chris_va
Typical 50% RH at ground level is ~7g/kg air, air is roughly 1kg/m^3, so between the surface and the planetary boundary layer (let's say 1km) is about 7L of water per m^2 of surface. Moving along at ~3m/s means 21L/s passes by each meter of fence line.
PBL probably mixes after about 50km, so it takes ~5 hours to normalize after you pull out water at ~5 knot wind speed. If you want to not make a dent, means you can pull less than 1L per m^2 per hour, or about 8m^3 pear, which is about 8x the yearly requirement for farmland.
So, you can irrigate a farm and your neighbors would mostly be fine.
(math not checked)
Though fun to see. More interesting than the station keeping (indefinite part) is that it enables ~100km orbits, which are ~5x closer than what remote sensing satellites use today and thus could get 5x the resolution for the same instrument.
And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).
Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.
My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_theory_of_Shakespeare...
By looking at mutual information from different authors on the same topic vs same author on different topics. As I recall, it convincingly disproved the hypothesis.
Learning to hack something together in high school using the latest technology (vacuum tubes, radios, microprocessors, web/javascript) has been a common theme in the tech world for generations. With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?
I see this in industrial cameras, do you know if any filmmakers use non standard Bayer filters?
Again, devil's advocate
The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.
As an aside, we need to dissolve roughly one large mountain into the mix layer (top ~50m) of the ocean to have it fully take up atmospheric CO2. Without dissolving, the reaction is very slow (co2 in atmosphere => slightly lower pH rain => reaction with mostly passivated rock + erosion).
Uniformity of the light field is going to be different, but that is not my sub-domain.
There aren't a lot of places with multiple km of water without things like animal life or other confounders.
When you give O(20000) people you have a 1-0.9999^20000 (high) probability that that will leak anyway (either 1/20000 people not following the rules, or just the accident/attack surface area).
The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.
... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.
And can in many cases be much higher than the heat energy (e.g. theta pinch).
Maybe the conclusion is correct, or maybe not, but as written the methodology is under specified, statistics are not supported, and there too many confounders not addressed. One should not take anything from this without a better write up. Just misunderstanding what n= means is a huge flag.
Since the author is here, I have to ask: Why a blog post and not an actual paper? Why spray this onto the internet without validating the work? Or, conversely, why not caveat the work as exploratory data science?
Mines Museum of Earth Science (Golden CO) and The Harvard Museum of Natural History (Mineralogy room, Cambridge MA)
Fun info: The NASA orbital codes include things like photon pressure... from sunlight reflected off of other planets in the solar system. At some point, I think they are just showing off :)
It explains the intent (to protect consumers/grid from price changes and fluctuation), and bans 20MW+ loads. They forgot to define load, so a behind-the-meter datacenter (zero net load on the grid) still would likely not get permitted even though it does not violate the intent of the law, which is a bit odd.