not do. In basically all cases regulators require things that are entirely sensible and usually they are not strict enough. The difference is, of course, that the regulator has the society as a whole in view, but the regulated industry and politicians only their localized profits and gains. Hence regula
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You seem very confused. What part of my comment that Fukushima had ineffective regulation made you thing I advocate less regulation?
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Well, going back, I cannot even parse what you wrote there, so I assumed. Probably shopuld just have written that. But there is your comment on TMI, which I do not agree at all on. And yes, I read the accident report.
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In what way do you not agree on TMI?
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bullshit.
it's because every nuke plant is an artisinal, made-to-order, FUCKING COMPLEX thing.
it's a place where the free market fails utterly. the design should have been standardized.
but you can't do that, because socialism.
back to the topic at hand. right wing shitwits like Johnson care about advancing technology or anything other than keeping an entrenched staus quo that keeps his drinking buddies rich. that usually involves financial scheming of some sort, hence the reason London is a "financial cent
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Nuclear is far too expensive.
Why does expense matter?
Are you _stupid_? (Don't answer that, I know you are.) For everybody with two working brain-cells, it is clear that "too expensive" in this context simply means we will get other options much faster and much more of them. And we need as much energy from alternate sources as fast as we can to _reduce_ the upcoming catastrophe.
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Hahaha, no. You just outed yourself as mentally defective. What the massively cheaper and massively faster to build up alternatives are is so completely and utterly clear at this time that I did not even bother to list them.
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Mate. Come on.
https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans... [twitter.com]
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Nuclear is far too expensive. Look at the price tag of Watts Bar as an example. Who is going to drop $10 billion on building a plant that won't be finished for a decade and still needs subsidies to stay operating?
Hmm... Well... The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) [wikipedia.org] -- nuclear-powered aircraft carrier -- cost $12.8B, took 9 years from contract to commissioning and will need constant subsidies to stay operating over its (estimated) 50-year lifespan. So the time and money for such long-term projects don't seem to be a hindrance for everyone.
Re:If you are anti-nuke, you are not green (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear is far too expensive. Look at the price tag of Watts Bar as an example.
It is when it's privately funded. If investors won't see a dime for 20 years then they want huge returns on their investment.
If it's taxpayer funded with no profit expectation (apart from still having a habitable planet a few years from now) then it suddenly gets a whole lot cheaper.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The French taxpayer fell for that one and has been regretting it ever since.
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Citations needed.
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God, this is the dumbest fucking argument - almost as stupid as the ones who think nuclear power is dangerous considering coal is killing hordes of people yearly.
You guys are like a guy stranded on a mountain dying of thirst and starvation and a helicopter comes along and offers to take you off the mountain for $200k. "Meh, too expensive, I'd rather die.".
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It's more like they want 200k to take you off the mountain in 20 years time, and there is another helicopter offering to recuse you right now for 20 bucks.
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That stuff is very dangerous and needs to be stored somewhere safely. Not really options here in Florida. Too many storms and too high of a water table.
And with our infrastructure the way it is, it a major nuclear accident waiting to happen.
Not on top of the engineering challenges making a plant that withstand a couple Cat 5 storms roiling over it.
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Florida is a pretty populous area. There are 30 million of us here and 2 million in this area alone. And really narrow. There is no part of Florida where you are more than 100 miles from the ocean/gulf/straight. I think if you in the Panhandle or the dead middle of the state like Orlando, then you can dig more than 10 feet before hitting water.
What are you going to do? Build all the plants in GA, and t
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Neutron induced radioactivity in steel and other materials tends to be low level and/or short lived.
Interstate transmission of power is a daily occurrence. We call it the power grid.
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You can fit all the nuclear waste produced by all the world's reactors in a single Olympic sized swimming pool.
Only if you do not mind it all blowing up and starting to burn about half a second later.
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You can fit all the nuclear waste produced by all the world's reactors in a single Olympic sized swimming pool.
