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Quantum Mechanic
Apr 25, 2010

Just another fuckwit who thrives on fake moral outrage.
:derp:Waaaah the Christians are out to get me:derp:

lol abbottsgonnawin

Nintendo Kid posted:

Er what I mean is, is there really a lot of Australian housing stock out there with no insulation at all or only very minimal insulation? The proposal seems to imply that there is.

Yes, there is. We're utterly shocking at properly insulating.

hobbesmaster posted:

So reading up on this... four people killed themselves in easily preventable accidents due to improper supervision and failure to follow basic electrical safety standards (in one case, directly contradicting them).

In the states (especially Texas) we call that "Friday"

Yes, but you see, the government oversaw the program so it was LAYBAH WASTE and LAYBAH KILLING ARE BOYS.

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Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Hobo Erotica posted:

Oh ok, good question then. So I just dug through the report (page 60 of the printed version):

41% of houses are brick veneer - poorest thermal performance of all construction types

69% of houses have some form of insulation, but only 18% have wall insulation

47% have window coverings designed to stop heat or cold

32% have outside awnings and shutters

2.6% have double glazing

Australian homes are also apparently 2-4 times as 'draughty'as those in north America and Europe

So, enough room to improve I suppose.

Christ that's awful. I can't even imagine the logic behind constructing anything recent with insulation in other places but not the walls.

Contra Duck
Nov 4, 2004

#1 DAD
"Hey we can save a couple thousand dollars on our $600k mcmansion by not getting proper insulation and just running the aircon on heating mode 24 hours a day for the entire winter instead" -- The average Australian.

NPR Journalizard
Feb 14, 2008

hobbesmaster posted:

So reading up on this... four people killed themselves in easily preventable accidents due to improper supervision and failure to follow basic electrical safety standards (in one case, directly contradicting them).

In the states (especially Texas) we call that "Friday"

Yeah, but we have halfway decent labour laws and workplace deaths are something we actively try to avoid, instead of just replacing the dead worker. I understand it's different in America.

Funnily enough the minister in charge was former dancer Peter Garrett, and he was forced to resign because he lowered the rate of deaths in the construction industry during the program. Meanwhile, our current immigration minister is personally responsible for the innocent women and children who we lock up for no reason, in places where locals have rampaged through the detention centre and killed people seeking asylum, and he gets the prime minister to vouch for him and his good work.

But enough on our hosed politics, let's get back to our hosed energy gen systems.

Phayray
Feb 16, 2004
But the fuckery doesn't stop! http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28339663

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

:suicide:
Next: environmental regulation by chaplains?

Hedera Helix
Sep 2, 2011

The laws of the fiesta mean nothing!
This was a foregone conclusion after their elections and the naked demagoguery that preceded them. It's a minor miracle that the carbon tax managed to survive even these few days, after the Australian Senate was sworn in.

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

Frogmanv2 posted:

Meanwhile, our current immigration minister is personally responsible for the innocent women and children who we lock up for no reason, in places where locals have rampaged through the detention centre and killed people seeking asylum

Wait, hold on, back up, what the gently caress?

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Wait, hold on, back up, what the gently caress?

Well we're scared of brown people and boats, so we're especially scared of brown people in boats. Why not concentrate brown people from boats in camps so we don't have to be scared anymore :v: (Rethoric aside, the proud immigrant nation of Australia is shipping current immigrants to detention camps located on islands, which in a shocking turn of events are not nice to live in after all. Oh, and the camps are run by everyone's favourite security contractor G4S).

In "oh you guys again" news: Germany tries to build offshore wind. At the sight of a big construction site, German greens once again poo poo a brick and sue anything in sight :eng99:. At this point, it looks like the Energiewende's biggest proponents suddenly become its biggest opponents once they notice decentralised rooftop solar and geothermal power alone (out of sight, out of mind) won't cut it.

Bates
Jun 15, 2006
In my corner of Europe everything pre-70s oil shock got terrible insulation. It's so bad that it's more economical to tear them down and just build a new one.

NPR Journalizard
Feb 14, 2008

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Wait, hold on, back up, what the gently caress?

