FeòragRe: last boost. The German transport minister would like to see maglevs back.
Also, this word meaning (I think) “Public Transport Financing Act” - Gemeindeverkehrsfinanzierungsgesetzes
Till Westermayer@feorag More or less, Gemeinde means communal (city/town/county) in this case.
Charlie Stross@_tillwe_ @feorag Thus ignoring the only sensible reason for going with maglev—sheer speed over long distance routes, competing with jet airliners—and ignoring that local transport needs to be cheap or free to get people out of their cars.
(Also, they don't seem to remember what happened to Transrapid. Oops.)
@cstross @feorag My guess: Friedrich Merz' frame of reference is 1998-2002, the year Merkel replaced him as chairperson of the CDU parliamentary party. Everything after this time is an error, to be ignored or corrected. (Or as one person in another thread on this asked: can I have back Grunge, too?).
@_tillwe_ @feorag There *might* be something I don't know—the new Chinese rare earth magnets this century have revolutionized car drivetrains, so they might no longer need superconductors for schwebebahn (i.e. light rail) applications?—but I doubt it's anything as forward-thinking as that, coming from the CDU.
JollyOrc@cstross @[email protected] @feorag the same clown posse also wants nuclear power back, along with "high efficiency combustion engines" and "green gas" power plants.
All their ideas are from the 80ies at best.
David Scott Moyer@jollyorc @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag In my ever so humble opinion, the problem with nuclear power is that we implemented it long before we figured out how to do it safely, cleanly, and with proper disposal/re-use of the waste. Then, because it was online and monetized, we never bothered to figure out those things.
mathew
Tubemeister@farbel @mathew @jollyorc @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag I think your assessments are halves of the same argument.
It takes a long time and a godforsaken amount of money to build nuke power _because_ we haven't figured out how to run this stuff safer and more efficiently, we've been dragging our feet for decades and now it's too late and we're up against the wall.
@farbel @mathew @jollyorc @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag I still think nuclear power could've had a good place in the mix, for steady high power industry like data centers(*) that you're not going to run off some simple rooftop solar.
* not the AI kind, the legitimate kind that replaces a couple thousand companies with on-prem servers.
But the time to start building would've been a decade ago at least. By now that money is better spent elsewhere, like upgrading the grid.
@farbel @Tubemeister @mathew @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag Naah, fusion turns out to be *difficult*—high temperature plasmas trapped in magnetic fields are unstable and like to dump their charge into the structure if they possibly can. Actual stable ones require lots of computing power that only became available after the 1980s, and meanwhile large plasma experiments like ITER have costs that scale as roughly the fourth power of their output, so they're monstrously expensive.
Stephen Cox Author@Tubemeister @stephenwhq @farbel @mathew @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag We've GOT stable commercial fusion power! You can buy it right now, by the kilowatt of solar panels!
@farbel @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag Also, 99% of the "high level waste" is basically unburned fuel with 98% of the energy still in there, which is uneconomical to reprocess and use as fuel at current market prices, but which *would work fine as fuel* if we priced in reprocessing and slapped a moratorium on uranium mining for a few centuries.
This is a failure caused by slaving adherence to market ideology, not a waste disposal problem.
Zillion@farbel @zillion @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag I think he(?) is referring to Uranium fission reactors that require enrichment (and can be tuned to breed plutonium) as opposed to low enrichment reactors or Thorium reactors which are erroneously believed not to be proliferation risks (they can be tweaked to produce 233U, which is usable in a bomb).