matlag

No matter what would have happened, he would have blamed someone else and his followers would have listened without any question. He can shoot someone on the 5th avenue and claims it’s because of immigrants, his base will repeat “immigrants, immigrants” like a mantra.

They do. But you need to reduce the generation to make sure you don’t heat up too much the water for the ecosystem that lives in. Less water means the temperature difference before and after the plant is higher. That’s the constrain.

Prices capped have nothing to do with nuclear energy and everything to do with stupid EU price policy.

France used to have a monopoly by a state owned company on electrIcity: EDF. But everyone knows that’s terrible, and private market is the way to go. At the time, electricity in France was the cheapest across Europe, but it’s still terrible because… well that HAD to change!

In order to introduce some competition, generation, network and “distribution” (billing…) activities were separated.

Then private distributors (again: billing companies with 0 generation capabilites and 0 grid network) were allocated some quota of electricity from the nuclear electricity generated by EDF at low cost.

In addition, and that’s the European policy: electricity price on the market would be set at the cost of the most expensive generator at a given time. Example: 100% nuclear today: cost is set at cost of nuclear. 95% of electricity from nuclear, 5% from gas: 100% of the electricity that day is billed at cost of gas! 80% nuclear, 15% gas, 5% coal: 100% of the electricity billed at cost of coal!

Why? So that the priate newcomer would get huge benefits and be able to invest in electricity generation. But: there was 0 constrain in doing so, so they just rack up benefits at the expense of EDF and clients! Even better: since they get such low prices from their quota, they’re cheaper than the EDF split distributor company. So at some point, their quota was insufficient for their client’s demand. Time to invest… hahaha! No I’m kidding: time to ask for a bigger quota, of course granted by Macron and his team.

Then came Ukraine invasion. Uh oooh! Gas price exploses, even the “distributors” start to feel the pain. What to do? Well, kick out their clients! Refure to renew contracts, or ask for such a ridicuously high price to make sure they just go! EDF’s hisorical distribution company is legally obligated to take them back. And that’s where the 2nd joke kicks in: EDF gave s much quota of nuclear electricity that they no longer have enough for these clients they have to take. No worries: the “distributors” sold back the electricity quota… at market price, ie mostly gas price!

With the price of gas multiplied n times determining the cost of the whole production, it became unbearable for clients. That’s where genius Macron and Lemaire (Minister of Economy) set a “shield” (cap) on the bills. It’s no shield nor cap. It’s actually the state of France paying the difference in the bills between the actual bill and the cap they set. That’s public money!

And again, that money didn’t go to resources. It went straight to “distributors” (rather call them parasites).

For sure, the heavy maintenance work on the nuclear power plant done at the time didn’t help. They decided to do it on all plants at once (another bad call) and it lasted longer than planned.

But the price issue has nothing to do with nuclear and everything to do with stupid policies.

And now, lesson learned (not): Spain and Portugal got out of that absurd elecricity market. Germany and France (and many other countries) made a few changes and keep going. Because competition with multiple private actors in electricity is good. Can’t you see it??

Yep, that’s textbook big tech strategy: -Build up the hype -Get the product out there, make sure as many orgs and people start using it as possible. Make it free or sell at loss if necessary -Oh yes, we broke a few laws for this. If we don’t get a waiver, we’ll have to close the service for everyone, do you realize the impact?

That’s Facebook on privacy, Uber on workers rights, etc. Now N+1th: OpenAI on copyright.

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

By the time countries that could have built nuclear power plants would complete them, they will have collectively burnt enough coal and gas to doom humankind.

So: indeed, the world leaders didn’t try seriously.

I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”

10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.

If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.

And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.

Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!

Never seen that one?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQdM369msk

Just add it to the list: “The ink used to print this warning is toxic”