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Thug Lessons posted:I think the main feedback loop at play here is confirmation bias. If you're really determined to melt all 5 quintillion tons of ice in the WAIS in a few decades you'll find a way, but that's not what we expect will happen. In fact no one has even found a way to make it thermodynamically possible. So IDK, worry about it if you want, but I'm not going to.
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Apr 12, 2018 20:53
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StabbinHobo posted:its not that they're environmentalists, its just the strongest vein in the nimby impulse. like you see what suburban white ladies do about the thought of low income housing being built within a ten minute drive of where they live. nuclear is that x10. I mean I've made this post to varying degrees several times in this and other threads, but you can't look at a shitshow like Olkiluoto 3 or Vogtle and blame it on nimby. The usual naive explanation for these kind of cost and schedule overruns is "something something regulations, mumble mumble Fukushima", but it's pretty clear when you look at the long chain of individual problems that plagued projects like these that the fundamental issues are poor management and organization within the commercial nuclear industry. It's not even like nuclear power couldn't work. The costs don't inherently have to be as high as they are, and if you look at e.g. military naval reactors there are some compelling arguments to be made that a better run, better organized, more vertically integrated nuclear industry making smaller, modular reactors could be very viable. But if the nuclear industry, for whatever reason, can't do this itself, it's hard to justify a large and expensive government or private intervention to try and make something better, given how cheap renewables/storage are and how much cheaper they are getting. For the near to medium term, throwing money at wind, solar, and batteries, and into further development of these technologies, is probably going to get you a much larger reduction in emissions much faster, than trying to restructure the nuclear power industry.
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Apr 12, 2018 20:58
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A Buttery Pastry posted:What do you mean by "thermodynamically possible"? And I think there's a difference between a few and eight, even if the latter is also really fast compared to the centuries time-scale. I mean that short of IDK, dropping a comet on it, maybe nukes, no one has figured out a way it's possible to melt that much ice that quickly. You framed that post in terms of "when we studied it we shortened the timescale for ice sheet collapse". No. We found ways that, in theory, it could accelerate. No one has ever found a way to melt it before 2100 so I'm not worried about that happening.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:02
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Morbus posted:I mean I've made this post to varying degrees several times in this and other threads, but you can't look at a shitshow like Olkiluoto 3 or Vogtle and blame it on nimby. You don't have to imagine future technologies like SMRs to see nuclear succeeding. France mostly decarbonized their grid with nuclear, which is something (non-hydro) renewables has never done. It's not impossible; it's actually the only proven strategy.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:08
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Remember when environmentalists and NIMBYs made those two nuke reactors get abandoned after ratepayers had already absorbed *b*illions in costs. loving Greenpeace.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:12
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It's great when the woke radicals who call me a neoliberal are suddenly super concerned about market competitiveness when it comes to nuclear power.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:14
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call to action posted:Remember when environmentalists and NIMBYs made those two nuke reactors get abandoned after ratepayers had already absorbed *b*illions in costs. loving Greenpeace. Greenpeace needs to apologize for breaking SONGS. right??
