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computer parts posted:Hydro damages the environment enough to make up for however many people it (doesn't) kill. Hydro power has been falling out of favor and environmentalists really, really don't like it. It is fairly clean but it goes far beyond environmental damage. Some fish species have gone endangered/very nearly extinct because of habitat disruption. Fisherman don't like it because it's loving up salmon and trout migration, which is also disrupting a few big time food sources. It causes problems downstream as less water ends up making it down the rivers. There are actually rivers that no longer reach the ocean, in part due to hydro power. If memory serves relative few dams are actually being built in the States (or was it none? I forget) and old ones are constantly being decommissioned. You really can't get a lot out of hydro power, especially when you look at how much disruption it causes.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:35
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This is probably a stupid question, but why does it feel like there is less discussion about the Amazon Rainforest these days? I remember it was a really big deal growing up, but I rarely hear anymore news stories. Has the science just gotten better so we talk globally instead of just the Amazon?
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Jun 11, 2014 22:03
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Femur posted:This is probably a stupid question, but why does it feel like there is less discussion about the Amazon Rainforest these days? Nah the battle was lost, better to just forget about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsIB81sLe2w
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Jun 11, 2014 22:05
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Nuclear does not have a monopoly on large scale catastrophic disasters with major loss of life and large scale environmental contamination.quote:The Aberfan disaster was a catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip in the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, on 21 October 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. It was caused by a build-up of water in the accumulated rock and shale, which suddenly started to slide downhill in the form of slurry.[2] quote:The Buffalo Creek Flood was a disaster that occurred on February 26, 1972, when the Pittston Coal Company's coal slurry impoundment dam #3, located on a hillside in Logan County, West Virginia, USA, burst, four days after having been declared 'satisfactory' by a federal mine inspector.[1] I don't know why Buffalo Creek doesn't have the same mental imprint on our country as Three-Mile Island. These spills aren't limited to the 60's and 70's either. Here are a couple huge recent ones: quote:The Martin County coal slurry spill was an accident that occurred after midnight on October 11, 2000 when the bottom of a coal slurry impoundment owned by Massey Energy in Martin County, Kentucky, USA, broke into an abandoned underground mine below.[1] The slurry came out of the mine openings, sending an estimated 306,000,000 US gallons (of slurry down two tributaries of the Tug Fork River. By morning, Wolf Creek was oozing with the black waste; on Coldwater Fork, a 10-foot (3.0 m) wide stream became a 100-yard (91 m) expanse of thick slurry. quote:The TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill occurred just before 1 a.m. on Monday December 22, 2008, when an ash dike ruptured at an 84-acre (0.34 km2) solid waste containment area at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, USA. 1.1 billion US gallons (4,200,000 m3) of coal fly ash slurry was released. [...] The slurry (a mixture of fly ash and water) traveled across the Emory River and its Swan Pond embayment, on to the opposite shore, covering up to 300 acres (1.2 km2) of the surrounding land, damaging homes and flowing up and down stream in nearby waterways such as the Emory River and Clinch River (tributaries of the Tennessee River). It was the largest fly ash release in United States history. [...] Although the land surrounding the power plant is largely rural rather than residential, the spill caused a mudflow wave[11] of water and ash that covered 12 homes,[12] pushing one entirely off its foundation, rendering three uninhabitable,[3] and caused some damage to 42 residential properties.[13] It also washed out a road,[9] ruptured a major gas line,[11] obstructed a rail line, downed trees, broke a water main,[14] and destroyed power lines. In addition, 262 people have died in coal mine explosions, fires, and gas leaks since 1970. 65 of those deaths were since 2000, so this isn't ancient history either. (source: http://www.msha.gov/MSHAINFO/FactSheets/MSHAFCT8.HTM#.U5jGnyhWOZQ) I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here about the evils of coal, but there must be more at play than "Nuclear has had more major disasters than coal".
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Jun 11, 2014 22:23
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Knockknees posted:I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here about the evils of coal, but there must be more at play than "Nuclear has had more major disasters than coal". There is, which is why you should be hostile to anyone who tries to pass off the idea that fossil fuels are used at the scale they are for any reason other than inertia and corporate profits.