Only if you do not mind it all blowing up and starting to burn about half a second later.
Or if you are incapable of making the barrels holding it out of neutron-absorbing material (yes, I know a totally insurmountable obstacle). Or too stupid. Oh wait, nevermind, I'm talking to a greenie. Oh well, carry on then.
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Or if you are incapable of making the barrels holding it out of neutron-absorbing material (yes, I know a totally insurmountable obstacle). Or too stupid. Oh wait, nevermind, I'm talking to a greenie. Oh well, carry on then.
I am not a greeny. I am an engineer and a scientist. I can tell when somebody is using a crappy lie by misdirection. At least come up with something a bit better. Fortunately, you are not in charge of storing spent reactor fuel, because there happen to be a few more problems that are all pretty bad.
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Total nuclear waste for the UK is currently in 5million m3. High level waste would fit into a swimming pool.
https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk... [nda.gov.uk]
Almost all of this is stored in "temporary" stores with no long term solution available. Now that's not a disaster. We have no "long term" solution for CO2 from oil and gas either. But it is not a small amount.
See: Finland (Score:1)
What are you going to do with all that waste product?
The same things we have been doing for decades without incident.
For a modern approach see Finland [science.org].
We know how to store waste safely. The only question is, do you actually care about CO2 reduction or not?
Re: If you are anti-nuke, you are not green (Score:2)
http://energyrealityproject.co... [energyrealityproject.com]
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Just today there's a story about Texas pushing back against the NRC's granting of a nuclear waste location there, citing the recent EPA ruling from Supreme Court means that the NRC doesn't have authority either. There was a radio story yesterday about some nuclear waste heard while brushing my teeth but I can't find details. Last week, New Mexico nuclear storage plant had an issue when radioactive liquid was discovered in a shipping container. In March, a story about nuclear waste in a landfill in Missour
Re:If you are anti-nuke, you are not green (Score:5, Informative)
It is the ONLY source of CO2 free power that can work at scale.
Apart from renewables with storage, which is far cheaper to build, produces slightly cheaper electricity, and faces far less political opposition to even get started on...I'm certainly not anti-nuclear but these days it only makes sense as a niche solution for places that don't have the geography for renewables.
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It is the ONLY source of CO2 free power that can work at scale.
Apart from renewables with storage, which is far cheaper to build, produces slightly cheaper electricity, and faces far less political opposition to even get started on...I'm certainly not anti-nuclear but these days it only makes sense as a niche solution for places that don't have the geography for renewables.
If it really was cheaper than everything else, the greenies would just be calmly investing in PV companies and counting their assured profits, not whining for more subisdies on them and more taxes and regulation on everyone else.
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If it really was cheaper than everything else, the greenies would just be calmly investing in PV companies and counting their assured profits, not whining for more subisdies on them and more taxes and regulation on everyone else.
Flag as Inappropriate
If that was really an issue of affordability, fossil fuel companies wouldn't have been doing the same damn thing the entire time.
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They literally are doing just that
https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans... [twitter.com]
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Hydroelectricity is cheap, plentiful in a few countries (there's a reason everyone in Canada calls their power bill the "hydro bill" - Canada's largest energy source is hydro). It's also CO2 emissions free after construction, renewable (though destructive on initial creation), etc. It's also dispatchable - it only takes a minute or two to bring more capacity online or to ramp down capacity, and handles base load just fine.
Sure it might suffer during a prolonged drought, but Las Vegas seems to still do well
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Slightly? Wind is now a fraction of the price of gas in the UK. Announced just today, scroll to the bottom...
https://www-bbc-com.cdn.amppro... [ampproject.org]
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One has to also look at the timescale of the CO2 problem, the time it takes to put up a windfarm, and the time it takes to get a nuclear plant from inception to criticality.
Nuclear may be CO2 neutral, but it is not an answer to the impending global warming problem.
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Simple truth to power here - if you are not fully backing nuclear energy at this point, you are not green and want the planet to die.