The current policy of the government is to use the military to intercept any boats carrying asylum seekers and tow them back to where they came from. They refuse to answer any questions about what's actually happening, citing operational security reasons. We also have over a thousand men, women and children in offshore immigration detention (which groups like HRW and Amnesty International call torture) and have ceased processing claims. A few months ago, the residents of manus island took exception to the asylum seekers and there was a riot and an asylum seeker named Reza Berati was killed. There are weekly reports of new horrors coming out of there, like the poo poo conditions, lack of medical support, constant self harm, including by children and worse stuff.

Also we have recently intercepted 2 boats with tamil asylum seekers and are keeping one in international waters because we were going to give them back to the Sri Lankan government and noted good lawyer Ron Merkel said what the gently caress is happening and got a high Court order to stop it. We did manage to get about 50 tamils shipped back though, and they have already been arrested and charged.

Yes, I know this is against international law, and common decency.

I could keep going but frankly I'm a bit depressed now. Come over to the auspol thread to find out more.

NPR Journalizard fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Jul 18, 2014

Pander
Oct 9, 2007

Fear is the glue that holds society together. It's what makes people suppress their worst impulses. Fear is power.

And at the end of fear, oblivion.



blowfish posted:

Well we're scared of brown people and boats, so we're especially scared of brown people in boats. Why not concentrate brown people from boats in camps so we don't have to be scared anymore :v: (Rethoric aside, the proud immigrant nation of Australia is shipping current immigrants to detention camps located on islands, which in a shocking turn of events are not nice to live in after all. Oh, and the camps are run by everyone's favourite security contractor G4S).

In "oh you guys again" news: Germany tries to build offshore wind. At the sight of a big construction site, German greens once again poo poo a brick and sue anything in sight :eng99:. At this point, it looks like the Energiewende's biggest proponents suddenly become its biggest opponents once they notice decentralised rooftop solar and geothermal power alone (out of sight, out of mind) won't cut it.
Man. whether it's 100% renewables or "let's pay polluters", Australia doesn't half-rear end anything. They put their WHOLE rear end into loving everything up.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

God drat this is like our greens here. They protest the poo poo out of new gas plants, pretty legit, yeah gas is way better than coal but it's still absolute poo poo and such a short term stop-gap solution. They protest the poo poo out of new hydro projects, ok hydro is awesome but the initial build does gently caress up the area due to the whole "hey this river is suddenly a lake" business, but after that you got very clean power and good flood control. All the time they are just shouting a mantra of "renewables and conservation". Finally they try to build some wind somewhere and it's the got drat local rich property owning greens blocking it. Then suddenly windmills have dangerous effects on ocean habitats and kill seabirds and their harmonic vibrations cause land values to go down and make people develop morgellions or what ever.

They honestly seem to think that we can just do rooftop solar on everyone's house and that's that. Also industry doesn't exist. ANy time you point out why this wouldn't work they just say "well then we need to adapt to using less power".

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jul 18, 2014

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Baronjutter posted:

God drat this is like our greens here. They protest the poo poo out of new gas plants, pretty legit, yeah gas is way better than coal but it's still absolute poo poo and such a short term stop-gap solution. They protest the poo poo out of new hydro projects, ok hydro is awesome but the initial build does gently caress up the area due to the whole "hey this river is suddenly a lake" business, but after that you got very clean power and good flood control. All the time they are just shouting a mantra of "renewables and conservation". Finally they try to build some wind somewhere and it's the got drat local rich property owning greens blocking it. Then suddenly windmills have dangerous effects on ocean habitats and kill seabirds and their harmonic vibrations cause land values to go down and make people develop morgellions or what ever.

They honestly seem to think that we can just do rooftop solar on everyone's house and that's that. Also industry doesn't exist. ANy time you point out why this wouldn't work they just say "well then we need to adapt to using less power".

One gets the impression that lots of self-described environmentalists are sentimental NIMBY types who see any sort of large scale industrial equipment as an eyesore rather than actual environmentalists who, uh, primarily consider how to protect the environment.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy
So MIT just announced this, a carbon foam and graphite floating layer that can transfer solar energy to water in a reasonably efficient manner.

