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A solar panel the size of a drink coaster split water into hydrogen at 10.8 percent efficiency two years ago, and when the same company built one twelve times bigger the number dropped to 9, which is the part nobody put next to this month’s announcement
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@tomanderson ROOKIE · 7 hours
Why have the somewhat arbitrary 10% efficiency? The sun shines relentlessly. If you put out 11 x 9% panels instead of 10 x 10%, now you are …
An Australian company sealed an abandoned gold pit with a 3.7-mile embankment and a plastic liner, pumped 6.6 billion gallons of water uphill into it, and built a 715-foot drop through two turbines — 250 megawatts for eight hours, and it was supposed to hit the grid this October
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@peterpotnoodle ROOKIE · 14 hours
Pumped storage is useless without a cheap source of extra power on hand to pump the water back up, where is that coming from?
An Indianapolis company wants to press uranium gas into ceramic pellets the size of a pencil eraser so America stops importing reactor fuel, and the 240-megawatt reactor it feeds runs on a coolant no American refinery has made since 1997, 82 percent of it refined in China
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@dopindan ROOKIE · 15 hours
It's about time we quit farting around with solar and wind, and convert to nuclear. It's a no-brainer, no matter your opposing views.
ronsonntag ROOKIE · 14 hours
FISION is dead, dead, dead....oh wait, except for Thorium. Watch who makes that happen. Otherwise, renewables for the next 50 or so years if…
Canada is cutting holes in the roofs of four reactor buildings outside Toronto to lift out 48 boilers, twelve per reactor, and crews are rehearsing the cut on a full-scale concrete dome built 40 feet off the ground purely so nobody practices on a real oneComment on the article →
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@adrianspiering ROOKIE · 19 hours
If we quit selling power to the states, do we still need to build new power plants?
Autonomous robots now live on desert solar rows, wake up after dark, brush the glass dry with no water and park to recharge off their own panel — dirty glass costs 7 to 50 percent of a farm’s output, and after a dust storm it can hit 80 percent
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@richardweinstei ROOKIE · 2 days
sounds good but what are the economics
@ryangunn ROOKIE · 23 hours
Soiling is a pretty standard term when discussing something getting soiled, not sure why you specified that this industry uses the normal te…
Graphite bricks six feet long sit glowing at 2,400 degrees in a Boston suburb, hotter than half the surface of the sun, and the way you switch the power on is to lower a panel into the light and the way you switch it off is to pull it back out
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@jeremytaylor ROOKIE · 2 days
This looks like a great adjunct to giga batteries.. By charging in cities and near high usage zones, at off peak hours, they can use existin…
@richardgreen ROOKIE · 1 day
Would this work, either the graphite heating or the panel that gets lowered and raised, by the new "satellite" setup that redirects sunlight…
@jamesgallagher ROOKIE · 24 hours
I understand how the heat of the bricks is converted to electricity but not how the bricks get so hot to start with. Please explain.
Target has more than 600 roof panels across 21 stores that look like solar and make exactly zero watts, mirrors dumping heat into space through a five-micron gap in the sky — water and glycol come back colder than a Texas afternoon, and the condensers work less hard
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@robwolverton ROOKIE · 2 days
Ooo, maybe they could use this at night, does not generate much power but maybe enough to clean the mirrors a bit or something?
Lingling…
@paulvalentine ROOKIE · 2 days
While I understand that you don't control wat units reports are made with, the switching between units makes it difficult to understand what…
A 22-inch Halliburton well is going sideways under a Texas cow pasture, triple the usual oil hole, so a 5,000-pound nuclear-waste canister can go down and come back up — no spent fuel on the pad, just the drill, a hole opener, and a warning about snakes
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@joepopbachofen ROOKIE · 3 days
Good reporting.
McLaren brought the stick back. Porsche confirmed one. Spyker came back from the dead with a gated shifter. Lamborghini parked a 1,065-horsepower hybrid V12 in the middle of The Quail with a dual-clutch and said a manual is not on the list
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@joshj ROOKIE · 3 days
People were also bashing Lamborghini for just releasing the same crap.
A 1.7-megawatt American solar array is sitting flat on the ground at a Fresno water plant with no racking steel, five months in, 862 megawatt-hours at 101 percent of its model — and that does not mean flat beats tilt, it means the city could afford to build it
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@danbaker ROOKIE · 4 days
Why do you keep talking about comparison to a tracker? I have personally never seen a tracker, they're fabulously expensive. Nobody builds t…
@petergreenberg ROOKIE · 2 days
Interesting, here are some numbers using PV Watts, showing expected kwh/yr comparing flat ground, 20 deg tilt fixed and a 1x tracker, and al…
paulrodgers ROOKIE · 2 days
I have a tracker, here in FL, free to you if you come pick it up.
