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On October 14 2021 00:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 00:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ ) There are no other options. You have 3 options for the next 10 years: Coal Gas Nuclear Nothing else actually exists. Everything else goes way beyond fantasy. It simply isn't possible, solar included. I say this as someone who worked in solar research for years.
Yeah, no point in discussing with you, sorry.
Let me just say that the way you view things is not very open-minded or scientific.
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On October 14 2021 01:27 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 01:04 Liquid`Drone wrote:I read three and linked two articles (I actually read them in their entirety, one from forbes, one from 'universe today'). They don't describe it as 'within the realm of possibility if we start working on it', more like Considering that the United States alone is storing about 60,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, it would take approximately 8,600 Soyuz rockets to remove this waste from the Earth. Even if we could reduce the launch failure rate to an unprecedented 0.1% (from the 2-3% it is today), it would cost approximately a trillion dollars and, with an estimated 9 launch failures to look forward to, would lead to over 60,000 pounds of hazardous waste being randomly redistributed across the Earth.
Unless we're willing to pay an unprecedented cost and accept the near-certainty of catastrophic environmental pollution, we have to leave the idea of shooting our garbage into the Sun to the realm of science fiction and future hopeful technologies like space elevators. It's undeniable that we've made quite the mess on planet Earth. Now, it's up to us to figure out our own way out of it.' or the costs - $1.2 trillion to launch the high-level waste into the Sun on a trajectory that takes a long long time.
The bottom line is that blasting our nuclear waste off into space, into the Sun, is just too expensive – by several orders of magnitude. I mean, I already stated that I'm not an expert at all on this. Which is why I went to helpful friend google for advice. I've never googled this in the past, so I'm guessing I haven't really influenced the results from prior searches, but nothing I could see from the first page of hits seemed to indicate that this was in the realm of possibility - it was all a bunch of different 'this is why we don't do it' - results. I'm not really invested in these findings though - as I have no personal expertise, I'm just going based on what I read, from sources that seem reasonably reputable, with math to back up their claims. If you want to convince me, or anyone else I guess, then it'd probably be good for you to back it up by something other than you stating 'we have the capability to do this'. How about you give a source that is more reliable than forbes or universetoday stating that 'yeah, we can totally launch our nuclear waste into the sun'? For the grander question of 'what do we do about climate change' + Show Spoiler +
my opinion is something like 'immediate, drastic cuts to consumption, everyone stops travelling by plane unless they have to, turn beef into a luxury product that is eaten for special occasions, lots of investing in trains, stop using coal immediately, accept some continued gas and oil during the transition (but absolutely don't go looking for more oil fields), continued massive investments into solar and ocean wind power and I'm guessing other sources, and sure, nuclear as well'.
I accept that this would entail a significant drop in living standards, also for myself (and while I love meat and travelling, I haven't flown since 2018, and that's because of climate, not covid, I don't have a driver's license, and I guess my meat consumption has dropped by 80% the past 5 years) but I consider climate change a possibly existential crisis, so even if my cure sucks ass, it's imo still preferable.
I appreciate you writing this out. I will try to explain the process of power generation and whatnot without typing 4 billion pages. When you try to get funding for something, you are basically always competing with coal and gas. Since you get money from either companies (looking for 10 year ROI) or government (extremely cheap, unreliable, small dollars most times) you need to be economical. As an example, look how little money cold fusion research gets. Funding for big, glorious solutions gets poor funding as along as cheaper things exists. When it comes to nuclear waste, we are always competing with just putting it in the ground. In reality, we have an insane amount of room to continue storing nuclear waste. We could run the world on nuclear and not run out of space to safely store nuclear waste for like 100 years if we tackled the issue as a planet. But it feels shitty to be working against a clock, so people get weird about nuclear waste. So when people are like "Hey I need some funding to figure out shooting waste into space", the people you're asking money from point to the cost of not shooting it into space and say "Why bother". Next topic: functionalized technologies. We don't have existing products intended purely for shooting something into orbit, then attaching it to something else to shoot towards the sun. If we look at the current technologies we have, none of them are for this purpose. Imagine if we didn't have oil tankers. How many boats would it take to transport oil, if we just used normal passenger boats? What if we just put barrels on a boat, rather than making a boat which itself is a barrel? How expensive would it be to use boats instead of aircraft carriers, to transport aircraft? When you are trying to develop a new technology, you are generally able to pull pieces from a bunch of existing things, then make a few new things, to create your new idea. In the case of transporting waste into space, it is technically feasible in every way, we just don't have a specialized, well thought out way to do it. Making a spitball determination as to whether something is feasible is not done by looking at what we currently do. It is done by looking at the tools we have and what tools we don't have. Dealing with nuclear waste by sending it into space is not something that we could bust out with a quick department of energy grant. It would be a global effort to establish the infrastructure and technology to do it. But it is entirely feasible and we likely don't have other options from what I understand. To clarify why we don't have any other options, I will state my underlying assumption: We will not sufficiently meet our power needs for the next 25 years without the use of coal, gas or nuclear energy. If it turns out this underlying assumption is wrong, everything changes. But I want to be clear this is the assumption I am using. From my experience working in solar power research, and being involved with what kinds of metrics we need to meet, after how long, everyone always ends up concluding "renewables can reduce our reliance on goal/gas/nuclear, but we still need a lot of the big 3 for the next 25 years". I can understand how if you are assuming we can just coat on renewables in 25 years, none of what I am saying about nuclear makes sense. I would vote for moving to the system you described, no air travel and stuff like that. I think it won't happen. It is the same as GH hand waving "go do revolution". It is a fun thought experiment, but if we are trying to say "What can we ACTUALLY do, and what do we ACTUALLY see happening in the next 25 years", your situation does not feel worth talking about. But I wish it were. Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 01:09 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:
Getting things into space is one of the most expensive, involved and polluting activities humans have ever done.
