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Nice piece of fish posted:
Don't hold your breath. You're chained the redox potential between two elements. There are real physical barriers to a breakthrough on this front, which is why we've improved a lot on optimizing existing chemistries but nothing really new has shown up in decades. The energy yield as a function of mass makes batteries wasteful for large applications to a fault. I'm actually pretty hopeful of Hydrogen cells actually, as an API pressure vessel can store hydrogen basically indefinitely. The cells themselves are at their infancy and have huge potentials for improvement. I believe hydrogen mini plants may actually make solar viable as they would be synergistic (put a massive solar farm in say Saudi Arabia, generate hydrogen and then pressurize and ship it around the world.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:21
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Hello Sailor posted:If you seriously think the human race may not last another 100 years, you and realism aren't in the same boat. Human extinction is definitely possible. It's been possible for a while actually, it's just that the odds have seemingly been very low. So for instance, we never ended up having a terminal thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States - but the reason that failed to happen was not because it couldn't happen, but because we just got lucky. There were plenty of close calls - read up about these two incidents, as one example. Now of course there were ifs - maybe that nuclear torpedo would not have triggered a nuclear war if it had been launched. Or maybe the war would not have wiped out humanity - there are simulations saying it would have, but these were criticized. But you see I'm not saying it is likely (or has been likely), I'm saying it is possible. I'd hate to depress you pal, but reality does not offer any guarantees. And "realism" means dealing with the world as it is, not the Disney version where everything works out in the end. Isaac0105 fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 14:26
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oxsnard posted:Don't hold your breath. You're chained the redox potential between two elements. There are real physical barriers to a breakthrough on this front, which is why we've improved a lot on optimizing existing chemistries but nothing really new has shown up in decades. The energy yield as a function of mass makes batteries wasteful for large applications to a fault. Allright, I'll defer to your expertise on this since it sounds like you know what you're talking about. I hate speculating on future anything really, because prediction is usually a complete illusion. I've read about battery technologies that don't rely on current materials technology at all (which I guess makes it basically science fiction until it can be proven to be science fact), crystal matrice batteries, carbon nanotube bullshit... I'm in no position to make assumptions as to what a battery (or general energy storage breakthrough) will look like in the future. The only assumption I will make is that there will almost certainly be some improvement beyond pure optimisation, even if it's not enough to consider a "breakthrough". When combined with other future technologies, it might become a viable alternative for public and private transportation. Maybe. But as I talked about in my previous post, I'm not holding my breath for any of it. Isaac0105 posted:But you see I'm not saying it is likely (or has been likely), I'm saying it is possible. I'd hate to depress you pal, but reality does not offer any guarantees. And "realism" means dealing with the world as it is, not the Disney version where everything works out in the end. You've done nothing to back up your assumptions with verifiable facts. Why exactly should we consider your view "realistic"? The very first thing you posted on this topic was wildy inaccurate wildly speculative nonsense.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:55
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Our knowledge of climate change and the laws of physics suggests no feasible path to the extinction of the human race. Yes, everything is technically possible which is why we don't consider all possibilities but rather focus our attention on probable possibilities and the extinction of the human race in 100 years through climate change is decidedly not probable.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:57
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The occasional good news:quote:US and China lead push to bring Paris climate deal into force early http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/18/us-and-china-lead-push-to-bring-paris-climate-deal-into-force-early How are u fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 16:13
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The great irony of course is that the vast majority of the populace who are fully on board with climate change action like to say the science is settled. It is. Physics tells us an excess of CO2 will lead to warming. I'm more skeptical of the accuracy of the modeling. Not in the "skeptic" manner, I just think that the narrow ranges presented and high probabilities presented is a potential liability. Warming could be worse or not as bad as the consensus forecast. The same people you see on Facebook beating the drum on climate change are also blindly optimistic on the real world effectiveness of solar and wind. A majority of them accept the science of global warming but refuse to acknowledge the real physical and thermodynamic limitations of these popular intermittent sources of energy. Nuclear is a non starter with this large subset of the population. Every dollar spent on renewables is largely wasted money that will have no impact of net carbon emissions. Nuclear is literally our only hope and until the same scientists who've successfully presented how catastrophic GW can be also push for actual solutions that will work, we're hosed.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:19
