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Fusion's difficulty in terms of energy-positive reactions that don't destroy all known or possibly physical materials seems to be on the level of "discover new physics that allow us to influence strong/weak/gravitational forces". Even if we built out a fusion-based supply chain of fuel and reactors (and handwave the cost and energy to have essentially single-use reactor vessels because fusion is so efficient)... we could do that now with fission power. We don't because people A) care more about money than the environment and B) are idiots who are irrationally afraid of the word nuclear. It doesn't seem like it's any kind of technology issue, it's 100% an issue of culture and politics (including bad-faith risk assessment or just plain propaganda), so the idea that improving technology will eventually appease the gatekeepers doesn't really make sense.
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Oct 24, 2020 20:53
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Can't we build solar on raised platforms to allow for wildlife under it?
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Oct 24, 2020 21:09
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Plants generally need sunlight to survive, and animals generally require plants to survive, so...
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Oct 24, 2020 21:15
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Raised platforms, but make them high enough to drive under and cover all the parking lots with them. We should just but as much of the solar in urban environment as possible. Mandated rooftop solar panels, windows made of transparent panels. Building walls covered in them. Couple decades ago in Helsinki they built a highrise where all the south facing balcony railings were made of solar panels. To continue my earlier heat pump post. Last year in Finland we broke one million installed heat pumps. Of new built houses 70-80% use some form of heat pump and every year 8000 oil heating systems are replaced with heat pumps. About 15% of home- and service building heating is done by heat pumps. Last year an exhaust air heat pump was installed in several hundred apartment buildings, they can reduce upto 50% of heating energy.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:31
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Crazycryodude posted:Plants generally need sunlight to survive, and animals generally require plants to survive, so... Some do, but not all of them.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:37
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Raenir Salazar posted:Some do, but not all of them. We should use solar where we can, but the idea that we should start just covering wildlands in them is laughable.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:38
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CommieGIR posted:
Land use is not really an issue, any negative aspects for nature is easily compensated for in the long run by averting further CO2 emissions. Here in scandinavia they have even put up the solar panels on stilts so that the sheep can graze underneath, because the grass grows well in constant shade too. Infinite Karma posted:Fusion's difficulty in terms of energy-positive reactions that don't destroy all known or possibly physical materials seems to be on the level of "discover new physics that allow us to influence strong/weak/gravitational forces". Easy, surround the reaction with black holes that vacums up the littering neutrons! We didn't spend billions on CERN for nothing you know.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:39
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Zudgemud posted:Land use is not really an issue, any negative aspects for nature is easily compensated for in the long run by averting further CO2 emissions. Here in scandinavia they have even put up the solar panels on stilts so that the sheep can graze underneath, because the grass grows well in constant shade too. Scandinavia also has an abundant Hydro and some thermal. Most solar in places like Germany and the US just gets backed by methane.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:42
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Zudgemud posted:Land use is not really an issue, any negative aspects for nature is easily compensated for in the long run by averting further CO2 emissions. Here in scandinavia they have even put up the solar panels on stilts so that the sheep can graze underneath, because the grass grows well in constant shade too. If we're talking about black holes then you may as well use the Penrose process to extract about 20% of the mass energy of whatever you dump into a rotating black hole. it's the second most efficient way to extract mass energy from objects after matter-antimatter annihilations!
