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lapse posted:I have trouble thinking of any other super common appliance or device that was that inefficient. Cars are another standout. Although they have improved mightily in the performance and safety departments, all that came at the cost of fuel efficiency. Flaky fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Sep 16, 2012 |
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Sep 16, 2012 08:54
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Has any research been done on marrying nuclear fuel with a fuel cell type set-up instead of using steam pressure to push a big ol' turbine? Or are the energy savings of fuel cells inherent to eliminating the 'combustion' step of the cycle and thus not useful when using nuclear fuel?
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Sep 19, 2012 14:25
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http://www.themonthly.com.au/clean-energy-future-gilding-parkinson-sandiford-6907 Haven't looked all the way through but seems interesting.
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Nov 15, 2012 15:33
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Flaky posted:http://www.themonthly.com.au/clean-energy-future-gilding-parkinson-sandiford-6907 I'm just going to go back and quote this again, because it makes some interesting claims. Things like the price of solar PV has decreased 75% in 2010-11 and will drop a further 30% in 2011-2012. Things like renewables generated 26% percent of power in Germany in the first 9 months of 2012, and cut a huge hole out of the profits of the traditional energy generation sectors. Stuff like the QLD state owned generator in Australia closed half of it's capacity this year because it simply wasn't needed, indeed the excess power in the grid meant it could have been removed altogether. Things like new solar PV under development at Melbourne Uni could provide 25GWH capacity in 10 years for only $25 million (that's the entire current demand of Australia). Australia has the lowest wholesale electricity price it has ever had, but the retail price is the highest ever. A sizeable chunk of this has been possible due to efficiencies implemented to reduce demand. Essentially most of the current historically high costs in power is due to new investment in unnecessary infrastructure replacement, poor regulatory practices by government and corporate greed. Until someone addresses these issues in some detail I see no reason to dismiss these claims out of hand and therefore for continued debate about nuclear generation in this thread. Flaky fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Nov 20, 2012 |
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Nov 20, 2012 04:15
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Pander posted:What does that last sentence mean? It means I haven't seen anything like these claims from the nuclear proponents, so maybe they should take some time to investigate the claims of their competitors.
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Nov 20, 2012 04:26
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Pander posted:Also I'm not arguing that nuke plants should be built in Australia, so I don't get the insane focus on that one locale. It's not insane to use Australia as an example more so than it is to use Germany. The impression I get is that generalisations about the weather in one part of the world versus the other are essentially meaningless.
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Nov 20, 2012 04:37
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Pander posted:I still don't get your point Flaky. Could you make it in a bullet-point format and describe the points as pro or anti something or other? Seriously. I'll quote directly from the video. 20.00 - 20:35 "The Melbourne University group making this stuff [holding up product] wants to be able to invest in a $25 million printing plant. With that, their ambition is to print 25GW of capacity over 10 years. 25GW is the demand in Australia. For $25 million." This is the guy: http://www.findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/display/person16035 I can't really pretend to know how to articulate the claims made in the video other than to encourage you to watch it, because they are very broad as befits the interview format in which they are presented. Flaky fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Nov 20, 2012 |
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Nov 20, 2012 04:51
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Install Gentoo posted:25 gigawatt is the demand in Australia for what? When? Please clarify. The professor doesn't specify. It looks like he was referring to Australia's solar power target by 2020.
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Nov 20, 2012 05:07
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ohgodwhat posted:You haven't seen nuclear proponents claim they can generate all of Australia's electricity for $25 million. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? The claim made in the video was that solar PV could generate 100% of Australia's 2020 renewable electricity target of 20% for $25 million within 10 years. That would mean for $125 million you could provide all of Australia's electricity with that technology. So it is only a marginal difference in price, and still way more cost efficient than nuclear.
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Nov 20, 2012 11:06
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Office Thug posted:All power plants are affected by a capacity factor which is largely set in stone for renewables due to environmental conditions such as night time or lack of wind. Renewables also have to contend with immense problems when it comes to load-following. This is just flat out wrong. Solar power directly cuts into the peak energy use period (the middle of the day) and displaces carbon emitting fuel sources 1:1. You will always use all of the renewable energy available to you, because it costs nothing. Then you will meet demand with fossil fuels until the point at which storage and network limitations of renewables are overcome. You never ever turn off a solar PV unit. If you had looked at the chart from the german energy regulator I linked to in the video you would see this happening in the real world right now. Aureon posted:And it's a claim so laughable we'll just ignore it, unless incredibly convincing evidence is made known. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree that it was extraordinary. I had never heard a claim (and it wasn't the only amazing one) like it which is why I linked the video. I was interested to see whether there would be any serious commentary on it by the posters in this thread. Clearly my expectations were too high. Let me reiterate. Three senior scientists are agreeing that the energy market in Australia is in the early stages of a transformation similar in magnitude to the industrial revolution. The only repeat only economic form of energy generation that they envisage in the immediate future is renewable. If you fundamentally disagree with this statement, then you should watch the video. Flaky fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Nov 21, 2012 |
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Nov 21, 2012 04:28
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GulMadred posted:Your video involves a team of scientific and policy experts talking to a funding group. Of course they're going to present an optimistic view of their technology and make extraordinary claims: they want the dudes in the audience to sign cheques when the presentation is over! You'll notice that one lady in the audience, upon seeing the professor hold up a sheet of printed PV film, during a presentation about renewable energy, has to be told what the abbreviation "PV" means. This isn't necessarily the most sophisticated, bullshit-averse audience; you shouldn't take the claims at face value. I realise all of this. Yes it would cost more to produce. Of course it will take time to produce. I wouldn't take his word on this alone, he works for the research group developing that particular product. I never actually said that that product was 100% stone-cold unavoidable reality. It just illustrates the potential of the new renewable technologies. I mean he mentioned covering windows with it (as it is translucent), as well as incorporating it into corrigated iron. I assume the same could be done for vehicles, so they recharge a fuel cell while they are sitting in parking lots. I just think that the range of possibilities for such a material could hardly be exaggerated. Who knows what the result of having every human manufactured sun-facing surface covered in this stuff could be. Thanks for taking the time to confirm my own suspicions about the video though. Don't worry I am not holding my breath for anything like the scenario presented. What about the rest of the claims? Do they paint the same picture to you as they do to me? Sorry, I promise to stop harping on about this now. Flaky fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Nov 21, 2012 |
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Nov 21, 2012 11:25
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Thanks for that post GulMadred.
