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Kunabomber posted:This right here. In my city of 100K, local elections usually have about 3000 voters. It only takes a few hundred votes swinging in a certain way to change the way things operate. Oh, wow. Lots of underemployed poli sci majors out there. I wonder how much you could do by setting up a little 'training institute' for your most charismatic activist buddies. Do your city's elected positions pay?
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Jan 23, 2019 20:24
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Adding a tax to the fuel that the poor buy: bad Adding a tax to the company that makes the fuel that the poor buy, raising prices the same amount: good (?) Hello Sailor posted:That explains his hatred of Borlaug's agricultural innovations; they mostly benefitted brown people. Wow, this is some cowardly bullshit - unless, of course, you can pull a quote? dream9!bed!! fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 21:10
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dream9!bed!! posted:Adding a tax to the fuel that the poor buy: bad This is a bit disingenuous because companies do not universally pass their tax burden onto the consumer and are obliged to provide to remain competitive in the marketplace. Taxing fuel companies *might* result in high prices for consumers but it's far more likely they will take action to either improve their operating costs or seek out alternative products first.
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Jan 23, 2019 21:28
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I spent some time this weekend at a facility in Encinitas CA that was demonstrating and promoting agroforestry. Agroforestry is the interaction of agriculture and trees, including the agricultural use of trees. This includes trees on farms and in agricultural landscapes, farming in forests and along forest margins and tree-crop production, including cocoa, coffee, rubber and oil palm. Interactions between trees and other components of agriculture may be important at a range of scales: in fields (where trees and crops are grown together), on farms (where trees may provide fodder for livestock, fuel, food, shelter or income from products including timber) and landscapes (where agricultural and forest land uses combine in determining the provision of ecosystem services). http://www.worldagroforestry.org/about/agroforestry
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Jan 23, 2019 21:34
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Zophar posted:This is a bit disingenuous because companies do not universally pass their tax burden onto the consumer and are obliged to provide to remain competitive in the marketplace. Taxing fuel companies *might* result in high prices for consumers but it's far more likely they will take action to either improve their operating costs or seek out alternative products first. So, say some portion of that corporate carbon tax is manifested in consumer prices (say, +10%). Is that reasonable or acceptable to you? What about 25 or 50%?
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Jan 23, 2019 21:35
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Insanite posted:So, say some portion of that corporate carbon tax is manifested in consumer prices (say, +10%). Is that reasonable or acceptable to you? What about 25 or 50%? I personally have no problem paying much more for gas, but the point was to have a regressive tax the tax has to disproportionately affect lower earners. In any of these scenarios the producers would still be bearing the brunt of the tax burden. I understand your point that higher taxes on the producers will eventually hurt consumers, and TBH they should. My point is that a lot more happens between "raise taxes on producers" -> "directly impacts the consumer", which is how the fuel tax in France should have gone down. Producers when faced with an unprofitable business model will start promoting alternative cheaper products and even actively work to train their consumers to stop buying products that don't make them money. This happens to be why we're in the natural gas Catch-22 right now, fwiw, but that's another problem.
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Jan 23, 2019 21:43
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Insanite posted:So, say some portion of that corporate carbon tax is manifested in consumer prices (say, +10%). Is that reasonable or acceptable to you? What about 25 or 50%? A way to resolve this is to do a carbon tax plus dividend: quote:A carbon dividend is a straightforward and egalitarian policy, creating a social fund that is financed by carbon emissions. Under a $230 carbon tax, we estimate that each person in the U.S. will receive an annual carbon dividend of $2,237.8 People who emit less carbon than average will end up with a net benefit (paying in less than they receive via a dividend payment) and people who consume more carbon than average will end up with a net loss (paying in more than they receive via a dividend payment). Under this policy, everyone contributes to the carbon dividend based on how much pollution they add to the carbon sink, while everyone receives the same dividend as equal owners
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Jan 23, 2019 21:46
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I'm somewhat pro-dividend in this scheme. Just attempting to differentiate between 'the least amongst us should not pay more for carbon emissions, period' and "I understand your point that higher taxes on the producers will eventually hurt consumers, and TBH they should."