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Apr 12, 2018 21:16
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Morbus posted:But if the nuclear industry, for whatever reason, can't do this itself, it's hard to justify a large and expensive government or private intervention to try and make something better, given how cheap renewables/storage are and how much cheaper they are getting. For the near to medium term, throwing money at wind, solar, and batteries, and into further development of these technologies, is probably going to get you a much larger reduction in emissions much faster, than trying to restructure the nuclear power industry. It seems like a time where a technology is very extremely viable and all the companies just happen to be making it suck is like the absolute perfect time for a bunch of government intervention.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:20
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VideoGameVet posted:Greenpeace needs to apologize for breaking SONGS. Nuclear is kinda like communism in that it's just never been tried ~the right way~
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Apr 12, 2018 21:20
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call to action posted:Nuclear is kinda like communism in that it's just never been tried ~the right way~ this but unironically
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Apr 12, 2018 21:21
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call to action posted:Nuclear is kinda like communism in that it's just never been tried ~the right way~ Oh ... that's good.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:21
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VideoGameVet posted:Greenpeace needs to apologize for breaking SONGS. As Morbus pointed out, nuclear basically needs state intervention to succeed. So yeah, Greenpeace should be faulted, because they helped make it a politically toxic position, so the people most poised to deploy it successfully have every incentive not to. They've recently moderated their senseless attacks on nuclear power recently after pressure from James Hansen and others, but the damage is done. It's definitely more complex than "greens did it", the very existence of the nuclear bomb did a lot in itself, but it's no excuse.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:24
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We don’t have time to wait for the revolution to work towards a zero-carbon economy. But if we’re redesigning the entirety of society, sure, let us compare all sorts of other metrics like construction timelines and social life cycle analysis. I agree completely we should consider a more systemic and wholistic view than just price when making large scale energy decisions. I’m just fairly confident renewables, effiency, demand reduction, and storage working together will be better from that systemic and wholistic perspective than grid designs that rely on fewer and larger complex complex plants. Be the technology fission, fusion, OTEC or CCS. Especially the closer to reality we make this fantasy.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:26
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Thug Lessons posted:As Morbus pointed out, nuclear basically needs state intervention to succeed. So yeah, Greenpeace should be faulted, because they helped make it a politically toxic position, so the people most poised to deploy it successfully have every incentive not to. They've recently moderated their senseless attacks on nuclear power recently after pressure from James Hansen and others, but the damage is done. It's definitely more complex than "greens did it", the very existence of the nuclear bomb did a lot in itself, but it's no excuse. What could have the state done to save SONGS, other than imprisoning the execs at SCE/SDGE to stop them from 'tweaking' the plant? Maybe we should have just had the Navy run things.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:26
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call to action posted:Nuclear is kinda like communism in that it's just never been tried ~the right way~ Canada has 80 nuclear power plants and never has any serious accidents. france has 58 and use it for the majority of all their power, a bunch of countries. Slovakia, Ukraine, Belgium, and Hungary get the majority of their power from nuclear and 31 countries have nuclear power. It's only America that seems to find it so very hard.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:27
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VideoGameVet posted:What could have the state done to save SONGS, other than imprisoning the execs at SCE/SDGE to stop them from 'tweaking' the plant? I'm not concerned about a particular plant. I'm making a point about how, with sufficient public investment, nuclear is already proven to be sufficient to mostly decarbonize a country in a couple decades. If renewables can do that now, great, but I'm not going to hold my breath, and I expect we'll regret not just biting the bullet and building the nukes when we had a chance.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:32
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Thug Lessons posted:I'm not concerned about a particular plant. I'm making a point about how, with sufficient public investment, nuclear is already proven to be sufficient to mostly decarbonize a country in a couple decades. If renewables can do that now, great, but I'm not going to hold my breath, and I expect we'll regret not just biting the bullet and building the nukes when we had a chance. I'm not in favor of shutting down existing operating plants, but the timing and costs of adding new ones make them less of a valuable option than wind/solar/storage at this time. The math doesn't work out in their favor.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:40