Underneath all their claims are two major problems:

1. It only works at 10 times solar concentration vs average daytime sunlight per meter.
2. The water vapour it produces sits as a layer above it, blocking further sunlight unless this layer is continuously removed in some manner.

I think this will potentially improve desert location desalination systems by a lot, but I'd be surprised if it was ever applicable to power generation.

Bip Roberts
Mar 29, 2005

EoRaptor posted:

So MIT just announced this, a carbon foam and graphite floating layer that can transfer solar energy to water in a reasonably efficient manner.

Underneath all their claims are two major problems:

1. It only works at 10 times solar concentration vs average daytime sunlight per meter.
2. The water vapour it produces sits as a layer above it, blocking further sunlight unless this layer is continuously removed in some manner.

I think this will potentially improve desert location desalination systems by a lot, but I'd be surprised if it was ever applicable to power generation.

Any solar-thermal installation uses concentration and steam is transparent to visible light. It would be very dark out if water absorbed the visible.

Bip Roberts fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jul 22, 2014

Deteriorata
Feb 6, 2005

EoRaptor posted:

So MIT just announced this, a carbon foam and graphite floating layer that can transfer solar energy to water in a reasonably efficient manner.

Underneath all their claims are two major problems:

1. It only works at 10 times solar concentration vs average daytime sunlight per meter.
2. The water vapour it produces sits as a layer above it, blocking further sunlight unless this layer is continuously removed in some manner.

I think this will potentially improve desert location desalination systems by a lot, but I'd be surprised if it was ever applicable to power generation.

The water vapor doesn't block the sunlight, it blocks further evaporation of the water. You get a liquid-vapor equilibrium established pretty quickly above the foam, so you have to keep pulling the vapor off so it can be replaced by more from the evaporating liquid.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

Bip Roberts posted:

Any solar-thermal installation uses concentration and steam is transparent to visible light. It would be very dark out if water absorbed the visible.

Steam is transparent, but this stuff tends to produce vapour clouds instead, which do effectively block light, being fluffy and white. There is a video, whose link is gone from the original article and I can't find in my history, that shows this issue. :/

If someone can design a concentrator and reservoir that is also a pressure vessel, then the steam would stay as steam, and could be moved somewhere and made to do 'work'.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

We used to have a specific space colonization thread, but since we don't I thought I'd ask this here.

In space what would be the best or most practical power sources? Obviously right now we use solar since what else are you going to use, but will solar always be king in space? If one had access to asteroids would nuclear become more of an option or would just mass producing solar and pointing it at the sun always be the cheapest option? What if one was not so close to the sun? Nuclear requires a lot of cooling and such, how could this be done in space?

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Baronjutter posted:

We used to have a specific space colonization thread, but since we don't I thought I'd ask this here.

In space what would be the best or most practical power sources? Obviously right now we use solar since what else are you going to use, but will solar always be king in space?

No, because as insolation drops the size/mass of your collectors becomes impractical. For our solar system/level of tech, the cutoff is around Mars. The little Spirit/Opportunity rovers used solar panels, the larger ones (Curiosity, Vikings) use RTGs. Pioneer probes going to the inner system used solar arrays, Pioneer 10 and 11 to the outer system used RTGs, as did the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, etc. Generally; technological development pushes the boundary outward and Juno's on the way to Jupiter and will be exclusively solar-powered, but the falloff is inevitable and pronounced - Juno's solar array could produce 18,000 watts at 1AU but will be producing only 400 in Jupiter orbit.

quote:

If one had access to asteroids would nuclear become more of an option or would just mass producing solar and pointing it at the sun always be the cheapest option?

The thing about space is that you're not talking about standard economic factors. Anything we're doing in space now or in the near-term future is going to be a net money sink, not a source of profit, so it's not the cheapest option that's going to be chosen. *Not* building and launching the Curiosity rover to mars is the cheapest option, but given that we want to do that, and the mission requirements are such-and-such, we went with an RTG to power it, even though RTGs are a ridiculously uneconomical way of generating electricity - the point of the mission isn't to be economical.