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Jan 23, 2019 21:53
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I've never argued the poor should never pay for the burden of emissions, for what it's worth. I sympathize with the yellow vests however because the problem there was lawmakers went straight to punishing the poor instead of correctly addressing the issue from the top down.
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Jan 23, 2019 21:57
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dream9!bed!! posted:Wow, this is some cowardly bullshit - unless, of course, you can pull a quote? It's misrepresenting his posts a bit. His point, in typical Rimesian fashion, is that none of those people should ever have been allowed to be born in the first place and their eventual deaths down the road are Borlaug's fault because he enabled their parents to not die of starvation first. How much of that you attribute to racism vs his way of posting is up to you to decide.  https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3750508&pagenumber=197&perpage=40#post474026961 quote:As for that piece of poo poo Borlaug: do you think it's better that hundreds of millions will now starve to death or die in utterly horrific conditions, after a lifetime of squalor and poverty, rather than tens of millions? They're going to die either way, the green revolution just kicked the can down the road and upped the death toll exponentially while also drastically harming the environment. You are either a dipshit or willfully ignorant if you can't see how utterly hosed up that situation is. quote:And which of those outcomes was obviously going to occur when Borlaug set his monster loose. We're not even touching on the environmental catastrophe from the intensive farming itself, mind, but just the human suffering which was inevitable to occur under existing socioeconomic systems. He knew his work would cause a population explosion, he knew it would require farming techniques which would sterilize the soil after a few decades of intensive use. He couldn't possibly have not foreseen this. Sundae fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 22:04
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I'm not sure exactly what I want, myself. Carbon emissions should be discouraged. Carbon fees or maximums are ways to do that. There are some equity issues with that, though. Like, if I'm a millionaire with a single electric car and a modest, modern, solar-powered and heated home, I might have a smaller carbon footprint than the poor dude with a shitbox ICE car in a slum. Maybe the answer is to smash capitalism?
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Jan 23, 2019 22:06
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Sundae posted:It's misrepresenting his posts a bit. His point, in typical Rimesian fashion, is that none of those people should ever have been allowed to be born in the first place and their eventual deaths down the road are Borlaug's fault because he enabled their parents to not die of starvation first. How much of that you attribute to racism vs his way of posting is up to you to decide. This post made me realize that BAU will include mandatory sterilization for refugee status. We get the cheap labor and can claim the carbon credits from the prevented offsprings. Win-Win.
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Jan 23, 2019 22:10
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Just so it didn't look like drive-by sniping: the last page of posts has been exactly the kind of thing that is needed: acknowledging the facts but instead of lashing out in despair, people are giving out reasons and ways to involve yourself while raising awareness of alternatives to unsustainable practices and promoting the joy that is to be had by doing things differently. Personal note: I subscribe to a form of Buddhist practice that starts changing the world from changing our own outlook on our own suffering. Our system locks us into an either/or narrative that makes people feel hopeless and powerless to change practices that already make us feel hollow inside. By demonstrating how a more sustainable lifestyle is also possibly more fun, and, well, otherwise better in many ways than continuing in the old consumerist groove, we can show how starting from building your own capacity to enjoy things differently can also have lasting positive influence on the planet. Doing lasting good against insurmountable odds should never be first about sacrifice, it's about finding joy in the common struggle alongside others. That doesn't mean that bad poo poo won't go down and that sometimes you might not even make it to the other side yourself, but the human quality of being able to stand up against evil together had often triumphed before. Despair is a drug that brings comfort while destroying everything without fail.