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The real long-term solution lies in orbital solar arrays powering antimatter production  Nothing could possibly go wrong with shipping a few pounds of antimatter to the surface every year! Regarding solar and wind being a waste of taxpayer dollars: things look a lot less grim with daytime hydrogen electrolysis as brought up by someone else earlier. It will necessitate a new distribution system though -- microrefineries in the home are going to have to fit into your average household budget and not kill people when they are inevitably ignored and go without service or inspection for years on end.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:48
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What's with the obsession with micro grids? I honestly don't understand it. The modern grid is an engineering wonder and allows for efficiencies of scale that are amazing. Power is loving cheap in America. Addition of mass nuclear would be expensive but you could leverage the grid as it's, you know, already paid for. Logistically the answer to decarbonization (or orders of magnitude reduction) is simple. The politics is another issue of course. Getting excited about technologies that may or may not exist in the future is silly when we've had the answer for literally decades
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Apr 18, 2016 17:16
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The point you're underselling here is that nuclear power isn't actually cost effective over the kind of time scales that investors generally care about. Yes it would be an effective solution and yes we could theoretically do it, but not without something akin to a completely nationalized power industry and significant amounts of control over the construction supply chain. This is more or less why China is able to go crazy building new reactors, but it's a near political impossibility here. The same reasons that people complain that our political and economic structures are badly equipped to deal with this crisis with regard to renewables hold true for nuclear power as well. Seriously, the problem isn't a vague and shadowy environmental lobby or NIMBY-ism. Americans generally favor nuclear power, so scientists don't need to convince anyone of anything. Public opinion isn't holding nuclear power back.
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Apr 18, 2016 19:33
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Given how much political and economic structures can be changed by circumstances like war, it's disheartening to think those changes so difficult when the upside of the future we're looking at is 'at least our species won't go extinct.'
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Apr 18, 2016 19:44
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We're not going to go extinct, though. Wealthier nations (and the wealthier people in those nations) will weather the storm, so it's understandable that there's a lot of resistance to the kind of complete social upheaval that might be needed to effectively deal with this problem before people start dying.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:05
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I have a feeling we're going to see another 18TWh of wind/PV/CSP go through: site selection, new construction all the way to US grid connection before we see another 18TWh of nuclear do the same. I'd rather have those crunchy smelly renewabes than not doing anything at all.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:20
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Paradoxish posted:The point you're underselling here is that nuclear power isn't actually cost effective over the kind of time scales that investors generally care about. Yes it would be an effective solution and yes we could theoretically do it, but not without something akin to a completely nationalized power industry and significant amounts of control over the construction supply chain. This is more or less why China is able to go crazy building new reactors, but it's a near political impossibility here. The same reasons that people complain that our political and economic structures are badly equipped to deal with this crisis with regard to renewables hold true for nuclear power as well. http://www.gallup.com/poll/168620/one-four-solidly-skeptical-global-warming.aspx The issue is that the subset of the population that most supports nuclear energy (republican men) are most likely to be skeptical of GW. Likewise, not sure why you didn't include this more recent Gallup poll that shows the problem clearly. Nuclear just edges out coal for support among democrats with just 24 percent of them supporting it. That's a huge problem to overcome as it will require not only huge upfront economic costs (unpopular among Republicans, especially those skeptical of GW) but also huge political support (unpopular among Democrats). That's my point; we've turned solar into the great green hope when its environmental cradle to grave cost is unclear at best and its ability to provide baseload power is a straight up fantasy.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:20
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oxsnard posted:That's my point; we've turned solar into the great green hope when its environmental cradle to grave cost is unclear at best and its ability to provide baseload power is a straight up fantasy. Even the most extreme 100% renewables people don't actually claim solar is the the be-all-end-all. There's a reason they keep chanting "wind, solar, wave" (notice the dis against big hydro). However, if Crescent Dunes lives up to the hype, CSP with overnight storage might provide the gap between pumped hydro, demand response and biogas/biomass.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:25
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That's the other thing; the one renewable that actually produces way more energy than it costs to build/produce (hydro) has fallen out of favor. They're delusional. Wind and solar occupy the same potential space in the total load. We may be able to hit 20% with either of those two. Where does the rest come from?
