Month: May 2018

The Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant (credit: Russ Nelson)

In the US, two types of electricity generation are on the rise: natural gas and renewables. If one of those is set to make a bigger mark than the other this year, it's natural gas: in 2018, natural gas-burning capacity is expected to outpace renewable capacity for the first time in five years, according to data from the Energy Information Agency.

All that additional natural gas capacity—approximately 21 GW expected this year—could spell trouble for the already-troubled coal and nuclear industries. Once a new gas facility is built, it makes it easier to close down older, inefficient coal plants, even if the price of natural gas rises a little. Coal plant closures have been happening for years already, and the Trump Administration has made a point of promising to bring coal back. But officials are having trouble finding a legal and politically acceptable way of boosting coal at the expense of natural gas, which is also a big US-based industry.

For nuclear, the problem is similar. The EIA wrote this week that the US nuclear energy industry is fighting not just against the falling cost of natural gas and renewable energy, also against the "limited growth in electric power demand."

Enlarge / The US has already spent $7.6 billion on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility, which is partially constructed. (credit: MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility)

The Department of Energy (DOE) sent a document to Congress last week formally executing a waiver to kill a project that would have used weapons-grade plutonium and uranium oxides as fuel for electricity generation in Georgia.

The Mixed Oxides (MOX) project, which required the construction of a special facility near the Savannah River nuclear site in South Carolina, has already cost the DOE north of $7.6 billion and would likely cost the federal government tens of billions more to complete, according to the document which was seen by Reuters. Instead of reusing the weapons-grade waste, the DOE proposes to mix the waste with an inert substance and dispose of the mixture at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).

Simply disposing of the waste was also proposed by the Obama Administration. A disposal plan would cost $19.9 billion, Reuters reported.

Sam Machkovech

There's a lot to unpack with the build-your-own-controller series of Nintendo Labo kits. Figuratively, the two boxed releases, dubbed Variety Kit and Robot Kit, include many opportunities to build, play, experiment, and learn, and that's worth exploring. Plus, they have to be literally unpacked before you can even get started—because you have to clip a zillion cardboard pieces together to turn your Switch into a range of weird toys.

As such, my colleague Kyle Orland has taken his time to play with the Variety Kit since its April 20 launch, specially because he has invited his young daughter to participate. Nintendo Labo absolutely screams parent-child participation in its advertisements, packaging, and in-game presentations, and it opens up the opportunity for families to build weird stuff like a functional piano, a motorcycle, and a Tamagotchi-like cardboard house.

This post contains a few spoilers. I've tried to keep them minimal, but if you're the sort who freaks out about that kind of thing, consider this a warning.

Overbrook Entertainment/YouTube

Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in sequels, prequels, and reboots. It's easy to see why; comfortable and familiar is less risky than new and unknown. But the urge to revisit a successful film or TV show from the past needn't always be resisted. Sometimes, great things can happen, as in the case of Cobra Kai.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

Are you the sort of person who needs to read and file every email they get? Or do you delight in seeing an email client icon proudly warning of hundreds or even thousands of unread items? For some, keeping one's email inbox with no unread items is more than just a good idea: it's a way of life, indicating control over the 21st century and its notion of productivity. For others, it's a manifestation of an obsessively compulsive mind. The two camps, and the mindsets behind them, have been a frequent topic of conversation here in the Ars Orbiting HQ. And rather than just argue with each other on Slack, we decided to collate our thoughts about the whole "inbox zero" idea and how, for those who adhere to it, that happens.

Jonathan Gitlin

Back when I had an office job and writing for Ars was a side gig, I was all about inbox zero. We used Exchange in my day job, and I was all about categorizing emails, sorting them into folders, and ruthlessly deleting unwanted messages each day. Some of this might have been brought on by the fact that, by default, we were only given a meagre 250MB storage on the server; learning how to make local archives and backups became a necessity, and in the process you learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Another factor was probably the nature of my job; as anyone who sits through several hours of meetings a day surely knows, staying on top of one's email becomes a welcome diversion during the many boring bits.

But in the last few years, that all changed, and the real reason was webmail. At first, it was just with my personal email accounts, but the trend accelerated in early 2017 when Ars migrated from Exchange to Gmail. Now, like my personal accounts, I was accessing it via Inbox. This does some things well but, like all webmail interfaces (to me at least), isn't nearly as conducive to a good bit of spring cleaning as an actual desktop application. Automatically bundling emails into groups—Promos, Updates, and so on—kept them out of my way, so in addition to never being read they never got deleted. Before long this all built up; at the time of writing, my personal Gmail account tells me it has 2,661 unread messages. (If you really want a fright, iCloud shows 6,261 unread items!)