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Jan 23, 2019 22:14
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Insanite posted:Plant a few hundred trees and don't have a cow, man. I wanted to get back to this but the Arbor Day Foundation operates out of my neck of the woods and has projects globally. On their site they have all kinds of opportunities to volunteer, donate, get involved in local community recovery, and even buy reforestation carbon offsets. https://www.arborday.org/programs/ I actually learned today that the offsets they're offering are actually pretty affordable and might be something my partner and I seriously consider working into our budget. Zoph fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 22:44
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barbecue at the folks posted:Despair is a drug that brings comfort while destroying everything without fail. Uh... Not to be a pedantic arse, but uhm.. Despair is loss of hope. I can personally testify to the fact, that losing hope in the psychological sense, is not in any way comforting. anyways, derail over. Everyone who try to do something are good people and I sincerely hope that people can succeed in, y'know, save all human life from complete disaster. I'm just... burned out by my experiences and it has left me tired and cynical.
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Jan 23, 2019 22:46
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Zophar posted:This is a bit disingenuous because companies do not universally pass their tax burden onto the consumer and are obliged to provide to remain competitive in the marketplace. Taxing fuel companies *might* result in high prices for consumers but it's far more likely they will take action to either improve their operating costs or seek out alternative products first. This sort of ignores the fact that there's no incentive to 'remain competitive in the marketplace' and not pass that tax to the consumer, for two reasons: -The tax would be applied to all fossil fuel producers, so there's no shifting of competitiveness -Oil and gas has, and will again, run PR campaigns informing people of exactly why they can't afford gas anymore (big bad gubbermint) Sundae posted:It's misrepresenting his posts a bit. His point, in typical Rimesian fashion, is that none of those people should ever have been allowed to be born in the first place and their eventual deaths down the road are Borlaug's fault because he enabled their parents to not die of starvation first. How much of that you attribute to racism vs his way of posting is up to you to decide. Yeah I guess I don't see racism in there, sorry, and you kinda mischaracterized the quotes too (thanks for pulling those so we can see what's going on without editorializing). I think you could even make an argument that Borlaug is sort of a white imperialist, dropping unsustainable, monoculture, corporate-approved food on countries that could and would have evolved more sustainable paths that didn't involve destroying their soil and applying infinite amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers. And to characterize that as 'Rime hates brown people' shows your rear end really, really hard btw. And just lol at 'despair kills everything', no, rising seas and higher temperatures kill everything. Your personal feelings about what's going on actually don't matter that much. dream9!bed!! fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 22:56
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Ssthalar posted:
Had to respond to this one: English is not my first language and the words don't always come out right, sorry. I did not mean to belittle anyone's struggles with depression and despair, poo poo, I know the feeling and have witnessed enough of it around me that I should know better, apologies for that. But the kind of holding on to a doom and gloom outlook out of a kind of narcissist impulse is poisonous and should be called out as such as it can ruin an otherwise working community aiming for social change and turn it into something else entirely. But yeah, derail over, keep up the good work spreading knowledge, everyone!
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Jan 23, 2019 23:03
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What is the argument against switching to nuclear/renewable energy and everyone driving electrical cars?
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Jan 23, 2019 23:05
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dream9!bed!! posted:This sort of ignores the fact that there's no incentive to 'remain competitive in the marketplace' and not pass that tax to the consumer, for two reasons: I'm not really sure how you get around nationalizing all energy companies and shifting their resources to less destructive projects. They'll sabotage things just as they always have, otherwise. dream9!bed!! posted:Yeah I guess I don't see racism in there, sorry Wait, that's the racist genocidal stuff? lol. Vile Pilot posted:What is the argument against switching to nuclear/renewable energy and everyone driving electrical cars? While this is probably a net good, electric cars require lots of resources to build and maintain, too. Additionally, car ownership is a big reason that land use is so terrible in America and Canada right now. Ideally, most people would get around using mass transit, walking, and bikes, with cars reserved for rare occasions. Insanite fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 23:05
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Vile Pilot posted:What is the argument against switching to nuclear/renewable energy and everyone driving electrical cars? By whom? Obviously that's insufficient now, but most serious people advocate some version of that with a really big "yes and..." clause.