As a practical matter, spacecraft are enormously mass-limited. More mass means that you need more fuel to maneuver or station-keep or change orbits, and you need more fuel to carry that fuel around until you burn it, and so on. So generally speaking, since space flight is so expensive anyway that the cost of getting that mass into space pretty much dwarfs the cost of what the mass *is*, when the mass of solar panel you'd need to generate the electricity you need to do what you need becomes greater than that of a nuclear source, you go nuclear. Under future economies, especially if you posit an arbitrarily low cost to orbit, then that changes and the particulars are going to vary by application.

quote:

What if one was not so close to the sun? Nuclear requires a lot of cooling and such, how could this be done in space?

In space, you're fundamentally cooling by radiators. You can have coolant loops to move heat from one place to another within a spacecraft, but the only way to eject the heat into space when you're done moving it is to radiate. Radiators radiate power proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so pick a temperature that your radiator material can handle and figure out how much area you need to dissipate your thermal power, and then realize you need some multiple of that area because you can't radiate into, say, the sun. That's a downside with RTGs, because they're essentially constantly at full-throttle; a 2000-watt RTG might produce 150 watts of electrical power, but even at times when you don't need all those 150 watts of electricity you still need to dissipate 2000 watts of heat.

There's still a space flight thread, even though the colonization one died, this question would be definitely on-topic there.

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Baronjutter posted:

We used to have a specific space colonization thread, but since we don't I thought I'd ask this here.

In space what would be the best or most practical power sources? Obviously right now we use solar since what else are you going to use, but will solar always be king in space? If one had access to asteroids would nuclear become more of an option or would just mass producing solar and pointing it at the sun always be the cheapest option? What if one was not so close to the sun? Nuclear requires a lot of cooling and such, how could this be done in space?

Some form of nuclear fission or fusion is basically the only option for deep space from our current understanding of physics.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Phanatic posted:

No, because as insolation drops the size/mass of your collectors becomes impractical. For our solar system/level of tech, the cutoff is around Mars. The little Spirit/Opportunity rovers used solar panels, the larger ones (Curiosity, Vikings) use RTGs. Pioneer probes going to the inner system used solar arrays, Pioneer 10 and 11 to the outer system used RTGs, as did the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, etc. Generally; technological development pushes the boundary outward and Juno's on the way to Jupiter and will be exclusively solar-powered, but the falloff is inevitable and pronounced - Juno's solar array could produce 18,000 watts at 1AU but will be producing only 400 in Jupiter orbit.


The thing about space is that you're not talking about standard economic factors. Anything we're doing in space now or in the near-term future is going to be a net money sink, not a source of profit, so it's not the cheapest option that's going to be chosen. *Not* building and launching the Curiosity rover to mars is the cheapest option, but given that we want to do that, and the mission requirements are such-and-such, we went with an RTG to power it, even though RTGs are a ridiculously uneconomical way of generating electricity - the point of the mission isn't to be economical.

As a practical matter, spacecraft are enormously mass-limited. More mass means that you need more fuel to maneuver or station-keep or change orbits, and you need more fuel to carry that fuel around until you burn it, and so on. So generally speaking, since space flight is so expensive anyway that the cost of getting that mass into space pretty much dwarfs the cost of what the mass *is*, when the mass of solar panel you'd need to generate the electricity you need to do what you need becomes greater than that of a nuclear source, you go nuclear. Under future economies, especially if you posit an arbitrarily low cost to orbit, then that changes and the particulars are going to vary by application.


In space, you're fundamentally cooling by radiators. You can have coolant loops to move heat from one place to another within a spacecraft, but the only way to eject the heat into space when you're done moving it is to radiate. Radiators radiate power proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so pick a temperature that your radiator material can handle and figure out how much area you need to dissipate your thermal power, and then realize you need some multiple of that area because you can't radiate into, say, the sun. That's a downside with RTGs, because they're essentially constantly at full-throttle; a 2000-watt RTG might produce 150 watts of electrical power, but even at times when you don't need all those 150 watts of electricity you still need to dissipate 2000 watts of heat.

There's still a space flight thread, even though the colonization one died, this question would be definitely on-topic there.

Thanks for all the info! Although I was more wondering for stationary power, not for ships. Like powering a huge orbital factory, habitat, or asteroid mine where mass isn't really an issue (and was all built from stuff already in space so no heavy lift). It seems location really matters in regards to solar, makes sense though.

