nuclear power

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > nuclear power

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

I agree we should spend a lot of money on fusion research.

Because even if we don't crack that nut there's a lot of super useful ancillary stuff to come out of understanding high-energy plasma physics.

And if we do crack that nut we get a cheap power source that runs on water.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2017 07:36

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 09:28

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

rudatron posted:

There's also a certain level of return on investment you can't really go below, because there's an implicit cost associated with the level of specialization and industrial capacity necessary to even make sonething like a pv cell in the first place.

Another point: Silicon is actual pretty extensive to make energy wise, because you need it to be a pure crystal, which means you have to melt it. But the energy you get from the cell from solar radiation isn't that much, so it had to sit there in the sun for like a couple of years, before you actually start paying that back.

That delay in surplus means that economic growth under a pure solar economy has a hard limit imposed on it, by the fundamental energy accounting process. Any expansion of the energy supply is going to take decades to actually afford, ergo economic activity & growth will be bottle necked by the supply of energy.

Yeah, solar panels as a technology break even on energy sometime this year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13728

Breakeven on greenhouse gasses is sometime next year

# ¿ Apr 25, 2017 07:42

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

rudatron posted:

Kaczynski was a reactionary nutter who killed people because he failed at life.

He was a subject of a psych "experiment" at Harvard trying to experimentally determine the long-term effects of being a horrible rear end in a top hat to someone for years (which may have been CIA-backed interrogation research).

Turns out that's not a great idea

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase3.htm

# ¿ Apr 28, 2017 01:30

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

Concordat posted:

hydro has it's own problems, sedimentation, local environmental destruction when creating reservoirs, and most notably, the one you mentioned.

Also occasionally killing a couple hundred thousand people

# ¿ Apr 29, 2017 04:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > nuclear power