China IS building nuclear power plants, typically six new starts each year. They're also building lots of solar farms and wind farms and developing more hydro-generation dams. They need the electricity.

The new coal-fired plants are mostly replacing older less efficient and more polluting coal-fired plants. I think the Central Planning Committee is aiming for coal to be about 50% of China's expanded generating capacity in the next couple of decades. Security of energy supply is a large part of that decision, no global hegemon can restrict their coal supplies via sanctions or military action since they are almost all derived from mines within their own borders.

HALEU is a rebranding exercise for Medium-Enriched Uranium or MEU. Regular PWR/BWR fuel enrichment is labelled Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU), about 5% or so. HALEU can be anything up to 19.7% enrichment (a nucleonic sweet spot for some reason I can sometimes understand for about five or ten seconds or so before some gal in a black suit holds a flashy chrome thing up in front of my eyes and... what was I saying?).

If the article had compared it to existing sterling engines and mentioned how it was better than existing Sterling Engines, that would have made it interesting.

Stirling engines actually work but don't return much in the way of mechanical energy for low heat differentials. The usual deal with attempts to scale up and commercialise Stirling engines for electricity generation or other use cases normally involves choosing hydrogen as the working fluid because it's closest to being an "ideal gas" and hence more efficient than the alternatives. The rest of the research budget is spent trying to contain the hydrogen gas with seals etc. before bankruptcy beckons. Step and repeat.

This re-invention attempts to get round the "blow a seal" problem by using fixed but flexible membranes to contain the hydrogen. I can imagine other issues with this technology that could cause problems in both the short-term and long-term but I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about the materials etc. involved.

Even with access to wire closet,

Well yes but it happened anyway. From what I could see the install was not working (the reason the idiots had raised a ticket with the support desk) since there was no actual accessible route from the cowboy's desktops to the modem/router in the wiring cabinet and AFAIK see there wasn't a phone line connection either (this was in the days of ADSL). I still unplugged the router's Ethernet cable from the bank's switches and then reported the situation to my boss. Next time I had occasion to visit that office it had been cleared out and it was being refurbished for other purposes. I presumed that steps were taken above my pay grade and I didn't ask questions.

The gist of my anecdote was that security, physical or otherwise, is not always as well-implemented as the top brass would like it to be. Plugging non-approved hardware into the bank's network was Not Allowed, but it happened and no-one noticed until it didn't work and I was called in.

My guess regarding the Raspberry Pi intrusion described in the Fine Article was that it was an inside job, some trusted engineer or wireman with access and a desire to get richer rather than Brad Pitt in IR-negative thermal overalls suspended over a network of laser beams plugging a blinky-light box into the Hollywood-styled server facility.

The article glosses over the elephant in the room. How did the hackers get physical access to the bank to plant the pi.

Long time ago I was working in the offices of a major bank as a support tech. We had some boutique subsidiary operations run by young men I would charitably describe as "clowns". One day I got a call to their office to fix their "internet connectivity". After some digging and questioning I found out that the Young Immortals running this operation had got tired of the limitations of their monitored and curated internet connections so they had arranged for consumer-grade broadband to be installed in their office so they could have full internet access on their desks. This resulted in a commodity broadband router being wired into the bank's firewalled and locked-down internal network by a tech from the internet supplier without anyone else noticing.

I don't think they think much about power.

The Chinese are building out lots and lots of new power generation capability since they don't actually have enough total capacity, cheap or otherwise, to provide a first-world level of energy supply for their population. They think more about power than most Western countries do.

and the winds are stronger in winter.

Actually no. Wind speeds are typically higher in the spring and autumn and lower during summer AND winter, at least in northern Europe. These are averages of course. Even in winter there are many calm periods with little electricity generation from wind. Wishful thinking doesn't keep the lights on.

Half of the programmers writing mission-critical code are worse than average.