So, I see you are now trying to use the "Big Lie" technique. Not really much of a surprise, your morals always were low, now they are non-existent. I am not even going to try to list all what is wrong with your statements. You basically took every lie about nuclear and mashed it together, probably hoping to over-power anybody with an actual clue.
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https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
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About that...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/bus... [bbc.co.uk]
£54 billion wind power upgrade announced today. Offshore wind energy auctioned yesterday is coming in at 1/4 the cost of gas. GAS.
Nuclear cannot compete. Even with massive amounts of storage, which isn't needed because offshore wind is constant, it would still be more expensive.
Don't tell me nuclear gets unfairly attacked by NIMBYs. Wind is dealing with Sea NIMBYs who can't even see it.
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About that...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/bus... [bbc.co.uk]
£54 billion wind power upgrade announced today. Offshore wind energy auctioned yesterday is coming in at 1/4 the cost of gas. GAS.
Nuclear cannot compete. Even with massive amounts of storage, which isn't needed because offshore wind is constant, it would still be more expensive.
Don't tell me nuclear gets unfairly attacked by NIMBYs. Wind is dealing with Sea NIMBYs who can't even see it.
Well, I agree with most of this but even off-shore wind power does drop off at times:
https://gridwatch.co.uk/WIND/p... [gridwatch.co.uk]
We need massive storage and probably nukes too as a backup. We need some sort of backup, certainly.
If you are a nuker, you are not green (Score:2)
Simple truth to power here - if you are not fully backing nuclear energy at this point, you are not green and want the planet to die.
Radio-isotopes are mutagenic and bio-available. When ingested they are a source of transgenic disease in species that, once released into the environment, exist and persist there whilst it decays through daughter products.
This can be tens of thousands of years and about as planet killing and toxic as anything can be.
It is the ONLY source of CO2 free power that can work at scale.
Not CO2 free, the mining of uranium is highly CO2 intensive unless you use it-situ acid leech mining which produces radio active sulfuric acid in mega litre quantities. There have been acci
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It is the ONLY source of CO2 free power that can work at scale.
How deluded can you be to equate the lack of CO2 to being green. Being green is a much wider concept and CO2 is just the most time critical aspect of becoming green.
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However it's not a cure to all our ills. The big problem with nuclear power is that it puts out a nice steady reliable flow... so you cant scale it up or down like we do with natural gas plants or renewables. The other problem is that for nuclear to be done right it is very, very expensive at the outset. It requires a large capital investment at the start, years to build and after that it's relatively cheap to run if you're not expecting an ROI for decades...
-1 Offtopic (Score:2)
"with tech legacy in tatters" .. was that title to news for nerdsify it? what about all the other legacies those are equally in tatters too.
35 times? (Score:3)
A study has claimed some miniaturized fission units produce as much as 35 times more waste to generate the same amount of power as a regular plant.
This seems unlikely to be true. Normal Gen III nuclear plants only use between 2-4% of their fuel. How could anything be 35 times worse than that? Gen IV reactors (the SMRs are always Gen IV) can use up to 96% of their fuel. Which is about 35 times more efficient than a Gen III plant. Perhaps the reporter (who has spent all of 3 days learning about these topics) perhaps got their facts backwards here? Or perhaps their definition of waste is a bit off? Hard to say but also hard to put much faith in their reporting either. I mean Gen III designs are from 50-60 years ago and Gen IV designs are from the last 20 years. Why would you think they are 35 times less efficient? Incredible claims require incredible proof (not some source said it, I think).
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Do you really think a reactor that only lasts 4 years is going to be at all commercially viable? Manufacturing, fuelling, installation and decommissioning costs every 4 years. Experts on permanent contract to do the work. For how many watts?
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He got Brexit done (Score:4, Interesting)
Enjoy a lifetime of poverty and international irrelevance, brexit supporters!
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The ubiquitous predictions of instant UK economic catastrophy upon Brexit were totally wrong. It's the EU itself that's in serious trouble.
