Waryle

  • 0 Posts
  • 224 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 9th, 2023
  • WaryletoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Refurbished hard drive retailersEnglish
    2·
    15 days ago

    Sure, in a ultra-consumerist world, everybody buy all things new. Now that hard drives cost a kidney, you buy refurbished ones, and you realize that it’s not that bad, especially if you use the right mitigations.

    And that’s a trend that may grow and spread to other things, considering that mondialisation will get increasingly difficult due to geopolitics troubles, and petrol becoming costlier over the next years/decades.

  • WaryletoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Refurbished hard drive retailersEnglish
    2·
    15 days ago

    Bought 4x10TB drives 2 years ago for 385€ on eBay, from a 20+ years old seller account with tens of thousands of good reviews with a long warranty on drives, to build a local media server + some other services for family and friends.

    One was dead on arrival: they just sent me another one, no question asked.

    I have them set-up in a RAIDZ1 array, so I can have one disk down and still have the system up.

    I have my services and critical data backed up daily (with about twenty snapshots that go back to months before) with Restic to both a Hetzner storage box and a local external drive (both tested for recovery).

    I have one disk that failed me a few months ago: sent the disk to the seller, they tested it, and sent me a new 12TB drive because they didn’t have 10TB anymore.

    Added it to my ZFS pool, and since then, everything is ok. My few users didn’t even notice anything going on: downtime was minimal, performance was ok.

    If more than one disk fails, I have my data on my external drive. If my external drive fails, I can download everything from Hetzner. In both situations, I wait for new drives, replace the old ones in the pool, and restore my snapshots. The downtime is annoying, but I’m not running a business so nobody is paying for anything, so it’s ok.

  • WaryletoScience Memes@mander.xyz•A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming...English
    2·
    2 months ago

    Solar is the main source of interest, since it’s gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon […] In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.

    Solar needs silver, tellurium, indium, gallium, cadmium and other things. Silver is already close-ish to become scarce, tellurium and gallium are for most part a China world-wide monopoly. Rare earth elements are needed in inverters and power conversion, and lithium/cobalt/nickel are needed for batteries needed by solar to be viable without a reliable power source. All of that will be in competition with EV and other applications.

    And nope, the amounts involved are not minor if we talk about all country phasing out of both nuclear and fossil.

    The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, … in the constituent resources are the batteries

    Nope. I mean as of today, and for decades to come the highly globalized production will be entirely dependent on oil. No oil: no ore mining, no manufacturing, no transportation, no installation, and therefore no wind turbines and no solar panels. And that’s before we even get to batteries and the power grid.

    So in a world where peak oil has already passed, the price of everything that relies heavily on globalization will keep rising, including solar panels and wind turbines. And let me remind you once again that we’re still only at the very beginning of solar and wind power: competition among countries hasn’t even started yet.

    So you might say that without oil, we can’t build nuclear power plants either, and that’s true. Except that with, say, 1 million liters of oil, we can generate far more megawatts through nuclear power than through solar and wind, because it requires far fewer resources and far less reliance on globalization.

    The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge.

    It’s entirely dependent on oil. Nothing get produced without oil, and oil will get costlier and scarce year after year.

    Also, we would need most of the entire world lithium reserve just to convert our cars from oil to electricity. Powering entire countries with batteries, which necessitate magnitudes more storage, is just science-fiction.

    And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future. If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now.

    I mean, if I seriously start building gen II nuclear reactors in parallel, I’ll have a dozen by 10-15 years, and have almost entirely decarbonated my electricity by 20-25 years with more than 50 reactors. That’s feasible, France proved back in the 70-80’s, humanity is not not dumber and less capable than then.

    But again, you can’t tell when/if you will ever find some storage technology that you can scale up to TWh for capacity, and GW worth of power input/output.

    Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land.

    Batteries are not up to scale and might never be, and you would need like 5 of the Europe biggest STEP to cover capacity, and 15+ for power output just for France’s needs in a windless night in winter. We’re talking about 60-70GW over 14h. And that’s assuming you somehow have enough solar and water the next day to pump all the water back in 10h, to be prepared for the next night.

    Also STEPs can’t be built anywhere, it’s highly dependent of the geography of the country. Some countries will need to rely on batteries exclusively, which again, are just plain science-fiction as of today.

    Overprovisioning

    Overprovisioning does nothing when sun is down and wind is missing over most of the continent, which will happen even more often due to climate change. Once again, just to hold a single windless night of winter in France, you’ll need close to a TWh of storage capacity, and 60-70GW of power output. And that’s without accounting for the remaining 2/3 of energy consumption that is still fossil-based and needs to be converted to electricity.

    So yeah, you need a baseline of controllable power production AKA fossils, nuclear, or hydro. Fossils are out for obvious reasons, as well as biomass which is just Germany coping for its bad energy policies, and not all countries have access to hydroelectricity. So we need nuclear in the end.

  • WaryletoTechnology@lemmy.world•France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity gridsEnglish
    82·
    2 months ago

    french power plants are getting old

    Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them

    can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves

    Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless

    and regularly have major accidents

    Also plain bullshit

    source(german)

    That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations

    in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.

    It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.

    And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.

    also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct

    Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.

    And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well

  • WaryletoScience Memes@mander.xyz•A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming...English
    63·
    2 months ago

    vs basically no risk with renewables

    Except for:

    • the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so if the world decides to seriously shift toward renewables, it will lead to competition for the metals and other materials needed to build them
    • the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so it takes a huge amount of oil to extract them (oil that we’re running out of)
    • the fact that they require an enormous amount of space, so current NIMBY issues will increase tenfold
    • the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours, and therefore a 100% solar + wind scenario is science fiction

    In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics related problems solar and wind need to solve.

  • WaryletoScience Memes@mander.xyz•take their money and arrest those responsibleEnglish
    51·
    3 months ago

    Hydrogen will never be a viable fuel and will never save the world. It leaks like hell, has a low energy density so it needs to be either highly compressed or highly refrigerated to liquify it to be even usable for something that is moving, which needs a lot of energy and induces a lot of constraints.

    Basically, everywhere where electricity is a meaningful solution, hydrogen is just outclassed. Which leaves heavy industries and maybe cargo ships. The rest must either electrify, or just go.