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wiki posted:The main finding of the study was that, in highly developed countries with HDI above 0.9, further development halts the declining fertility rates. This means that the previously negative development-fertility association is reversed; the graph becomes J-shaped. Myrskylä et al. contend that there has occurred “a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century”.[1] So basically once people are secure enough in their social development, turns out they actually quite like having babies?
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Oct 6, 2013 01:20
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Flaky posted:So basically once people are secure enough in their social development, turns out they actually quite like having babies?
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Oct 6, 2013 04:38
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Flaky posted:What are the assumptions underlying this estimate? I would imagine that if conditions are favourable, then the population will increase. Is there some point at which everyone will just decide 'actually, 2 babies is more than enough'. Most European countries are already at under 2 babies per woman at this point, actually. Birth rates have been declining near-universally. Earth's global birth rate was at its highest in the 1960s/1970s. Also everyone loves to gently caress, but few people like dealing with raising kids much more than they have to. Contraception and available abortion are heavily used when women have access to them. Hobo Erotica posted:As for install windows, there are plenty of problems with the present food production system - like chemical run off and crazy distribution networks, but I'm on my phone and it's late so I might address them tomorrow. They are not solved by attempting to jam in agriculture to random clear room in cities though.. although they do provide a nice use of space they inherently have restricted yields due to the logistics of small spaces and the like. To wit: they should be encouraged where there's vacancy that can't otherwise be used, but they're not going to replace farms. Especially when the farms are in places better suited to grow whatever it is you want.
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Oct 6, 2013 04:40
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Major advance in the R&D of fusion power. This is great news! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621 quote:Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab
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Oct 8, 2013 14:49
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Fusion is not Nuclear power because?
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Oct 8, 2013 14:55
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It says "current" nuclear power.
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Oct 8, 2013 14:57
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muike posted:It says "current" nuclear power. Yeah, but it sounds like it's going to have the same drawbacks of adoption (NIMBY) but with higher initial costs and no proven track record of success. E: I'm more discussing "Fusion is totally the way of the future and people will recognize that" than the actual benefits of the technology. computer parts fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Oct 8, 2013 |
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Oct 8, 2013 15:01
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Charlz Guybon posted:Major advance in the R&D of fusion power. This is great news! No, it's pretty trivial news. ICF fusion is basically a jobs program for a bunch of engineers who saw the writing on the wall at the end of the Cold War and repurposed their bomb-research machines to market them to environmentalists who don't know much about physics or economics. ICF fusion is never, never going to produce commercial fusion power. First, if you read the article you'll see that this "breakeven" isn't really breakeven, it's just breakeven if you only consider the energy absorbed by the fuel. Which is only the tinest fraction of the actual input energy. First they have to turn electricity into 3 megajoules of infrared laser beam, which they then throw away half of converting it into 1.5 megajoules of ultraviolet laser beam, which they then throw away some of converting it into x-rays at the hohlraum, and about 15% of those x-rays actually impact the target. These are flashlamp-pumped lasers, which are very inefficient; the *input energy is 422 megajoules.* What'd they get out? About 8 kilojoules. End-to-end efficiency is actually about .001%. Even just considering the *laser energy*, it's about .5%. The only way you can consider that anywhere close to breaking even is if you do what they've done here, and look at it solely in terms of the vanishingly small fraction of your total energy input that actually goes into compressing the fuel. It's like looking at a gasoline energy, considering only the energy that goes into pushing a piston down and ignoring all of it that just turns right into heat and saying that the engine's 70% efficient, instead of the 17% efficient it actually is. So this isn't a significant step, it's not a major step, it's just a tiny incremental improvement. For actual real commercial fusion power, an ICF facility would have to operate at Q (the fusion gain factor) of around 60. That is, for every megajoule of input, they need to get 60 out. For a tokamak, they'd need Q=20. ITER is hoped to get Q=10. The biggest and best Q that any fusion plant has ever achieved is 1.25, and even *that* was just a theoretical value which they'd expect to have gotten had they used D-T fuel instead of the D-D fuel that particular experiment was limited to using. In addition to the grotesque inefficiencies at converting electricity into fusion yield that ICF suffers from, there's the insane cost of the fuel elements. The is frozen D-T contained within a copper-doped beryllium capsule that needs to be spherical to micron tolerances, and the surfaces of that sphere need to be smooth to *nanometer* tolerances. The beryllium must be precisely 150 microns thick, and a 5-micron hole is laser-drilled through it. The capsule in turns rests within an equally-precisely made hohlraum comprised of a gold/uranium alloy. Each one of these precision assemblies costs tens of thousands of dollars to make, assembly of the various parts also must be done to micron tolerances. And out of this, if fusion works perfectly and every bit of the fuel is used, you can expect a maximum possible energy output of 45 megajoules. That's 12.5 kilowatt-hours of energy; if you can manage the miraculous feat of 100% efficiently converting that back into electricity, you could sell that electricity for about $1.25. And they'd need to burn ~15 of these fuel elements per second, each and every second, which means they'd need to get the fabrication cost down the order of 10 cents per, a reduction of several orders of magnitude. Ain't gonna happen. It's a jobs program for bomb designers. quote:It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms - fission - rather than squashing them together in fusion. It's also markedly different from current nuclear power because that is actually capable of generating useful quantities of electricity. We could build how many LFTRs for the cost of one NIF?
