"environmental damage inflicted by a nuclear power station" ... which is what exactly?

"If a nuclear power station suffers a leak, we’re all dead"... well no. It's not nice but we're not ALL dead.

Don't you live in France?

Don't you live in France?

Did you not notice that there is an active war zone in France turning it into apocalyptic mess? People swim to the UK for shelter in their thousands now.

"England is a former French colony which didn't turn well"

Nope: The French never managed to colonise us. Nor the Spanish.

The Italians: Yes. The Norse: Yes. The Germans: Yes.

Or, more accurately: The Roman Empire, then the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and then the Normans (Norse men).

But never the French (William the Bastard being Normal, hence Norse).

Assuming we are forgetting the Celts then, who were from what was later to become France (and bit of Austria...)

Yeah, even when a nuclear power station's reactor catches fire and explodes, although it's pretty catastrophic, it's far from being a "we're all dead" moment.

Chernobyl was a really badly designed reactor with no containment , and I've watched interviews with the people who had to pick up the bits of the reactor off the roof with their hands, made thirty years later. I mean, yes, it wasn't exactly good for them, but a good number of those who didn't die from the acute radiation poisoning are still about.

As for Fukushima, well yes, nobody thinks reactors going bang is a good thing, but my understanding is that exactly one person died as a result of that, and this was from being crushed by a falling crane, or something similar. Nobody seems to be talking about the massive fucking tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people and caused those reactors to fail.

And if we're talking about reactors that leak? Well Windscale (now Sellafield) did that pretty much all the way through the '50s, then caught fire, and there are still people living in Cumbria with the correct number of toes.

Yes, nuclear has its risks, but so do most things in life. For example, burning coal causes radioactive fallout, and actually releases more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power does. Because coal contains trace radioactive elements.

"As for Fukushima, well yes, nobody thinks reactors going bang is a good thing, but my understanding is that exactly one person died as a result of that, and this was from being crushed by a falling crane, or something similar. Nobody seems to be talking about the massive fucking tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people and caused those reactors to fail."

Nor the chemical spills from industry up and down the coast.

And people still don't talk enough about the designed leaks from many other power sources.

Ah yes Windscale - my mum was a kid on a farm not far from the place back then and they didn't chuck the milk or the veggies that they were told to as it being after the War nothing got wasted. This was in the 1950s ffs so the food must have been as good as glowing for them to be told to throw it out.

While my number of toes might not be 100% normal, we had that in the family before Windscale so it is probably just bog standard inbreeding.

Wender?

There were actually three deaths at Fukushima. The other two were power station workers who were washed out to sea by the tsunami.

According to [1]Gridwatch France . the French nuclear power stations are generating about 30GW of power (about 60% of the daytime and 75% of the nighttime requirement).

[1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/

There is not enough supply of STM32 MCUs, so good luck with scaling this up.

You may scrap some on Aliexpress, but chances are you'll get a different MCU with reprinted markings to imitate the real deal.

> they just keep going indefinitely, or at least until the algae get bored

Or evolves into something that demands rights and payment for the energy produced.

With an output of 1 microAmpere, you really need to give it time ... you'll get a full Coulomb of charge pumped in only 11.5 days. Assuming this cell runs against a voltage of a Volt or so, it would produce a full J of power in said 11 days.

So how many microW algae cells would we need to replace a good-sized 1 GW nuclear power plant?

"So how many microW algae cells would we need to replace a good-sized 1 GW nuclear power plant?"

Answer: Giga/micro = 10¹⁵

The article says each algae cell was about the same size as a AA battery, so if that's stood on end it takes up about 1cm² of floor space. So a GW of them spread out on the ground (to make sure they still get light) would be 10¹⁵ cm² (100,000 km²), or a square about 316km along each side.

Just for clarity, can we have those dimensions in linguine.

If it helps, it's about five times the area of Wales.

Sorry, I need it in football pitches to fully comrehend the scale. ;-)

How many microwatts in 1 gigawatt? Let me think about that one...

For those who can't do simple maths in their heads, that is one quadrillion (10 15 ). Now the question is how much space would that take up, in an arrangement where they all get a suitable amount of light falling on them?

But then my brain is so twisted it can pat itself on the back without having to turn around, so that may just colour my outlook a tad. Or perhaps the Dried Frog Pills are the cause of all the pretty colours & this is all just an impressive hallucination.

I can't explain how the stuff works though, we need AMFM1 for that level of gibbering insanity. =-)p

Not that I was expecting to understand any of the maths, the macroscopic two-level Hamiltonian thingy looks impenetrable, but I was wondering if this is also caused by mathematical markup/ formatting getting screwed up OR if they have invented a whole load level of brainf@ck style notation:

$${{{{{\mathcal{H}}}}}}=\hslash \left({\begin{array}{lc}{\omega }_{{{{{\rm{B}}}}}}[{N}_{{{{{\rm{B}}}}}}(t)]&-{{\Omega }}\\ -{{\Omega }}&{\omega }_{{{{{\rm{S}}}}}}\end{array}}\right),$$

Its just hard so brace yourself before you try.

Somebody just copied some raw rich text out of a word doc.

It looks more like latex to me... but then maybe rich text markup is similar?

