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Bob Nudd posted:Why not? It seems people have a total phobia about spending money on generation plant that will be only used occasionally, but sinking money into storage for the exact same purpose is okay. In any study I've seen, the former option is economically preferable, even if that runs against intuition. Because supposedly this is supposed to replace Coal/et all for baseline power, which for obvious reasons needs to be consistently on.
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Sep 6, 2012 17:59
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Winks posted:I'm confused how solar energy being cleaner is non-obvious. What am I missing here? The cost of making/mining the materials to make the panels/storage system, I imagine (especially if either of those don't have a terribly long shelf life).
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Sep 10, 2012 03:21
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The Ender posted:Yeah, LEDs are the better option - I just talk about CFLs first because they are the most widely available alternative to incandescent bulbs for the moment. Are LEDs on any store shelves in America? In Canada they're strictly an 'order online' thing. According to Home Depot's website I can pick them up in store now (although they won't ship them, oddly enough).
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Sep 12, 2012 23:06
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Boiled Water posted:
nope: quote:"The issue is too important to let it go away," said Rep. Joe Barton of Texas. "It is the perfect symbol of government over regulation and that is why we will continue to look for avenues to bring this bill up and ultimately repeal the de facto ban on traditional light bulbs."
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Sep 12, 2012 23:20
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Rent-A-Cop posted:I hope everyone involved in the above ridiculous discussion realizes exactly how dumb the idea of telling people to spend $20 now so they can save $5 over the next 15 years is. Would you also like to share your opinions on home insulation and higher efficiency vehicles?
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Sep 13, 2012 19:10
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Rent-A-Cop posted:If you give me $100 now I will give you $101 (adjusted for inflation) on your 80th birthday. What a great deal for you! So I take it your answer to my previous question was "exactly like lightbulbs, chief"?
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Sep 13, 2012 19:21
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CombatInformatiker posted:Since there are a lot of nuclear fission proponents in this thread, could you give me some pointers/links to how the highly radioactive waste products can be safely stored/treated? Not trying to argue, just genuinely interested, and I didn't find the answers on Wikipedia (nor in this thread). This would be what you're looking for.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:25
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CombatInformatiker posted:Well, that's not an argument against production of hazardous waste, not one for nuclear energy. It's an argument against "we should support x because it's not hazardous unlike Nuclear".
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Apr 3, 2013 14:44
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Is there anything we could do to ensure that there's absolutely no way nuclear plants could ever run past decommissioning age? Yes, it's called "letting new nuclear plants be built". But you see, people are scared of atoms, so...
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Apr 3, 2013 22:48
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Quantum Mechanic posted:
The plant couldn't be shut down at the time because it provided a significant amount of power. It couldn't be replaced because that entails building a new plant, and the voting public the world around seems to be irrationally batshit crazy about anything to do with nuclear plants. So yes, that was literally the plan, because they literally could not do anything else. This is also, by the way, why no Nuclear plant has been built in the US post-Three Mile Island despite them supplying 20% of the power in the country.
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Apr 4, 2013 03:21
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Actually I distinctly remember the safety audits for Fukushima saying that it was in a tsunami/earthquake risk zone and that the possibility should have been accounted for. Regardless, the environmental impact if it had been solar plants would have been at worst a bunch of fertiliser dumped into the ocean instead of a 20km evacuation zone. A. The equivalent amount of solar panels would cover a 20km area B. The only reason it was a 20km area is that people are scared of atoms.
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Apr 4, 2013 03:43
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Sure, and that's an important caveat -- that's why co-operation will be more important than ever, with towns and entire countries being able to share energy surpluses and being connected. The problem with non-nuclear renewables is that they're either not able to provide power 24/7 (solar, wind, etc) or are already being used right now and can't be counted for additional energy (hydroelectric power, especially in the western US ). No amount of cooperation is going to fix that.
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May 26, 2013 20:03
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Anosmoman posted:Can you have a nuclear power program that enables you to build power plants but not nuclear weapons? Yes, just don't use Uranium. Or not; I guess U-233 is still a thing.
