Another completely misleading article on gravity batteries. All the solid weight stuff is bunk, probably designed to suck out money from naive investors / corrupt state officials. Moving solid weights gives only a very small electric power, so building the proposed solid weight batteries gives units of MW at most, which is uneconomical. Unless it transports a large lake of water up and down a hill like in pumped-storage hydroelectric plants, and can provide tens or hundreds of MW. Such installations are very expensive to build today, because all the low-hanging fruit options seem to have been already built.
My thoughts exactly. It makes the engineer in me go mad if I see projects like Energy Vault [1] getting massive funding that could be used to try and develop technologies that make sense. Thankfully there are some people who see through the charade [2].
If you are into this thing and looking for an even more stupid idea to store energy, I present to you the StEnSEA [3]. Rolls right off the tongue, right? It is a hollow concrete sphere that is lowered to the bottom of the lake. Pumps then remove water from it, creating a vacuum. Letting the water back in and using the pumps as generators, the energy is reclaimed. Curiously absent from all documentation of this project is the amount of energy stored. I did some back of the envelope calculations a while back and it is 3.8kWh, for a multi-million-euro prototype!
If I understand it correctly, ~20MWh is for the full size model at 700m depth and with a radius of 15m (prototype radius is 1.5m and it is located at a depth of 100m).
And building concrete spheres that can withstand the pressure of a 700m water column is probably an interesting design challenge on its own.
These kinds of gravity batteries worry me a little, because when I've seen the economics, they actually look pretty decent… and yet, that economic calculation ignores the other impacts, like them being terrible energy density and thus needing absurd volumes dedicated to them.
Most proposals are even worse, as they suggest concrete rather than sand. The monetary cost works out even then, but concrete production currently emits CO2, and the combination of that with the low energy density means they'd have to run for around a century to only be as bad as fossil fuels.
The best option i know of for a mine is compressed air, and there some storages like this already built and operational. Just seal mine/cavity/empty oil well/etc and pump air in. There are some loses on friction, heating-from-compression but overall good economically speaking
> Unless it transports a large lake of water up and down a hill
https://gravity-storage.com/ are trying to make compact hydroelectric plants by putting weight on the fluid. Wish someone would give them loads of money :/
Gravity batteries are so appealing, until you calculate the cost per kWh. Any weight that you have to manufacture is already too expensive and you want manufactured weights since you want your weights to be as dense as possible and not just made out of compressed dirt.
> rather than slapping things that work on top of each other, mindlessly using magic like containers.
I have exactly this problem. I need to run centos7-era binary application on rocky9, and of course, it does not compile on the new gcc compiler in rocky9, and also some libraries are missing/have changed too much.
I was thinking I will run the app in a centos7 container on rocky9 machine, but this creates lots of unwelcome complications and additional work.
I'm not very familiar with Nix, but it seems one could install Nix on rocky9 and then somehow use it to build my application against the centos7 devel libraries. Do you think this is a plausible pathway for compiling and running such an old application? It would be great if I could just compile the old app on the new system and forget about containers.
Commercial nuclear should be very hard, almost impossible. This seems to be the correct conclusion after all the accidents and the reasons for them - incompetent, self-serving management pushing dangerous commands on the personnel (Chernobyl,Three Mile Island) or normalizing bad architecture and security plans (Fukushima). Better expensive energy than another major nuclear accident.
Nuclear energy can be done safely as long as it is run by competent nuclear energy physicists/technicians with real authority, so they can and will shut down stupid ideas such as operating outside parameters because economy/boss said so. This seems to rule out commercial organizations. NRC is more benevolent than that, maybe they should actually be even tougher.
We should allow only competent states to build and operate nuclear plants, so science and rules take precedence to money and boss boot-licking.
This may push nuclear energy into unprofitable territory, depending on the market conditions, infrastructure, water and people resources. Which is fine by me - nuclear energy in some areas is so important for grid stability we should have it even if it is unprofitable.
Extreme events and subsequent changes are why it can be the "safest form of energy". After Chernobyl and Fukushima, regulation did change in those countries as well.
There must be a name for the fallacy when one is focused on avoiding a single risk while completely ignoring much larger and closer dangers.
Nuclear energy has a minuscule list of total casualties throughout history. Casualties per megawatt produced? It's practically zero. At the same time burning hydrocarbons kills every single day through pollution. It kills millions yearly. Burning coal even spews radioactive ash into the air!
And above all, climate change is looming as a civilization-ending danger, closer and closer.
The black swan big disasters have to be taken seriously too.
A nuclear accident creates a big and costly disaster suddenly. People don't like sudden big problems but can live with continuously growing ones.
Burning hydrocarbons is much more acceptable in that regard. CO2/dust pollution is accepted by society, because it is continuous and dilutes well. Killing millions is socially acceptable when it happens randomly all over the planet. Radioactive pollution due to coal burning is/should be negligible, most is(should be) filtered out in the smokestack scrubbers.
I don't like fossil power plants, but they are much easier to build and more acceptable to people than nuclear ones. That's why regulation and security have to be high with nuclear, to make it acceptable to most of society.