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Oct 24, 2020 21:46
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Zudgemud posted:Land use is not really an issue, any negative aspects for nature is easily compensated for in the long run by averting further CO2 emissions. Here in scandinavia they have even put up the solar panels on stilts so that the sheep can graze underneath, because the grass grows well in constant shade too. Look I'm extremely pro-solar and I can still admit that covering vast swathes of natural land with solar panels is problematic. We still need to do it but just pretending like there's no ecological cost to doing it is kind of stupid We're not going to blanket the entire world in solar panels or anything but we do need to try to minimize the ecological impact, because the scale of the problem is in fact quite large. That just means "do it in the most mindful way possible", though. Covering buildings and already-paved surfaces can help a lot QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 21:52
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Many of solar farms in California and Nevada while take up a ton of space are in the desert. Nothing really lives there and the impact in minimal.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:58
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CommieGIR posted:We should use solar where we can, but the idea that we should start just covering wildlands in them is laughable. So's the idea that we somehow don't have enough land to put solar panels on. Global power (not electrical power, *power*. Total power demand for the entirety of human civilization) demand is a bit over 18 terawatts. Insolation averaged over the entire globe, including a bunch of areas where you'd never install solar panels, is 340 watts/square meter. Polycrystalline solar panels are about 20% efficient, so that's 68 watts/m^2. So roughly 100,000 square miles for enough solar panels to meet that entire 18 terawatt demand. That's about this much of Earth's land area:  Obviously this is greatly simplified, don't anyone start pointing out that it's impractical to put 100,000 square miles of solar panel in Saudi Arabia and distribute the power, it's just an illustration of how little land is required by measure. This is an estimate that includes an insolation figure that's lower than would be in actual use, with the cheapest solar panel tech, and again, this isn't *electrical* demand, it's *energy* demand. For electrical demand alone, you could meet that with some vanishingly small percentage of the land area we currently devote to agriculture. And again, nobody is suggesting using solar panels exclusively to power the entire planet. By comparison, we've already covered 1.3 *million* square miles of the Earth's surface with cities. Which are also bad for plants and animals and basically all living things other than people. The idea that we don't have enough land for solar power is absolutely, 100%, ridiculously wrong. It's every bit as wrong as complaining that the problem with nuclear power is that we don't have someplace to put the waste. Crazycryodude posted:Plants generally need sunlight to survive, and animals generally require plants to survive, so... The solar panels don't need to intercept *all* of the sunlight falling on an area. In fact, solar panels can play well with marginal croplands; there's a synergy where the panels cool the soil which increases yield and the plants cool the panels increasing efficiency. FreeKillB posted:There's no form of generation that doesn't have a footprint. I would say that the point of comparison is not a utility-scale 100MW solar farm vs 500 acres of pristine wilderness, it would be the footprint of that solar farm compared against the corresponding impact of the fossil fuel plant it would hypothetically be replacing. Yes, exactly, that's what I meant by needing to compare things to the real-world alternatives rather than some mystical state of perfection. It's like the argument that wind turbines kill birds. Okay, sure, wind turbines kill birds, how many birds is fossil fuels instead of wind turbines going to kill? Phanatic fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 22:02
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There's no form of generation that doesn't have a footprint. I would say that the point of comparison is not a utility-scale 100MW solar farm vs 500 acres of pristine wilderness, it would be the footprint of that solar farm compared against the corresponding impact of the fossil fuel plant it would hypothetically be replacing. It does help that the highest-quality solar resource tends to be in the desert, too. Other than that, you can do stuff like rooftop solar to mitigate the environmental impact, but it hardly helps the environment if you're holding off on building solar while gas plants are still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:03
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Gabriel S. posted:Many of solar farms in California and Nevada while take up a ton of space are in the desert. Nothing really lives there and the impact in minimal. For the most part that's not true. Much less than a rainforest, sure, but most deserts are not wind-swept sand dunes devoid of life like in the movies
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Oct 24, 2020 22:07
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Phanatic posted:agriculture. Quoting this, If anyone is at all concerned about environmental land use, agriculture has ruined massive swathes of land see stuff like fertilizer run off. The concern of solar land use is absolutely miniscule.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:10
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QuarkJets posted:For the most part that's not true. Much less than a rainforest, sure, but most deserts are not wind-swept sand dunes devoid of life like in the movies I mean, there is wild life no doubt but in comparison to other environments it is miniscule.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:11