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Oct 8, 2013 15:25
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The ICF facility? That thing that's built solely for weapons-testing that circumvents bans on live-testing? http://nnsa.energy.gov/aboutus/ourprograms/defenseprograms/stockpilestewardship/inertialconfinementfusion
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Oct 11, 2013 02:41
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Office Thug posted:The ICF facility? That thing that's built solely for weapons-testing that circumvents bans on live-testing? http://nnsa.energy.gov/aboutus/ourprograms/defenseprograms/stockpilestewardship/inertialconfinementfusion Well...I still think its cool  drat it, we need some real fusion research.
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Oct 11, 2013 02:57
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Strudel Man posted:I don't really know why you responded with this. The rebound phenomenon is found in one study, disputed, and small in comparison to the overall pattern of decline, something that you could have easily seen for yourself. It's certainly of academic interest, but virtually irrelevant to the general observation that improving quality of life and women's education is the surest way of reducing birthrates. I just don't necessarily accept that birthrates are directly determined by availability of contraception and the education of women to the exclusion of other factors. Historically, women had loads of babies because they were required in order to compensate for infant mortality and that no formal structure existed to support people in old age other than the work done by their immediate family. Neither of those have anything to do with education, in fact, a well educated woman capable of accurately calculating the utility of having lots of babies might be expected to do just that. Let me give you another illustrative example. The single factor most commonly shared by Australian women seeking abortions is not educational qualification, socioeconomic status, race or availability of contraception. It is that they are victims of domestic violence. You can read about that here. Education does have a protective effect, but the reality is the women seeking abortions in the first world are already well aware of how to use contraception. Their abortions relate to sexual violence, not education or socioeconomic background. This goes back to Germaine Greers idea on her own abortion: "abortion is the last in a series of steps of disempowerment (for a woman) between the sexual act and the decision to abort." Without continuing the derail further, I would suggest that when women are well educated, financially secure and in stable relationships, the birth rate will increase to reflect that.
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Oct 11, 2013 06:17
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Install Windows posted:There is no need to go vertical because farmland exists and is serving us just fine. It might be serving us OK for the moment, but can it be improved? The average item in the supermarket has traveled ~ 1,500 miles. If we can cut that down by growing some of it where we eat, that's a start. Again, I'm not talking about building skyscrapers, I'm talking about rooftops, balconies, walls, fences, pillars, courtyards, etc. Here's a pretty good article about it: quote:at the most basic level, fewer transport miles do mean fewer emissions. Pirog's team found that the conventional food distribution system used 4 to 17 times more fuel and emitted 5 to 17 times more CO2 than the local and regional (the latter of which roughly meant Iowa-wide) systems. Similarly, a Canadian study estimated that replacing imported food with equivalent items locally grown in the Waterloo, Ontario, region would save transport-related emissions equivalent to nearly 50,000 metric tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road. It goes on to say that food miles are far from the most significant factor in our diet's environmental impact (and can sometimes be outweighed by other factors), but growing close to where we eat has advantages beyond food miles too: I can have all of the herbs I want or need available right there, any time I want them. This means my cooking improves, and so my diet improves. It means they are as fresh as possible. It means there is no chance they will get thrown out before I eat them (like 30% - 50% of the food we grow at the moment). It means I don't have to make as many trips to the supermarket (maybe, depending on how you shop). It means they don't need pesticides and fertilizers. It means the organic waste from my worm farm has a good place to go. It means I can show my kid where things come from and how plants grow. It means we watch TV a bit less. It means my balcony is a little bit cooler, and nice to look at. It mean the city has a bit more green in it. Of course we will still need the big farms to grow wheat and corn and most of the rest, but if we can take a little bit of the strain off that system, great. Another way to think about it is empowerment. This thread is obviously about energy generation, but none of us can commission a nuclear power plant, or build a wind turbine. It's out of our hands. About the most we can do is stick some PV panels on our roof, and they'll set you back a few grand at the least, if your landlord even lets you. And so we have this feeling of powerlessness. 