madnificent

I love the argument you make here. I disagree, but it’s a direct, hard and positive set of statements.

Nuclear takes a decade to build, it concentrates power to a large actor, and we have issues with handling waste (including closing down the plantO. The risks are huge when in a war zone (see Ukraine) and when things go bad they go bad for many. Further, nuclear can’t rapidly scale up or down so it’s not great at handling fluctuations in demand, similar but less extreme than wind and solar without batteries.

Progress has been made. With each step we think it’s now really safe. But a few decades later it turns out we still had a bit more to learn. In the seventies they were telling us it was safe too.

Ever since there was a glimmer of hope that costly reactors could get built again there has been a weird amount of positive posts about how great nuclear is. I don’t think we know how to store anything for 1000 years because we have not had the necessary structures in place for so long yet and thus we are de facto finding that out.

Batteries are not cheap. But solar and wind are! I think, based on what I’ve read, that that is a great path forward. It is safe, and it puts power in the hands of the people. No need to buy uranium from the next slowly corrupting regime. No need to get threatened by a company that they’ll ahut the plant down. You have read other things and believe nuclear is the right way. No CO2, safe, good power delivery, limited space use. Neither of us is calling the shots on these decisions.

I guess one will clearly be better than the other based on geography and available workforce.

If we can continue to choose the least impactful and most distributed and cheapest long-term (including plant cleanup, windmill recycling, solar panel recycling, nuclear waste storage, battery recycling) then we’re on a good path. I hope we can do that whilst subsidizing research on all these fronts.

I agree with that to some extent. It was probably not the engineers’ task, but as I’ve read in the past, our models of the seventies were not that far off. They did not plan for it probably because they were asked not to, or perhaps they (like many others) did not want to believe in the doomsday predictions, or perhaps they (like many others) believed it would be solved by science by now. The warnings were there though, we chose to ignore what was coming at us if we did not change our ways.

My point is that by stating the reactor could work, you imply that there’s a trivial solution: stop protecting nature to have nuclear electric energy in France. You could state explicitly that we should or should not. By leaving it open it feels to me like we’re pretending nuclear is ready for the climate change ahead of us if only we could get way with that stupid nature. An argument could be had I suppose.

As a side-note: It did make me wonder if you could work with complete evaporation. Not dumping any water back. That would also be horrible for nature but I don’t know if anything in the system has to run at less than 100C.

To my knowledge, but I did not look this up, these constraints were known at design time. I don’t recall these changing. Hence the statement may be true, but pointing at the known constraint after the fact shifts the blame to nature conservation rather than infrastructure and climate change. This at a time where climate change focus is of utmost importance.

Hence, albeit factually correct, it is disingenuous to give it the focus.

If these constraints were added in the past 10 years then that could be considered different depending on the reasons for the change.

What has changed are the water levels and base temperatures. Our environment has changed and the infrastructure has not been adapted to it. Luckily we have other tools for generating electric power ready to be rolled out.

That twists it to “protecting nature raises your electricity bill” where it’s just that that the plant, when built, did not take into account water levels could drop this low. As if they assumed climate change wouldn’t be this influential or something.

Our experience so far shows that using Linked Data can give you many apps that work together on parts of the data.

Depend on semantic data models (vocabularies of URIs such as foaf), use triples in your applications, and share these same triples whilst looking at the serialisation (such as xml, jsonld, ttl) as an implementation detail, and you’re a long way towards interoperable apps and information sharing.

If you have many interoperable apps and they can share data, then you’ve went a good distance towards and open market where software can compete. If the data is also openy available to you (as it should) then you took large steps towards sovereignty too. You’ll have a choice of applications to use and you can easily move the data between the applications.

Feel free to ask questions should you have any.

Interesting read. I’ve glanced over sections and read others.

I’ve been involved in the use of some of these frameworks. They are good reference frameworks but they are most often overly heavy to get started and/or the implementation is most often not supporting what the marketing material suggests.

Good integration projects start from limited partners with limited datasets exchanging with each other knowing they want to exchange with more partners in the future. Limited can be two to seven and they can even be in the same organisation. Perhaps it works with more, I have not been involved in that. They contain only the necessary roles and know how they’ll expand. These frameworks are great to get the expansion options in place. However, to get something going we’ve seen that a cheap and structurally correct solution to data sharing gets the ball running more quickly and for longer, then an expensive and heavy project which needs all sorts of approvals (even if it would be superior).

Projects that start with the weight of all the roles filled in by different actors need substantial funding to get started and I don’t think they generally last after funding dried up. Projects faking their way through the extra roles and providing the most limited interpretation of some of these roles with the project having some (even vague) shared benefit seem to survive past the grant stage.

Get some basics right and get going is my advice. Identifiers, shared and extensible data models, and a clear way of sharing data.

I like these frameworks, they help set the stage, but my gosh do they see problems where there are none when a project is just getting started.