Mounted with 2 400w panels, with 2 identical 400w panels laid flat (on a …
A 2,000-pound American drone named after a fish swims into the mines Iran laid in the Strait of Hormuz for 16 hours at a time, comes up nose-first so nobody has to go in the water after it, and hands over a map of what is buried down there
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@krystalcane ROOKIE · 4 days
Interesting article of the fact is we wouldn't need any of this and we didn't have a goddamn moron running the United States
America is drilling a mile-deep, 40-inch hole in Kansas granite to lower a working nuclear reactor into it, using a mile of water as the pressure vessel and the rock as the containment dome — 5 megawatts by late 2027, and they want the hole 60 inches wide so it takes nine assemblies
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@kevinsmith ROOKIE · 4 days
5mw hardly seems worth the effort, it would barely power a small subdivision.
@hanspeterraatz ROOKIE · 11 hours
Agree, it works in a submarine.
A 538-foot Belgian ship that turns five this month is the strongest cutter dredger on Earth, a 59,250-horsepower machine with a 2,550-ton cutting arm that chews solid rock off the seabed so ports can go deeper without dynamite — including 1.7 million cubic meters of Portuguese granite in six months
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@timturner ROOKIE · 4 days
Check the AIS - it's currently dredging that Senegalese port.
While 82,000 solar panels now shade 11,200 cars at Disneyland Paris, the 36 gigawatt-hours those canopies make each year do not run Space Mountain — the Swiss builder sold the entire output, and the park never self-consumes a kilowatt-hour
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Mike Smith ROOKIE · 5 days
The panels are installed incorrectly. The panels are inclined at the wrong angle (should be about 50 degrees) and are too close together so …
Germany just stood all 64 turbines at a North Sea farm called He Dreiht — Low German for “It Spins” — each a 774-foot Danish Vestas with a blade 19 feet longer than an NFL field, the first commercial-scale V236s on Earth, 960 megawatts and no state subsidy
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@richardmercer ROOKIE · 5 days
Over 60% capacity factor is about the same as Combined Cycle Gas plants. and higher than for Coal plants
An Australian dairy farmer just unfolded 105 kilowatts of solar out of shipping containers on rails, like an accordion, with a 241-kilowatt-hour battery sitting beside 240 cows that milk twice a day in the dark — and the whole farm can fold the array up and drive it somewhere else
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@andrewburgess ROOKIE · 6 days
They will be loosing 90% of the power with the bottom of the panels shaded
A four-story American building in Kern County is a 100-megawatt-hour stack of toaster-wire and blast-furnace brick that has been making high-pressure steam every night for a year on sunshine alone, heating past 1,832°F, and the customer that owns it pumps crude oil
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@brianweight ROOKIE · 6 days
"Greenest steam in the San Joaquin Valley"? Sure. Where is the water for the steam coming from. To pump crude oil from the ground. In a stat…
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@raybecker ROOKIE · 6 days
Just make electricity with the steam and you'd save even more carbon monoxide.
@justinwilson ROOKIE · 3 days
this is fracking and they dont use the term in the article.
Germany is hanging a 324-millimeter drone the size of a spare torpedo off its non-magnetic minesweepers, a machine that swims at walking pace for a full day, maps the seabed 600 meters down and comes home while its 43-kilogram sister rams the mine and dies
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@negarosenberg ROOKIE · 7 days
I believe you meant 324 centimeter, not millimeter.
@georgepeters ROOKIE · 4 days
No. The 324 millimeter cited is correct. It is about one foot in diameter.
A 661-pound Swedish drone fires out of a submarine’s torpedo tube, crawls across the Baltic floor at 3 knots, picks up a second one that has been sitting there waiting and tows it back in through the same hole
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@markkosko ROOKIE · 7 days
Regarding sun launched drones. Mention the U.S. Navy LMRS (Long-Term Mine Reconnaissance System), designated as the AN/BLQ-11. Successful te…
A 155-ton reactor vessel near Bologna runs on molten lead with electric heaters standing in for uranium, and the French firm that built it just told US regulators it wants to make plutonium fuel in America, where the last plant that tried is a half-built shell
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@joshuakirkland ROOKIE · 7 days
Who builds a reactor vessel with a round bottom leading to favorable geometry for criticality in the event of a meltdown?? 🤨
A 22-ton pod sitting 1,640 feet down off Norway lets the ocean do the squeezing that a coastal plant builds a whole pump hall for, pulls a million liters of drinking water a day off the seabed, and the only wobble on its sensors is the tide
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@sherlockholmes ROOKIE · 7 days
I don't understand the concept. The pressure that the ocean exerts on the intake tube is the same as the pressure of the water on the tube …
Japan switched one reactor back on at the biggest nuclear station ever built after fourteen years dark, and three weeks later the utility that owns it started switching off solar farms for the first time, up to 3,290 megawatts on a single afternoon
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hanswolfgangsch DRIVER · 1 week
Start to set up water purification and energy backup systems with the excess power. Solar systems age, so do reactors. Make some methane, …
@damiendye ROOKIE · 7 days
sould e hydrogen rather than methane, as that burns clean, or goes though a fuel cell nicely.