'Climate change', or the unsustainability of our lifestyles, are such huge global problems, and the solutions spend so much time being debated at an intergovernmental level. The individual can feel shut out. The big oil and gas companies have all of the power, we're screwed, so there's nothing we can do. Look at the climate change thread. This can lead to apathy, which is dangerous. Planting a garden, is something that anyone can do (and is literally 'energy generation' - sorry to anyone who just wanted to talk about electricity but this is definitely on topic). It's not going to immediately solve everything of course, but just making a start is such an important step. Feeling like we can have a bit of control is crucial to actually taking control. I might be getting a bit carried away by this point, but I hope you can see what I mean. Most of what I listed above applies to home/balcony gardens, but spreading it throughout the city can have similar rewards. So to get back to the original point, if after all that we've decided that we do want to grow locally, and we live in urban spaces, the most efficient way to do that is to grow vertically. There's a lot of space we can use, and it's worth using, for a lot of reasons. So as well as the more commercial ones I posted originally, here are some more home style ones:    
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Oct 12, 2013 15:01
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I don't think anyone is criticizing small scale urban gardens, where an individual can water them and tend to them, and can stick to crops that deal with having very little light. I just don't think it will ever be a viable replacement for horizontal growing once you try and scale it up. Any of the sustainability gains from not having to transport your food long distances are lost because most crops require additional light and water inputs, which generally will come from fossil fuels just the same. There is a huge loss of sunlight energy at the angles one has to grow at, I bet those commercial vertical farms use a ton of energy on lighting. European style cities that just stop instead of trailing off into suburbs seem like a better answer. Growing the city's crops right outside the city would take a big chunk out of those 1500 miles. EDIT: Rooftop farming is a lot more reasonable than vertical farming, we should certainly do that where we can. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 19:47
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Jeffrey posted:European style cities that just stop instead of trailing off into suburbs seem like a better answer. Growing the city's crops right outside the city would take a big chunk out of those 1500 miles. France's market gardens are a particularly good example.
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Oct 12, 2013 22:55
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Jeffrey posted:European style cities that just stop instead of trailing off into suburbs seem like a better answer. Growing the city's crops right outside the city would take a big chunk out of those 1500 miles. Try as you might you will never be able to have the sandy/rocky soil (I cant look up the precise soil compositions due to gov shutdown) of the population dense North East match the productivity of the mid west. Smaller patches of farmland also require more energy to harvest since you cannot use the big hosses they break out for large stretches of field.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:29
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I noticed this on CNN and thought it might be of interest: Arrests in Power Grid Sabotage Fortunately the big equipment (large transmission lines) would be physically harder to sabotage, but I don't think there's much protection for an event where someone drives a big truck through a fence at a substation and sabotages equipment, be it for electrical controls or transmission equipment itself. One of the concerns awhile back was the "Aurora" attack vector - where someone either hacks or physically access a breaker at a power substation and opens the breaker, waits, and closes the breaker out-of-synchronism between the power generator the grid. There was a video of this being tested where the generator (looks like both the engine and generator) were destroyed. The whole assembly bounced on the skid when the downstream circuit breaker was closed out-of-phase. Either vector would require some basic knowledge, but it's not all that complicated to perform. Much in the same way someone doesn't need to be a chemist or a pyrotechnician to build a potentially devastating bomb. Three-Phase fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 01:28
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Jeffrey posted:I don't think anyone is criticizing small scale urban gardens, where an individual can water them and tend to them, and can stick to crops that deal with having very little light. I just don't think it will ever be a viable replacement for horizontal growing once you try and scale it up. Any of the sustainability gains from not having to transport your food long distances are lost because most crops require additional light and water inputs, which generally will come from fossil fuels just the same. There is a huge loss of sunlight energy at the angles one has to grow at, I bet those commercial vertical farms use a ton of energy on lighting. Fair enough, I guess I was responding to two main things: The idea that growing vertically is inherently inefficient / stupid (e - or necessarily means 'building special sky scrapers', although I appreciate the distinction), and the idea that current farming is just fine as it is so we don't need to do anything else. To respond to your post, I'd reiterate that I'm not talking about replacing horizontal growing, but augmenting it, and that most of what I'm talking about doesn't need additional light. Also I still haven't seen any actual examples of these commercial vertical farms that people keep talking about, or any analysis of their EROI. That said, I'm all for the euro style city idea too. Bucky Fullminster fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 03:11