..to the heady days of LISP

Not exactly going to waste. The 'daylight' would otherwise fall on the surfaces that the PV panels cover up, warming them, and even causing plants to grow. Granted that the PV converts energy into a form we find more convenient, but the concept of 'waste' in this context seems rather narrowly western-urban-ethnocentric for comfort. As a parallel, a Cambridge physicist calculated a few years back that, given the typical density of UK housing estates (20+ dwellings per acre), geothermal heating would not work except for the few, as there wouldn't be enough to go round.

What we really have to do to sustain our own future as a species (the planet itself being much more robust than we are) is to abandon the concept of growth being the primary indicator of achievement. Granted, it's the measure 'used' by all life on the planet but the gross impact of all other species is curbed by inherent limits such as dying out by the ton when resources dry up. Our fundamental difference is that we're so darned adaptable that we have so far sidestepped such natural controls. Consequently, we have to start thinking differently - not 'going back to nature' in this respect but striving to overcome the 'natural' drives and patterns of behaviour. Locusts can only operate the way they do because they're hard wired to do so. We have the capacity to abandon the evolutionary hard wiring, and it's long overdue that we did.

>> The 'daylight' would otherwise fall on the surfaces that the PV panels cover up, warming them, and even causing plants to grow.

If the solar panels on my roof prevent plants from growing on it, all the better.

"a Cambridge physicist calculated a few years back that, given the typical density of UK housing estates (20+ dwellings per acre), geothermal heating would not work except for the few, as there wouldn't be enough to go round."

Might have been for currently 'easily-available' geothermal. If we can develop the technology to drill about 5km+ deep, there's more energy than we can ever consume, everywhere in the world.

"abandon the concept of growth being the primary indicator of achievement"

Very absolutely this, and triple thumbs-up. Closely related is using GDP as a measure of "what must always grow". GDP says very little about either wealth (since it's divorced from purchasing power), nor about quality of life (since it doesn't take account of any other factors than strictly monetary). The main advantage of using GDP is that it's easy to calculate. In other words, just like looking for your lost keys under the streetlight is easier cos there's more light, even if you lost your keys somewhere else.

I’m pretty sure the boffins from those other dimensions are sucking energy out of our computers in order to run theirs.

I think you're due some royalties!

https://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Interdimensional_energy_collector

Alas for Mr McKay, this was pre-dated by Isaac Asimov's book The Gods Themselves (1972?) which has transfer of energy between Universes as the central theme

Me thinks Dabbsy has been at your I.P. eh?

Then again I think Simon is Bob Howard's Pen name.

The Director will see you soon Mr Dabbs.

I've heard we could change people into batteries to power up machines. Let's work on that.

reach stability only if isolated from the environment and the observer, I guess no one can easily check if they did manage to produce two of them......

"Researchers at the University of Lancaster’s Physics department, Royal Holloway London, Landau Institute and Aalto University in Helsinki cooled superfluid helium-3 to almost -273.15°C inside a rotating refrigerator, created two "time crystals" (which are impossible) and brought them into touch (which is impossible)."

Damn, all that hard work, and still only 1/3rd of the way towards earning themselves a celebratory breakfast at Milliways...

Will all the offshore wind farms they're building on the East Coast of the UK have a significant effect on onshore wind speeds? They must have an impact, as pointed out you can't "make" energy, so in a few years time will the be blamed for localised climate change?

"I can't hang my washing out any more, thanks to all those ***** wind farms - I have to sue the tumble drier1"

"Will all the offshore wind farms they're building on the East Coast of the UK have a significant effect on onshore wind speeds? "

Some much cleverer people than me have worked out that there is a theoretical 30% efficiency limit on turbines. So at most they could take out 30% of the wind power even if they occupied 100% of the cross-sectional area the wind passes through. Given that in practice most wind passes above and below turbine blades, and there is a lot of space between turbines, I would say that the turbines themselves occupy far, far less than that.

Also, the wind energy is constantly being replenished by solar heating of the atmosphere, sea and land at different rates to each other and in different locations, so it's not going to run out any time soon.

Short answer, no.

Semiconductor crystals are useless until you introduce lattice irregularities such as impurities. Similarly, a useful time crystal must hiccup irregularly in order to be useful. It is at those hiccup points that we open our eyes and take a peek. Indeed, the act of doing so is what causes the crystal to hiccup, thus making it useful. Use it or lose it.

Of course, that's quantum time crystals. Macroscopic time crystals have existed for many years. They are the TV channels that only ever show repeats...

So we have several impossible things happening before breakfast.

One problem though is that time crystals must be tiny.

How about we harness another 'impossible' thing - the humble bumble-bee? They work on a macro scale. I know it would be a bit cruel, but couldn't we hook them up to a mini-treadmill or fly-wheel?

"Which do you prefer: sweat or green slime?"

What happens if we mix them together?

See icon>>>>>

created two "time crystals" (which are impossible) and brought them into touch (which is impossible).

"If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."

Also: there's a lot more to fusion than emulating the Sun. In fact, if a plant did fusion the way the Sun does, it would have to be at least a 100m cube to compete with the output from conventional power stations.

Anyone else reminded of The Gods Themselves by Asimov (1972)? Not only a fun read, but a message that could still be relevant today.

Why yes, and had I read to the end of the comments before typing I would not have looked quite so foolish