Explosions don't work that way in space. Very little energy goes into moving the object. Almost all of it either dissipates into space or is spent breaking a large rock into many small rocks that still hit your planet.
You need to impart kinetic energy and quite literally push the rock away. The only reasonable way to do that is throwing inert kinetic projectiles.
Think about starting a Newton's Cradle by lighting a firecracker under it instead of dropping one of the balls. Technically the firecracker has an order of magnitude more energy, but basically none of it is translated into 'useful' kinetic motion.
Detonating a nuke close enough to the surface of a comet or asteroid will cause a lot of it to boil away which produces a lot of thrust. And you could always use more than one!
In the US most small to medium sized companies ignore ipv6 completely. Every company I have worked for didn't use it and had it blocked at the firewall.
Every vote should be a separate piece of paper. My preferred voting method are the fill in the bubble sheets that get scanned as they go into the locked box. They automate the vote count but can be manually counted if needed.
Not having ANY tests means tons of manual testing is needed every time you modify code, which will rapidly consume more time than writing the tests would.
The manual tests also stop being run, or get reduced to such an extreme that any value from them is going to be low. Testing only happy paths and maybe release specific tests. This is shockingly (to outsiders, not to anyone who's ever been in the industry) common in aerospace and defense systems. There were some aircraft I would not fly on for a few years until I knew our updates had rolled out. Now I'm not connected to that work anymore so I'm back to "ignorance is bliss" mode and try not to think about it.
Tchaikovsky has written some of the best books I have ever read like Children of Time and Children of Ruin and also some of the worst books I have ever read like Cage of Souls.
I call it an opportunity. Let France built reactors on their borders (looking at you, Chooz) and earn money. What's the problem here? Everybody gets what they want.
Those "perfectly safe" reactors were hopelessly outdated (the ones last shut down in 2023 were built from 1982 to 1988/89) and nearing the end of their useful life. What no one mentions about nuclear power in Germany: since they weren't allowed to start a nuclear weapons program of their own, one of the reasons for having a civilian nuclear program was already missing, so the German nuclear plants were mostly showcases of Siemens nuclear technology. Once Siemens decided to completely withdraw from this sector in 2011, there was no pro-nuclear lobby in Germany anymore, so the fate of the remaining nuclear reactors was sealed, although some more political theater followed (and still continues).
Of course, this was just the final chapter of a story that began way back in 1986, when Chernobyl led to no further reactors being built in Germany and other countries shelving their plans for nuclear power. If you think the situation in Germany is curious, then look at Austria, who already in 1978 decided to "temporarily" mothball a 100% completed nuclear power plant, a decision which turned permanent in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Austria). Or Italy, which shut down all four of its nuclear power plants (from the 60s and 70s) by 1990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Italy).
They were absolutely not hopelessly outdated. Nuclear reactors can last 60 to 80 years.
When I checked electricity maps today Germany was emitting 17 times as much CO2 per Watt of electricity as France. That is what idiotically shutting down nuclear reactors instead of coal plants does and German environmentalists should be ashamed of themselves.
German electricity is also some of the most expensive in the world and is causing companies to close plants in Germany. BASF, a major German chemical company, has implemented plant closures due to high production costs. Germany's energy policy is a disaster that has made electricity both expensive and dirty.
Agreed, but that's over a decade against now. Time to move on. If Germans just don't want nuclear in their back yard, but have now issue buying from France (soon Poland perhaps), then so be it.
Nuclear reactors are about the most expensive way of producing energy. If you want cheap energy you certainly want to phase out nuclear, which is only viable with massive subsidies or externalities paid for by the tax payer.
Yes and nuclear was especially funded like that by countries with nuclear weapons. Is not a coincidence that there's so much overlap between countries with much nuclear power and weapons.
Not that nuclear power plants create weaponisable isotopes, they don't, but having a healthy functioning nuclear industry really helps.
Conflating nuclear power and nuclear weapons is the mistake Germany made that led to their deeply stupid decision to shut down their perfectly safe nuclear reactors.
Personally I think we do need nuclear weapons but not nuclear power. We can't rely on the US anymore for a nuclear umbrella so Europe needs to have its own (and just the UK/French ones is not enough).
It's the only real deterrent against Russia. But nuclear power I'm not in favour of due to the long-term waste and potential safety impact.
The decision was made in response to Fukushima, 15 years ago. Generational trauma from Chernobyl probably played a role as well. How does this relate to nuclear weapons at all?
Renewables have been built on the back of decades of subsidies, tax credits, mandated purchase obligations (RPSs), and net metering policies that shift integration costs to non-participants. Singling out nuclear here is intellectually dishonest unless you apply the same standard to all sources.
A grid running 70%+ renewables needs massive storage, transmission overbuild, and firm backup capacity costs that don't appear in solar/wind LCOE figures but are real and substantial. Nuclear provides firm, dispatchable, carbon-free baseload with a ~90%+ capacity factor. Solar capacity factors are 20-30%, wind 30-45%.
The OECD's 2020 Projected Costs study shows that at a 3% discount rate with a $30/ton carbon price, nuclear was the cheapest dispatchable option in most countries. Nuclear becomes comfortably cheaper than coal and gas under carbon pricing at low discount rates.
As a Germany energy scientist you should be very angry that right now according to ElectricityMaps.com Germany is emitting about 17 times as much CO2 per watt as France is.
Germany also has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. It is so expensive it is making some industries unprofitable. BASF, a major German chemical company, has implemented plant closures due to high production costs.
Most countries choose either cheap and dirty or expensive and clean for electricity but Germany chose expensive AND dirty.
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