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I'm not an oceanographer or anything like that, but every response I've seen to this from scientists (like Miriam Goldstein, who studies the garbage in the gyres) has been negative. And when it was originally reported on, it was just a highschool kids project. The fact that they've done their own investigation of their idea doesn't particularly impress me either.Feasibility Assessment posted:Because no nets would be used, a passive cleanup may well be harmless to the marine ecosystem and could potentially catch particles that are much smaller than what nets could capture. Remember, they're talking about filtering the first 2-3 metres of the ocean surface. It's pretty clear they are thinking only of macroscopic animals and ignoring the plankton, which again are very fragile and can't avoid the booms. (Edit: ignoring is not right, but I believe they have a simplistic view of what can affect an ecosystem) I'm not in that field so I'm leaving my judgement to the experts, who are saying it won't work without harming the ecosystem. Adenoid Dan fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 07:52
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Baronjutter posted:Is capital so loving resistant to not outright killing the planet? Do you really need to be told the answer to that?
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Jul 2, 2014 08:07
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Adenoid Dan posted:I'm not an oceanographer or anything like that, but every response I've seen to this from scientists (like Miriam Goldstein, who studies the garbage in the gyres) has been negative. And when it was originally reported on, it was just a highschool kids project. The fact that they've done their own investigation of their idea doesn't particularly impress me either. Fair enough I suppose. Can I ask what you'd do then? Do any of those other scientists have any better ideas? As to the plankton, this is what they had to say: quote:"Because they are effectively neutrally buoyant, both phytoplankton and zooplankton are likely to pass underneath the barriers along with the current. But even assuming the worst - the Ocean Cleanup Array would harness all the plankton it encounters, this would constitute a maximum loss of 10 million kg of planktonic biomass annually." They then go on to say "Given the immense primary production of the world oceans, this would take less than 7 seconds to reproduce". While I'm not sure about that, 10,000 tonnes per year seems pretty manageable to me. They also say "Qualitative data suggested that the barrier does not catch zooplankton as the net behind the boom appeared to have caught an equal amount of zooplankton as the net next to the boom". (But surely a better way of knowing would be to look i the net, no? It raises a question I suppose - how much plankton would you be willing to remove to get the plastic out of the oceans? If all that plankton is hanging around with all that plastic, do we want it there anyway, or would we be better off taking it all out and starting again? Since I went through it I may as well break down some data points: * Total plastic in North Pacific Gyre: 140,000 tonnes (21,000 tonnes < 2 cm, 119,000 tonnes > 2 cm) * ~ 90% (maybe a bit more) is in the first 3 meters of depth * A solid boom of a specific length (1.4 km), on a specific angle (30 degrees) has the best chance of capturing all that * Platforms cost 14 million euros (excluding equipment and mooring) * In total, to extract 70 million kg (42% of total) from NPG over 10 years, cost is 317 million euros. * That means the plastic has to have a value of 4.53 euros per kilo to be profitable (which was obviously never going to happen, but anyway). There are some more charts and graphs in diagram in the report too but I couldn't pull them out. Problems: Trial period was only over 1 month - given the effect of seasonal variability on the oceans I would want to see it over at least 12. I'd also like better data on exactly what it does to the marine life, but I guess that comes with building bigger models and seeing what happens. Anyway the next step is to actually test a pilot, which they hope to do in the next 3-4 years, progressively scaling it up until they get to the 100 km array. Again, I know this isn't strictly on topic, but I feel it's appropriate, in a "discuss the feasibility of solutions to large, borderline intractable environmental problems" kind of way.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:04
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140,000 tons doesn't seem like a huge amount of plastic. That's like and aircraft carrier and a half of plastic, which is a lot, but not necessarily on a global scale.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:10
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That's just in the North Pacific Gyre, there are 4 others around the world, so in total it would be a fair bit more. Also should have said that's a conservative estimate. But yeah, interesting to think of it in terms of aircraft carriers I guess.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:24
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"In the north pacific gyre" meaning spread out across thousands of square miles and god only knows how much depth.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:39
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Nintendo Kid posted:"In the north pacific gyre" meaning spread out across thousands of square miles and god only knows how much depth. This. It enters needle in a haystack territory. I think the better solution is keep developing better nanobot technology. Solar-powered self-replicating nanobots. Maybe in 50 or 100 years. I think the carbon dioxide emissions issue is a bit higher priority than ocean plastic. Both suck, but one's just a bit more pressing and solvable now.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:52
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Nintendo Kid posted:"In the north pacific gyre" meaning spread out across thousands of square miles and god only knows how much depth. Well, yeah. That's what the problem is. The question is what to do about it. Pander posted:I think the better solution is keep developing better nanobot technology. Solar-powered self-replicating nanobots. Maybe in 50 or 100 years. I think the carbon dioxide emissions issue is a bit higher priority than ocean plastic. Both suck, but one's just a bit more pressing and solvable now. I'm not sure that a platoon of 'self replicating nanobots' would really be a safer or more cost effective solution than a simple passive floating boom, but I'd be interested to know more. And come on, let's not fall into the "either / or" dichotomy.