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Apr 18, 2016 20:33
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oxsnard posted:[url]The issue is that the subset of the population that most supports nuclear energy (republican men) are most likely to be skeptical of GW.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:09
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oxsnard posted:That's the other thing; the one renewable that actually produces way more energy than it costs to build/produce (hydro) has fallen out of favor. They're delusional. Wind and solar occupy the same potential space in the total load. We may be able to hit 20% with either of those two. Where does the rest come from? NREL's studies show far higher limits to grid penetration than that blog post does. But even if wind and solar peak out at 40-60% of the grid, I'm still glad we're building them now rather than waiting for a better solution to come alone later. Also you're very incorrect to treat PV, CSP and Wind as the same kind of generation capacity on the grid. Wind farms are now using better electronics to provide spinning reserve services, PV follows the AC demand curve nicely if you want it to, CSP isn't really at scale yet but could actually provide power overnight, reducing the need for demand response or other storage.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:09
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Trabisnikof posted:NREL's studies show far higher limits to grid penetration than that blog post does. But even if wind and solar peak out at 40-60% of the grid, I'm still glad we're building them now rather than waiting for a better solution to come alone later. Just to be blunt: there are mainly two factors at play for energy generation. 1 - The laws of physics 2 - The human factor (public opinion, regulation, finance) The laws of physics overwhelmingly support a central grid system with a nuclear baseline, something that hydroelectric - among renewable power sources - is the only thing accomplishing even remotely the same. We need this baseline. We cannot replace this. One of these two factors can change. The other one can't. It's the laws of physics. That's the one that can't change. This means that either public opinion, regulation and financing changes, or we don't get power as we know it. This is not a new debate in general or on this forum, a quick look in the energy generation megathread can pretty much get you all the facts and details. In any realistic scenario with continued industry and high-tech living with high living standards, we need power and nuclear is the only realistic option. And just to point it out, industry and manufacture is very important to both economy, military might and living standard (job generation), as we can't all work in tertiary sector jobs. If the western world refuses to adapt to global warming and the disappearing fossil fuel issue, the third world countries that are building and developing nuclear are for damned sure going to become the new superpowers. And the western world with its human rights advances and social ideals will be left in the dust. Nice piece of fish fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 22:17
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Netherlands is passing a bill by majority that would ban all petrol powered vehicles and sales by 2025.
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Apr 18, 2016 22:33
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Nice piece of fish posted:Just to be blunt: there are mainly two factors at play for energy generation. Just because according to some models a baseline generation centric grid is the most efficient by some metric doesn't mean other grid models won't work. DOE studies show that the US grid can adapt to 80%+ renewables. Wind alone can get above 35% with only historical levels of grid investment. I'm pretty sure NREL had heard of the laws of physics when they wrote the study modeling a 90% renewables grid for the US. From a climate perspective, we simply don't have time to wait and any amount of carbon reductions we achieve now is good.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:13
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oxsnard posted:What's with the obsession with micro grids? I honestly don't understand it. The modern grid is an engineering wonder and allows for efficiencies of scale that are amazing. When you think about sustainability it's easy to fall into a trap where you think that every level of society needs to be self sustainable. In reality this tends to lead to lots of inefficiencies that really don't need to exist. Also the environmentalist movement (at least in the US) is culturally tied to the "organic" movement which tries to promote local produce instead of mass produced food (which again, has lots of inefficiencies associated with it). This leads to wires being crossed. CommieGIR posted:Netherlands is passing a bill by majority that would ban all petrol powered vehicles and sales by 2025. If this was a German-French co-sponsored agreement I could maybe see it working, but good loving luck Netherlands, especially since an abhorrent amount of EU cargo is delivered by 18 wheelers. (There will probably be an exemption for either foreign registered cars or commercial vehicles, or both) computer parts fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 23:37
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oxsnard posted:That's the other thing; the one renewable that actually produces way more energy than it costs to build/produce (hydro) has fallen out of favor. I'd like to see more geothermal just for the increased chance of releasing eldritch horrors man was not meant to know.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:44
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oxsnard posted:That's my point; we've turned solar into the great green hope when its environmental cradle to grave cost is unclear at best and its ability to provide baseload power is a straight up fantasy. You're focusing on public perception for some reason, when the reality is that we get less than 3% of our total grid capacity from solar (and that's being exceptionally optimistic) while we get about 20% of it from nuclear, with plans for expansion. The public's attitude towards nuclear power may not be completely ideal, but it's not so terrible that it's stopping us from any expansion at all. The real problem is that we aren't currently doing anything at a scale or speed that's appropriate for the seriousness of the problem that we're facing. You might have a point if we were currently implementing or even seriously discussing something like a WPA-level initiative to transition to renewable power nationwide, but we're not. As it is, hydro and wind are the only two renewable sources that currently generate any sizable portion of power in the US, and combined they represent about half the total output of our nuclear fleet. I don't see any evidence that renewable initiatives are actually competing with nuclear power expansion.