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Jan 23, 2019 23:07
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dream9!bed!! posted:Yeah I guess I don't see racism in there, sorry, and you kinda mischaracterized the quotes too (thanks for pulling those so we can see what's going on without editorializing). I think you could even make an argument that Borlaug is sort of a white imperialist, dropping unsustainable, monoculture, corporate-approved food on countries that could and would have evolved more sustainable paths that didn't involve destroying their soil and applying infinite amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers. Honestly, at least from my impression of Rime's perspective/stance, his hatred of Borlaug makes sense. I think Borlaug did as well as he could without personally smashing capitalism, but fortunately we have more shades than black and white to paint with and there have been clear negatives moving forward. I'm steering clear of the racism thing because I have no clue what Rime's posts outside this thread are like. I just did a google search for [site: forums.somethingawful.com "Rime" "Borlaug"] and clicked through a few pages to find those posts. (I'm not the OP, just remembered the posts and figured I'd provide.)
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Jan 23, 2019 23:10
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Accretionist posted:Oh, wow. Lots of underemployed poli sci majors out there. I wonder how much you could do by setting up a little 'training institute' for your most charismatic activist buddies. Do your city's elected positions pay? I don't think city council positions pay much, if at all. I live in one of the infinite number of 'cities' that's actually attached to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Typically the people running are real estate developers or people who own their own business because they have the flexibility in their day jobs to go around shaking hands. The biggest thing that drives low turnout is that the local elections are held on odd-numbered years in May with little fanfare.
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Jan 23, 2019 23:12
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Sundae posted:Honestly, at least from my impression of Rime's perspective/stance, his hatred of Borlaug makes sense. I think Borlaug did as well as he could without personally smashing capitalism, but fortunately we have more shades than black and white to paint with and there have been clear negatives moving forward. I'm steering clear of the racism thing because I have no clue what Rime's posts outside this thread are like. I just did a google search for [site: forums.somethingawful.com "Rime" "Borlaug"] and clicked through a few pages to find those posts. Some of that's pretty gross. I'm sympathetic to the Green notion that there are plain too many people, but we'd be better served culling Americans, Canadians, and Australians than any of Borlaug's billion. Every American you cap is worth over 3 of the world average going by CO2 emissions per capita. e: But still, Free Rime. Insanite fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 23:26
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Insanite posted:Some of that's pretty gross. I'm sympathetic to the Green notion that there are plain too many people, but we'd be better served culling Americans, Canadians, and Australians than any of Borlaug's billion. Agreed. I'd start with myself, but the world would mourn the loss of my shitposts.
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Jan 23, 2019 23:30
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VideoGameVet posted:I spent some time this weekend at a facility in Encinitas CA that was demonstrating and promoting agroforestry. Thanks for that link. As a zoologist I've been aware of climate change for a long time but haven't paid much attention to the details. Over the last few months I've had time to review literature in climatology, geology, and other fields outside my own and it's left me demoralized and depressed. I figured it was going to get bad over the next few decades, I didn't realize how turbofucked we are now, at this moment. However pointless it is though I'm going to keep fighting, making changes for myself, my family, and whatever part of society I can influence. I'm fortunate enough through age and opportunity to own a couple of wooded hectares on Vancouver Island. Over the last four years we've had extended summer droughts and intermittent winter monsoon rains that run off instead of thoroughly saturating the forest soil. Around the Salish Sea there's been extensive die-off of shallow-rooted balsam fir and the iconic west coast red cedar, mainstay of traditional indigenous cultures. Removing all the dead trees on our lot before the next fire season has been keeping me busy. It's depressing work; red cedar is one of my favourite trees and turning the forest into something "park-like" just reminds me of all the wildlife I've encountered in and around those cedars. I've considered re-planting the cedars but our aquifer might not be reliable enough to get them through the summers. I'll probably try planting more food producing trees. Coulter pines look like they might be a good fit for some of the slightly more exposed rocky slopes. Their pine nuts are probably going to end up as part of a squirrel enhancement project rather than feeding us. It's a bit of a challenge trying to match trees with existing site conditions and whatever comes down the pipe climatically over the tree's expected life span. Interesting times. I'm beginning to wonder if we need to change our attitude towards "alien invasive species", quit fighting them and see what works. (But not poplars. gently caress poplars. Himalayan Giant blackberries otoh rule.) The garden however is doing well and producing enough to feed the two of us and others over the year. I installed drip irrigation several years ago - plastic pipe bad, decreased water and electricity use good. It's nice not to have to give a crap about the price or availability of broccoli and cauliflower during the winter. Once I get through this grief I intend to get angy. Very, very angry. Also: #FreeRime
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Jan 24, 2019 00:20
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dream9!bed!! posted:And to characterize that as 'Rime hates brown people' shows your rear end really, really hard btw. I just remembered his dislike of Borlaug in this thread (and/or previous versions of this thread) and matched it to how another poster characterized his posting in another thread (which he was also kicked out of) that I don't follow. If you'd prefer to characterize it as "Rime hates all people" instead of "Rime hates brown people", take it up with the poster I responded to (preferably in PMs). Either way, good loving riddance to him.