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Thug Lessons posted:I'm not concerned about a particular plant. I'm making a point about how, with sufficient public investment, nuclear is already proven to be sufficient to mostly decarbonize a country in a couple decades. If renewables can do that now, great, but I'm not going to hold my breath, and I expect we'll regret not just biting the bullet and building the nukes when we had a chance. Oh, and of course you're not concerned. You're not a SDG&E ratepayer like I am and you're not facing the prospect of having waste buried on the beach.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:41
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call to action posted:Nuclear is kinda like communism in that it's just never been tried ~the right way~ It works fine, its just was never more profitable than coal and gas so we stopped building new plants which lead to every new contract having to relearn all the lost institutional knowledge and enormous expense.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:44
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VideoGameVet posted:I'm not in favor of shutting down existing operating plants, but the timing and costs of adding new ones make them less of a valuable option than wind/solar/storage at this time. Okay, but the actual situation in e.g. Germany is that we are shutting down existing plants and the "more valuable" renewables can't make up the difference and carbon emissions rise every year. To fuel the bioenergy renewables they have to chop down forests, and to make up for the deficit they have to mine lignite. I would question how much more valuable they are.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:46
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If the actual threat of climate change is acute collapse of life on earth or civilization within a generation or two I don't really see why anyone would not be in favor of nuclear power like, even if nuclear power was just building big open pits with tarps over them and throwing uranium in it to boil water. There is pretty much no amount of damage a nuclear plant could do to the environment that anywhere near matches the end of human civilization. Like even if we did an unthinkably bad job building them and some of them magically formed into straight out nuclear bombs it wouldn't be a speck compared to the scenarios some people are proposing as the risks of climate change. Like if most of the earth will be destroyed if we don't stop carbon release in the next few years we can figure out solar power and batteries and whatever later, we have nuclear now and you could basically haveto have a chernobyl every day for a hundred years to displace a billion people like climate change. Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Apr 12, 2018 |
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Apr 12, 2018 21:47
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VideoGameVet posted:Oh, and of course you're not concerned. You're not a SDG&E ratepayer like I am and you're not facing the prospect of having waste buried on the beach. No, instead I'm paying for billions in fly ash cleanup. You're not wrong that the US nuclear industry is a trash fire, but so is the US energy industry. I guess you're right; I'd rather have the Navy do it.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:If the actual threat of climate change is acute collapse of life on earth or civilization within a generation or two I don't really see why anyone would not be in favor of nuclear power like, even if nuclear power was just building big open pits with tarps over them and throwing uranium in it to boil water. There is pretty much no amount of damage a nuclear plant could do to the environment that anywhere near matches the end of human civilization. Like even if we did an unthinkably bad job building them and some of them magically formed into straight out nuclear bombs it wouldn't be a speck compared to the scenarios some people are proposing as the risks of climate change. Yeah, the self sustaining vaults that the rich people will retreat to will be powered by nuclear reactors.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:52
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Canada has 80 nuclear power plants and never has any serious accidents. france has 58 and use it for the majority of all their power, a bunch of countries. Slovakia, Ukraine, Belgium, and Hungary get the majority of their power from nuclear and 31 countries have nuclear power. It's only America that seems to find it so very hard.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:58
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Thug Lessons posted:I mean that short of IDK, dropping a comet on it, maybe nukes, no one has figured out a way it's possible to melt that much ice that quickly. You framed that post in terms of "when we studied it we shortened the timescale for ice sheet collapse". No. We found ways that, in theory, it could accelerate. No one has ever found a way to melt it before 2100 so I'm not worried about that happening.
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Apr 12, 2018 22:00
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I mean, if you put that ice on the equator I don't think it'd last that long. Yes, in its current location it will take a long time to fully melt, but what if you just need enough melt on location to cause chunks to break off and head into warmer climes? That's a very different calculation, basically dependent on seawater infiltration and mechanical forces rather than brute-force melting. Like, the moment a piece breaks off it's pretty much living on borrowed time, melting away into nothing as it floats around in comparably balmy seas. if the Antarctic starts making GBS threads out monster icebergs, that just means they live longer and have a shot at showing up in even warmer waters, like passing by South Africa or some poo poo. Your initial post seemed to imply that you thought it wasn't on land. It is. It's just that the ice weighs so much that it causes the land to sink up to a kilometer. Even with accelerated mechanisms you are not getting that much ice into the ocean before the end of the century. That is a lost cause. If you want to be a pessimist, say we'll get 3m of SLR. That's at least possible within the laws of physics.
