Yep the birth of Christ just coincidentally coincides with the end of Brumalia, which of course noone noticed when the emperor suddenly insisted everyone become Christian and had the bible written by committee. And it's of course a coincidence that that was (back in the day) exactly the winter solstice. And it's also just a coincidence that Jesus' life story has quite some parallels to that of earlier sun gods from the general area.

Most current Christmas traditions are more Germanic in nature, though, e.g. the Christmas tree. While in the current form a quite recent invention, decorating the house with evergreen stuff was common through the ages -- branches, wreaths, not whole-ass trees. The needles btw are fine smudging material don't just sweep them away.

Hmm it also got pulled from gog.

UT2004 Onslaught is still the best game mode ever btw. Haven't played in a long while but like ten years ago there were still a good number of servers around. Not enough players for the big maps, though, those need like 20 people per team and good luck convincing a server full of deathmatch players to play as teams.

I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don't even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.

She's a good science communicator in her specialised area from a particular POV (No, Sabine, physics, also theoretical physics, has made progress in the last 50 years) but past that she neither has a clue nor the discipline to work towards having a clue, or the sense to work with people who have a clue.

She lacks that one crucial virtue of a scientist: Considering herself to be clueless. And as a science communicator you need to be a good scientist -- not in pedigree of your degree, but approach to knowledge.

OMG yes I said "blast furnace to reduce steel". I meant "to reduce iron [to produce steel]". Obviously: What else would you use hydrogen for in a blast furnace?

But "reduce steel" is still, at least colloquially, correct for recycling steel: Scrap has rust on it so it also needs to be reduced. Which you would've realised instead of trying to turn this into a silly gotcha if you knew what you were talking about.

Go ahead, do tell me about your plan on how to produce steel, from ore, without getting fossil fuels or hydrogen involved. Charcoal? Could work, but I don't think the economics make sense.

What makes iron is the lack of O in Fe~3~O~4~ (that's magnetite, other ores are similar). Carbon for alloying is not an issue it can be easily covered by biomass, you smelt the magnetite by combining it with hydrogen resulting in iron and (very hot) water, no carbon involved, then you add carbon, something like 2% thereabouts, to get steel. Add too much and you get cast iron. The overwhelming majority of coke used in the coke process is not used for alloying, but smelting and reducing the iron. That part of the steel making process is completely decarbonised in the hydrogen process, and the carbon that's used in alloying, well, it's not in the atmosphere is it.

You can rip the oxygen off iron ore with electricity but that's less energy-efficient than taking a detour via electrolysis. It's different with aluminium, there using electricity directly is more efficient.

Sad to day I now understand your point of view. Natural gas wins.

If you think that's what I'm saying then no, you don't understand my POV.

In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we'll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.

Even with fusion up and running we're going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running... and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they'll have customers from day one.

When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?

Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it's still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we'll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.

Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.

Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that's what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer's initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn't hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that's negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there's good enough interconnectivity.

...meanwhile, we'll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.

Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.

Gas can be synthesised and we're going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don't need much maintenance if they're not actually running.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?

It's not technology it's physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn't explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.

Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it's not like we don't know how to do that, or don't already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and "but we don't want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive".

The watthours is what gas is for. Germany's pipeline network alone, that's not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.

...or at least that's the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium's strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.

Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.

That's physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

The cost for one night of defence seen as significantly higher than the price Iran paid to mount its attack

That looks like it's exactly the point. Israel hitting the Iranian embassy wasn't extreme enough for Iran to seriously escalate, yet you can't just leave such a thing unanswered or they'll do it again and again, you also don't want to draw (additional) ire to yourself, meaning you don't want to have any casualties, at least not indiscriminate ones, at the most you want to give people a scare. So you shoot a couple of volleys you know Israel can intercept, maximising not for anything getting through but interception costing them a pretty penny. Now, the next time the IDF considers such a strike some politician somewhere is going to say "we don't have a billion dollars to spare right now for that BS, cut it out".

No worries, it has been towed outside of the environment.