I'm generally quite pro-nuclear because honestly having a few kilotons of radioactive waste to deal with is nothing compared to the effect of us continuing to burn coal. But not because I think we can launch the waste into the fucking sun. Lol.
IMO we don't actually need to worry about the feasibility of launching stuff into space right now because we can store nuclear fuel for a very long time before we run out of space. Even in 50 years the science/logistics/cost of launching stuff into space will be incomparably better than today. I am pointing out with nuclear, we can launch it into space. With gas/coal, we can not launch the externalities into space. It is unresolvable. Nuclear, we have options, even if difficult. We don't have any such luxuries with coal and gas.
I think we've had this discussion before, so I'll drag out the same point as last time. Building new nuclear plants is not necessarily the best investment in terms of Energy produced per $ invested. For instance, Hinkley Point C in the UK ( Linky) has gone severely over budget and is still not finished. It is going to cost about ten times more in terms of dollars per produced Watt than what you would get if you just invested that money directly in renewables without any of the benefits. To re-iterate the point, if the UK had decided instead to invest that cash into a bunch of windmills and solar plants, it would already be generating 10x more energy than you'll ever get from Hinkley Point C.
Mohdoo, if you want to state that the future is 'nuclear, coal and gas', I'd like to see a good ref for that because the authoritative scientific literature I'm familiar with is not tilting in that direction at all.
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On October 14 2021 02:35 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 01:54 Mohdoo wrote:On October 14 2021 01:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
fwiw I'm not "hand waving go do revolution" I'm just pointing out that the technical discussion is pettifogging the actual issues of the social, political, and economic (structural, not resources) barriers (and their disheartening impacts) I was discussing with ChristianS.
I think the whole discussion on nuclear is almost entirely irrelevant to the barriers preventing substantial progress on climate change from the US and to the thread generally. In your eyes, what do we do to convince US voters climate change is worth addressing to the extent that we need to? What mechanism do you see to convince people their lives should radically change today so as to prevent their lives from changing even more in 50 years? As you know, I advocate for authoritarianism to get that done, but I think you tend to be a libertarian left kinda guy, so I am curious what you see as a rough outline for changing people's minds. I think we're better served with a question like: "How do we get the people that recognize climate change (or the plethora of other pressing issues) needs to be addressed to organize and mobilize in effective ways" which is what ChristianS and I were talking about with mutual aid, building dual power, and extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change. I've mentioned Freire a lot because I think Pedagogy of the Oppressed in particular provides some great insight into the fundamental aspects of going into communities and building the mutually beneficial understandings and frameworks that push us toward those goals in meaningful ways.
If we need a proposal, here’s something. I thought of this in two seconds so there’s certainly all manner of implementation details involved that might make it infeasible, but it’s at least a framework besides “elect Democrats and then yell at Democrats to suck less.” I have some reservations about it myself but I’ll let other posters point out why it wouldn’t work (or, even better, suggest improvements!).
A scheduled general strike. The demands of the strike are that all companies involved in energy production set up a general relief fund responsible for compensating refugees affected by climate disasters. If your town burns down, or gets leveled by a hurricane, or gets deleted by rising water levels, the energy industry is going to pay to resettle you. FEMA and private charity are currently woefully inadequate to accomplish this task, and even if they weren’t, why are government and private charity money being used to offset the externalities oil companies cause? Oil companies have known for decades that climate change was coming, yet they publicly promote denialism because they want to be able to reap the profits and let other people suffer the costs.
Maybe this results in a bill getting passed to meet the demands. If so, great! Or maybe some executive order or other semi-legitimate government process accomplishes it. Good enough! But the energy companies themselves might want to make a deal; a general strike hurts them, too, and they’re always worried government regulation is going to fuck them in inefficient and counterproductive ways that help nobody. Better to cut a deal themselves and not let some Senator sneak in some clause about having to give every Iowa farmer $10,000 or some shit.