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Apr 19, 2016 00:10
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Trabisnikof posted:Just because according to some models a baseline generation centric grid is the most efficient by some metric doesn't mean other grid models won't work. DOE studies show that the US grid can adapt to 80%+ renewables. Wind alone can get above 35% with only historical levels of grid investment. I'm pretty sure NREL had heard of the laws of physics when they wrote the study modeling a 90% renewables grid for the US. NREL is a really cool and good govt organization. I grew up 20 miles from their HQ and know a bunch of people who work there. That study that everyone got excited about had some major issues: 1. Assume no increases in demand over the next 40 years. What happens if/when EVs make up 50% of cars on the road? 2. Even with pie in the sky assumptions, they had solar/wind as just 50% of the grid, with biomass/biogas making up 40%. Biofuels are far from carbon neutral and the energy return on investment is horrific (see ethanol). Deep sea methane reserves are probably just as "renewable" as any other implementation of biofuels I've seen.
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Apr 19, 2016 01:22
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Paradoxish posted:You're focusing on public perception for some reason, when the reality is that we get less than 3% of our total grid capacity from solar (and that's being exceptionally optimistic) while we get about 20% of it from nuclear, with plans for expansion. The public's attitude towards nuclear power may not be completely ideal, but it's not so terrible that it's stopping us from any expansion at all. Consider that the federal government spends $40 billion a year on solar subsidies. You could build 4-8 or so nuclear reactors a year that would provide a huge boost to base load power. We could probably kill off coal altogether along with lots of natural gas in a generation with that kind of spending.
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Apr 19, 2016 01:36
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And you just explained why that money is being spent where it is, rather than on Nuclear.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:19
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Isaac0105 posted:Human extinction is definitely possible. It's been possible for a while actually, it's just that the odds have seemingly been very low. So for instance, we never ended up having a terminal thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States - but the reason that failed to happen was not because it couldn't happen, but because we just got lucky. There were plenty of close calls - read up about these two incidents, as one example. Now of course there were ifs - maybe that nuclear torpedo would not have triggered a nuclear war if it had been launched. Or maybe the war would not have wiped out humanity - there are simulations saying it would have, but these were criticized. Now you're just being dishonest. We're talking about the possibility of the consequences of climate change leading to human extinction, not nuclear warfare. If you'd like to seriously discuss the possibility of nuclear warfare, find or create a thread for it. "Possible" does not also equal "realistic". It's possible that flipping a (fair) coin a hundred times in a row will result in a hundred instances of heads, but it's not realistic to assume that scenario has a reasonable chance of occurring. So, find us some reliable evidence that the consequences of climate change have a reasonable chance of bringing about human extinction within 100 years. Best of luck with that, because there isn't any.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:50
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I don't have the math on deployed MWs but the subsidy is largely a regressive tax on the poor which allows the upper and upper middle class to collect cash from the government to gently caress up the grid, collect ridiculous ongoing net metering subsidies and only effectively capture maybe 25% of the rated capacity of deployed panels. Utility solar and related subsidies is mostly OK with me actually because we're still at the point where solar provides some ease to mid day peaking in places like CA and NV. Long term investment favors nuclear though
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Apr 19, 2016 03:53
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Hello Sailor posted:Now you're just being dishonest. We're talking about the possibility of the consequences of climate change leading to human extinction, not nuclear warfare. If you'd like to seriously discuss the possibility of nuclear warfare, find or create a thread for it. Sorry, climate change is going to have a massive and unpredictable systemic effect. Events in the real world don't take place in neat, tightly separated little boxes. So humanity does not have two separate problems called "climate change" and "nuclear proliferation" but two connected problems which can feed into each other very easily. In the real world, everything is connected. You see - in the context of this doomsday and anime topics discussion group that we all know as Something Awful, climate change and nuclear extinction are separate topics. If someone goes way off course and doesn't even have the courtesy to tie things back to the main topic, something called a "D&D moderator" comes along and puts that someone in a naughty box. My friend I can assure you, these "D&D moderators" do not have a global, omnipotent reach. If in the real world the consequences of climate change want to feed into and escalate other global problems, then they will, and there is nobody around who can stop it. How might this happen? Well for instance, we have these two unstable and corrupt countries in the world, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, arch rivals of each other, called India and Pakistan. These countries have massive social problems, hard nationalist political groups gaining power (see Narendra Modi), with famine and massive poverty already present there. They have already fought each other in wars. What might happen if the already present famine was worsened by some extreme weather events (wonder what might have caused that? ), turning up the social temperature in one (or why not both!) of those countries. What if this rising heat puts a fire under the asses of some of those ultranationalist political groups, which scramble to find ways to unite the people behind them again - I wonder what that could involve? And of course when it comes to these "ways", victory could only be assured by "controlled" use of the most menacing and efficient killing devices... See in a scenario like that everything feeds into each other. Usually a huge disaster is precipitated not by one problem running out of control but by many problems running into each other. To not confuse you too much, I didn't even include some other fun factors that might tie into this even more. Like say a massive global recession, destabilizing India's sizable middle class, maybe? Are you having fun yet? - - - Evidence? What kind do you want? In science, the best kind of evidence is the type that is brought to us by controlled experiments. Well sadly, we can't run these kinds of experiments on the scale of civilizations. But what we do have is a record of previous "controlled" experiments. A record showing us all sorts of interesting things. A lot of civilizations falling, for instance. And we have conflicts that took place in the nuclear age, which I already talked about. Or massive, seemingly invincible, social formations collapsing in the timeframe of a few years (as little as 25 years ago!). Or do you want simulations? Well, there are some. Neither of them show "evidence" for human extinction, but do you really think that one of the possible (if very unlikely) outcomes of something like "irreversible civilization collapse" couldn't be a worst case scenario that causes humanity to be wiped out? Or if all of that still isn't enough "evidence" for you, I guess I will have no choice but to jump inside a time machine and travel into alternate versions of Earth in 2116, running a scan for hominid lifeforms, then calculating the odds that we will go extinct. As long as you can send me Doc Brown's Delorean I can have the charts for you by tomorrow, and supply you probabilities with margins of error and confidence intervals.
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Apr 19, 2016 10:48
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Nice piece of fish posted:You've done nothing to back up your assumptions with verifiable facts. Why exactly should we consider your view "realistic"? The very first thing you posted on this topic was wildy inaccurate wildly speculative nonsense. Making estimates about the future is a pretty thankless task. Though how exactly do you expect me not to be "speculative" when talking about the future? And how do you know my estimates are "wildy" "inaccurate" unless you are some kind of traveler from the future? I have no clue what part of my first post you exactly find so offensive. Maybe this part? quote:There's no way anyone whosoever will be living the way we are living 50-100 years down the road. And it's rather certain that there will be a lot less of us living in any case. I'd like to remind people that the huge population overshoot we have going in the world is based on increased food production. This in turn is based on the methods developed during the industrial age (especially the green revolution) - a lot of which are fossil fuel dependent. Meaning that we are basically guaranteed to fall down to pre-industrial population levels, meaning 6 billion people or so will die. Well since you hate my simple speculations so much, there are some higher level speculations (computer simulations) which make a rather similar prediction. For instance, The model in Limits to Growth predicts that population levels in 2100 will fall back to population levels at around 1970. Well there are around 7 billion people in the world today, and there were around 3.5 billion people alive in 1970, so that gives us a population die off of about 3.5 billion. Could be more too, if we hit something like 8 billion people before the downward phase of the population curve. My own slightly higher estimate simply assumes further that we will have to drop down our population to adapt to a form of agriculture which isn't reliant on fossil fuels or industrial civilization. You get a die-off of around 6 billion for instance if you compare world population today with world population at around 1900, way before the Green Revolution (7 - 1.5 = 5.5 billion). Finally, I really advise you to extend your healthy skepticism to similarly "speculative" (but "wildy accurate", I guess) predictions made by mainstream sources.
