kayaeb

This isn't the case with thorium salt reactors or, if we had enough funding to finally crack it, fusion.

I'm not sure if "accidents" count as "cooked" statistics... modern nuclear plants are much safer than 20th century ones as well, so if we're updating numbers I think nuclear is still an extremely safe contender (and if you split nuclear deaths by country, USA is an order of magnitude again safer than all nuclear). Maybe I misinterpret what you mean by cooked though, I would be interested in reading more about it, if you have a good piece? Wind also relies on pizoelectric elements, I'm not sure what their carbon footprint is compared to nuclear fuel, probably would be less in the future if like CA/OZ stepped into the rare-earth supply chain.

And new types, like thorium salt reactors don't have classical issues like uranium waste products and much much smaller possibility of runaway reactions. And France has been "5 years away" from fusion reactors for like 30 years on a shoestring budget, with real money that could be a possibility in maybe another 30 years and also dodges all the horror-story problems.

Overall, I agree, modern solar, especially reflector-steam plants shouldn't be lumped in with silicon panels, especially when talking about total carbon footprint. But I do think nuclear carries a lot of unfair baggage that has kept us on oil for way longer than we should have been.

Not on the scale of "we need to move the bulk of the energy from Texas to New York for 3 hours, then when the sun sets shift state-level power supply routing from the cornbelt to cover the drop."

Handling a plant going offline is totally different from the logistics of shuttling variable regions of production across the entire country.

if you look up deaths by energy production method, nuclear is far and away the safest, in every single country by orders of magnitude, even wind is deadlier.

Is it though?

Renewables that are popular now, like solar and wind, are weather dependent, which means the grid needs to handle variable input, which it's not designed to do and would need major fixing. Also means you need to store the energy for when it's not abundant, Germany does this by pumping water into mountain lakes to produce hydro on demand, but they've run out of lakes, so you need batteries. Batteries of a grid-size magnitude need carbon-expensive materials and have their own plethora of problems.

These two problems are only feasibly conquerable in a reasonable timescale by a few countries, for others they are prohibitively expensive, far beyond the small subsidies proposed in things like the Paris Accord. Now, sure, USA, Europe could implement these, but it's not going to fix the problem if Asia, Africa don't, and additionally it's going to add significant economic and geopolitical pressure between these nation-blocs, those who are hamstringing themselves and those who aren't.

Hydro has serious geopolitical issues as fresh water supplies grow more tactically necessary, consider Egypt / Ethiopia right now with the Nile, or China's tibetan plateau snow-seed cannons to capture water before it reaches India.

Tidal has extremely short lifespans, any moving system in salt water is difficult to keep going for more than a few years.

Geothermal is good, but also one of the most expensive and a bit of a "slow burner," not going to be powering anything serious with that without sinking billions into the plant.

The only real solution I see is nuclear, but that's a naughty word for some reason.

OCD isn't double-checking your line-spacing in a document, it's being unable to leave the house in under 45 minutes because you check the stove twenty times, then the door lock twenty, then turn around 5 minutes down the street to check again, then make a deal with yourself that you'll check the stove 3 times in a row and then not allow yourself to do it again, only you do it again anyways and finally take a picture of it so you can discretely check the photo on your phone when you're out on your date that you showed up half an hour late to.

This really rubbed me the wrong way, the closing sentence sums it up: "What if a doctoral program’s prestige arose, in part, from the way that it treated its students? We should dare to dream of such a thing."

There is a huge problem in academia where the number of PhDs is growing exponentially, and the number of positions is staying basically flat. I strongly disagree with this "participation award" mentality of "you deserve it." It's... leading a lot of people to make really stupid career decisions and I think a lot of people are doing it just to get this gilded club to bludgeon people who don't have PhDs -- that's the only reason I can think of for a person to hope for an "easy" PhD experience.

My advisor being rough at the right times (and in good spirit) was absolutely essential to the defense, which is essentially gladiatorial combat against your father (well, mother in my case), when both you and your advisor hope you can defeat the master in your specific realm. I would not have been able to do it if my advisor pranced about making everything pleasant and easy and convenient.

protip: if your prof is tenured and still first author on more than 2 papers a year, they're siphoning their student's work, or they're setting you up for pipelining positions (which are not horrible, but, be aware that's what's up).

I've never had a prof insert my work into their own papers, they've hooked me up to contribute to other teams, but with us it was always "my" project.

If you get a chance to see them present at a conference (lots of these are on video online nowadays), check if they specifically mention their students in the presentation, that's a green flag.