PS
Where is the space thread? Can't seem to find it in D&D or A/T.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jul 22, 2014

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Baronjutter posted:


Where is the space thread? Can't seem to find it in D&D or A/T.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3580990

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

Baronjutter posted:

Thanks for all the info! Although I was more wondering for stationary power, not for ships. Like powering a huge orbital factory, habitat, or asteroid mine where mass isn't really an issue (and was all built from stuff already in space so no heavy lift). It seems location really matters in regards to solar, makes sense though.

PS
Where is the space thread? Can't seem to find it in D&D or A/T.

Any orbital factory is probably going to use solar. Space isn't really a concern in space, so huge arrays are just a matter of construction and upkeep. Nuclear RTG wouldn't never have enough power for serious factory work, and other types of nuclear would probably be more expensive to build than solar panels and more expensive to run as well. Panels also are a net negative to heat, which is a nice benefit. Maybe a fallback RTG in case of catastrophic failures?

Lunar bases would probably go nuclear due to variance in sunlight availability. Ideally fusion of some sort and scavenge fuel from the lunar surface, or fission and mine it from the local rock. Probably borrow a lot from submarines with a liquid metal reactor of some sort.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

EoRaptor posted:

Any orbital factory is probably going to use solar. Space isn't really a concern in space, so huge arrays are just a matter of construction and upkeep

But again, *mass* is. Even if you're in orbit, you need to do stationkeeping and adjustments (the occasional avoidance maneuver if nothing else). There comes a point where the mass of panels is something you want to avoid (and the construction and upkeep issue scales with array size as well).

quote:

Nuclear RTG wouldn't never have enough power for serious factory work, and other types of nuclear would probably be more expensive to build than solar panels and more expensive to run as well.

All are more expensive than staying home. Again, cost isn't the primary concern by definition, mission requirements are. We don't power submarines with nuclear reactors because it's less expensive than diesels, we do it because we want the things to be able to do what they do.




EoRaptor posted:

Panels also are a net negative to heat, which is a nice benefit.

Bwuh? What do you mean by that? They're not serving to cool the thing. They can't, they're sitting in the sunlight by design. You can't cool off by radiating into that unless you're hotter than the thing you're radiating into.


quote:

Lunar bases would probably go nuclear due to variance in sunlight availability. Ideally fusion of some sort and scavenge fuel from the lunar surface, or fission and mine it from the local rock. Probably borrow a lot from submarines with a liquid metal reactor of some sort.

Fusion is really, really hard and will probably never generate economical electricity but this is one of those cases where, again, the economics of it isn't the primary concern. It's still really, really hard though. At least on the moon you have somewhere else to dump the heat than by radiating into a vacuum.

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Jul 22, 2014

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Some parts of the moon are really well-suited to solar power. For instance, here is a spot that's in near-constant sunlight.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

Phanatic posted:

But again, *mass* is. Even if you're in orbit, you need to do stationkeeping and adjustments (the occasional avoidance maneuver if nothing else). There comes a point where the mass of panels is something you want to avoid (and the construction and upkeep issue scales with array size as well).


All are more expensive than staying home. Again, cost isn't the primary concern by definition, mission requirements are. We don't power submarines with nuclear reactors because it's less expensive than diesels, we do it because we want the things to be able to do what they do.


Bwuh? What do you mean by that? They're not serving to cool the thing. They can't, they're sitting in the sunlight by design. You can't cool off by radiating into that unless you're hotter than the thing you're radiating into.


Fusion is really, really hard and will probably never generate economical electricity but this is one of those cases where, again, the economics of it isn't the primary concern. It's still really, really hard though. At least on the moon you have somewhere else to dump the heat than by radiating into a vacuum.

I'm assuming a space factory would be able to make things, or draw from an existing space based manufacturing ability. The very first space factory is probably going to be very different than any and all subsequent factories, so I'm not too concerned with that 'startup' factory. I'm also assuming that space travel has tipped over into potentially profitable, so cost is a concern.

For the heat comment, a panel may receive 100 unit of energy per given area. 10 of those units become electricity, and the other 90 are radiated out the back as heat. You can get clever and try dumping other heat into the panels, or just ignore it if it's too expensive.