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QuarkJets posted:Look I'm extremely pro-solar and I can still admit that covering vast swathes of natural land with solar panels is problematic. We still need to do it but just pretending like there's no ecological cost to doing it is kind of stupid I didn't say it would not be problematic, I just said it is a non issue if we fry the planet and those eco systems are toast anyway. 26% of the worlds surface is used for livestock grazing, 155000000 acres of public land is used for livestock grazing in the US, surly half a percentage of that could be combined solar farms too. And this is of course ignoring the vast amount of non utilized area available on human built crap.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:13
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Phanatic posted:The solar panels don't need to intercept *all* of the sunlight falling on an area. In fact, solar panels can play well with marginal croplands; there's a synergy where the panels cool the soil which increases yield and the plants cool the panels increasing efficiency. This is partly what I'm alluding to when I mention being "mindful", this is the kind of thing that needs to be done even if it's a lot easier to just pave over kilometers and kilometers of land with silicon panels. "Just put them on stilts so animals can walk underneath" is not enough
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Oct 24, 2020 22:14
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Zudgemud posted:I didn't say it would not be problematic, I just said it is a non issue if we fry the planet and those eco systems are toast anyway. 26% of the worlds surface is used for livestock grazing, 155000000 acres of public land is used for livestock grazing in the US, surly half a percentage of that could be combined solar farms too. And this is of course ignoring the vast amount of non utilized area available on human built crap. You said "it's not really an issue", I'm just responding to that notion  We can accurately say it's less of an issue than becoming Venus II. We still need to take the issue seriously, just like we need to take all of our other land use issues seriously
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Oct 24, 2020 22:16
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QuarkJets posted:For the most part that's not true. Much less than a rainforest, sure, but most deserts are not wind-swept sand dunes devoid of life like in the movies They're not devoid of life but when you start counting biomass there's not much. And in places like the Gobi and the Atacama, wind-swept dunes devoid of life is a pretty good approximation. This is from a biomass survey of China: 
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Oct 24, 2020 22:17
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Phanatic posted:They're not devoid of life but when you start counting biomass there's not much. And in places like the Gobi and the Atacama, wind-swept dunes devoid of life is a pretty good approximation. This is from a biomass survey of China: This is a pretty poor take, because Deserts are actually INCREDIBLY sensitive biomes, and just going "Well, there's not much there, so gently caress it" is a really bad take. Let alone the idea that we can just dump a bunch of solar panels in the desert and then pipe that power everywhere else. Like transmission losses are not a thing. Like you pointed out: Over cropland might be suitable, but the reality is we're not going to just pave everywhere with solar panels and make it work, because it still doesn't address the gaps, and battery/storage isn't there. Even worse that in the examples I showed: That wasn't desert. They effectively covered over massive areas of greenery. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 22:21
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You are still not getting it. How are those incredibly sensitive desert biomes and massive areas of greenery going to fare fossil fuels instead of solar panels?
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Oct 24, 2020 22:31
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Phanatic posted:You are still not getting it. Well, considering that we have to keep burning fossil fuels for a solar/wind system....
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Oct 24, 2020 22:36
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I love how you still alternate between “everything that we can do to help, we should do” to “if it’s not a perfect solution it is meaningless,” at a moment’s notice, while steadfastly ignoring that your perfect solution is unrealizable. I mean, come on, even in your masturbatory fever dreams about how we manage to build thousands of fission plants, you recognize that we’d still be burning some fossil fuels, right?
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Oct 24, 2020 22:57
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CommieGIR posted:This is a pretty poor take, because Deserts are actually INCREDIBLY sensitive biomes, and just going "Well, there's not much there, so gently caress it" is a really bad take. If we're working from the assumption that ecosystems are more or less getting hosed anyway, then killing the deserts at least doesn't meaningfully impact ecosystem services that anyone cares about even if it kills off a bunch of cool specialist species.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:04
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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CommieGIR posted:Even worse that in the examples I showed: That wasn't desert. They effectively covered over massive areas of greenery. It just sounds a lot like conservative handwringing about bird deaths caused by wind turbines while simultaniously giving zero fucks about birds deaths caused by windows and cats. Yes, solar takes up space as do parking lots, roads, suburban sprawl and agriculture. Scouring the earth appears to not be a problem for growing coffee or storing cars cheaper so why should it be a problem here?