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Aug 6, 2013 21:14
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Kafka Esq. posted:This is just political right? What are the economics of their decision? They already HAVE these plants, why cap them? If the goal is cheap power and no carbon, then no reason whatsoever. At best, you could say that they're trying to transition to a fully wind/solar economy but that's still going to require nuclear in the near term and it will raise power costs.
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Sep 25, 2013 16:47
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Which means the Mojave could fit nearly 9,000 of them, 3 times the existing power generation in the US. There's space. I imagine both that water usage in desert environments is a contentious issue (even if you pump it in) and that the Mojave is not some magical wasteland where nothing lives and no ecosystems are disrupted by it.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:10
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KennyTheFish posted:I prefer to think of it as impressive that we can design a system of mirrors to heat a boiler to produce the same power as a Jumbo Jet. Enough power to make hundreds of tonnes of steel fly. It's 5.5 square miles of mirrors so it's not really that impressive.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:19
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Hobo Erotica posted:
quote:Again, how unique is this to solar thermal, as compared to coal or nuclear? They're all running on the same principle of making steam. You don't need to put a nuclear plant in the desert.
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Sep 27, 2013 13:54
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Flaky posted:I find the discussion of prices for coal and gas to be particularly unconvincing because they seem to be quite changeable. Surely demand for these raw materials is only going to continue to increase so the price will also increase? (at least until they are inevitably abandoned in favor of more sustainable alternatives) I mean there is only ever going to be so much gas that doesn't require drastic environmental damage to extract no? If CSG installations are already being fast-tracked before the science is in on the environmental impact isn't that a good indicator that the price of gas is already too high? Demand is going to increase, but also (at least for petroleum related stuff) all of the cheap stuff is more or less gone. For the new stuff like fracking it's simply not economical below a certain price per barrel. Fortunately, it appears that that price is just enough to get people to shift over to more renewable energy sources (and if demand falls, fracking becomes economically unviable, which means we need different tech! And so on).
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Sep 28, 2013 13:52
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Pander posted:How many plants can a few mines power, though? It's not like each nuclear plant has its own personal uranium mine, is it? A dozen or so mines could produce enough uranium to power the world's fleet, meanwhile it would take thousands of plants similar to Ivanpah to produce an equivalent amount of energy. That and the materials solar panels are made of presumably require some sort of mining as well.
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Sep 28, 2013 15:45
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Pander posted:I dunno. Even on a per-megawatt-produced basis I'd bet Ivanpah required a lot less construction material than a nuke plant. Nuke plants have a LOT of steel, iron, cement, etc. Uncountable stretches of piping, etc. I was thinking more rare earths.
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Sep 28, 2013 15:53
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Anosmoman posted:Well it's economically cheaper to burn oil than pretty much any other energy production method - it's just that the true cost is carried by the climate and ecosystems much like conventional farming. It's difficult to compete with conveniently packaged energy from fossil fuels or just cutting down a forrest, throwing some seeds on the ground and pumping some water onto it - that doesn't mean it's a good idea. As mentioned by the post you quoted, it's not economically cheaper but arguably environmentally cheaper via nutrients. And anyway, there's not one type of "natural", letting the wild reclaim farmland will likely result in just new growth from poo poo we've spread across the world (I know in Texas any growth you see is not "natural" compared to 200 years ago).
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Oct 4, 2013 13:48
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never mind
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Oct 4, 2013 20:19
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Fusion is not Nuclear power because?
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Oct 8, 2013 14:55
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muike posted:It says "current" nuclear power. Yeah, but it sounds like it's going to have the same drawbacks of adoption (NIMBY) but with higher initial costs and no proven track record of success. E: I'm more discussing "Fusion is totally the way of the future and people will recognize that" than the actual benefits of the technology. computer parts fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Oct 8, 2013 |
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Oct 8, 2013 15:01
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Quantum Mechanic posted:gently caress off. The Greens membership has a higher percentage of doctors, scientists and other researchers as than any other party in Australia. Just because one is a scientist doesn't mean that they don't also believe in crazy poo poo (that happens to fall outside of their field of research). For example, Einstein for a long time was opposed to the theory of plate tectonics.