Happy to discuss this proposal specifically but first it might be more productive to start with discussing the concept of a general strike -what is it? When should it be used? How can it even be accomplished? I don’t have great answers to any of those questions but I’d love to know others’ opinions.
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On October 14 2021 02:45 justanothertownie wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 00:31 Mohdoo wrote:On October 14 2021 00:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ ) There are no other options. You have 3 options for the next 10 years: Coal Gas Nuclear Nothing else actually exists. Everything else goes way beyond fantasy. It simply isn't possible, solar included. I say this as someone who worked in solar research for years. Yeah, no point in discussing with you, sorry. Let me just say that the way you view things is not very open-minded or scientific.
Sounds like you have no experience here. Care to elaborate on your background in electronic materials or sustainable energy? I've worked on solar research and done a lot of analysis regarding energy needs and what targets are necessary to actually do something. What have you done?
One thing to make clear: the goal is ZERO coal and natural gas use. Not just lessening it. We can pay ourselves on the back for generating s watt of energy using bacteria and various other things, but we’re talking national scale here. When Germany started their demented process of scaling back nuclear, there’s a reason they are bending the knee to Putin for natural gas.
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On October 14 2021 02:46 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 01:27 Mohdoo wrote:On October 14 2021 01:04 Liquid`Drone wrote:I read three and linked two articles (I actually read them in their entirety, one from forbes, one from 'universe today'). They don't describe it as 'within the realm of possibility if we start working on it', more like Considering that the United States alone is storing about 60,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, it would take approximately 8,600 Soyuz rockets to remove this waste from the Earth. Even if we could reduce the launch failure rate to an unprecedented 0.1% (from the 2-3% it is today), it would cost approximately a trillion dollars and, with an estimated 9 launch failures to look forward to, would lead to over 60,000 pounds of hazardous waste being randomly redistributed across the Earth.
Unless we're willing to pay an unprecedented cost and accept the near-certainty of catastrophic environmental pollution, we have to leave the idea of shooting our garbage into the Sun to the realm of science fiction and future hopeful technologies like space elevators. It's undeniable that we've made quite the mess on planet Earth. Now, it's up to us to figure out our own way out of it.' or the costs - $1.2 trillion to launch the high-level waste into the Sun on a trajectory that takes a long long time.
The bottom line is that blasting our nuclear waste off into space, into the Sun, is just too expensive – by several orders of magnitude. I mean, I already stated that I'm not an expert at all on this. Which is why I went to helpful friend google for advice. I've never googled this in the past, so I'm guessing I haven't really influenced the results from prior searches, but nothing I could see from the first page of hits seemed to indicate that this was in the realm of possibility - it was all a bunch of different 'this is why we don't do it' - results. I'm not really invested in these findings though - as I have no personal expertise, I'm just going based on what I read, from sources that seem reasonably reputable, with math to back up their claims. If you want to convince me, or anyone else I guess, then it'd probably be good for you to back it up by something other than you stating 'we have the capability to do this'. How about you give a source that is more reliable than forbes or universetoday stating that 'yeah, we can totally launch our nuclear waste into the sun'? For the grander question of 'what do we do about climate change' + Show Spoiler +
my opinion is something like 'immediate, drastic cuts to consumption, everyone stops travelling by plane unless they have to, turn beef into a luxury product that is eaten for special occasions, lots of investing in trains, stop using coal immediately, accept some continued gas and oil during the transition (but absolutely don't go looking for more oil fields), continued massive investments into solar and ocean wind power and I'm guessing other sources, and sure, nuclear as well'.
I accept that this would entail a significant drop in living standards, also for myself (and while I love meat and travelling, I haven't flown since 2018, and that's because of climate, not covid, I don't have a driver's license, and I guess my meat consumption has dropped by 80% the past 5 years) but I consider climate change a possibly existential crisis, so even if my cure sucks ass, it's imo still preferable.
