Wind farms are a thing because a wind turbine can only be so big: for more power, you put up more of them. They are so cheap because all the costs are transparent, there is noplace to bury wholly-legal graft. A big farm amortizes fixed project management cost.
Capacity factor of nukes is not so much more than of wind turbines, though if you have a bunch of nukes, it would be rare to have many of the nukes down at once other than for urgent retrofits. Steam turbines are down a lot, so nukes are always built with two or more.
But the main thing is that nukes cost far, far more than the wind farm that produces as much; or, a wind farm at the same price produces many times the power, with near zero lead time and possibly negative decommissioning cost. After their contribution to the grid gets large enough, you build out storage, which incrementally reduces the fraction of time you spend burning NG or, later, ammonia.
A farm of small nukes would cost quite a bit more to build than a big nuke of the same capacity, because all the systems are duplicated throughout. On the up side, the farm might be built incrementally with much less of the graft always attached to monster public works; you might save 75% vs a big nuke just on that basis. If you could get the first one going early, its revenue might help pay for subsequent units.
But whatever the heat source, anything with a steam turbine is just not competitive anymore. That is another reason why fusion is a dead end: it is just very hard to compete with zero opex.
None of these dams ever produced more than the tiniest fraction of even just the commercial value of the fisheries they destroyed. They totally didn't care.
The value extracted from the dams was never more than a tiny fraction of just the commercial value of the fishery each eliminated, wholly leaving aside the matter of causing extinctions.
California's system with dams near peaks of the Sierra Nevada range, feeding penstocks to thousands of meters below, is both massively more efficient and causes nowhere near the ecological damage of the river valley dams being torn down.
Those were largely built in the 1920s with pulley-operated (pre-hydraulics) equipment trailered up on abysmally bad roads... that still exist, unimproved.
And, a compiler that knows custom SIMD optimizations for every algorithm anyone might ever need, and can recognize when you have coded one of them so it can substitute its SIMD version.
The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.
Not just back to +1.5C, but to where you would have been by that time.
Meanwhile, the whole ocean ecosystem has collapsed as acidification continued on up. The primary protein source of a billion+ people has vanished. They do not starve quietly.
It would be disastrous if a program in any way like this went ahead, because it would be seen as a substitute for fixing the root problem, would steal funding from the latter, and would do nothing to stop the ocean acidification that threatens the roots of the global ocean ecosystem.
I tried a Beyond Meat burger. It tasted so much like the real thing that I did not finish it. It had that rusty-nail sharpness I have not missed at all.
I have been vegetarian for ~30 years. Pork and ham are the only meat I have missed. Knowing how pork is produced in the US, I would never buy any of it.
Unfortunately, fake meat is as "packaged and processed" as it is physically possible for stuff sold as food to be, making it not really food at all. That is too bad, because meat production is a huge driver of the looming global climate catastrophe, enough so that people switching to a meat substitute would cut their CO2 footprint more than giving up their car. But it is hard to recommend switching from actual food to merely food-shaped stuff. That said, a huge fraction of Americans habitually eat stuff not really food, already. If those were to switch to a meat substitute, their diet would have no more non-food than before. Unfortunately, those are the least likely to switch, no matter how closely it matches the real thing, unless it gets substantially cheaper than real meat.
There are numerous mainland Chinese and Russian certificate authorities listed. I always have to go through and disable them. How did they get in there in the first place, and what keeps them there?
The browser updates will refresh the cert store. To see yours and the overrides file use
find ~/.mozilla -type f -name "cert*"
cert9.db is a sqlite database file and cert_override.txt is a text file with dns names and certificate fingerprints. There are probably scripts to drive this tool [1] for automating removal of certs assuming FF is not running but I have not looked for any. Here [2] is someone making it work n Windows.
I suppose one could set the file immutable once it in the desired state but I have no idea how well Firefox will deal with not being able to update it. I would hope it just throws some stderr noise. The risk of course is that new CA's would not get added unless your script deals with comparing the updated cert9.db and your custom file and alerts you when new CA's show up. It's probably best to make use of the overrides file rather than removing certs from their cert9.db file.
[Edit] I totally missed that a comment further down in the linked article actually explains how to use the certutil tool to manage overrides by Rowena
Instead of siting polar panels in the desert, it would be overwhelmingly more efficient use of resources to float the solar panels on the canals and reservoirs involved, cutting evaporation and bio-fouling while keeping the panels cool for better efficiency and longevity, and also more easily cleaned of dust. California has begun experimenting with PV on canals, while in India it is already in full production. So, panel area is moot.
Brine may be returned to the sea via a long leaky hose, eliminating effects of excess salt concentration on wildlife by distribution along its length. There is no need to produce extremely concentrated brine, anyway: there is plenty of seawater, and it takes less energy to extract fresh water from less-concentrated brine.
You don’t need expensive PV and reverse osmosis to separate fresh water from brine: greenhouses can do the job at much less capital cost, with incoming water used to cool the glass that fresh water will condense onto the bottom of, and heat exchanged from outgoing brine to incoming brine after it drains off the condenser and spreads out over black evaporation pans.
In some places, condensing the fresh water is unnecessary; the water vapor may be released for the wind to carry off, to rain out into mountain streams collected behind alpine dams. North/central California is ideally situated for this mode, with myriad dams in long use in the Sierra Nevada range.
Hawaii successfully demonstrated using deep sea water solely as a coolant to condense fresh water directly from ambient humidity.
Capacity factor of nukes is not so much more than of wind turbines, though if you have a bunch of nukes, it would be rare to have many of the nukes down at once other than for urgent retrofits. Steam turbines are down a lot, so nukes are always built with two or more.
But the main thing is that nukes cost far, far more than the wind farm that produces as much; or, a wind farm at the same price produces many times the power, with near zero lead time and possibly negative decommissioning cost. After their contribution to the grid gets large enough, you build out storage, which incrementally reduces the fraction of time you spend burning NG or, later, ammonia.
A farm of small nukes would cost quite a bit more to build than a big nuke of the same capacity, because all the systems are duplicated throughout. On the up side, the farm might be built incrementally with much less of the graft always attached to monster public works; you might save 75% vs a big nuke just on that basis. If you could get the first one going early, its revenue might help pay for subsequent units.
But whatever the heat source, anything with a steam turbine is just not competitive anymore. That is another reason why fusion is a dead end: it is just very hard to compete with zero opex.