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Hobo Erotica posted:To respond to your post, I'd reiterate that I'm not talking about replacing horizontal growing, but augmenting it, and that most of what I'm talking about doesn't need additional light. The problem with generically proposing to do more growing in urban areas as a supplement to growth elsewhere is that the basic presupposition is that growth locations are sort of basically interchangeable containers and that moving the container closer to the dinner table is inherently better because it will save on transport costs. That's an appealingly intuitive assumption, but I think there are a couple of problems. First, let's just look at a lifecycle breakdown of energy consumption in agriculture in the US (from http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS00-04.pdf):  So, Americans put about 10 quads of energy into agriculture for every quad and a half they get out. Of that 10 quads, about 1.4 goes to transport. "Transport" here is actually pretty close to the specific number we're interested in: quote:The transportation component of Figure 5 is composed of energy in transporting raw and processed foods from manufacturing and distribution sights [sic] to areas of retail distribution as well as the estimated energy consumed in household food shopping trips. Transportation energy in the food system is a strong function of the distance between areas of production and areas of consumption. A Cold War era study estimated that the average food item in the U.S. travels 1300 miles[144]. Fresh produce in the U.S. travels an estimated 1500 miles[145], primarily because 90% of all fresh vegetables consumed in the U.S. are grown in the San Juaquin Valley of California[146]. In addition, the large quantities of off-farm inputs used in today’s agriculture (seed, fertilizer, pesticides, animal feed) contribute to the energy consumed in transportation. This is a little odd to parse, but their "transport number" is basically estimated energy spent getting food from initial distribution points (think shipping terminals) and in shopping trips to retail locations. The text points to "off-farm inputs", but if you look at the methodology, no effort is made to quantitate that. I don't have a good number for the energy consumption of the logistical system required to supply agricultural inputs, but I'm willing to bet it's similar to that required to distribute finished food products, if you do an honest lifecycle analysis (eg phosphate from mine to runoff). If we can agree that it's fair to assume that the transportation problem is actually probably on the order of 2 or more quads, divided between those two logistical systems (handling inputs and outputs), we can make a guess as to what impact more urban growing will have on both. Let's charitably assume that urban growing reduces the output system consumption to nil for those served by it, as people can meander outside and pick peaches off trees lining the balmy 2050 streets of Winnipeg. The input system, unfortunately, needs to be more-or-less intact, as one of the things that's happened in North America is cities shipping off all their topsoil, so we're going to need to maintain nutrient flows, and, depending on location, water and other resources as well. Unfortunately, this also means that crop quality suffers, as soil structure and quality needs to be built up from zero, and it's going to be more difficult to maintain the sorts of complex soil microbial communities that give rise to good vegetable flavour. Furthermore, we have to deal with many very small plots- our energy consumption may have gone down, but labour inputs are way up (whether or not this is a problem depends on the community we're talking about and your point of view). Small, organically grown plots really need highly skilled, dedicated labour to maximise productivity, so your workforce may affect productivity as well. If you're talking about "growing vertically" in the non-skyscraper, generic, grow-up-a-wall sense, to make that make sense at all we've got to get some kind of density benefit over, say, tearing up a parking lot or ripping down a foreclosed home and using the lot as a garden, so labour quality is an important point. Let's just go ahead and say that this is all a wash and the inputs side stays the same- we reduce system consumption from ~11 quads to ~9.5 quads, or 86% of the original figure. That's actually pretty good, but I think we have to look at the problems associated with urban growing and ask whether the kind of highly distributed tiny-plot urban vertical growing you seem to have in mind makes sense versus any number of other options that give us nigh-identical logistical benefits (ie minimal farm-to-table distance). For instance, intensifying peri-urban growing puts your growing locations adjacent to your settlements, allowing a positive net energy return even if you have to use the food to power the