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Dec 11, 2013 15:41
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hobbesmaster posted:While the theory was proposed in 1912ish according to wikipedia the mechanism by which continental drift occurs wasn't discovered until the late 40s and confirmed in the early 60s. Einstein died in 1955 so it seems perfectly reasonable for him to be "opposed" to plate tectonics. Yes, but the particular theory he attached himself to was never accepted as a possible alternative in the scientific community.
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Dec 11, 2013 16:00
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Baronjutter posted:I know germans are pants-making GBS threads stupid about nuclear power but they don't actually think the plant caused the tsunami do they? They hear "a tsunami hit and the plant exploded and after that there were 20,000 people dead".
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Jan 6, 2014 18:39
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CommieGIR posted:We really need a science ethics committee to downplay this crap. Environmentalism was never a strictly scientific pursuit and it likely never will be.
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Jan 7, 2014 03:36
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In Texas most of the renewable money is going into wind, for a variety of reasons (although mostly because a local billionaire is invested in it) and indeed I can get 100% of my power from wind right now (although it costs like twice as much).
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Jan 10, 2014 20:30
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blowfish posted:While the Indian fast breeder reactor currently under construction is technically a prototype, it's commercial scale (500MWe). It's actually supposed to sell commercial energy a year after it starts up too.
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Jan 15, 2014 02:24
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ohgodwhat posted:Even in Arizona? Sure, a good chunk of people turn up the temperature when they're gone during the day, but nobody wants to come back to a 110 F house when they get back from work during the summer. Average lows in Phoenix during the summer hover in the mid 80s so I'm guessing it's more that they still use a lot of AC at night along with whatever else.
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Jan 16, 2014 19:29
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Unfortunately we're probably not getting away from car noise anytime soon.
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May 20, 2014 16:52
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Anosmoman posted:- How are you going to thaw snow on the road with solar power... when it's snowing? Plus if you only melt some of it the water can refreeze and now you have icy roads.
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Jun 16, 2014 23:23
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Blue Star posted:Am I to understand that nuclear energy is enough to power the world? I mean, if we build enough plants, obviously. Do we have enough nuclear fuel? And how long will it last? There's enough fuel if you pay a certain amount for nuclear fuel (like how fracking is only possible if oil is at a certain price)for the foreseeable future (ie, current demand for several decades/centuries). The good thing is that the cost of fuel is a relatively small portion of a nuclear plant's overall cost, as opposed to coal where it makes up most of the cost of the plant. That's the idea for nuclear + solar (and wind, hydro, etc). The other fuel sources can be extremely variable (might be cloudy, might not be windy), so you want a baseline power source that's more or less constant, and then you can supplement it however you wish.
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Jun 17, 2014 05:02
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blowfish posted:Not sure for Thorium yet because if I recall correctly that got axed by Nixon and people have only recently restarted working on it in earnest. India's targetting a 2016 date for their reactor to come online.
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Jun 17, 2014 14:55
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The Insect Court posted:Sure, nuclear power has and will continue to have a place in zero carbon energy generation, but the techo-panglossian hippie-punching fanboy-cultists who seem to pop up around the issue aren't realy helping things. Given how the alternatives are discussed this is pretty  .
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Jun 17, 2014 22:37
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Tasmantor posted:The nuclear fan club in here really seam to kill conversation. Much in the same way as the consensus to "should you raise minimum wage" kills conversation.
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Jun 18, 2014 01:20
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The Insect Court posted:Why won't you crybaby hippie ecologist n00bs admit that Nuclear Is The Light. Hey look, it's a site that believes that GMOs are Frankenfoods.
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Jun 18, 2014 23:12
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enbot posted:Yet. Many designs are in the works that would do exactly what you are talking about- bury and forget. But I'll never understand why these threads end up being comparisons of wind/solar and baseline power. They are simply different things. If you were to make a pie chart of energy production, you wouldn't even be able to see the slices for alternative green technologies. Pretty much:  Note that even if we still ran everything on coal and switched all of our cars to electric it would still probably result in a net decrease in carbon emissions.
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Jun 19, 2014 13:47
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Tokamak posted:Hmm... Or coal, when they realize they can't generate enough power on renewables alone (as in Germany).
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Jun 20, 2014 05:19
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