> civilization-ending danger
I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger in the coming decades. It already creates political problems, migration. If we keep pumping CO2 then maybe in hundred years.
We had 2 huge ones. They resulted in a few thousand deaths and some uninhabitable land. Nothing compared to pollution damage.
> accepted by society [...] socially acceptable
I'd rather decide based on reason. And I doubt many people find millions of deaths due to pollution every year acceptable. They just don't know they had a choice. Choice stolen from them by rabid anti-nuclear fear mongering.
> I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger
Yet you think a few black swan nuclear disasters are? Can I borrow your crystal ball? You are pretty sure about the future but most experts I read disagree: nuclear experts consider it extremely safe while climate experts warn of dire futures.
That is surprising view to me. I tried to explain why naive anti-regulation talk is not helpful for getting more nuclear energy. The way to have more nuclear energy is to embrace and strengthen the state interest in nuclear.
When discussing nuclear vs coal, it's always funny to point out that coal power plants produce several times as much radiation as nuclear power plants.
Coal plants emit more radionuclides into atmosphere, but nuclear plants produce more radionuclides overall (burnt fuel). This coal nuclear pollution is however still very small to the point of irrelevance, the real pollution problem is with CO2, dust and mining coal.
This is what IBM and people living off mainframes tell the world all day long, but I think you'll have trouble showing that mainframe's job can't be replaced by a few hi-end x86 servers under cost.
Inertia, regulators, and company having lots of money to the point they don't care (banks...) explains mainframes. They do the job well, so why bother replacing them if you don't care that they cost more.
> This is what IBM and people living off mainframes tell the world all day long, but I think you'll have trouble showing that mainframe's job can't be replaced by a few hi-end x86 servers under cost.
It's been tried many times before, and it never works out. Whether it's system complexity that can't be replicated, or woes from floating point imprecision, it's a hell of a lot harder than people who haven't dug into it think.
Im on mobile at the moment but I'll see if I can find some when I'm back on desktop. The stories I've read were nearly all on HN over the last 10 years, some as articles and some as comments, that came up on threads about cobol (mainframe rarely seems to make it to relevance lol)
For starters they don't suffer from C and C++ related exploits, given the systems languages that were used to write them like PL/S and NEWP, or the business languages being mainly COBOL, RPG and nowadays Java.
> However, z/OS also implements 64-bit Java, C, C++, and UNIX (Single UNIX Specification) APIs and applications through UNIX System Services – The Open Group certifies z/OS as a compliant UNIX operating system – with UNIX/Linux-style hierarchical HFS[NB 3][NB 4] and zFS file systems. These compatibilities make z/OS capable of running a range of commercial and open source software.[3] z/OS can communicate directly via TCP/IP, including IPv6,[4] and includes standard HTTP servers (one from Lotus, the other Apache-derived) along with other common services such as SSH, FTP, NFS, and CIFS/SMB.
Although I like the argument that having an OS that does not require use of C is an interesting feature. Then it's really about the quality software platform, more than about the magic hardware.
Nope. They made great software, and not so good hardware. They went away because dot-com bubble burst and tech world cancelled orders of the hardware. Also, bad business decisions linking their success with sales of hardware, instead of support for software.
> "Sun is responsible" for the problem, said a project manager at a large European bank that was affected by it. The manager spoke on condition of anonymity. "Their architecture was fundamentally flawed because there was no ECC checking on the cache memory. This is something you get in even the lowliest Intel processor that costs a few dollars," he said in an e-mail message.
I can't stand Dave's garage. There's no garage - he's a Microsoft millionaire who became a youtuber bragging about his empty golden tech life escapades fueled by the well-paying position as a programmer at Microsoft in the past.
Now he made a shallow acolyte video which seems like it should have been a paid marketing by the IBM mainframe division. I hope he got payed well, otherwise Dave is even more self-unaware that I thought. I get this is what Linus Tech Tips would do for a living, but really, a senior programmer with gobs of money is doing this superficial reporting on a what IBM told him on his trip there???
Seriously, this video (and YT comments it has) is a naive uncritical sucker reverberating most of the standard phrases from the mainframe sphere, although admittedly, with nice high-def shots of the machine components. I expected more serious adult commentary, not a teenage boy fan ravings.
Mainframes by IBM are a niche expensive product that is an interesting concept and history, but it is not an "amazing machine" to be put up today. There is no perspective for most young people working on mainframes, they will be phased out eventually. It's a solid product for the captured audience, which is like 2 banks and card payment processors, but that's it.
"Woo, they don't rely on ECC, they have multiple independent modules, because cosmic radiation, so cool" Get real, this is not an important problem, ECC works already, and good software has to account for occassional HW errors anyway.
Mainframes have their uses, and I haven't heard of anyone pushing them outside of financial applications, where mainframes don't offer much value. As for being eventually phased out, so will everything else, even x86 and ARM.
You don't have to like Dave, his "garage", his channel, or his previous employers, but lots of people find his videos interesting.