shipment (eg feeding pack animals with your crop), so it's pretty robust in an energy-balance sense. It also allows for spatial integration of functions that you can't integrate in an urban area, such as seed growing (impossible to have a seed farm in an urban area), pasturing animals/manure/compost operations, colocation of biofuel facilities, etc. Finally, for the most part you're growing in substantially better, living, structured soil than whatever you'd have to import from elsewhere to grow in an urban area. I can't remember who was talking about hydroponics, but aside from the obvious increase in material inputs required to keep hydroponic systems going, the quality of the veg is often pretty similar to growing tomatos in fertilised sand- when you treat vegetables as hermetic units growing in some kind of interchangeable substrate, you usually end up with crappy tasting veg. Taken together, there's a pretty compelling argument to made for periurban over urban growing in most contexts, then, if what we're trying to do is kill that transport energy cost. That's not to say there aren't contexts where urban growing makes sense- I think Detroit is going to be the first example of reclaimed urban farmland being integrated into the subsistence routines of locals on a large scale in North America, for instance. But this is not a very vertical phenomenon, they're knocking down 1- and 2-story homes to grow flat. Hobo Erotica posted:Also I still haven't seen any actual examples of these commercial vertical farms that people keep talking about, or any analysis of their EROI. Yes you have, as I mentioned, the Singapore picture you linked was literally from a Singaporean commercial vertical farming project. They have 9-story dedicated towers. The EROI is massively negative, obviously, if you look at the chart above you can see that the skyscraper-farm doesn't do anything to reduce most of the energy costs of producing food. If you want to know why they're a stupid idea, Monbiot wrote a thing a couple years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/16/green-ivory-towers-farm-skyscrapers Hobo Erotica posted:That said, I'm all for the euro style city idea too. It's IMO generally a better solution for most settlements. Paper Mac fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 11:13
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Phanatic posted:It's also markedly different from current nuclear power because that is actually capable of generating useful quantities of electricity. We could build how many LFTRs for the cost of one NIF? I have a friend who works at the NIF who pretty much confirmed all of your critiques when I asked him about the story. Sadly, the article title is misleading and makes it sound as though they have broken even with energy output = energy input, but they're nowhere near that It's still a cool facility and I'm glad that they're working diligently on the fusion problem from another angle. Science is filled with unexpected breakthroughs, which is why we fund basic research That said, I don't think that anyone should hold out for nuclear fusion. I'd prefer that we build a bunch of nuclear power plants and start throwing solar panels on more homes/buildings with high levels of sun exposure
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Oct 13, 2013 20:49
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Paper Mac posted:I can't remember who was talking about hydroponics, but aside from the obvious increase in material inputs required to keep hydroponic systems going, the quality of the veg is often pretty similar to growing tomatos in fertilised sand- when you treat vegetables as hermetic units growing in some kind of interchangeable substrate, you usually end up with crappy tasting veg. rudatron fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 00:24
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rudatron posted:Do you have a source for this? I find it difficult to believe that the presence (or non-presence) of soil microbes would have an effect on something like taste. Like literally any soil microbiology textbook, pretty much. The population of the rhizosphere can strongly determine plant growth and flavour. You can read about this in many papers. Dan Barber gave kind of a modestly useful layperson's summary in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgAOFOYCnTc&t=2051s
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Oct 14, 2013 11:38
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It's really sad that NIMBYism in Canada is so strong when the power mix of the two largest provinces are so close to eliminating fossil fuels. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/10/11/science_hubris_and_ontarios_planned_lake_huron_nuclear_waste_dump_walkom.html quote:Science, hubris and Ontario’s planned Lake Huron nuclear waste dump: Walkom
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Oct 15, 2013 03:04
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Paper Mac posted:Like literally any soil microbiology textbook, pretty much. The population of the rhizosphere can strongly determine plant growth and flavour. You can read about this in many papers. Dan Barber gave kind of a modestly useful layperson's summary in this talk:
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Oct 15, 2013 03:26
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Kafka Esq. posted:It's really sad that NIMBYism in Canada is so strong when the power mix of the two largest provinces are so close to eliminating fossil fuels.