Really depends on your mentor. I've seen some gross abuses where the union was absolutely essential.

Also the union hooked up like BBQs and whatever so like, that's nice.

I disagree a bit about freedom and flexibility in switching faculty, and I disagree strongly about the phrasing of "willing" to work with x faculty on y problem.

I don't care how smart a student is, they are in no way prepared to select a project that will lead to interesting findings, which is a must if you plan to continue in any capacity. A good mentor will have a project with proprietary data that has a 95% chance of successful publication. In this way the student won't get scooped (not through any fault of their own, it's just that a PhD student, even a good one, just can't compete speedwise with someone like me who already has a code library built up to do complex analyses, this is why proprietary data is essential, or an extremely good prof who has an idea that they are confident no one else is on). My projects were a mix, I had one with proprietary data, and one which was a legit eureka finding. But as you say, most profs just aren't good enough to do these Eurekas (not an insult, 90% of science is gruntwork), so they need the cloistered data playground that the child student can crash around in until they manage to build their horrible little sandcastle. That data depends on funding, which depends on a proposal, which depends on a promise to do project X on data Y, and the prof is going to get reamed next time they apply for funding if student Z decided it wasn't "fun" and went to some other prof.

Caveat: We had one turkish guy who was straight up getting academically abused by his advisor (like literally timing his lunch breaks, sending spies to make sure he attended class, super weird shit), and thank the heavens there was a judicial oversight in place for him to get a new placement.

Caveat the second: I thrive in a low-input environment, so my prof just put me in the sandbox and I built the most magnificent and beautiful sandcastle the world has ever seen and roared my way to a whopping like seven citations (lol). My prof was also the director though and the low-input environment wasn't like optional, and not everyone did well in this low-input environment.

FAST can also move it's "mirror," the shell has some huge number of triangular sections on wires, so it should be able to point even more than arecibo which has an immutable reflector. Both have adjustable focal points (sensor head) on wires like you describe.

FAST is actually having difficulty hiring (on-site specialists like operations director) the smartest minds because it's in a jungle in small-town China.

But yes, overall China is executing an excellent "brain drain" (not meant in a negative sense) by being willing to invest in these "keystone" projects when other countries are tightening budgets.

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

This is correct to an extent, the surface of a mirror needs to be polished to a degree such that abnormalities in the lens are small relative to the wavelength being observed (I think it's the diffraction limit equation, not positive atm). Radio telescopes (with cm wavelengths) require much less precision than optical ones (with sub-micron wavelengths). This telescope, FAST, actually is made out of a collection of triangular (I think) sheets arranged into a kind of dome, if it were observing optical it would act like a disco-ball instead of a parabolic mirror. Arecibo is literally a hole in the ground with rocks and crap on the reflector.

This thing actually had "first light" observations with several holes in it from triangular sections that were fritzing just kind of fluttering in the breeze. The first radio telescopes were literally built out of post-coldwar trash just kind of rigged up in the back-yard. There's a major array going in in south Africa where the antennas are like christmas tree wires that are just kind of hammered into the ground, one of the PIs showed video at a colloquium I attended of his 10 year old kids setting them up. If anything in modern science can be called "low specification" it's radio telescopes.

Why does this scientific publication read like an op-ed? Absolutist language strikes me as exceptionally unscientific.

"it’s time to panic." "We are in deep trouble." "That’s it. Forever." "Forever. Think of what that word means."

Disregarding that, the paper seems to address the idea that stratospheric albedo modifications cannot counteract atmospheric carbon buildup since they operate on timescales of decades versus millenia. Specifically they state that:

"Deployment of albedo hacking does not in any way “buy time” to get carbon dioxide emissions under control, since once emitted, carbon dioxide cannot to any significant extent be unemitted with known economically feasible technology"

Which seems to rest on the absolutist premise that we will never know an economically feasible way to go negative carbon. Otherwise, buying time should absolutely be a reasonable thing to consider.

The author closes with a sentence along the lines of:

"To decarbonize, however, requires building a political movement that regards the climate crisis as a top priority."

Which strikes me as... not exactly impartial (Why would not an economic reason work? Or a grassroots social reason?). Which is obnoxious when the author makes specific appeals to the authority of their profession which has authority by the very virtue of being impartial:

"As a scientist, I viscerally dislike repeating myself; I like to think that once the truth is out there, it will somehow win out and it is not necessary to belabor the point."

This "article" rubs me wrong.