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Apr 19, 2016 11:19
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blowfish posted:Please provide any evidence beyond "well what if it happened" for us running out of raw materials before building some thousands of reactors. Note that I pointed out several examples of things that already exist or are currently in build, so again, this is not purely hypothetical. Well I have never told anyone "let's throw up our hands in despair and wait for the end of times". I personally would much rather pick up my hands and do what I can to prepare for hard times ahead, especially because I might even want to do something really greedy further down the line, like marry someone and have a kid or two for instance. The reason you think that thinking the way I do will lead to "resignation", is because reading my posts triggers something like a crisis of faith in you - you've believed in our system all your life, and now someone is telling you that it's all going to come down. I have some sympathy for you - crises of faith happen to be very distressing and depressing, they can drive people to insanity (see Micheal Ruppert, Guy McPherson). So what good are they at all you might ask? Well here is the thing - if you want to have any chance of surviving a crisis, it helps to actually see a crisis coming and to prepare oneself psychologically for it. A crisis of faith is not fun, but it is an order of magnitude less fun when you get it at the same time that you are in a very agitating and unpredictable personal situation (such as in the middle of a social crisis). I think it is a much better idea to have this little breakdown right now - I (hopefully you too) still have a relatively comfy situation now, we have time for luxuries like personal crises and reflection about the world surrounding us. Might not have that anymore 20 years from now, for instance. I would personally rather not be one of those broken souls who leaned against a system all their lives, had it collapse on them, and then turned to alcoholism and drugs to cope with their incredibly miserable lives after their only pillar of support fell down on them. I grew up in the former Soviet Union - there were plenty of people like that even here, who had relied on the Soviet state to prop them up, and there were plenty more beyond that in the Soviet heartlands (Russia, Ukraine, etc). - - - I don't know where you picked up that I expect a "global renewable rollout" to happen. I don't think any global rollout will happen. I think business as usual will continue until the system crashes against the wall, giving it a stinging kick in the balls, putting it in sufficient pain to make the society leaning on it to have a massive crisis of faith (along with a devastating social, political and economic crisis), and then something might happen. I absolutely don't expect global economic growth or global industrial growth to continue (green or no green) - the only question is when and how it will end and what the post-peak situation will look like. - - - Finally, the most interesting part of your post is the question of us running out of resources for the construction of nuclear reactors. I found a really good paper that summed up that particular problem. And no, it's not a crank - it's Professor Derek Abbott, a physicist from the University of Adelaide. Here's the relevant figure.  Beryllium, niobium, zirconium, yttrium and hafnium are all rare resources, all of them used for the construction of nuclear vessels or cores. The chart depicts the resource situation for all five, along with reserves and yearly production, along with the growth rate. The figures were prepared based on data from the US Geological Survey (2008) and it also accounts for the production of these resources for purposes other than nuclear reactors. And relative extinction time is the time it takes for us to empty our known reserves, assuming that the use of that resource grows according the growth rate in the figure (not looking good for your plan, I'm afraid). And reminder - this is assuming current resource usage rates, not the resource usage rates in a world where we are trying to shift the entire world to be run on nuclear. I think the chart speaks for itself honestly. So yeah, add resource restrictions to the list of reasons why world energy production will never be nuclearized. Isaac0105 fucked around with this message at 12:41 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 12:24
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oxsnard posted:We could probably kill off coal altogether along with lots of natural gas in a generation with that kind of spending. Rime posted:And you just explained why that money is being spent where it is, rather than on Nuclear. Holy poo poo. 