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Jul 7, 2014 04:00
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Hobo Erotica posted:Well, yeah. That's what the problem is. The question is what to do about it. It's not a "problem" for that precise reason. It's something on the level of a desk that could use dusting, only the dusting could easily destroy the desk.
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Jul 7, 2014 04:58
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's not a "problem" for that precise reason. It's something on the level of a desk that could use dusting, only the dusting could easily destroy the desk.  From Wikipedia: quote:[...] Of the 1.5 million Laysan Albatrosses that inhabit Midway, nearly all are found to have plastic in their digestive system. Approximately one-third of their chicks die, and many of those deaths are due to being fed plastic from their parents. Twenty tons of plastic debris washes up on Midway every year with five tons of that debris being fed to Albatross chicks.  gently caress the ecosystem, what has it ever done for us?
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Jul 7, 2014 06:20
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CombatInformatiker posted:
The goon say is you freaking out about it when every cleanup thing we can think of currently involves devastating the very same ecosystem.
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Jul 7, 2014 06:22
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Nintendo Kid posted:The goon say is you freaking out about it when every cleanup thing we can think of currently involves devastating the very same ecosystem.
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Jul 7, 2014 06:55
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So it is a problem, or it's not? And which is more devastating, catching a few thousand tonnes of plastic contaminated plankton per year, or just leaving all the plastic there? Do you have something to back up the idea that it would "destroy the desk/ecosystem"? Because in the most scathing critical assessment posted so far it just said: "Plankton biologists, needless to say, are skeptical."
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Jul 7, 2014 06:58
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Hobo Erotica posted:So it is a problem, or it's not? Destroying a major food source would really hurt the ecosystem, yes. The existence of the plastic is a problem, but every way of removing it so far produces much bigger problems. The only thing we can actually do is stop letting so much new stuff show up, rather than expect to clean it up once it arrives!
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Jul 7, 2014 07:00
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Nintendo Kid posted:every way of removing it so far produces much bigger problems I don't think you've really shown that, but I don't mind leaving it there.
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Jul 7, 2014 07:02
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The best way to clean it up would probably be to let it degrade and let it leave the system naturally, while improving waste disposal and recycling to reduce the input. I think this is just generally not studied enough to even come to conclusions about harm, let alone what damage intensive cleanup might cause. The harms are mostly theoretical at this point. Certainly there are harms, we just don't know what they are, or how large the impact is. We know organisms are eating the plastic (or using it as normally much more scarce habitat, which changes the composition of the community), but we don't know if that's really what's killing the animals found dead - we don't do much sampling of healthy animals to see what's in their stomachs. It could be that the plastic mostly just passes through them without causing trouble. So I'd much rather study the problem before deciding that action is necessary. Sometimes it's better to allow it to recover on it's own. I've never done real life work on assessment or remediation of contaminated sites, but I've taken classes on it, including graduate level (almost entirely dealing with terrestrial ecosystems).
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Jul 7, 2014 23:17
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This is a really boring derail for the Energy Generation thread.
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Jul 8, 2014 00:36
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Doom Rooster posted:This is a really boring derail for the Energy Generation thread. Honestly, anything is an improvement over throwing another tantrum about how nuclear energy is misunderstood by US politicians and environmentalists. Somehow though, posters in this thread don't seem to get bored of that, even after 48 pages.
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Jul 8, 2014 00:54
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I come at this thread from the opposite perspective of silence_kit, but I'm pretty ok with talking about other forms of environmental technology.
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Jul 8, 2014 01:06
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I don't know what the solution is to our plastic ocean, but I swear to god the solution involves looser nuclear regulations and more money for thorium research.
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Jul 8, 2014 01:13
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I say we empty the oceans of water to fuel massive hydrogen powered engines and fusion reactors, then pick up the plastic on the floor. It's about as efficient as surface floating tech!