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Jan 24, 2019 00:32
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Hello Sailor posted:I just remembered his dislike of Borlaug in this thread (and/or previous versions of this thread) and matched it to how another poster characterized his posting in another thread (which he was also kicked out of) that I don't follow. If you'd prefer to characterize it as "Rime hates all people" instead of "Rime hates brown people", take it up with the poster I responded to (preferably in PMs). Either way, good loving riddance to him. You're thinking of Namaste F* (who ate repeated chain probations and then a permaban). Bob Ross Nuke Test fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2019 01:22
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Hexigrammus posted:Thanks for that link. The Agroforest I visited is in a place that might get 6 inches of rain a year. Part of the reason for this is to create microclimates under the trees and use ground cover to prevent loss by evaporation. More on this: https://coastalrootsfarm.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-food-forests/ VideoGameVet fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 01:39
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Execution is probably the best way for a prophet to get canonized.
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Jan 24, 2019 01:39
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It's honestly really simple to fix, you just go on a war economy and mobilize all of society to combat climate change. You don't solve an urgent existential threat with taxes, you fix it with urgent measures. Don't put a tax on beef, or else the rich will be able to eat it all they want and the poor won't be able to afford it, some demagogue will be able to capitalize on the fact that 'the elite eat steak every night and you have to have lentils' you'll get a backlash that will end up derailing your plans. Instead, ration it so that everyone can have a little bit. Nobody will like it, but the equality of sacrifice will help ensure that you don't cause resentment. A tax means "they're tryna tell me what to eat!", rationing implies an actual emergency.
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Jan 24, 2019 01:41
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Yes, Rime is pretty racist, just a quick scan through his probes yields: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3533827&pagenumber=881&perpage=40#post469016393 quote:If micro lofts like those hipster conversions down in Gastown were a lot more common, and renting for $300-$500 a month, I'd happily snap one up. Hell, I'd jump to buy one if they were less than $70k and I'm sure there's plenty of 20-something freespirited bachelors/ettes who feel the same. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3750508&pagenumber=393&perpage=40#post489031654 quote:Fly all you want, peeps, because worthless lives in the tropics are emitting more carbon than the entire EU, purely through their rampant and unstoppable deforestation efforts. quote:The problem enters when you are renting from Asian absentee landlords who are waiting to flip the wreck for land value. My poor (literally) mothers basement and roof are both flooding, and the squinty eyed motherfuckers are just trying to force her to move by refusing to fix anything. quote:Gypsies are the worst. People who've never been to eastern europe go all bleeding heart when they hear locals talk about the gypsies but seriously. I feel like, yeah, he's pretty  , and not just a misanthrope. I'm fairly sure there's more that just didn't get reported, but I really don't want to dig through his posting.