methane should be avoided at all cost sinc…
Every ship through the Panama Canal sends about 50 million gallons of fresh water out to sea, the lake meant to replace that loss costs $1.6 billion and will not hold a drop before 2031, and the canal has already cut how deep ships can sit five times this year
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@derekbayslittle ROOKIE · 1 week
To long, way to long winded writing
A robot arm on steel tracks is printing the world’s first 3D hotel in the West Texas desert with barely a right angle on 60 acres, 43 domes north of Marfa — and the reason it’s round is that the nozzle chokes on anything bigger than a grain of sand
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@darthvader ROOKIE · 1 week
That's a dead end project in the desert, good marketing and bad engineering, that's the icon story
The hydrogen land speed record stood at 185.5 mph until a British digger manufacturer took a car onto the Bonneville salt and clocked 406.320 over a flying mile, and the FIA is still ratifying it
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@andygoddard ROOKIE · 1 week
Why can't vehicles be fitted with a water tank and small hydrogen splitter, converting 'on demand'? Rather than storing and distributing lar…
A Swiss tomato grower hung 1,736 solar modules inside his greenhouse directly over the rows, and they take only the infrared the plants never use, so the crop came out 1 percent up and the pickers started working under them because it was cooler
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@wadeworkman ROOKIE · 1 week
Wouldn't you WANT the extra heat from infrared in tht winter time?
@andyhill ROOKIE · 1 week
I'm more than a little confused. Given the whole point of a greenhouse is to be warmer than outside conditions, this seems to be directly f…
A terminal being finished at JFK has 13,000 solar panels across six and a half football fields of its own roof, and not one of them would keep a light on in a blackout at 2am, because what carries the building in the dark is 3.84 megawatts of fuel cells burning gas
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homer10 DRIVER · 1 week
Oh, the solar company sold them a bad bill of goods. These panels have to have grid power to put out any power. It's stupid, but that's what…
@jimmyautry ROOKIE · 1 week
Fuel cells do not burn gas. They use the hydrogen to run and emit water as a byproduct.
mikeconley DRIVER · 1 week
Did they consider a 15 MW microreactor?
Arizona bolted 2,556 solar panels over half a mile of irrigation canal on steel trusses that never touch the water, the first in the country to do it, and it costs about twice what putting the same panels on the ground would
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williamsabey DRIVER · 1 week
A megawatt sounds like a lot, but to put it in perspective, a typical nuclear reactor produces three or four *thousand* megawatts, and can r…
@m209 ROOKIE · 1 week
Wildlife loses access to water?
@stuartshurlock ROOKIE · 1 week
But nuclear takes forever to build, and currently in Europe, solar is propping up power systems where nuclear has had to close down due to l…
A British company laid three fiberglass pipes 200 feet long up a Devon hillside, filled them with 343,000 gallons of a fluid dense enough to float concrete and dropped it back through a turbine it had to build from scratch, because water turbines cannot handle it
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@nicolae ROOKIE · 1 week
what are you NOT saying..how much energy do you consume to create the emulsion? how much does it cost? and when does the pool fill with emul…
@robertminichino ROOKIE · 1 week
Could they not make it work 24 hours a day with more than one system that picks up where the other one fades out?
@timothyfknight ROOKIE · 1 week
Interesting. This has potential in areas that don't have sufficient power.