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Jul 8, 2014 01:47
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Adenoid Dan posted:The best way to clean it up would probably be to let it degrade and let it leave the system naturally You'll forgive me if I say I don't consider this a viable option, right? They don't degrade. Well I mean the sun photo-degrades them into smaller and smaller pieces, but it's all still there. They don't leave the system, and it's definitely not natural. $500 million to stick some booms out there and try and catch what they can seems like a deal worth trying (Or at least testing further) to me. I'll take your point that we need more study into the harms of both the problem and the solutions, but at this stage my gut says action is required, that it should be passive (let the currents do the work), hopefully come in at a reasonable price per kilo, and that it shouldn't involve nets. And yes we can all agree we need to immediately reduce the input.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:19
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They weather into smaller and smaller pieces which can sediment out in feces and dead animals, or wash up on shore (where they certainly should be cleaned up when reasonable). That is how the huge amount of tiny pieces got there in the first place, after all. http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/25/1314705111 Doing nothing is often the least bad solution, even when there are remediation options that would fix the original problem.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:58
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silence_kit posted:Honestly, anything is an improvement over throwing another tantrum about how nuclear energy is misunderstood by US politicians and environmentalists. Somehow though, posters in this thread don't seem to get bored of that, even after 48 pages. But that's pretty much why this thread dies so often, right? Plastic in the oceans has nothing to do with energy generation, and it's the only thing getting talked about right now. All of the old energy generation arguments have been thoroughly debated and discussed. People in the thread have fallen into three camps: 1) People who are pro-green and pro-nuclear power, who need to come up with solutions to nuclear power's popular perception problem. At the same time, they want many types of renewable power generation in ways that make sense (putting solar panels on residential homes in the desert, for instance). Most of the self-professed scientists, engineers, and people who grew up with a good science education fell into this camp. 2) People who are pro-green and anti-nuclear power, who need to come up with solutions to a myriad of problems involved with adopting renewable power for the entire country. People in this camp mean well, and some of their papers have a lot of scientific merit, but ultimately their argument boils down to either "cost doesn't matter, let's use renewables everywhere" or "this idea is actually cheaper if you make the following assumptions". Their anti-nuclear stance is often fueled by overblown fears of what happens during actual nuclear disasters. Granted, it would suck getting evacuated from your home because the 50 year-old plant down the street was experiencing a meltdown due to a natural disaster, but a nuclear power proponent will gladly point out that the plant was really old and had a lovely design anyway, and no one actually died. 3) People who are anti-green. Coal and oil are good enough, more money in my pocket, FYGM, etc The people in the pro-nuclear camp want us to switch away from coal as fast as possible for a variety of reasons, so they propose nuclear power, and then they get frustrated that people in camp 2 are so anti-nuclear that they'd rather continue burning coal for power while their favorite pet project gets kickstarted and is still 50-100 years from seeing fruition. The arguments back and forth were all hashed out, so the thread became boring and people stopped posting about energy generation.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:26
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Adenoid Dan posted:Doing nothing is often the least bad solution, even when there are remediation options that would fix the original problem. Well it's something I don't think I've ever even considered, so thanks I guess. Yeah fair point. The arguments have all been done, and I'm glad they have, but after all that I did intend for the thread to be for sharing news and articles on the energy generation front. I mean it's such a rapidly advancing field I thought it would be worth having a place to come and discuss the developments as they happen around the world. quote:Plastic in the oceans has nothing to do with energy generation Um excuse me plastic is made from oil, so you can you can break it down and shake it up or whatever, and turn it into a really lovely fuel, thank you very much.
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Jul 8, 2014 14:13
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QuarkJets posted:2) People who are pro-green and anti-nuclear power, who need to come up with solutions to a myriad of problems involved with adopting renewable power for the entire country. People in this camp mean well, and some of their papers have a lot of scientific merit, but ultimately their argument boils down to either "cost doesn't matter, let's use renewables everywhere" or "this idea is actually cheaper if you make the following assumptions". Their anti-nuclear stance is often fueled by overblown fears of what happens during actual nuclear disasters. Granted, it would suck getting evacuated from your home because the 50 year-old plant down the street was experiencing a meltdown due to a natural disaster, but a nuclear power proponent will gladly point out that the plant was really old and had a lovely design anyway, and no one actually died. You forgot the part where they randomly accuse us of having some sort of radiation fetish.