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Jun 11, 2014 22:35
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Hydroelectric plants can be real slaughterhouses, too.quote:On August 17th 2009, near Sayanogorsk in south central Russia, a catastrophic accident took place in the turbine and transformer rooms of the hydroelectric plant of the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam. The exact cause is still under investigation, but what is known so far is that a tremendous amount of water from the Yenisei River flooded the turbine room, causing at least one transformer explosion and extensive damage to all ten turbines, destroying at least three of them. 74 workers are known to have lost their lives in the accident, while one remains missing. Additionally, 40 tons of transformer oil were spilled into the river, killing an estimated 400 tons of trout in two fisheries. Investigators plan to release findings in two months, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for a nationwide infrastructure inspection.   http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/the_sayanoshushenskaya_dam_acc.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfW5MqT7CSA Even worse was in 1975 when Typhoon Nina a bunch of dams in China were destroyed by a typhoon, killing directly 26 thousand people (plus far more in the subsequent famines and epidemics) and a staggering 11 million people lost their homes. Now, I don't think you can blame this case directly on hydroelectricity, as the flooding of rivers has been a huge issue in China for several thousand years now, and in this case it all came down to broken communications which prevented from opening the dams before they broke. But it's a reminder of what happens when 15.738 billion tons of water gets out of control!
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Jun 11, 2014 23:26
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Here is some more on drying effects. The key role of dry days in changing regional climate and precipitation regimes quote:Future changes in the number of dry days per year can either reinforce or counteract projected increases in daily precipitation intensity as the climate warms. We analyze climate model projected changes in the number of dry days using 28 coupled global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, version 5 (CMIP5). We find that the Mediterranean Sea region, parts of Central and South America, and western Indonesia could experience up to 30 more dry days per year by the end of this century. We illustrate how changes in the number of dry days and the precipitation intensity on precipitating days combine to produce changes in annual precipitation, and show that over much of the subtropics the change in number of dry days dominates the annual changes in precipitation and accounts for a large part of the change in interannual precipitation variability.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:37
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Chile is doing the sensible thing unlike China and most of Europe, and decided not to dam up rivers with still-natural water regimes like a bunch of retards 
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Jun 12, 2014 00:10
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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The connection that you guys are not making is that we nuked 2 cites and annihilated them; that memory ain't going away for a while. Fear of change is universal through, someone's just gonna have to build them, but you make more profit if you spend nothing through, so oh well.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:16
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Femur posted:The connection that you guys are not making is that we nuked 2 cites and annihilated them; that memory ain't going away for a while. I think this is right. Everyone lived in a deep world ending fear about anything nuclear throughout the entire Cold War.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:26
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Knockknees posted:I don't know why Buffalo Creek doesn't have the same mental imprint on our country as Three-Mile Island. These spills aren't limited to the 60's and 70's either. Here are a couple huge recent ones: Poor hillbillies getting terminally sad doesn't sell as well as WASPs getting angry - or rather, the pre-existing marginal identity of those affected by the Buffalo Creek incident simply carried over into media and popular discourse! Erikson's book probably got it all the steam it would ever have gotten, sadly. Also, if you look at satellite imagery of the area surrounding Buffalo Creek and zoom out you begin to see the real power of coal in West Virginia and the surrounding area as the dead, grey worm colony it is. I imagine it wasn't but a few weeks before other mountain towns with equally risky coal operations up the hill from their hollow started banging the drum about how the folks in Buffalo Creek brought it on themselves.
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Jun 12, 2014 02:49
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Guys I'm starting to think that there's no such thing as energy generation that doesn't cost someone something.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:39
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Fojar38 posted:Guys I'm starting to think that there's no such thing as energy generation that doesn't cost someone something. Yes, every action has a cost, but oil/coal are not accounting correctly. They are costing society its future, potentially. I believe that is the issue, and it's the problem of a society thats knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:01
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Fojar38 posted:Guys I'm starting to think that there's no such thing as energy generation that doesn't cost someone something. Except for nuclear wind and solar sure
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Jun 12, 2014 05:06
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down with slavery posted:Except for nuclear wind and solar sure I'm sure the residents near Fukushima would have something to say about that.
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Jun 12, 2014 08:26
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blakout posted:I'm sure the residents near Fukushima would have something to say about that. Absolutely, since it's not their fault the evacuation was so botched it literally killed more people than even rabidly anti nuclear researchers predicted would die from radiation, and that the exclusion zone is several times bigger than it should be if it were made according to standards like "is the level of radiation remotely dangerous".
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Jun 12, 2014 08:58
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blakout posted:I'm sure the residents near Fukushima would have something to say about that. Tsunami deaths: 15.887 (2.615 missing) Nuclear deaths: 0
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Jun 12, 2014 12:38
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blakout posted:I'm sure the residents near Fukushima would have something to say about that. How many people did Fukushima kill?
