The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges

Piell: Sep 3, 2006; Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer; Young Orc

QuarkJets posted:

Eh, not really. Dirty bombs have never really been a thing except in sensationalist news pieces and politics. If you're a terrorist, then you want a bigass explosion that causes a lot of death and destruction. A dirty bomb doesn't accomplish this any better than a normal bomb, and meanwhile you're going to have to handle a bunch of radioactive material while you build it, putting yourself at far greater risk. The radiological material from a dirty bomb might cause a slightly higher incidence of cancer in the local area of the explosion, but that's not going to appear on a headline for probably many many years. This means that you'd have to go through a lot more risk and effort to build a dirty bomb for basically no added benefit.

And the larger the blast, the less effective it is as a dirty bomb; a larger blast spreads the radiological material over a greater area and actually makes it less effective because the dosage/area is now smaller.

tl;dr The concept of a dirty bomb is scarier to most Americans than the actual results of a dirty bomb explosion, dirty bombs aren't a an actual thing, no more so than a conventional bomb

The entire point of the dirty bomb is the concept. People freak the gently caress out over ATOMZ, and that's all a dirty bomb needs to do is cause the panic.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2012 10:28

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:56

Piell: Sep 3, 2006; Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer; Young Orc

Hobo Erotica posted:

Hydro works well as a back up for these reasons I think. Turn it on, turn it off, in a matter of minutes. And as has been mentioned in the thread, water can be pumped up hill during times of surplus generation to be used when it's needed.

Also can I use the 100th post to ask if a Mod can fix the thread title so it's Megathread.. sorry.

Hydro is incredibly limited in where it can be used, and all the good spots have already been used.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 03:32

Piell: Sep 3, 2006; Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer; Young Orc

Fine-able Offense posted:

Car insurance is not the same as calculating the risk of something like a pipeline rupture or nuclear powerplant meltdown, just FYI.

Like, nobody is using such a simple formula when the downside risk is effectively measured by ∞ instead of a dollar figure.

Nuclear powerplant meltdowns do not have an infinite cost - even Chernobyl (and another Chernobyl is literally 100% impossible) has estimated cleanup costs of 250 billion.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2013 07:07

Piell: Sep 3, 2006; Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer; Young Orc

Radbot posted:

That's a good point. I was pro-renewable, ambivalent about nuclear (primarily because it still puts Americans in hock to countries with uranium ore) but then I saw the data about how expensive and difficult it would be to build near-zero carbon energy infrastructure without nuclear.

Yes, how terrible it would be to have to get uranium from such shady countries as Canada or Australia

# ¿ Aug 4, 2014 17:41

Piell: Sep 3, 2006; Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer; Young Orc

fishmech posted:

Negative energy savings. Flight is very expensive in terms of energy expended, because of the need to maintain lift - and you'd need multiple drone trips to carry a large amount of product.

The current most efficient use of energy, and it seems it will stay that way for some time to come, is the delivery services which gather up a whole truck's capacity of food and merchandise and then drive around between customers to make deliveries. You get about the maximum usefulness out of the fuel expended, and it's a lot less total fuel/emissions than if all or even most of the customers had driven to the store, while still allowing bulk purchasing that is not practical to carry when you walk/bike/take public transit to the store.

Drone delivery of very small orders might be competitive in energy usage with driving all the way out to the store just to get one small item, however the delivery costs are likely to make those sorts of orders impractical and rare. And the guy with a truck who delivers your one small item on the way to other people still uses less fuel/energy to do so.

What if we fired groceries out of a big cannon into individual nets everyone has on their roofs?

Edit: ^^^ You son of a bitch

# ¿ Mar 7, 2017 18:54

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