The serious trouble of having stocked supermarket shelves and fuel stations during the pandemic, and now enjoying better economic growth and lower inflation than the UK? Is that the serious trouble the EU is in?
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If you were actually in the UK during the pandemic ...
Supermarket shortages affected every "western" nation. Fuel shortages were caused by striking tanker drivers and the media hysterically reporting on fuel levels, causing panic buying until it was actually difficult to buy fuel. Where are you from? Why is your opinion relevant?
The thing is, the UK is still experiencing shortages. Even after panic buying subsided. Jobs are going overseas, as are the companies who supported Brexit... It's not just shortages but high prices as well (OK, compared other western nations the UK was insanely cheap for food, now it's just sanely cheap). These are the Brexit benefits.
Have you ever even seen the UK on a map, let alone lived here in the last 5 years? We went from one of the best performing G8 economy to one of the worst in the G20. We are
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Yeah, that's pretty much how the Brexit-supporting idiots actually sound. A bunch of crap that's the complete opposite of reality.
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You can have freedom and globalism at the same time. Nationalism takes away an individual's freedom. Freedom to trade, freedom to travel, freedom to associate with whom you like. Not to mention nationalism is nearly always coupled with religious compliance.
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Brexit isn't done. We are still in the middle of it. As the article notes, we haven't work out how to replace Horizon yet, we don't know how to work out the border in NI (Boris' solution when asked was "we will use technology"). And, we don't know what we will do to all the rules we imported from EU law into UK law when the EU law starts to change.
We have also signed up to many free trade agreements (mostly following close the ones we had before under the EU), all of which require an source of independent r
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Brexit will never be done because there will always be the opportunity to fix our economy by rejoining the single market.
The government is looking for a replacement for the Galileo satellite system too. Unbelievable waste of money.
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We're about 4% down on output vs where we would otherwise have been, which is pretty fucking catastrophic.
No country sets all the laws for itself. That's literally the point of international treaties, of which the UK has signed 14,000+. It's also the reason we set up the ECHR after WW2 at Churchill's instigation, because just leaving the German gov't to set its own rules turned out to be a really fucking awful idea.
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More than that, he probably broke up the UK. Scotland is likely to leave now.
I'm sure Putin will send his thanks.
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I think he got done by Brexit.
Actually that's not fair to Brexit. His ineptitude caused his government to spectacularly implode even without Brexit's help.
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That's punishment, for sure.
You want a world where you should be able to enter and agreement, get all the benefits, exit the agreement, and make it illegal for the other party to stop providing you with things in that agreement you just ripped up.
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I suspect it'll be a multi-stage process over some years, not least because the longer we wait, the more of the sour selfish old cunts who largely (not entirely, but largely, the age profile of Yes vs No voters is quite distinct) drove the Brexit vote will die off.
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Hopefully the weather will get to them, now that they aren't allowed to spend all year in Spain.
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It will indeed, and we'll not have cherry-picking as an option. But it will still be good value cf the alternative.
Surprised? (Score:3)
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Since when has Boris Johnson ever followed through on anything?
I saw an article today about Boris Johnson's sense of power being the generation of chaos and destruction:
I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.“
He followed through on that. He certainly used his power to fuck up the UK and its re
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Since when has Boris Johnson ever followed through on anything? Even his one & only political objective of "getting Brexit done" was left unfinished & is coming back to bite him. We shouldn't be surprised that his administration ends with almost everything it's touched in tatters.
To be fair, Boris Johnson's one and only objective was getting and keeping Boris Johnson in a job. He would say anything to get into the position. He has no personal politics, just opportunities to benefit Boris.
He was an abysmal Mayor of London, a terrible representative for Uxbridge, an absolute failure of a Brexit secretary and an even worse Prime Minister.... Fortunately he's got nowhere to go after this. Traditionally MPs who've failed this badly joined UKIP as MEPs (Member of the EU Parliament) but