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Oct 24, 2020 23:09
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Owling Howl posted:It just sounds a lot like conservative handwringing about bird deaths caused by wind turbines while simultaniously giving zero fucks about birds deaths caused by windows and cats. Yes, solar takes up space as do parking lots, roads, suburban sprawl and agriculture. Scouring the earth appears to not be a problem for growing coffee or storing cars cheaper so why should it be a problem here? I think a more apt comparison would be Michael Moore recent documentary where finds out we have to mine minerals for wind and solar power. And the companies that do this privately owned which is capitalism!
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Oct 24, 2020 23:22
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Gabriel S. posted:I think a more apt comparison would be Michael Moore recent documentary where finds out we have to mine minerals for wind and solar power. And the companies that do this privately owned which is capitalism! Which is a good point actually, because many people just assume renewables need next to no mining/concrete/any other material inputs.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:29
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suck my woke dick posted:Which is a good point actually, because many people just assume renewables need next to no mining/concrete/any other material inputs. Who are these people because it doesn't take any effort to see the Wind Turbines are made out of metal. This doesn't appear out of air.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:31
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Gabriel S. posted:Who are these people because it doesn't take any effort to see the Wind Turbines are made out of metal. This doesn't appear out of air. Every. Goddamn. Time. Someone mentions that big power stations take way too large amounts of resources to build and we should just have renewables instead.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:34
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CommieGIR posted:Well, considering that we have to keep burning fossil fuels for a solar/wind system.... This argument is extremely weak. A) If the use of photovoltaics reduces the use of fossil fuels incrementally, then it's still a net positive overall environmental impact unless you think that after mathing it out the impact of the fossil plant is still less than the impact of the panels. My priors are that it would not even be close especially if you take all of the other pollution into account, not just the CO2 (even looking at the impact of mining materials for the plants). B) we only 'have' to if we are unwilling to scale up batteries, demand response, transmission + overbuild, fission, concentrating solar or other kinds of storage to deal with the intermittency issues. None of these are a silver bullet but the attitude that fossil fuels are strictly necessary is only true if you are looking at a 'what would be profitable' lens as opposed to a viewpoint that priced carbon aggressively enough. I agree that under the existing policy status quo we are inevitably going to keep burning fossil fuels, but that has no bearing on questions of necessity.
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Oct 25, 2020 01:01
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Owling Howl posted:It just sounds a lot like conservative handwringing about bird deaths caused by wind turbines while simultaniously giving zero fucks about birds deaths caused by windows and cats. Yes, solar takes up space as do parking lots, roads, suburban sprawl and agriculture. Scouring the earth appears to not be a problem for growing coffee or storing cars cheaper so why should it be a problem here? If that's what you hear then maybe you just need to read the posts more carefully? Take this one for instance, I'll bold some of the important bits: QuarkJets posted:Look I'm extremely pro-solar and I can still admit that covering vast swathes of natural land with solar panels is problematic. We still need to do it but just pretending like there's no ecological cost to doing it is kind of stupid Solar power is great, but especially when you're putting panels on houses and office buildings. Obviously putting solar panels over a parking lot is simply good. We can reclaim a lot of wasted urban and suburban space in this really useful way. But that's obviously not sufficient, we need even more; it would be ideal if we could take the extra time and effort to make the ecological impact minimal while still installing more. Obviously there will still be some negative impact no matter what but that doesn't mean that we should just throw up our hands and pave over the Mojave Desert
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Oct 25, 2020 01:05
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It's about minimizing negative impact wherever we can, and being smart about energy production and use. There are no perfect solutions, only a choice between bad and worse. The real smart play would be to build out a lot more nuclear 30-40 years ago, but we didn't do that, so here we are...