The outreach teams are composed of professionals - scientists, engineers, regulators, sociologists, lawyers - who must sometimes spend weeks or months on-the-road, away from their families, giving presentations to rooms full of skeptical local citizens of #current_city. Some of those citizens will curse them as polluters and poisoners and murderers. Sometimes there will be no public interest, and they'll see only two visitors throughout the entire day. Even on a "good day," they'll spend a lot of time re-narrating material that they've already discussed a hundred times in previous engagements, and fielding various versions of questions that they've heard hundreds of times ("what about the groundwater?" "will it explode like a nuclear bomb?" "can't we just shoot it into the sun?"). It's thankless work, and yet they do it because it needs to be done - onsite storage is not a permanent solution, and it would be deeply irresponsible to accept the status quo. I think that the testimony of the Saugeen Ojibway Nations1 helps to illustrate a few salient points: Saugeen Ojibway Nations (PDF) posted:The very first question in these proceedings concerns the concept of safety. The question was asked about the differences between safety as regulated and safety as perceived and whether OPG’s concept of safety encompassed a broader perspective. quote:As we all now understand, the willing host community concept is a central aspect of social safety and public acceptability and it is a core component of the adaptive phase management approach as it is applied in the Canadian context. And as we heard from Dr. Leiss on Tuesday, it is also now understood as a necessary aspect for the successful siting of any DGR project or other hazardous waste disposal facility. quote:Over the last few days we had a very - a few very clear examples of [trust vs acceptance]. For instance, in the EIS and again in the presentation from OPG, it was noted that the presence of the DGR which directly affects the rock, the first order of creation, may have special meaning to some Aboriginal people and therefore may be seen as incompatible with their worldview and that this might affect how Aboriginal people value the plants and animals they harvest. quote:let us not get trapped by our fears and interests, let us not get fooled by our own intelligence. Let us instead understand the seriousness of the problem and the concerns of others. Let us not rush into decision, but make the best decision, one that we can all live with. 1: For non-Canadians - First Nations (aboriginal) people tend to get hosed over in these sorts of development projects. Their input is ignored, their treaty rights are infringed, their land is used or contaminated without their consent, and they may be forced to wait several decades for an apology (let alone relief/recompense). The fact that they're present at this hearing shows that they have at least some expectation of exerting a positive influence on it; the content of their testimony shows that they're mostly satisfied with the work done to-date (although there are several more issues that they'd like to see addressed before they'll be on-board). GulMadred fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 05:33
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In addition to what GulMadred posted, there definitely wasn't all that much NIMBYism going on for this project. Far from that, there were some 20 communities that volunteered and actually contested to have it built nearby, since having a multi-billion dollar project near your town tends to be fairly good for the local economy and such.
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Oct 15, 2013 17:15
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Well, good. Glad to hear it.
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Oct 15, 2013 22:40
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Paper Mac posted:Yes you have, as I mentioned, the Singapore picture you linked was literally from a Singaporean commercial vertical farming project. They have 9-story dedicated towers. The EROI is massively negative, obviously, if you look at the chart above you can see that the skyscraper-farm doesn't do anything to reduce most of the energy costs of producing food. If you want to know why they're a stupid idea, Monbiot wrote a thing a couple years ago: It reduces land use, which is the other big thing loving up ecosystems. If you feed it with carbon neutral energy sources (say, nukes or renewables that don't take up massive amounts of space themselves), it's a very good idea to at least replace all those bullshit biofuel fields with vertical stuff.
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Oct 20, 2013 10:11
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:It reduces land use, which is the other big thing loving up ecosystems. If you feed it with carbon neutral energy sources (say, nukes or renewables that don't take up massive amounts of space themselves), it's a very good idea to at least replace all those bullshit biofuel fields with vertical stuff. Aren't many biofuel fields already energy negative? Using other electricity to produce light for vertical farms is only going to make the goal of getting energy out of them further away. You are taking a bad product and proposing to make it even worse. It's hard to get more carbon neutral than you do growing horizontally using the sun. Is space use for farming really a limiting factor that is pressuring our ecosystems? I'm sure it is in some places but not others.
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Oct 20, 2013 10:42
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Jeffrey posted:Is space use for farming really a limiting factor that is pressuring our ecosystems? I'm sure it is in some places but not others. "Space" is not normally the problem, decent soil is. We could solve many of the problems we have with land use in North America simply by limiting the development of arable land, there's no pressing need to grow vertically. In any case, your second statement is really the rub. There might be a couple of places where vertical farming makes some sense due to political considerations (Singapore) or otherwise, but generally speaking it simply exacerbates most of the sustainability issues associated with industrial ag (eg <.1 EROEI and the invested inputs are normally FFs).
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Oct 20, 2013 16:47
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Paper Mac posted:Yes you have, as I mentioned, the Singapore picture you linked was literally from a Singaporean commercial vertical farming project. They have 9-story dedicated towers. The EROI is massively negative, obviously, if you look at the chart above you can see that the skyscraper-farm doesn't do anything to reduce most of the energy costs of producing food. If you want to know why they're a stupid idea, Monbiot wrote a thing a couple years ago: Ok we still seem to be getting some wires crossed. The Singapore facility isn't a 9 story sky scraper. It's a 3 story glass house, and it's not arranged with one storey on top of the other, it's a continuous revolving tower. And we haven't seen any EROI analysis for it, except for your post claiming its 'massively negative'. The only real EROI analysis we've seen is that chart you posted, which shows that conventional agriculture (in the US) gets an EROI of 0.13. So current agriculture is already 'massively negative', and we don't know what the Singapore one would be. The other thing is that growing vertically in urban areas doesn't just eliminate the transport factor. There's also zero run off. No water wastage. They can be grown without pesticides or herbicides. They use less space (which is of varying significance depending on the location), and they bring food closer to people so they can see and connect with it better. Depending on how it's done, it can take chunks out of the Agricultural Production, Packaging, and maybe the Processing parts of your bar graph too. Again, I'm not saying stop traditional farming and grow vertically everywhere. I'm saying grow where can, as illustrated by the pictures I've posted so far. The Monboit article is pretty good, but not really relevant, since it talks exclusively about Despommier's sky scrapers, which I'm not. Jeffrey posted:Using other electricity to produce light for vertical farms is only going to make the goal of getting energy out of them further away. You are taking a bad product and proposing to make it even worse. Again, I have never talked about using electricity to produce light. All of the examples I've posted use naturally available light.