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Jul 8, 2014 14:44
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QuarkJets posted:But that's pretty much why this thread dies so often, right? Plastic in the oceans has nothing to do with energy generation, and it's the only thing getting talked about right now. That really isn't true at all, there is camp #4, pro-nuclear and anti-green who want only investment in nuclear technology and see any alternative technologies as a waste. They have been pretty vocal. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 15:12
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Ardennes posted:That really isn't true at all, there is camp #4, pro-nuclear and anti-green who want only investment in nuclear technology and see any alternative technologies as a waste. You probably need to be more honest about the biases in the thread. Those people are insignificant. (unless you have quotes to show otherwise)
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Jul 8, 2014 15:18
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computer parts posted:Those people are insignificant. I would say they are far from it, I remember quite a few discussions that wind investment should be "minimal" because of peak load, and solar technology being useless. Even if you suggested a mixed portfolio you experience "group criticism." The D&D energy thread has historically been very anti-green/pro-nuclear to an extreme. I am actually pro-nuclear expansion to an extent, but this thread has always creeped me the gently caress out. That said, since SA has gone pretty right-wing, a lot of threads have. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 15:36
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Ardennes posted:That really isn't true at all, there is camp #4, pro-nuclear and anti-green who want only investment in nuclear technology and see any alternative technologies as a waste. They have been pretty vocal. Who here has made this argument? I must have missed it.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:38
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crabcakes66 posted:Who here has made this argument? I must have missed it. Someone dismissing green technologies one by one is probably anti-green.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:40
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Ardennes posted:Someone dismissing green technologies one by one is probably anti-green. I'm looking through the thread trying to find a specific example.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:42
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Ardennes posted:Someone dismissing green technologies one by one is probably anti-green. It seems more like you're just making a blanket accusation that anyone who is pro-nuclear is anti-green. Do you have an example of someone who is "anti-green", because I don't think I've come across many like that in this thread? Ardennes posted:That said, since SA has gone pretty right-wing, a lot of threads have. Ah yes, D&D is basically Freep, as we all know Kaal fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 15:43
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Ardennes posted:Someone dismissing green technologies one by one is probably anti-green. Perhaps a better way for you to express what you're getting at would be to suggest that some people are pro nuclear but believe that renewables are presently inviable for base load or substantial load following capacity generation? Anti-green seems like an over road and misleading moniker in this context.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:45
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crabcakes66 posted:Who here has made this argument? I must have missed it. I think he's including in that anyone skeptical of green technology being able to fully replace all other forms of power generation.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:45
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Ardennes posted:Someone dismissing green technologies one by one is probably anti-green. The only thing I've seen even close to this is people arguing against zealots who insist the entire electric generation load can be carried by solar and wind. This is not mathematically possible. Carbon-free electricity generation has to include a fair amount of nuclear. We should certainly exploit solar and wind sources as much as possible, but nuclear has to be in there as well.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:46
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Kaal posted:It seems more like you're just making a blanket accusation that anyone who is pro-nuclear is anti-green. Do you have an example of someone who is "anti-green", because I don't think I've come across many like that in this thread? I am going from page 6 to 10 and I have already seen some examples. If someone refers to "rabid greenies" then they probably don't have a high regard for an alternative solution. It has always been a echo chamber in here, scroll through the thread from the beginning. If anything the lack of acknowledgement of it is sort of the proof in the pudding situation. quote:The only thing I've seen even close to this is people arguing against zealots who insist the entire electric generation load can be carried by solar and wind. The discussion has always been about minimizing investment in wind into as little as possible because of the "peak" generation issue.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:47
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For what it's worth, I don't really think it's useful to lump "green" together. My layman's impression is that there is a clear hierarchy with solar near the top (because the peaking issues are a lot more manageable) and biofuels near the bottom because they are a really terrible and wasteful idea all around, but I'm just some dumb rear end in a top hat reading stuff on the Internet so I might be wrong. Even if the current generation of solar isn't ready to step in as a grid replacement, it's a great way to increase efficiency at the consumer scale.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:47
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Ardennes posted:I am going from page 6 to 10 and I have already seen some examples. If someone refers to "rabid greenies" then they probably don't have a high regard for an alternative solution. It has always been a echo chamber in here, scroll through the thread from the beginning. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this post is too small to contain.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:49
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Jeffrey posted:I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this post is too small to contain. Great! Anyway, one thing I have noticed in this thread is the expectation for green technologies (and the reason they should be dismissed) is that they are expected to "fix" the issue. For example Fishmech citing how many solar panels it would take to take care of the energy generation of the US, reductio ab absurdum. That said, I am out of a limb because I think anyone lurking who hasn't bought into this thread has left a long time ago but the "meta"-discussion of reducing the thread to "moderates" and "crazed environmentalists" is way too much. That said, enviromentalists and hippies seem to be the prime enemy of D&D at the moment. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 15:55
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