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Jan 24, 2013 18:09
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TyroneGoldstein posted:I love how the toxic green sludge is coming out of the top of the cooling tower. She should have put the nuclear symbol wearing a witch's hat while stirring it like a cauldron for extra effect. Yeah it's so hilariously overstated. Don't they know benzene is colourless?
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Apr 2, 2013 13:36
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John McCain posted:That and the fact that there's absolutely no reason why benzene would be anywhere near a pure nuclear power plant (it will show up in real life since if you're dealing in hydrocarbons you can't escape it, and any power plant will have hydrocarbon-fueled backup generators), while it's a universal gasoline additive (and occurs naturally in most fossil fuels)! I was making a joke about CSG.
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Apr 2, 2013 13:51
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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?
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Sep 28, 2013 11:26
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Install Windows posted:The land footprint for agriculture is already taken, and we're already producing more than enough food for the world with it. Current population modelling predicts a continuance of the trend of ever-declining birth rates leading to ever-slowing growth of world population: so we're not due to have to deal with 20 billion people by 2100 ever more, instead it's looking more like 8 to 10 billion. What are the assumptions underlying this estimate? I would imagine that if conditions are favourable, then the population will increase. Is there some point at which everyone will just decide 'actually, 2 babies is more than enough'. Paper Mac posted:To be specific, my argument is that the space savings vertical farming affords do not address the primary sustainability problems with extant agricultural systems, which are not really related to footprint. The productivity of industrial farming on a per-area basis is nothing special and there's no reason to suspect that it can't improve by increasing eg labour intensity. Which is why converting conventional farmland over to more productive modes of farming (such as no-till farming and pasture-cropping) are things now. The problem is not so much finding more phosphate, it is reactivation of the loads of unavailable or locked-out phosphate that has already been dumped on agricultural land over the last 100 years. As far as vertical farming, that is a principle of some permaculture style farming techniques, but those aren't hydroponic, greenhouse based, urban or intensive in any way. They simply use several productive species colocated to maximise the beneficial relationships between the plants. Think like an orchard with root vegetables, ground layer, herb layer, shrub layer, tree layer and a few large forage trees to cycle nitrogen (e.g. leguminous trees or tree lucern). Good doco on the subject:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVBYgg013KM Flaky fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Oct 5, 2013 |
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Oct 5, 2013 09:40
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wiki posted:The main finding of the study was that, in highly developed countries with HDI above 0.9, further development halts the declining fertility rates. This means that the previously negative development-fertility association is reversed; the graph becomes J-shaped. Myrskylä et al. contend that there has occurred “a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century”.[1] So basically once people are secure enough in their social development, turns out they actually quite like having babies?
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Oct 6, 2013 01:20
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Strudel Man posted:I don't really know why you responded with this. The rebound phenomenon is found in one study, disputed, and small in comparison to the overall pattern of decline, something that you could have easily seen for yourself. It's certainly of academic interest, but virtually irrelevant to the general observation that improving quality of life and women's education is the surest way of reducing birthrates. I just don't necessarily accept that birthrates are directly determined by availability of contraception and the education of women to the exclusion of other factors. Historically, women had loads of babies because they were required in order to compensate for infant mortality and that no formal structure existed to support people in old age other than the work done by their immediate family. Neither of those have anything to do with education, in fact, a well educated woman capable of accurately calculating the utility of having lots of babies might be expected to do just that. Let me give you another illustrative example. The single factor most commonly shared by Australian women seeking abortions is not educational qualification, socioeconomic status, race or availability of contraception. It is that they are victims of domestic violence. You can read about that here. Education does have a protective effect, but the reality is the women seeking abortions in the first world are already well aware of how to use contraception. Their abortions relate to sexual violence, not education or socioeconomic background. This goes back to Germaine Greers idea on her own abortion: "abortion is the last in a series of steps of disempowerment (for a woman) between the sexual act and the decision to abort." Without continuing the derail further, I would suggest that when women are well educated, financially secure and in stable relationships, the birth rate will increase to reflect that.
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Oct 11, 2013 06:17
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