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Oct 21, 2013 03:13
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Hobo Erotica posted:Ok we still seem to be getting some wires crossed. The Singapore facility isn't a 9 story sky scraper. It's a 3 story glass house, and it's not arranged with one storey on top of the other, it's a continuous revolving tower. Ok, that's new to me, but the specific configuration of the greenhouse isn't that important, it's the fact that you're pointing to a greenhouse, a specific type of infrastructure, that's important. Hobo Erotica posted:The only real EROI analysis we've seen is that chart you posted, which shows that conventional agriculture (in the US) gets an EROI of 0.13. So current agriculture is already 'massively negative', and we don't know what the Singapore one would be. I laid out an estimate for the general case, which was an optimistic ~15% reduction in inputs, and I can't think of a case that would be substantially better than that from moving growing to urban areas alone. I also laid out an alternative case which achieves the same reduction at better cost that is more relevant to most places (periurban growing). If you've got better numbers, post 'em. It's really irritating to actually post data and have someone say "well all we have is this data you posted, so we can't really know anything". Hobo Erotica posted:The other thing is that growing vertically in urban areas doesn't just eliminate the transport factor. There's also zero run off. No water wastage. They can be grown without pesticides or herbicides. These things are a function of labour intensity in agriculture, not building a structure around the system, or making it more vertical, or whatever. Pesticides and herbicides are FF replacements for labour inputs- see e.g. organic growing techniques. "No water wastage" makes me think you're talking about pure hydroponics, but I'm not sure to what extent you're referring to enclosed vs open areas since you seem to be referring to any number of growing techniques. There are any number of ways to conserve water in open areas, however. Skilled traditional cultivators in arid areas are generally excellent at micro-shaping land in order to maximise water retention. Some industrial dryland cultivators are good at this too. In any case, increased labour intensity is going to be the main driver in these kinds of efficiencies. Hobo Erotica posted:They use less space (which is of varying significance depending on the location), and they bring food closer to people so they can see and connect with it better. Depending on how it's done, it can take chunks out of the Agricultural Production, Packaging, and maybe the Processing parts of your bar graph too. Right, and the periurban growing scenario I proposed as an alternative is cheaper and has all of these benefits. Hobo Erotica posted:Again, I'm not saying stop traditional farming and grow vertically everywhere. I'm saying grow where can, as illustrated by the pictures I've posted so far. I understand what you're saying, but my point is that what you're saying seems to be "let's build and commit additional physical/organisational infrastructure dedicated to vertical growing in urban areas". What I'm trying to get across is that this is worth doing to the extent that it's cheaper or less energy intensive than alternatives which benefit from whatever beneficient government decides to start cultivating intensively in and around urban areas. If you're talking about encouraging people to grow tomatoes on their balconies and condo roofs, fine. If you're talking about building large glass structures with closed hydroponic growing systems that need to be reskinned every 20 years, I can guarantee you that this will be more expensive and more energy intensive than growing in dirt. It's very likely to look like malinvestment in 20 years when fossil fuels are expensive and climate storms are putting hailstones through glass towers every winter. Hobo Erotica posted:The Monboit article is pretty good, but not really relevant, since it talks exclusively about Despommier's sky scrapers, which I'm not. I don't think anyone's sure what you're specifically proposing- what I've gotten so far is that you're in favour of growing everywhere we can, but that's gardening clubs, not production of foodstuffs on a meaningful scale. Again, the kind of urban agriculture that is really producing significant proportions of the local populace's diet (still pretty low, but it registers) is Detroit, and their growing is, from what I've seen, flat as hell. Paper Mac fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 21, 2013 08:08
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Jeffrey posted:Is space use for farming really a limiting factor that is pressuring our ecosystems? I'm sure it is in some places but not others. To add to what Paper Mac has already said, globally arable land is scarce. The vast majority of the best land is already under cultivation, which means increasing agricultural production over the next century is going to be difficult, especially given the risks posed by climate change. There are three ways we can continue increasing food production: begin cultivating currently marginal land, increase the productivity of land we already use, or increase how efficiently we use food already produced. Globally the greatest threat to biodiversity is habitat destruction, primarily driven by the expansion of agriculture into tropical forests, but also by competition for water between humans and other species in arid environments. The the problem is it's much easier to start growing on marginal land than it is to increase productivity. Making land more productive requires a lot capital, and there is generally little political will to preserve forests or plains in the face of development. Which is too bad, since besides containing most of the world's biodiversity the tropical forests (probably the most developable marginal land) contain immense carbon reserves, and burning it will probably destroy civilization. Slightly less apocalyptic, misusing land in arid regions can quickly render it useless desert, meaning you'll soon have to find a new source of calories. I doubt that urban farming is ever going to take off much of the pressure on ecosystems. Today there are 13,812,040 Km2 under cultivation, globally. How many square kilometers of urban farms will be viable? WIll they ever produce cheap commodities like corn or are they solely viable for high end fresh produce? Accomplishing the first could protect species, the second will not.