Lunar will probably be standard nuclear honestly, it's compact, reliable and cheap. Fusion is only given consideration because of how much He3 you'd have access to. Our theoretical base location would probably be driven by other concerns (water, etc) than constant sunlight, and I don't see anyone trying to build transmission lines on the moon.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

EoRaptor posted:


For the heat comment, a panel may receive 100 unit of energy per given area. 10 of those units become electricity, and the other 90 are radiated out the back as heat. You can get clever and try dumping other heat into the panels, or just ignore it if it's too expensive.


Oh, okay, gotcha. Yeah, that's what the ISS does, there's a liquid coolant loop (ammonia) carrying the heat from the station to the radiators on the back side of the panels.

quote:

Lunar will probably be standard nuclear honestly, it's compact, reliable and cheap. Fusion is only given consideration because of how much He3 you'd have access to.

There's actually not all that much He3, even putting aside how insanely hard He3 fusion would be. Better off digging up the abundant thorium.

Pander
Oct 9, 2007

Fear is the glue that holds society together. It's what makes people suppress their worst impulses. Fear is power.

And at the end of fear, oblivion.



Phanatic posted:

Oh, okay, gotcha. Yeah, that's what the ISS does, there's a liquid coolant loop (ammonia) carrying the heat from the station to the radiators on the back side of the panels.


There's actually not all that much He3, even putting aside how insanely hard He3 fusion would be. Better off digging up the abundant thorium.

The fun part of a nuke plant in space or on the moon is firing off waste products into the sun!

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Pander posted:

The fun part of a nuke plant in space or on the moon is firing off waste products into the sun!

But if we put radiation into space space will become radioactive and dangerous!!

\/ That's natural radiation, background radiation isn't dangerous, only man-made radiation is.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jul 22, 2014

Pander
Oct 9, 2007

Fear is the glue that holds society together. It's what makes people suppress their worst impulses. Fear is power.

And at the end of fear, oblivion.



Baronjutter posted:

But if we put radiation into space space will become radioactive and dangerous!!

Then we'll just have to raise some regulations prohibiting people living in open space.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Pander posted:

The fun part of a nuke plant in space or on the moon is firing off waste products into the sun!

Launching something directly into the sun would take an enormous amount of energy... although, hmm, maybe a gravity assist or two could drop the trajectory low enough.

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

Launching something directly into the sun would take an enormous amount of energy... although, hmm, maybe a gravity assist or two could drop the trajectory low enough.

Just throw it into an eccentric orbit, the sun will eat it eventually.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

hobbesmaster posted:

Just throw it into an eccentric orbit, the sun will eat it eventually.

Just put it in a pile somewhere on the moon you don't care about and ignore it. On earth that's a no go, put it's perfectly fine for lunar operations.

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

EoRaptor posted:

Just put it in a pile somewhere on the moon you don't care about and ignore it. On earth that's a no go, put it's perfectly fine for lunar operations.

There will be a :supaburn:no nucular waste in space:supaburn: crowd.

tsa
Feb 3, 2014

EoRaptor posted:

Just put it in a pile somewhere on the moon you don't care about and ignore it. On earth that's a no go, put it's perfectly fine for lunar operations.

That's a perfectly viable option for the earth, unless you mean politically viable and even then you'd probably hear the same complaints even if it's on the moon. Fukiyama is like a case study on how good water is at absorbing and dealing with radiation and that was without any protections at all. Of course you should probably handle it in a better way than the italians did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27Ndrangheta


blowfish posted:

One gets the impression that lots of self-described environmentalists are sentimental NIMBY types who see any sort of large scale industrial equipment as an eyesore rather than actual environmentalists who, uh, primarily consider how to protect the environment.

Eh this is a small part of it but I'm guessing these people would still freak out at something like the buried modular fission reactors that are being researched. Unfortunately the average environmentalist is just as anti-science as the average global warming denier. Facts are completely irrelevant to the major activist groups on this subject.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Can anyone give a good general rundown on Fukiyama and the current situation there? I keep hearing "It's a great example on how even ancient nuclear tech handled a disaster with no deaths or serious health issues as a result" to "Fukiyama is a massive lie and the radiation is 1000000000x worse than they admit and the area is going to be a mutant infested exclusions zone for a thousand years, also it keeps getting worse!"