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Oct 25, 2020 01:44
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The fact is any kind of resource extraction from collecting freshwater to mining ore is going to be ugly. Unless you think we're all going to turn into luddites this is reality.
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Oct 25, 2020 02:51
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Owling Howl posted:It just sounds a lot like conservative handwringing about bird deaths caused by wind turbines while simultaniously giving zero fucks about birds deaths caused by windows and cats. Yes, solar takes up space as do parking lots, roads, suburban sprawl and agriculture. Scouring the earth appears to not be a problem for growing coffee or storing cars cheaper so why should it be a problem here? The problem with you framing it this way is that nobody is arguing we should use space already scoured. We're talking about more natural spaces that should be protected, versus covering the city in solar panels. Don't take this as some total opposition to renewables, that is not what it is.
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Oct 25, 2020 03:49
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Gabriel S. posted:The fact is any kind of resource extraction from collecting freshwater to mining ore is going to be ugly. Unless you think we're all going to turn into luddites this is reality. Is anyone disputing that, though?
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Oct 25, 2020 04:21
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Gabriel S. posted:Who are these people because it doesn't take any effort to see the Wind Turbines are made out of metal. This doesn't appear out of air. Yeah but people don't think "taking into account capacity factor we'd be looking at building 1000-1200 2.5MW wind turbines with individual foundation slabs plus eventually a storage facility instead of one power station with a 1.2GW-ish reactor", they think "ok so instead of a huge concrete powerplant with atomz we could build, like, three dozen windmills". There are also a few slightly more sophisticated versions of this argument but ultimately the point ends up being "so building lots of nuclear will use lots of resources and uhhh wouldn't it be nice if we just build something that doesn't use a lot of resources instead". suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 17:31
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CommieGIR posted:The problem with you framing it this way is that nobody is arguing we should use space already scoured. We're talking about more natural spaces that should be protected, versus covering the city in solar panels. It’s not that it’s not a valid point but we, as in society at large, have made our position quite clear: We do not care. One favored talking point among conservatives, including Trump, is that windmills kill birds. One may surmise that Donald Trump cares a great deal for birds. However, a brief examination of Trump Tower reveals no mitigation efforts to prevent birds from striking windows although it’s not a difficult or complex problem – simply applying decals can measurably reduce impacts. One might also expect Trump to favor a reduction in cat ownership or to at least encourage people to not let their cats roam freely. No such efforts have been undertaken in 4 years. It is quite the conundrum! Trump so yearns to protect birds but does nothing even when solutions are cheap, simple and would barely affect quality of life of anyone. It is what happens when you oppose a thing and then go looking for arguments against it. Trump does not care whatsoever about birds and we all know that. He does not like windmills and simply uses any and all arguments against them without consistency. It’s blatant, absurd hypocrisy. Our position on land use is as clear as our position on birds. We use millions of hectares to grow tobacco, cocoa, tea, coffee and wine although we don’t really need it and could easily reduce consumption by simply taxing it. We put swathes of land under asphalt although we could stack parking spaces and drastically reduce land use. We could encourage multi-story buildings and discourage houses but we don’t. Our position can be loosely summarized as scouring the earth if the alternative is mildly inconvenient. Solar power merely continues and extends this policy in accordance with our values, reprehensible as they are. This sudden interest in land use vis-à-vis solar power is like keeping discos and bars open and then complaining that soup kitchens spread covid-19.
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Oct 26, 2020 09:19
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Tritium isotope detected 10 miles from nuclear plant: we can't use nuclear despite so much CO2 reduction, it might ruin an infinitesimal part of the earth. Solar fields cover up and destroy regional biomes? Price ya gotta pay!
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Oct 26, 2020 13:47
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Pander posted:Tritium isotope detected 10 miles from nuclear plant: we can't use nuclear despite so much CO2 reduction, it might ruin an infinitesimal part of the earth. But radiation is scary.
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Oct 26, 2020 13:59
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