Interesting Links for 13-10-2021

[andrewducker]

Disney's The Shadow King - Henry Selick's Lost Masterpiece

(tags:Disney stopmotion animation video history )

Ten EU countries join France in condemning UK post-Brexit fishing regime

(tags:uk europe fish doom )

How much did Tim Burton have to do with The Nightmare Before Christmas?

(tags:TimBurton neilgaiman animation video history movies )

Issues to consider about Northern Ireland

(tags:NorthernIreland Ireland UK Europe trade usa )

Damnit, now I want a Robin Williams biopic!

(tags:video biography movies )

The real reason Britain failed on coronavirus

(tags:Pandemic epicfail uk )

China's solar power has reached price parity with coal

(tags:china solarpower coal GoodNews )

Scared Of Spiders? There's An App For That. (I've downloaded it myself to give it a go)

(tags:phobia spiders apps psychology )

The role of class in the "Bad Art Friend" story

(tags:writing class behaviour )

Comments

Chinese Solar PV

[danieldwilliam]

$3 / MWH by 2060?

Eleventy !!1!?!1

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[andrewducker]

Fingers crossed, eh?

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[danieldwilliam]

$3 is practically zero compared to the last 200 years.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, it would be amazing. Let's hope we can pull it off.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[armiphlage]

$3 is practically zero compared to any form of power ever used by humans ever.

At $3 per MWh, so many technologies suddenly become feasible.

It'd be so cheap to incinerate toxic waste in plasma furnaces that waste dumps would be remediated just to save on maintenance costs.

Aluminum would replace steel in nearly every application.

Titanium would take over for today's current applications of aluminum.

It'd be worthwhile dumping incinerator ash into electroplating baths to recover all the heavy metals.

We'd be making nitrogen fertilizer and cement using electric arc furnaces instead of fossil fuels.

Desalination would be so cheap that any potentially arable land near coastline would be irrigated.

Restaurants would air-condition their outdoor patios.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[armiphlage]

The Irving Family (billionaires in New Brunswick, with their own oil company) installed a heated driveway that would melt snow, so they wouldn't have to shovel it. Even they couldn't afford to keep it running.

With cheap electricity, it might be feasible to install heating elements in roadways, as being cheaper than paying for snow ploughs.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[andrewducker]

That really would be an amazing change.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[danieldwilliam]

I think you are absolutely right about it being practically zero.

I generally carry in my head the ballpark figure that energy costs about $100 / mwh.

$3 / mwh is a 97% discount, that's as close to zero as makes no odds.

Desalination and pumping of water would be so cheap that you could use any potentially arable land within a 100 km of the coast, or more. And pump water in the Aral and Caspian Seas or back up the Himalayas or Greenland uplands to form re-glaciers.

We could mine the oceans for lithium and gold and everything else that is in there in small concentrations and do so more cheaply than we could mine it out of the ground.

I actually wonder if it would be cheaper for every city by the coast to run desalination plants rather than get drinking water from local rivers.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[armiphlage]

When the cost of energy is less than the cost of running pipes to reservoirs, it'd be cheaper to purify and reuse your sewage.

The output from my local sewage treatment plant is already cleaner than the lake it is dumped into (which is also the water supply for the metropolitan area). With cheap electricity, you could add UV arrays and reverse osmosis filters, to remove the "ick factor" currently preventing most cities from recycling their sewage.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[danieldwilliam]

I see that - especially given as you say the sewage needs to be treated before it goes back in the water anyway.

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[armiphlage]

The city of Windhoek has been recycling their sewage for 53 years out of necessity. Cheap energy would make this economically viable for other cities. That includes those near coasts - since you have to manage your sewage sludge anyway, using sewage as your water source saves you from having to also manage disposal or dispersal of concentrated brine from seawater desalination.

https://www.planet.veolia.com/en/wastewater-recycling-drinking-water-windhoek-namibia

Re: Chinese Solar PV

[armiphlage]

Sandy looked at me in puzzlement when I squeaked loudly when I read that!

[anna_wing]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueTrace

The NHS didn't actually have to reinvent the wheel on track and trace, either...

[andrewducker]

Oh abolutely.

And we had a decent existing track/trace system which *was* local. But the government decided to ignore that and set up a whole new centralised system from scratch. Because, presumably, that way they could outsource it to their mates and hand them a ton of cash.

[calimac]

What is going on here? Are they actually making a Robin Williams bio-pic? What exactly is this clip?

[andrewducker]

It's someone who does an amazing Robin Williams impression trying to get a movie made by getting a short scene shot, in the hope it catches the attention of a movie exec.

[calimac]

Thanks for the explanation. This is not something people who wanted to make a movie did back in the days when I knew anything whatever about the movie industry.

Obviously his RW impression is indeed amazing. How well he can act would have to be seen.

[andrewducker]

Agreed. This is one scene, he'd need to do a lot more, with more range, to carry a movie.

The real reason Britain failed on coronavirus

[anef]

I suppose at least this is in the Spectator...