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Jun 12, 2014 14:57
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down with slavery posted:How many people did Fukushima kill? John E. Ten Hoeve and Mark Z. Jacobson posted:We find that inhalation exposure, external exposure, and ingestion exposure of the public to radioactivity may result in 15 to 1300 cancer mortalities and 24 to 2500 cancer morbidities worldwide, mostly in Japan. Exposure of workers to radioactivity at the plant is projected to result in another 2 to 12 cancers cases. This radiological health effect compares with the ~600 non-radiological deaths already attributed to the evacuation following the accident. http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf
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Jun 12, 2014 15:28
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Quite the confidence interval Still puts nuclear at effectively 0 deaths compared to the others
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Jun 12, 2014 15:33
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down with slavery posted:Quite the confidence interval poo poo is hard to model. If the numbers on the Fukushima 1 NPP Wikipedia page and at http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html are right, and a US coal plant would have generated the electricity 884 TWh ⋅ 15 deaths/TWh = 13260 deaths would have occurred. E: You might want to add 35 deaths which would have statistically occurred without disaster due to nuclear energy to the Fukushima 1 NPP death toll for comparisons sake. Grim Up North fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 15:48
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Grim Up North posted:poo poo is hard to model. Again, the point stands, compared to the alternatives, nuclear, solar, and wind are effectively "safe" and only offer benefits because using them can replace more harmful methods.
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Jun 12, 2014 15:58
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down with slavery posted:Again, the point stands, compared to the alternatives, nuclear, solar, and wind are effectively "safe" and only offer benefits because using them can replace more harmful methods. Agreed, I just wanted to see the numbers myself.
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Jun 12, 2014 16:02
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down with slavery posted:Again, the point stands, compared to the alternatives, nuclear, solar, and wind are effectively "safe" and only offer benefits because using them can replace more harmful methods. I agree with you, I'm just saying that nuclear power isn't free and should be replaced by renewable energy as soon as it's remotely feasible.
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Jun 12, 2014 16:26
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blakout posted:I agree with you, I'm just saying that nuclear power isn't free and should be replaced by renewable energy as soon as it's remotely feasible. But renewable energy kills more people?
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Jun 12, 2014 17:06
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Struensee posted:But renewable energy kills more people? Neither of them kill an amount of people where it's worth talking about it.
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Jun 12, 2014 17:12
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blakout posted:I agree with you, I'm just saying that nuclear power isn't free and should be replaced by renewable energy as soon as it's remotely feasible. They're doing exactly this in Germany as we speak, and it's been a disaster. Solar and wind are so bad at producing power when it's needed, and storing said power is so incredibly expensive, that there've been gluts and shortages across the country. They've been burning more coal as a result, as a way to try and stabilize production, and have even brought new coal plants online. Similarly, in Japan, they've been burning a shitton of natural gas, as a replacement for their now deactivated nuclear reactors. The only real difference there, aside from the type of fossil fuel used, is that they hadn't even bothered with renewables.
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Jun 12, 2014 18:21
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blakout posted:I agree with you, I'm just saying that nuclear power isn't free and should be replaced by renewable energy as soon as it's remotely feasible. Can recyclable nuclear count?
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Jun 12, 2014 21:34
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I think there should be a thread in D&D separate from the climate change thread and the energygen thread in which goons can circlejerk about nuclear power. Don't get me wrong, nuclear power is the key to breaking from fossil fuels, but I think everyone is tired of seeing nuclear trotted out over and over again and dominating discussion in the aforementioned two threads at the expense of other topics. Seriously the nuclear power horse got murdered by D&D years ago and we're beating it into loving quarks now.
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Jun 12, 2014 23:40
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Negative Entropy posted:I think there should be a thread in D&D separate from the climate change thread and the energygen thread in which goons can circlejerk about nuclear power. Don't get me wrong, nuclear power is the key to breaking from fossil fuels, but I think everyone is tired of seeing nuclear trotted out over and over again and dominating discussion in the aforementioned two threads at the expense of other topics. Seriously the nuclear power horse got murdered by D&D years ago and we're beating it into loving quarks now. Nuclear is a key point of any alternate energy plan though because any other renewable energy source is limited either by availability (solar, hydro), reliability (solar, wind), or scale (hydro).
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Jun 12, 2014 23:46
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Negative Entropy posted:I think there should be a thread in D&D separate from the climate change thread and the energygen thread in which goons can circlejerk about nuclear power. Don't get me wrong, nuclear power is the key to breaking from fossil fuels, but I think everyone is tired of seeing nuclear trotted out over and over again and dominating discussion in the aforementioned two threads at the expense of other topics. Seriously the nuclear power horse got murdered by D&D years ago and we're beating it into loving quarks now. Elotana fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jun 13, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 00:15
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computer parts posted:Nuclear is a key point of any alternate energy plan though because any other renewable energy source is limited either by availability (solar, hydro), reliability (solar, wind), or scale (hydro).