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Oct 22, 2013 00:23
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We're way off into derail territory now but you also can't just put water and seeds in a thing in the city and go voila! Produce! The energy concerns with modern farming (beyond transport/storage considerations) center around chemical inputs. Intensive monoculture requires a staggering amount of treatment of the soil, we're talking hundreds to thousands of pounds of multiple applications of nutrients per acre. These nutrients have to be Haber-processed, strip-mined, and trucked in. Then they have to be applied, eating more fossil fuel and further damaging the soil. Couple that with the limitations on natural sources of phosphorus, soaring erosivity over time, soil acidification, and you've got a really sticky problem. And this all happens before you even get to consider pest management. This is the first step, getting a soil or growing matrix (heh) to even support a food crop. There are soil management techniques out there to ensure currently viable soils will be able to produce food basically forever, but they don't have a One Fiscal Year return, which is all anyone is concerned about at the bottlenecks of the global food distribution system. also thanks for posting Paper Mac.
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Oct 22, 2013 16:07
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I'd like to improve my knowledge on fracking, especially with the advent of recent protests in my own province about the subject and more extreme views on the subject such as gasland and fracknation have been thrown around a lot. Could anyone point me to some reading material or references on the subject? I found this study published last year to be very good when it comes to the local concerns and dilemmas with Fracking in New Brunswick, Canada (http://www.unb.ca/initiatives/shalegas/shalegas.pdf) but I'd love to have more information on the subject since it's becoming a bit of a phenomenon in many other places around the globe.
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Oct 22, 2013 21:08
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I'm seeing this posted on facebook a lot: http://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/fukushima-28-signs-that-the-west-coast-is-being-absolutely-fried-with-nuclear-radiation/ I see that it quotes infowars once, and the first 5 points are entirely bullshit. (#5 quotes 'mox news'). However it does quote researchers saying various things that do sound scary. It seems like the blogger tried to gather every single report about fukushima possible, and compiled them without caring about whether they were bullshit or not. Are those points all bullshit, or just some of them?
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Oct 27, 2013 23:40
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If the California coast was being bathed in radiation anyone with a geiger counter could find out. In Japan after the disaster nobody trusted tepco or the gov't so everyone went off private geiger counters. Its not like the amount of radiation is some big secret that only some random conspiracy bloggers would report on.
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Oct 27, 2013 23:46
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redreader posted:I'm seeing this posted on facebook a lot: http://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/fukushima-28-signs-that-the-west-coast-is-being-absolutely-fried-with-nuclear-radiation/ You know how I know? Because radiation isn't like some kind of secret ray that only black helicopters can detect. If poo poo is radioactive enough to actually do damage it's pretty obvious. Like way too obvious to hide. Any idiot could buy the equipment off Amazon and test himself so these articles wouldn't be full of "some people say" they'd have numbers. Rent-A-Cop fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Oct 27, 2013 |
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Oct 27, 2013 23:48
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Also my cat has been losing fur and has open sores from biting there. My vet says its allergies but now I know its actually radiation!
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Oct 27, 2013 23:49
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I heard this guy talk last week, and no, the Pacific Ocean is not a radioactive wasteland. e: The talk was some pro trolling because it was entitled "Japan's Ongoing Nuclear Nightmare" and the first opening remark from the panel moderator was "We titled the talk this way because a nightmare is really terrifying and also not real."
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Oct 27, 2013 23:55
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| # ? May 10, 2024 11:51 |
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I get to listen to fukushima crap all day long and when i try to challenge what their saying they put their hands on their ears and scream LALALLALALA. Its motivating me to try to become a physicist so i can spend my days smashing their arguments all day long.
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Oct 28, 2013 00:27
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