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Apr 19, 2016 14:37
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I don't understand the obsession some of you have with destroying private transportation. THis would effectively restrict large portions of the population to within a short distance of their homes. Not everyone lives in a dense urban area.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:25
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Isaac0105 posted:Finally, the most interesting part of your post is the question of us running out of resources for the construction of nuclear reactors. I found a really good paper that summed up that particular problem. And no, it's not a crank - it's Professor Derek Abbott, a physicist from the University of Adelaide. Here's the relevant figure. By Abbots logic we should've already run out, it ignores recycling of rare elements and newer reactor designs that use less of said materials.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:28
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-Troika- posted:I don't understand the obsession some of you have with destroying private transportation. THis would effectively restrict large portions of the population to within a short distance of their homes. In workflow automation, you try to make easily-repeatable bulk tasks less expensive to handle. Is there a place for cutting into use of private transportation for repeatable mass transits like the daily commute of a suburban community? I absolutely think so. Private transportation will always have a place: going to a friend's place, going to your doctor, etc. Repeatable daily commutes, however, can be moved from private cars to interconnected networks of high-efficiency, high-speed vessels in a hub-and-spoke system served by smaller, more flexible access vessels that can take commuters from hubs to their homes.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:42
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CommieGIR posted:By Abbots logic we should've already run out, it ignores recycling of rare elements and newer reactor designs that use less of said materials. Also known reserves does not mean 'how much of that stuff we know is out there'
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Apr 19, 2016 18:49
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Istvun posted:Also known reserves does not mean 'how much of that stuff we know is out there' That and during our initial reactors, we basically dumped that stuff into the designs just to get them working in amounts that were staggering. We've cut those needs a lot as reactor safety has improved and reactor efficiency increases.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:56
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CommieGIR posted:By Abbots logic we should've already run out, it ignores recycling of rare elements and newer reactor designs that use less of said materials. Fair criticism, though to be exact, Abbott seems to predict that the rarest of the elements in this chart (beryllium) would run out by 2018 or so. Personally I think the situation is probably a bit less drastic than those figures show, but it still doesn't exactly bode well for global nuclearization of world energy. Remember that the resource usage described in that chart is for the current world situation, not a situation where the world is also trying to build tons of new reactors. As for recycling, it's possible that these elements can be recycled when they are put to uses not related to nuclear reactors. The article does point out that these elements are not recyclable when they are a component of nuclear vessels - a used nuclear vessel is irradiated after all, that's quite a complication to work around. I think the fair thing to do is probably to update that chart, maybe with newer data from the source that he used. Would be interesting to see how the resource situation panned out compared to his predictions. I might do that later this week if I have time, though if someone wants to beat me to it, feel free to do so. Similarly, if anyone wants to give me some articles with regard to these "new reactor designs" and their resource needs, feel free to do that too. -Troika- posted:I don't understand the obsession some of you have with destroying private transportation. THis would effectively restrict large portions of the population to within a short distance of their homes. I don't so much as have an obsession with "destroying private transportation", I just think it is going to get less and less viable as a form of transportation over time. Feel free to drive your car around while gas is still not that expensive, it's not like anyone can stop you. Though your logic really is pretty funny (and quintessentially, painfully American). You see, I have the fortune of living in a decent country where I can get basically anywhere with either public transportation and/or a bicycle. Not exactly "limited to within a short distance of my home", that's kind of a hilariously silly exaggeration, to say the least. Also contrary to what some of you might think, I don't have some kind of burning hatred for suburb-dwellers. Though if you are seriously planning to spend your whole life in one, especially one with no decent public transportation of any kind, I highly urge you to reconsider. I think it's my social duty to warn you.
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Apr 19, 2016 19:01
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The best part about discussing alternative energy sources is how it reveals the lack of grasp people have on infrastructure. Switching to nuclear, that's great. Dismantling the petrochemical industry? You can't. You cannot, unless you propose we kill billions and permanently reduce our tech level to that of the Amish. From plastics to petrochemical fertilizers, to literally the grease our civilization needs to keep spinning, you can't kill off fossil fuels and expect things to be fine and dandy. Furthermore, if we simply stop using oil and gas derived fuels? They go back to being waste products. What do you plan to do with billions of litres of wasted hydrocarbons that are now a byproduct of producing everything else which we require for our civilization to function? Gas will just go back to being burnt at the well if there's no market, which hardly solves the carbon footprint. Like, it's nice that you all think of the big fancy picture of powering cars and houses, but you don't know or care about the several hundred barrels of lubricant a single small scale factory will require in a single year, and the monstrously polluting oil cracking plant required to create that lube. Stop looking at the machine and focus on the cogs that make it function, that's where the horror sets in. All that plastic, those fertilizers, the complex gasses used for welding, grease, all of that is only cheap and accessible because they are byproducts of the existing fossil fuels process. Remove that subsidization and poo poo gets wierd. Rime fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 19:21
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Rime posted:The best part about discussing alternative energy sources is how it reveals the lack of grasp people have on infrastructure. Yeah but every single chemical engineer in grad school right now is working on some method to supply those needed feedstocks without using fossil fuels. Actually, ditto for Dow, DuPont, BASF, Bayer, etc. You don't need oil to make naptha after all. Also, non-fuel products make up only 7% of crude oil consumed in the US (the largest oil producer in the world atm), a rather small chunk of total oil usage. Likewise, Industrial emissions make up only 15% of US co2 equiv. emissions.
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Apr 19, 2016 19:33
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