> Nuclear power is considered a clean energy source because it has zero carbon dioxide emissions;
This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally expected.
And any kind of mass produced „nuclear battery“ which will eventually end up in land fill is a risk not worth taking. It reminds me of the story about leaded fuel. Yeah maybe a few cars are no problem. But scale up the pollution and boy will you be in trouble.
Nuclear has the lowest net CO2 emissions per unit of energy besides hydroelectricity [1]. Waste recycling would make known terrestrial reserves last for several thousand years. Furthermore, seawater extraction would make nuclear effectively unlimited [2].
You can pedantically point out that nuclear isn't truly unlimited. But once you're getting to the point of energy sources lasting millions of years, the term "renewable" becomes academic. You could just as easily point out that the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen.
The more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions. The media may be 110g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050.
The same issues apply to the materials needed to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and the batteries needed to mitigate intermittency.
Uranium's incredible energy density means increases in raw uranium costs is negligible (enrichment is a much more expensive part of the overall nuclear fuel cost). From the previously linked article:
> Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting uranium from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
True, however those materials needed to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels... can be recycled, most of them infinitely (at human scale), and it more and more becomes either legally or economically unavoidable.
Uranium isn't recyclable: there is no satisfactorily running fast-breeder.
My point was not about costs but about emissions. Extraction and immediate post-processing (before enrichment), and therefore ore grade, have a major impact on emissions: see figure 5 in the referenced communication (Werner, Heath).
Uranium recycling is not the same thing as breeder reactors. It's essentially the same nuclear enrichment we do to natural uranium to bring it up to concentrations of U235 as usable fuel, just used on spent fuel rather than virgin uranium.
Also, for uranium sea water extraction the plan is to drop buoys with the absorbtion material and let natural currents bring water into contact with it. Pumping all that water out of the ocean would of course be stupid.
Emissions: those are present (now) emissions. The paper I quoted (read above) is about future emissions (median up to 110g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050), bumped up by lowering ore grades.
Recycling: however breeders are AFAIK the most efficient way to tackle this (however it is so difficult there is no adequate industrial reactor, after ~70 years of prototypes and research). Other ways don't seem very appealing, for example France ceased to recycle in 2013.
Yes, since the 1980's a fair amount of Grand Plans aimed a extracting uranium from seawater. Nothing industrial yet. I won't hold my breadth.
Every energy source does require some sort of energy to make it possible to harvest it. And nuclear is no exception. We do not have any sustainable way to filter out enough carbon dioxide with any of the hypothetical excess energy.
So saying there is a any energy source without any carbon dioxide emission is wrong.
> Every energy source does require some sort of energy to make it possible to harvest it. And nuclear is no exception
Indeed, and neither are solar, wind, hydro or any other - they all have environmental impact for producing the panels, turbines, dams, etc. So there are actually no exceptions at all, anywhere, which makes the classification completely useless. Could we get back to the topic now?
Following that there does not exist an energy source that is zero carbon dioxide emissions. Just mining iron cost a lot of energy, pollutes the environment and cost a lot of energy. All current built wind and solar panels that include steel are built using processes that burn fossil fuel. If we look at plastic used in those the picture get even worse.
To reiterate the written words from the authors: Intel prevented this particular problem gets to the public and than they flat out lied to the customer.
I enjoyed the reading and think that it is not a technical article rather entertainment. Maybe that is wrong too and it is both. Why should every technical article by definition be written in a boring language?
For technical details use the terms and search them in your favourite search engine. There are literally tons of articles about every aspect of H.265.
> For technical details use the terms and search them in your favourite search engine.
Thanks for lecturing me, but the article in question is neither too entertaining nor too informative. That was my point. Other than that, of course I can find better materials on the net.
My favourite at the moment is sendwithus. They said their service will never be GDPR compliant. But fortunately they have a new "enterprise grade" product called sendwithus dyspatch. Same feature set, new price plus GDPR compliance.
This is a price jump from $79/Month to a minimum of $24.000/year. And this is with discount for former sendwithus users.
I would consider this to be mafia methods.
Why? This seems like good behavior. They're original product is supported by a business model that relies on user data. Now they are offering a similar product that doesn't make money off of user data but instead charges the user. I am all for the GPDR, but the regulations don't say you can't suck up all user data _and_ you still have to provide your service for free/discounted
I work for a competitor to sendwithus, and, while I can't speak to specifics or the industry as a whole, I can definitely say that it is proven possible to run a company whose revenue model is to charge something comparable to sendwithus's previous monthly subscription fees, be profitable, grow steadily, and not make a single dime on the side selling data to advertisers.
Maybe, maybe not. If it's not I assume they'll be forced to lower their prices and go out of business. I don't have a problem with a company charging money for their product though.
The GDPR appears to be doing its job here because it's forcing a company out of a business model that is unethical and into one that's better for society, regardless of it's better or not for the company and some of its customers
User data could or could not be worth that much. Having a team of programmers implementing and maintaining features that make the software GDPR compliant is perhaps the biggest contributing factor the price increase
If an EU company who holds private data of their customers ("data controller") is buying services from some third party service provider ("data processor"), then it's the data controller's responsibility to ensure that they handle the data responsibly and don't ever give it out to noncompliant processors.
A B2B service can legally offer a non-compliant service in the EU, but then the buyer isn't allowed to put any privately identifiable data in it; GDPR article 28.1 "Where processing is to be carried out on behalf of a controller, the controller shall use only processors providing sufficient guarantees to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures in such a manner that processing will meet the requirements of this Regulation and ensure the protection of the rights of the data subject."
So in the sendwithus case, GDPR would prohibit an EU company to use its $79/month service for handling private data, since it doesn't come with the required assurances.
The problem is you won't get an Data Processing Agreement (DPA) from them. And since email and names are sent through the service the DPA is mandatory. If someone somehow manages to detect your are sending his data to a non-compliant service you can get sued.
pfsense was forked a year or two ago, their 2.3 is just to keep up with the new kid on the block opnsense. And guess what, they have an API ;)
https://opnsense.org/
This is flat out wrong. Containing, mining, recycling and long term storage are so extremely costly and energy hungry that it does not make any economically sense in mid term to use nuclear power. And do not forget. Nuclear is not renewable. It has to be mined. There are mines which will be empty sooner than generally expected. And any kind of mass produced „nuclear battery“ which will eventually end up in land fill is a risk not worth taking. It reminds me of the story about leaded fuel. Yeah maybe a few cars are no problem. But scale up the pollution and boy will you be in trouble.