Xasin, Neira & Mesh @xaseiresh@qoto.org

@pauleastwood this is a thing people often forget indeed.

We don't just need to replace our current electricity production with carbon-free sources, but scale it up by a factor of at least three to accommodate those two other huge sectors!!

For solar and wind that would mean hilarious amounts of battery storage to get us through downtimes too, and I am kind of afraid that this is a perfect problem to ignore until it's way too late and we realize that we need to backtrack - much like Germany currently is dealing with high prices and major CO2eq/kWh

@abbie One argument I hear a lot is that nuclear is too expensive - while the argument has also been made that excessive regulation and safety concerns cause delays and cost increases.

I know, for the most part, how a nuclear reactor is built and structured, and although it's a fascinating technical achievement, the base concept... Really isn't that technically complex, so it often made me curious where all the supposed extra costs for nuclear plants are coming from.
And aside from the pressure vessel and containment building, the steam turbines are bog standard parts that we know extremely well from other powerplants.

This factor is a bit hard to research, so I'm curious what their opinion is.
To formulate the question snappily:
"How safe are we building nuclear reactors compared to how safe we need to build them due to external pressures/excess safety concerns, and how has this impacted the cost of reactors?"

@KrisOlds
The same holds true for Germany, in a way.
University is cheap (I pay about 400€ every six months, per semester, and there's a good, cheap Cafeteria available), but for my mandatory university internship, at the #wendelstein7x no less, I was... Not paid for four months, had to weasel around some paperwork to get 900€/month for two months, then finally minimum wage for the last two.

Meanwhile, CERN's Technical Studentship unconditionally gives you 3.3kCHF a month. Just like that!

It feels a bit like it's telling me where my work is more valued.
Add to that the somewhat "boring" tariffs that the TVöG requires of German scientific institutions like the Wendelstein, which give fairly low pays for e.g. IT personnel...

Another small win for #opensource tools like #grafana:
My supervisor at the #wendelstein7x #fusion experiment and I successfully used Grafana and #timescaledb to implement logging and monitoring of the new arc detection system, and the ease of use and rich set of plotting tools are quickly becoming important parts of interfacing with the system.

They now officially handed out the task of building a permanent adapter between Grafana and their internal timeseries database, ArchiveDB, to be able to use it for even more systems!

Exciting <3

@noctarius2k I'm already on your Slack, it's been a good experience so far and I enjoyed writing [my Q&A blog post](https://www.timescale.com/blog/using-iot-sensors-timescaledb-and-grafana-to-control-the-temperature-of-the-nuclear-fusion-experiment-in-the-max-planck-institute/) for your team!

One quick related question: Is there an easy way of switching between tables in a Grafana SQL query to utilize Continuous Aggregates for "zoomed out" data and the raw data table for more "zoomed in" shots?
Optimally I'd define a PostgreSQL view, but from what I gathered, an `IF` block or a `UNION` between two `SELECT`s with a complementary `WHERE` statement works just as well.

Would make for a great optimization for plotting stuff in Grafana, we have some graphs here that have 1ms resolution in some areas, and we often switch between viewing the last hour(s) of data before digging in, so an automatic switch between CAGG and raw data would be super helpful!

@richardwerskine
Ah, thank you for the elaboration! I think I heard about the move away from Baseload but need to read up on it further :)
The paper looks like a good resource as well!

That makes me wonder what makes Germany's CO2eq per kWh so high, especially compared to France's (France at 67gCO2eq/kWh versus Germany at 402, both in 2021)
[Data taken from this chart](https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intensity-of-1)

There is a large amount of both wind and photovoltaic installed here, but it seems like the coal plants still have to be run to provide this "firm" power, to an extent where there's quite a lot of CO2 emission left.

Perhaps we just don't have the needed hydro storage, and batteries are still being developed after all?

@richardwerskine Renewables are a double-edged sword however.
Germany's Energiewende has been adding a large quantity of renewables to the energy grid mix... Which have not been able to keep CO2 emissions low:

https://vxtwitter.com/TheFrackingGuy/status/1594444953547046912?s=20&t=PYbuN-6A67w9L9IHBBCBow

Renewables are part of the solution, but we *also* need to give ourselves a safe, 24/7 available, baseload capable system.
SMRs or just regular full-size reactors are great for this!

@noctarius2k Thanks! I think lttb would solve this issue very nicely, however, the server that Timescale is running on is already set up and without a direct internet connection ((another plus for Timescale not fussing with any DRM)).

Does LTTB support group-bys, anyhow?
The documentation only shows it for a single stream of data that then needs to be unnest'ed, which wouldn't quite fit our use case here.

Adding the toolkit would be possible, I'd just have to contact the IT department to get them to sing off, and with the start of the official experiment phase of the #wendelstein they're very busy ATM.
This was a quick but good-enough fix.

Actually, I should update how the project has been doing :D

@bojacobs
The same, but worse, probably holds true for regular waste and chemical disposal sites.