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Apr 12, 2018 22:08
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Trabisnikof posted:Levelized Cost of Energy/Electricity is a measure of the comparative costs to build a brand new plant of different types as dollars per MWh. Any serious proposal to supply baseline electric power from renewable sources effectively requires rebuilding the electrical grid to deal with intermitent generation. Over a suitably large area the average renewable generation production is stable enough to consistently supply baseline power, but this requires actually having a grid that can move power over the required distances. This is not a trivial issue and has to be considered when comparing the the cost of different power sources. It's obviously not intractable, for example this paper describes a US HVDC grid system that could allow most US baseline power to be supplied by renewables without requiring any storage:  However someone actually has to build such a system, and realistically in the US the federal govt is the only institution that can or will do it. Presumably it requires at a minimum a level of expenditure similar to building the national highway system, and the public would probably have to pay for all of it. It's obviously possible to do with current technology, but this kind of long-distance transmission capacity currently just doesn't exist. Until there is at least a PLAN for such a system the low cost of solar/wind power as shown in these levelized energy comparisons is not realistic. IMO of the main advantages of the "crank out nuclear plants" approach to decarbonizing electrical power generation is that it would more or less work with the current grid. Also it's been done at least once in history, unlike a renewable dominated baseline power system. However as others have pointed out it would also likely require significant public spending, which is a problem because the US political consensus right now is to pay nothing towards climate change mitigation. Nocturtle fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Apr 12, 2018 |
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Apr 12, 2018 22:10
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Thug Lessons posted:Your initial post seemed to imply that you thought it wasn't on land. It is. It's just that the ice weighs so much that it causes the land to sink up to a kilometer. Even with accelerated mechanisms you are not getting that much ice into the ocean before the end of the century. That is a lost cause. If you want to be a pessimist, say we'll get 3m of SLR. That's at least possible within the laws of physics.
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Apr 12, 2018 22:39
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Yes, the ice is resting on the sea floor, that still means you've got water interacting directly with the base of the ice sheet. As for 3m of SLR, that's still a little more than half the ice melted, so I guess you're just slightly more optimistic than me. antarctica is a continent (the only one without a cat). It's got rocks and ground and everything. the arctic is the one that is just a bunch of ice floating around on water or sitting on the sea floor
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Apr 12, 2018 22:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:antarctica is a continent (the only one without a cat). It's got rocks and ground and everything. the arctic is the one that is just a bunch of ice floating around on water or sitting on the sea floor
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Apr 12, 2018 22:58
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Thug Lessons posted:No, instead I'm paying for billions in fly ash cleanup. You're not wrong that the US nuclear industry is a trash fire, but so is the US energy industry. I guess you're right; I'd rather have the Navy do it. Rickover was a real SOB but he got it mostly right. Better than the civies did.
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Apr 13, 2018 00:56
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Nocturtle posted:People with an overly rosy view of our future might be fooling themselves and those listening them, but I cannot accept that they're "the real problem demographic" preventing progress on climate change. There's a lot of polling data on this issue and it's pretty clear which demographics are holding up progress, it's the ones who don't accept the science, and vote for explicitly reactionary politicians who campaign on repealing environmental regulations while expanding fossil fuel usage. Against that insane backdrop I don't understand the need to direct vitriol against anyone who accepts the basic science of climate change. We need to treat climate change mitigation as an ecumenical matter. Much the same way that SCOTUS didn't need to wait (nor should they have) to force desegregation over the protests of racists, the only realistic way to avoid global collapse is to figure a way to just ignore and forcible go over the heads of deniers. There is no route where we all sit down in a circle, sing kumbaya, and all the mutants have a change of heart. The deniers are here to stay. We can include them and go extinct, or force fixes over their protests somehow. People like Thug and OOCC like to pretend that not only are no sacrifices needed, but also there is a route to reach deniers and bring them around to some tweak solution (that will magically work in their minds). They are the demo that gives voice to the lie that we have time to come to a consensus and survive. It's a fantasy. Either there is some type of radical solution that involves ignoring the petulant children who still deny climate change in 2018, or we're gonna end. poopinmymouth fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Apr 13, 2018 |
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Apr 13, 2018 22:29
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poopinmymouth posted:
There is no sacrifices needed because this isn't some sort of religious issue where if we just feel bad enough and repent our decadence hard enough the nature goddess will spare us or something. We are never going to win this by rebuking our sins through willpower. If all you can offer people is worse lives and more poverty they aren't going to follow you. You either find real answers, or maybe everyone dies eventually.