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Baronjutter posted:

Can anyone give a good general rundown on Fukiyama and the current situation there? I keep hearing "It's a great example on how even ancient nuclear tech handled a disaster with no deaths or serious health issues as a result" to "Fukiyama is a massive lie and the radiation is 1000000000x worse than they admit and the area is going to be a mutant infested exclusions zone for a thousand years, also it keeps getting worse!"

Fukushima.

The nuclear power plant survived the Earthquake with light damage even though it was designed for Earthquakes several times weaker. The tsunami killed 16000 people and then washed over the nuclear power plant and put the emergency diesel generators out of operation because the latter were sitting in the basement instead of on the roof. The npp didn't do well given the resulting lack of cooling, the outer containment for the cooling cycles (if I recall correctly) was blown out along with the walls of the building, and a general clusterfuck and release of a good amount of radioactive material ensued.

Going out and measuring radiation is not exactly dark magic so the available radiation maps are probably a decent estimate. The tsunami water level change maps where idiots changed the units to show glow-in-the-dark level radiation for their blog posts are not a decent estimate.

There's a plume stretching inland where radiation doses crossed into low-intermediate range. The highest measured yearly dose in people has been on the order of about 60mSv, which is about 30-60 times the normal background dose most of us experience. Most people were exposed to way below 20mSv. There are areas around the world with high natural or artificial background doses of over 20mSv per year (up to over 100mSv in some cases) where people have been living for decades to centuries without dying from cancer and mutations more than everyone else.
Depending on who you ask, 20mSv or 60mSv either doesn't matter because we observe that low radiation doses don't matter or it will kill about 200 people (confidence interval goes to 2000-ish) because the classical linear no threshold model assumes there can be no safe dose of radiation. Jacobson regularly goes out of his way to bash nuclear so he won't have gone for a low death toll estimate.

In the wake of the radiation release, authorities panicked, and evacuated everyone in a mad disorganised dash which killed 600 people in the process and another 1000 via inadequate living conditions and medical support till now. People in countries halfway around the world (UK, France) shat themselves and recommended their citizens to leave Tokyo because reasons. Note that the evacuation killed at least about as many people as would've died according to Jacobson's linear no threshold assumption based estimates. According to non-LNT estimates, nobody except people actually going to the power plant is at increased risk of cancer death. Great job with the evacuation, guys :thumbsup:.

While TEPCO did their best Homer Simpson impression trying to contain the mess, radiation-contaminated water got released into the sea at various times. Radiation measurements a few kilometres off the coast showed no worrying increase in radiation (30km off: increase by 25% of background). Somehow, idiots translated this very very localised problem into "radiation will kill everything in America thousands of miles away" and abused statistics on not-at-all random samples to show that tens of thousands of Americans had died. Also some probably climate change and eutrophication related glut of dead organic matter off California last year described in a study that didn't mention radiation or Fukushima at all got called proof that Fukushima is killing marine life by natural news&friends. UC Berkeley has continuously failed to measure Fukushima related radiation increases throughout the whole hubbub.

Currently, TEPCO is dumping cooling water that is slightly radioactive and would be considered acceptable drinking water in an emergency according to the WHO, which has caused another tempest in a teapot because :tinfoil: the WHO numbers are taken from IAEA studies, so you'll glow in the dark if you drink it :tinfoil:


There's some interesting observations on potential radiation effects on wildlife, e.g. allegedly increased mutations in butterflies, though these studies tend to have methodological issues (aside from sampling and weird statistics, reproducing the supposed radiation effect in the lab required rather high radiation doses not actually found in the area). It would be interesting to follow up on this since low level radiation effects on various organisms are not well-known enough, but nobody wants to cough up decent funding for that.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

AFAIK most of the people who believe that Fukushima is killing thousands of Americans and wiping out all life in the Atlantic also believe that vaccines cause autism and that baking soda cures cancer

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Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

EoRaptor posted:

Just put it in a pile somewhere on the moon you don't care about and ignore it. On earth that's a no go, put it's perfectly fine for lunar operations.

Yeah, about that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cq7isloJj8

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