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Jun 13, 2014 00:20
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Does anyone know about the benefits of eating local? I was under the impression that most of the impact from the big farms comes from transport, which is a fossil fuel problem. I've read that multiple smaller farms put out more waste than one giant farm for the same amount of produce if you remove transport from the equation. I've also read that this is BS and I can't find anything reliable on it. I'm basically wondering what the value is in eating local, or what long term problems it is supposed to address.
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Jun 13, 2014 01:57
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Stoven posted:Does anyone know about the benefits of eating local? I was under the impression that most of the impact from the big farms comes from transport, which is a fossil fuel problem. I've read that multiple smaller farms put out more waste than one giant farm for the same amount of produce if you remove transport from the equation. I've also read that this is BS and I can't find anything reliable on it. I'm basically wondering what the value is in eating local, or what long term problems it is supposed to address. Big, mass production farm exist because the food is cheaper to grow there and transport elsewhere than it is to grow locally, full stop. Growing most things locally doesn't work for a variety of reasons, such as climate and soil conditions that favor different crops-- trying to grow a diverse crop menu on any particular soil is inefficient, and you end up spending more on fertilizer, pesticide etc than you would have on transport.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:20
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If you want to go for more environmentally-friendly eating you'll get more mileage cutting out the red meat or, a step further, going vegetarian.
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Jun 13, 2014 03:26
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Evilreaver posted:Big, mass production farm exist because the food is cheaper to grow there and transport elsewhere than it is to grow locally, full stop. Growing most things locally doesn't work for a variety of reasons, such as climate and soil conditions that favor different crops-- trying to grow a diverse crop menu on any particular soil is inefficient, and you end up spending more on fertilizer, pesticide etc than you would have on transport. Also, people want to do things like eat seasonal produce all year round.
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Jun 13, 2014 03:26
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Evilreaver posted:Big, mass production farm exist because the food is cheaper to grow there and transport elsewhere than it is to grow locally, full stop. Growing most things locally doesn't work for a variety of reasons, such as climate and soil conditions that favor different crops-- trying to grow a diverse crop menu on any particular soil is inefficient, and you end up spending more on fertilizer, pesticide etc than you would have on transport. Well, no. The major reason that big, mass production farms exist is because of corn subsidies. Like really, the government pays people to grow as much corn as they can, which leads to utterly massive corn farms, corn being in literally everything we eat, and corn being used to feed meat. Part of the reason we rely so heavily on artificial fertilizer is because growing gently caress tons of corn every year is guaranteed profit. The other snag is that a lot of diversity in crops has been lost in the past few decades. Different soil conditions led to different crops sure but with proper crop rotation and study of local conditions you could grow a very wide variety of foods in various areas. However, contemporary farming techniques rely heavily on monoculture crops of the same thing every year with absurd amounts of chemical fertilizers. Consumer attitudes of "I want to eat strawberries in Maine in December" certainly don't help but really, a lot of it is American food policy at the federal level.
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Jun 13, 2014 10:31
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Consumer attitudes of "I want to eat strawberries in Maine in December" certainly don't help but really, a lot of it is American food policy at the federal level. Globally, though, it's still a thing. Huge swathes of Africa are being turned into farmland to produce vegies for the European market, for example.
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Jun 13, 2014 12:00
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Struensee posted:Tsunami deaths: 15.887 (2.615 missing) Number of people evacuated from their homes as a result of the Fukushima disaster: 160,000+ Number of officially recognized deaths from the stress of evacuation: 1,660 (as of Jan. 2014)* Percentage of surveyed evacuee households whose family has been split up: 48.9%** Percentage of surveyed evacuee households reporting family members showing signs of symptoms of physical or psychological distress: 67.5%** I'm glad we haven't seen any radiation deaths as a result of Fukushima, but I'm tired of people acting like there isn't a real human cost. * http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/editorial/AJ201403080030 ** http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201404290046
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Jun 13, 2014 12:10
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Ganguro King posted:I'm glad we haven't seen any radiation deaths as a result of Fukushima, but I'm tired of people acting like there isn't a real human cost. Because of a loving stupid botched overreaction because  ATOMS were involved. Most of the evacuated zone is less irradiated than a number of high background radiation places where people live without any problems. If you want to die of radiation around Fukushima you have to break into the power plant, and if you want to get cancer you have to actively look for a place where radiation is strong enough to matter.
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Jun 13, 2014 12:22
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