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Jan 24, 2019 03:35
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Hexigrammus posted:It's a bit of a challenge trying to match trees with existing site conditions and whatever comes down the pipe climatically over the tree's expected life span. Interesting times. I'm beginning to wonder if we need to change our attitude towards "alien invasive species", quit fighting them and see what works. (But not poplars. gently caress poplars. Himalayan Giant blackberries otoh rule.) Most definitely; pretty much all ongoing ecosystem restoration efforts are doomed to be costly wastes of time. However, the alternative of seeding the systems with more adaptive "invasive" species (or leaving them unchecked when they're already present) is even more daunting than native restoration planning, in between not knowing for sure how biomes will shift over the next few decades and watching out for not inadvertently screwing the food chain sideways while trying to save it. #FreeRime
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Jan 24, 2019 04:06
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Vile Pilot posted:What is the argument against switching to nuclear/renewable energy and everyone driving electrical cars? With new nuclear plants, you want a competent and engaged DoE administering their bidding and construction processes (to say nothing of their administration and upkeep, and the ever-present NIMBYing), and as cool as electric cars are, the mining and refining of lithium is terrible for the environment and turns anyplace that does either act into something that needs to be called a Megafund site instead of just Superfund. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact
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Jan 24, 2019 04:08
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BIG HEADLINE posted:With new nuclear plants, you want a competent and engaged DoE administering their bidding and construction processes (to say nothing of their administration and upkeep, and the ever-present NIMBYing), and as cool as electric cars are, the mining and refining of lithium is terrible for the environment and turns anyplace that does either act into something that needs to be called a Megafund site instead of just Superfund. I have dealt with the NRC before and they were not all that bad. (DOE on the other hand... terrible.) All combined Construction and Operating licenses have currently been issued from the NRC. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col.html Also there are multiple layers of "double checkers"... (For example on the nuclear Construction side, there is typically an ANI-Authorized Nuclear Inspector whom is seperate from the inspectors used by the builder. (Different company.)) Between the 3 of them (ANI company, the NRC, and the Contractor) I am not really concerned with their construction processes. If its required, it will get done.
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Jan 24, 2019 04:54
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I’m more and more of the opinion that nuclear aviation is what doomed the US nuclear industry to its current stagnant status. If you look back at the history of nuclear power you see that right as funding was peaking and right and the academic base was broadest for nuclear engineering we decide to spend a generation’s worth of research on nuclear aviation. We spent billions on it from the 40s-60s and got very little in return. If that money had been spent towards civil power development instead it seems reasonable to assume we might have an industry today that isn’t in a bit of a death spiral. Do visit the testbed aviation reactors out in Idaho, they’re pretty incredible engineering artifacts.
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Jan 24, 2019 05:05
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Here's another hope killing study for all the racists out there: "Climate Change Tipping Point Could Be Coming Sooner than We Think New study shows that vegetation may not be able to continue abating the effects of emissions from human activities" https://engineering.columbia.edu/press-releases/climate-change-tipping-point
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Jan 24, 2019 05:38
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Trabisnikof posted:I’m more and more of the opinion that nuclear aviation is what doomed the US nuclear industry to its current stagnant status. This is a very interesting and spicy take... The entire Army/Air Force/DoD Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) and Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program that it grew into had a total cost of ~1 billion, over it's lifespan from 1945-1963. Adjusted for inflation that's roughly 10 billion. So yes, billions were spent on it. In contrast the reactors built as a result of France's Messmer plan, if we just include the 54 reactors built in CP0, CP1, CP2, P4, and P'4 batches (and ignore the four extremely expensive and as of yet mostly unbuilt new clusterfuck reactors), the total cost just for construction was roughly 100 billion USD inflation adjusted. In other words, France's extremely ambitious and mostly successful plan from ~1973-1994 to generate nearly all of their electricity from nuclear power cost about an order of magnitude more just to construct the reactors than the US spent on it's dumbshit nuclear aviation projects. Since electricity demand in the US is and has been much larger than in France (today about ~8x times total GWh generated), the cost for the US would have course been much larger, several hundred billion to a trillion dollars. Indeed, the US built a similar amount of nuclear capacity as France and spent about the same for it, and even this was much, much more expensive than what was spent on nuclear aviation. So rest assured that the amount wasted on super atom jet was small compared to the cost of nuclear reactors and this is very definitely not what is responsible for the sad state of our nuclear industry. I mean, France's modern nuclear industry is just as hosed as ours and they did go whole hog civil nuclear power, and did not have a nuclear aviation program. Edit for sources: https://fas.org/nuke/space/anp-gao1963.pdf http://apw.ee.pw.edu.pl/tresc/-eng/08-FrenchNucleamProgram.pdf https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2353305 https://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports-publics/054000069.pdf (in French) Morbus fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 06:07
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dream9!bed!! posted:Here's another hope killing study for all the racists out there: Is this true? Trabisnikof posted:I’m more and more of the opinion that nuclear aviation is what doomed the US nuclear industry to its current stagnant status. In the U.S. we had competing nuclear designs. (Westinghouse, General Electric, Combustion Engineering, Babcock and Wilcox) Also, as you said, we spent a lot of money on "experimental" reactors that only ran for 8-15 years and then shut down. (Fort St. Vering or whatever that one in Colorado comes to mind. It was Helium cooled if I remember correctly.) Also, with the bulk of U.S. electricity generation, a lot of companies are not owned by the government. Personally I kind of feel like some of these companies are financially motivated to shut their nuclear reactors early. (For example there was the whole debacle with SONGs in California.) 2000MWe is unfortunately replaced with something like 2000MWe coming from a newly built natural gas power plant in another state. (You can't build 1000MWe of solar thermal, solar PV, or wind in a one year period. For natural gas, it is do-able.) Morbus posted:Stuff (Or was did he really mean the U.S. program for nuclear powered planes and rockets?) Anyway... money spent on nuclear power has cost a lot and continues to cost a lot and I don't really see that changing without people really putting in the effort to... really think/plan out their programs ahead of time. (Procurement/Supply Chain Plan, Construction Plan, Maintenance Plan, Operations Plan..) However, at the end of the day Nuclear Power does have to live up to a higher pedigree than compared to other industries and trying to make it cost competitive is... unlikely. And even then, unexpected poo poo can happen with something that is "new". Senor P. fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 06:15
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Vile Pilot posted:What is the argument against switching to nuclear/renewable energy and everyone driving electrical cars? There isn't any argument against it. Taking electricity generation and transportation down to about zero emission is pretty much a requirement. Doing the first absolutely requires switching to nuclear or renewable energy, and doing the second requires that any cars or trucks on the road be zero emission (arguments for less driving notwithstanding). There's a lot of other things you also need to do, to, but nobody really debates that renewable energy and the eliminating the great majority of ICE vehicles is required. It should be noted, that, especially now, most of the work with "switching" to renewable energy is the decommissioning of existing carbon intensive infrastructure well before its useful end of life, ASAP, rather than just making sure that new installed capacity is renewable. But we've spent the last 20+ years doing basically gently caress all, our government is hosed, we've already baked in some degree of climate catastrophe, and we have very little time left to avoid extreme catastrophe. So the problem right now really isn't finding solutions, but acknowledging that we've blown through our margin for enacting any solution in a way that will be politically or personally comfortable. Once there is broader acceptance of that reality, you may see people willing to push and fight for what needs to be done, without the pretense that it needs to support X% of economic growth, or be "cost competitive" with the status quo, or poll well among the general public, or have the approval of a majority in whatever branch of government.
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Jan 24, 2019 06:36
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Senor P. posted:So recently at work a co-worker of mine... (who grew up in Northern California in like the 40s and 50s and 60s) was talking about glaciers calving off and the resulting sea level rise. In general, 50:50 thermal expansion and glacial melt: quote:Global sea level is currently rising as a result of both ocean thermal expansion and glacier melt, with each accounting for about half of the observed sea level rise, and each caused by recent increases in global mean temperature. But also local factors sometimes. For example: Article: Flooding Hot Spots: Why Seas Are Rising Faster on the U.S. East Coast Date: 2018 APR 24 quote:...
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Jan 24, 2019 06:48
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