America filled a 1,020-ton reactor with concrete foam, wrapped it in blue plastic and pushed it 270 miles up the Columbia to a pit in the desert, and 27 years later the fuel it ran on is still sitting on the riverbank in 34 casks
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@lloydbriner ROOKIE · 1 week
Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) shut down its only nuclear power plant, the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station, on June 7, …
There are 100 of these in the world, they weigh 2,198 pounds, they have a fan on the back that spins at 7,000 rpm, and one of them has been driving up and down 17-Mile Drive this week ahead of Monterey Car Week
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simonrockman DRIVER · 1 week
I followed one around the Millbrook bowl once. I was there for a Journalist's day and GMA were testing. As it happened I wasn't planning on …
America just handed out the federal recipe for mining uranium from the ocean instead of the ground: cheap yarn, chemically treated until the metal sticks to it, left soaking in seawater for weeks, proven so far at five grams, the weight of a nickel
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@johndeptuch ROOKIE · 2 weeks
It's interesting that Canada isn't mentioned anywhere in this article. Over 30% of the United States uranium comes from Canada making Canada…
A ground squirrel that weighs less than a burrito and sleeps eight months a year keeps every truck at an Oregon plant powering 100,000 homes down to 20 mph, fences off 785 feet around each colony, and the state tells the operator to armor the cables because it chews
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@gregorygilligan ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Why not just eliminate them?There must be a way to control them
@gregorygilligan ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Just eliminate them
@mkj ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Just because some may not be impressed with a ground squirrel or a shrub steppe habitat doesn't mean they're not as worthy as something a hu…
How to disable the driver monitoring system in a 2026 Subaru WRXComment on the article →
simonrockman DRIVER · 2 weeks
The most gentle nag is in a Rolls Royce. When you have been driving non stop for a few hours it displays a silver teapot and suggests stoppi…
A 3.6-ton mirror three inches thick sits on a Maui volcano collecting sunlight, and keeping it from cooking itself takes seven miles of coolant pipe, thirteen separate temperatures and about a swimming pool of ice made fresh every night
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@lisavenusthesun ROOKIE · 2 weeks
I think they should prob cut the check already. 17 mil still sounds like a deal.
@lisavenusthesun ROOKIE · 2 weeks
17 mil sounds like they got a hellova deal.
@cowboymatt ROOKIE · 2 weeks
This article was about 7x more than it needed to be and didn't explain many things clearly enough. Some of Us take interest in this kinda th…
288 solar panels went onto a Swiss roof and not one of them has ever been replaced, while the inverter underneath has been swapped five times, and 48 of the originals are still feeding the grid today
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@dside ROOKIE · 2 weeks
I bet they have ground leeched so many hazards that the water is contaminated for miles
@backcountry164 ROOKIE · 2 weeks
China supplies 80% of solar components worldwide. I'm sure they're only using the best materials. I'm sure they want them to last as long as…
@stephenoneill ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Just like Cancer Alley and everywhere else in the world that processes or extracts oil, gas and coal lol
An American startup wants to lower a 15-megawatt reactor a mile down a hole outside a Kansas town of 9,600 people, with the water above it doing the job of a containment dome, and the route it is on lets the government skip the environmental impact statement
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williamsabey DRIVER · 2 weeks
15 megawatts is really small for a reactor. Most reactors at power plants are a hundred times that or more. Hopefully if this test is succes…
@wolfy ROOKIE · 2 weeks
This is how we destroy the country. The next time there is an earthquake, and the nuclear material leaks out into the ground water and they …
A 132-pound American drone two people can lift off a tailgate went into the North Sea instead of a crewed survey ship and picked out everything down to a one-meter cube on the bottom, and its own maker says do not use it below 20 meters of seabed
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@bizdafookes ROOKIE · 2 weeks
How does it burrow down below the sea bed?
Australia is pulling 12,900 tonnes of concrete and steel out of the River Derwent with a 280-tonne crawler crane and barges underneath to catch what falls, and the ship it is doing it for still sails 419 miles to refuel
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@thedrilldoctor ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Pretty cool! All that to go on a chilly little adventure.
A crane set a 2.2-million-pound module five storeys tall into a Georgia reactor in a single lift, and America is now planning as many as 91 more of those reactors, held up not by cranes or concrete but by the few people qualified to sign the paperwork
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@sbfarmer8 ROOKIE · 2 weeks
murica! F yea!
@deantyner ROOKIE · 2 weeks
I was at Vogtle during the construction it was the paperwork, and the long delays waiting on engineering answers, not the workers that cause…
America is building seabed batteries that charge drone submarines and keep throwing off heat for 28.8 years without a cable or a support ship, fuelled by a generator the Energy Department has had in a store at Oak Ridge
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@montyjoemartinj ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Sounds like a great idea and a good way to use this type of material instead of storing it as hazardous waste forever.
williamsabey DRIVER · 2 weeks
Until one starts leaking, releasing radioactive Strontium into the ocean... You do realise that radioactive waste doesn't last "forever", ri…
@josephburke420k ROOKIE · 2 weeks
sounds like a great way to lower population, keep throwing radioactive material into the water to slowly poison the Earth's water supply -- …
A 46-foot drone boat sat 16 miles off Plymouth for more than 100 hours with nobody touching it, picked up a low-power distress beacon 13.7 miles away and pinned it to within 65 feet, and it did all of it with the hydrogen taken out and a diesel put inComment on the article →
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@ryandonovan ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Hydrogen is NEVER the answer if the use case needs to carry the fuel supply. It's physics. you can't make even liquid hydrogen work because …