What do we say to our ancestors when they find the lake in America that was an abandoned mine, which has become so acidic that we have to keep birds away from it?
https://youtu.be/qtlPTE-UmY4

The countless swaths of land that have become polluted with toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and even trace radioactive elements from coal ash damm spills?
https://youtu.be/a91UqFEMs5A

Or the underground stores of arsenic that we have to keep frozen at all times else they seep into the groundwater?
https://youtu.be/E4nZDSLdIiM

Nuclear waste is highly dangerous, but it is in such low quantity and high density that we have the luxury of enclosing it within incredibly safe and tight containers. We can also learn to reprocess and further minimize the amount of high level waste by reusing spent fuel.

There are countless other sources of toxic pollution that produce waste in far, far greater amounts, and with far less regulation. Those, however, rarely hit the media because they're not radioactive. Yet there are so many more of them that their impact is far above that of nuclear power generation.

Saying that nuclear waste is a problem while throwing all other kinds of toxic byproducts aside is hypocritical.
Nuclear is one of the few industries with such compact waste that we even have the luxury to think about a contained permanent disposal site.

Uff, data downsampling can be a weird problem sometimes!
Averaging over regular-spaced data is fine, but when you have short, sharp spikes in-between lower frequency samples, that can lead to very werid behaviour.

Picture no. 1 shows awkward graph behaviour, resulting from averaging over the leftmost edge of a sharp spike.

#timescaledb, luckily, has tools to fix this. Using their `first` and `last` operators to extract the edges of each time bucket (generated with `time_bucket_gapfill`), it's possible to "fill in" buckets without any samples in them to use the edge of an adjacent bucket. This ensures that edges of sharp spikes remain preserved.

Picture no. 2 shows the exact same data but with a bit of edge preservation done. The data looks much closer to the truth with almost no extra points plotted!

Something for the #dataviz people maybe? ;)

@rmattila74@mastodo.fi
I think that's a really interesting and good point - the types of resources and what their limitations are.

While there are some physically limited resources such as oil, agricultural land, etc., for which we do need to be careful - there are other resources like electricity that we could have in overabundance (e.g. large nuclear+hydro installations and other supporting generation methods).
Those could have fascinating effects on other resources, such as making steel production with hydrogen more viable, lowering costs for recycling, synthetic fuels, carbon capture for concrete production, etc.

I think the real issue is doing it fast enough. We are already seeing major effects of climate change on the horizon, some have already arrived.
For now, any useful form of reduction of emissions is something we need, and once things stabilize we can think about expanding out again.

With enough money I'm sure we could pull off both, though, but... That's a bit dreamy.

@StanczakDominik
Grafana itself is quite easy to work with, I think the [official documentation](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/v9.0/getting-started/build-first-dashboard/) is nicely fleshed out already :)

The more important part is the data source that you're using!
This project uses #timescaledb because it integrates very nicely with Grafana and has a few other useful abilities.
[We wrote a blog about how we use it a while ago!](https://www.timescale.com/blog/using-iot-sensors-timescaledb-and-grafana-to-control-the-temperature-of-the-nuclear-fusion-experiment-in-the-max-planck-institute/)

For server monitoring you might instead want to look into InfluxDB or similar. Grafana mostly just plots what you give it :)

Work is proceeding nicely at the #wendelstein #fusion #experiment!

The arc detection boards are due to being tested tomorrow, after the #data #server was successfully moved to a permanent virtual machine! More news on that soon.

For now, have another screenshot of a new, gorgeous #grafana dashboard for the devices. We figured out that you can use repeats on entire rows, which is wonderful for what we want to do!

@neglesaks Kurzgesagt's latest video has a mention of this as well, saying that living in a 1.6km radius around a coal ash pile increases cancer risk by 2000x above acceptable limits.
See: https://youtu.be/Us2Z-WC9rao?t=486

Also, coal ash dam spills are horrifying events:
https://youtu.be/a91UqFEMs5A

It's so easy to think that concentration is everything, and that high level waste is incredibly dangerous - but the sheer quantity of coal ashes, combined with the hazardous materials contained within it, makes it much harder to manage safely and a greater risk overall.

Today at the #wendelstein #stellarator #fusion #experiment:

Documentation! And learning to not just write it, but also test it.

TL;DR, let someone else go through it. The second pair of eyes makes very different mistakes than yours.

We are setting up a permanent server for the sensor boards that we have been working on for the past few months - finally, a proper place to put the #grafana and #postgresql #timescaledb instances and the #ruby backend code.

In order to make this repeatable, we wrote a page or two in the #gitlab wiki of the project about how to go about it, and our supervisor set up the server by following said wiki...

And immediately things didn't line up quite right.
The server didn't have internet, so we had to figure out how to download the .deb packages instead - same for the Ruby bundler packages!
Then some issues with the versioning, and setting up Timescale...

Nothing *insurmountable*, but if we hadn't been there in person, it might not have worked as smoothly.

So, even if you write documentation, make sure someone else tries to go through it on their own, and figure out where things get stuck!

Pictures of the new Grafana #dataviz panels coming up soon - I gotta say, Grafana 9 looks very lovely!