Sellafield was initially set up as a plutonium production facility for nuclear weapons, similar to the US Hanford Reservation operation which is also a disaster in terms of hazardous materials and pollution control (saying that, a lot of the worst pollution in such sites is from toxic chemicals rather than radioisotopes and nuclear material). I understand the locations of the early Soviet nuclear weapons plutonium production facilities are in a similar mess.

I find the "forty year lifespan" and "70% annual operation" figures mentioned in the linked article a little puzzling. Some operating PWRs (including Japanese ones) are being licenced for 60 and even 80 years of operation and new-builds today are expected to be operable for a century. Annual uptimes for modern PWRs and BWRs are typically 80% and higher according to IAEA records.

The price per kWh mentioned will include end-of-life decommissioning and insurance since that's factored into the cost of all nuclear generation in the Western world. Over sixty and more years a nuclear power reactor will produce a lot of electricity and so it's easy to pay for the decommissioning operation from ongoing receipts and compound interest of the accumulated funds.

UK decommissioning of nuclear reactors is done by SafStor (sic), a process where the radioactive parts of the plant are "stored" for about eighty years to let most of the radioactivity decay to the point where final dismantling can be undertaken more easily. The cost savings supposedly make up for the extended supervision of the site during this period.

China mostly imports metallurgical-grade coal (i.e. anthracite) from Australia for use in its iron and steel industry. In early 2024 Reuters reported "China imported 52.47 million metric tons of Australian coal in 2023". In contrast China mined about 4.5 billion tonnes of indigenous low-grade coal in 2023 for local consumption in power stations, ninety times more than its coal imports from Australia.

I think there are a few coastal coal power stations in China where the cost of imported coal delivered by ship is less than the cost of transporting it thousands of kilometres by rail from the coal mines in the far north-west of the country, however most coal power stations are supplied exclusively from Chinese coal mining operations.

Almost all the coal China burns to provide electricity is mined in-country. It can't be limited by sanctions by hostile countries preventing it being imported. Energy security is something most countries don't think about until bad things happen.

Bad coders write bad code in _any_ language.

Fifty percent of all programmers writing production code today are worse than average programmers. Ninety percent of all programmers writing production code today think they're better than average and the other ten percent think they never make a mistake ever.

There are lots of "ethical investment" pension funds offered by financial houses. I took a look at some of them a few years back when I was making changes to my main pension fund, rearranging the balance of the investment vehicles I had previously chosen. Generally the climate-friendly and Green funds underperformed the funds I had my money in, the ones which included fossil fuel companies like the Dow Jones Industrial Index (which is up over 11% this year and still rising).

It was a while ago but I recall one ethical fund I had looked at had actually lost significant amounts of money -- you know that disclaimer that says the value of your investment might go down? Well it was true for this one. It was a weird hair-shirt fund though, from memory it didn't invest in meat production or pharmaceuticals or companies with operations in places like China and definitely no fossil fuels or nuclear too.

I've played with the idea of writing a science fiction story about "hunters" who gain money and fame by tracking down certain board members and CEOs, and their descendants, and delivering some measure of retribution to them for the world they are creating.

I own an oil company. A couple of them, in fact plus some gas businesses and possibly even a coal mine or two, I don't know. You see, I've got a couple of retirement pension funds and they invest in fossil energy companies because they are profitable and provide a decent return on the money I squirreled away into my pension funds over my working life. Okay, I only own a fraction of each company but I do have an interest in them.

The executives running fossil energy companies are not the owners of those companies, the big institutional shareholders are, pension funds and investment vehicles and the like. If your "hunters" went around killing pension-fund beneficiaries like Granny and Grampaw then maybe they'd do some good for climate change in your simplistic eliminationist worldview, but it's usually easier to find someone else to label as bad and kill them to fix the problem regardless of how the real world works.

Irish corporation tax is lower than in most EU countries but the Irish government gave Apple a special deal. Other Irish companies were required to pay the full amount of corporation tax due and the Irish government went after them if they didn't pay up. Apple got special treatment from the notoriously corrupt Irish government and under EU rules that's not permitted.

Ben there, Dunn that, bought the Taoiseach.