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Apr 13, 2018 22:57
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is no sacrifices needed because this isn't some sort of religious issue where if we just feel bad enough and repent our decadence hard enough the nature goddess will spare us or something. We are never going to win this by rebuking our sins through willpower. Did people sacrifice during WWII to aid in the victory over the axis?
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Apr 13, 2018 23:03
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VideoGameVet posted:Did people sacrifice during WWII to aid in the victory over the axis? Not really and this is a dumb comparison. E: Like even germany held off on requiring any real sacrifice of the german populace until the war was basically already lost exactly because they knew people get angry quickly. the idea that there will be large scale sacrifice in the name of climate change is utterly moronic. you can't even get people to turn off lights they aren't using. tsa fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Apr 13, 2018 |
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Apr 13, 2018 23:06
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VideoGameVet posted:Did people sacrifice during WWII to aid in the victory over the axis? Like, people sacrificed their life and lived under rationing to like, temporarily empower an army to go defeat an enemy and fix a problem, not in some weird plan where they hoped to reduce the quality of their lives for the rest of history in hopes that would keep the nazis from coming. If you got some plan where it's a rough couple years but then everything is fixed and better that is a real thing someone could talk about doing, if the idea is we just reduce the quality of life of the first world, ban the third world from advancing through vague and unspecified ways that you claim isn't going to be force or authoritarianism but absolutely would be then maybe cull off some people and have everyone live poorly till time ends then no, no one is going to do that
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Apr 13, 2018 23:17
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Well, that's pretty clear, then. Any measure that means intentional reduction in quality of life (as opposed to natural  ) is unrealistic and therefore not worth considering.The best part is that if the edifice collapses, Thug and OOCC and Orange Sunshine will not blame people for refusing to reduce overall use of energy and resources, but rather the ~deluded anarcho-primitivists~ for poisoning the well of ideas and failing to come up with functional solutions.
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Apr 13, 2018 23:58
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Conspiratiorist posted:Well, that's pretty clear, then. Any measure that means intentional reduction in quality of life (as opposed to natural Can you describe how you envisage people behaving in your idea of what should happen?
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Apr 14, 2018 00:36
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Conspiratiorist posted:The best part is that if the edifice collapses, Thug and OOCC and Orange Sunshine will not blame people for refusing to reduce overall use of energy and resources You are right, I won't. What good would that ever do? The solution is to find solutions, not to make everyone on earth pinky swear to just live worse lives forever ever and ever till the sun expands and then somehow enforce that across all cultures generation to generation. Because that is unenforceable and not even desirable. We either figure out renewable energy to make it better, call up the president of sci-fi science to advance physics till we figure out something new or we build nuclear power plants and accept that if we have a chernobyl and a fukushima every single day for a hundred years it would not kill as many people as producing too much carbon would have. Then we advance everyone, so the first world and the third world move forward and human suffering is reduced and lives are improved.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:18
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Surprise Giraffe posted:Can you describe how you envisage people behaving in your idea of what should happen? Well, corporatism is incompatible with serious environmental protection so that has to go, for starters. And if you can do that, then you can also implement some serious wealth redistribution (you know, like UBI), so that's good too towards protecting quality of life for the most vulnerable in an increasingly harsher world. And then you have to hit hard the things have the most impact in regards to emissions and pollution that do not actually meaningfully impact people's quality of life. Goodbye beef, goodbye cheap and frivolous air travel to expand your mind by petting cats in every continent, individual vehicle ownership culture, etc. Then pray for a miracle with the little bit extra time bought.
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Apr 14, 2018 02:14
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