I appreciate you writing this out. I will try to explain the process of power generation and whatnot without typing 4 billion pages. When you try to get funding for something, you are basically always competing with coal and gas. Since you get money from either companies (looking for 10 year ROI) or government (extremely cheap, unreliable, small dollars most times) you need to be economical. As an example, look how little money cold fusion research gets. Funding for big, glorious solutions gets poor funding as along as cheaper things exists. When it comes to nuclear waste, we are always competing with just putting it in the ground. In reality, we have an insane amount of room to continue storing nuclear waste. We could run the world on nuclear and not run out of space to safely store nuclear waste for like 100 years if we tackled the issue as a planet. But it feels shitty to be working against a clock, so people get weird about nuclear waste. So when people are like "Hey I need some funding to figure out shooting waste into space", the people you're asking money from point to the cost of not shooting it into space and say "Why bother". Next topic: functionalized technologies. We don't have existing products intended purely for shooting something into orbit, then attaching it to something else to shoot towards the sun. If we look at the current technologies we have, none of them are for this purpose. Imagine if we didn't have oil tankers. How many boats would it take to transport oil, if we just used normal passenger boats? What if we just put barrels on a boat, rather than making a boat which itself is a barrel? How expensive would it be to use boats instead of aircraft carriers, to transport aircraft? When you are trying to develop a new technology, you are generally able to pull pieces from a bunch of existing things, then make a few new things, to create your new idea. In the case of transporting waste into space, it is technically feasible in every way, we just don't have a specialized, well thought out way to do it. Making a spitball determination as to whether something is feasible is not done by looking at what we currently do. It is done by looking at the tools we have and what tools we don't have. Dealing with nuclear waste by sending it into space is not something that we could bust out with a quick department of energy grant. It would be a global effort to establish the infrastructure and technology to do it. But it is entirely feasible and we likely don't have other options from what I understand. To clarify why we don't have any other options, I will state my underlying assumption: We will not sufficiently meet our power needs for the next 25 years without the use of coal, gas or nuclear energy. If it turns out this underlying assumption is wrong, everything changes. But I want to be clear this is the assumption I am using. From my experience working in solar power research, and being involved with what kinds of metrics we need to meet, after how long, everyone always ends up concluding "renewables can reduce our reliance on goal/gas/nuclear, but we still need a lot of the big 3 for the next 25 years". I can understand how if you are assuming we can just coat on renewables in 25 years, none of what I am saying about nuclear makes sense. I would vote for moving to the system you described, no air travel and stuff like that. I think it won't happen. It is the same as GH hand waving "go do revolution". It is a fun thought experiment, but if we are trying to say "What can we ACTUALLY do, and what do we ACTUALLY see happening in the next 25 years", your situation does not feel worth talking about. But I wish it were. On October 14 2021 01:09 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:
Getting things into space is one of the most expensive, involved and polluting activities humans have ever done.
I'm generally quite pro-nuclear because honestly having a few kilotons of radioactive waste to deal with is nothing compared to the effect of us continuing to burn coal. But not because I think we can launch the waste into the fucking sun. Lol.
IMO we don't actually need to worry about the feasibility of launching stuff into space right now because we can store nuclear fuel for a very long time before we run out of space. Even in 50 years the science/logistics/cost of launching stuff into space will be incomparably better than today. I am pointing out with nuclear, we can launch it into space. With gas/coal, we can not launch the externalities into space. It is unresolvable. Nuclear, we have options, even if difficult. We don't have any such luxuries with coal and gas. I think we've had this discussion before, so I'll drag out the same point as last time. Building new nuclear plants is not necessarily the best investment in terms of Energy produced per $ invested. For instance, Hinkley Point C in the UK ( Linky) has gone severely over budget and is still not finished. It is going to cost about ten times more in terms of dollars per produced Watt than what you would get if you just invested that money directly in renewables without any of the benefits. To re-iterate the point, if the UK had decided instead to invest that cash into a bunch of windmills and solar plants, it would already be generating 10x more energy than you'll ever get from Hinkley Point C. Mohdoo, if you want to state that the future is 'nuclear, coal and gas', I'd like to see a good ref for that because the authoritative scientific literature I'm familiar with is not tilting in that direction at all.
Past the next 10 years, we have lots of other options, but nothing soon. I am saying if we are faced with the question of "How do we bridge the gap between now and major energy breakthroughs?" the 3 options are gas, coal and nuclear. Nothing else will meet our needs in the next 10, probably 15 years. So people need to be aware that when they close nuclear power plants or advocate against new nuclear power plants, they will get 1 of the other 2 options. Its not like "Oh well if we aren't using nuclear, I guess lets just use algae and solar instead, since that is just as effective and easy to integrate into our grid"
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Northern Ireland23899 Posts
On October 14 2021 04:22 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 02:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 14 2021 01:54 Mohdoo wrote:On October 14 2021 01:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
fwiw I'm not "hand waving go do revolution" I'm just pointing out that the technical discussion is pettifogging the actual issues of the social, political, and economic (structural, not resources) barriers (and their disheartening impacts) I was discussing with ChristianS.
I think the whole discussion on nuclear is almost entirely irrelevant to the barriers preventing substantial progress on climate change from the US and to the thread generally. In your eyes, what do we do to convince US voters climate change is worth addressing to the extent that we need to? What mechanism do you see to convince people their lives should radically change today so as to prevent their lives from changing even more in 50 years? As you know, I advocate for authoritarianism to get that done, but I think you tend to be a libertarian left kinda guy, so I am curious what you see as a rough outline for changing people's minds. I think we're better served with a question like: "How do we get the people that recognize climate change (or the plethora of other pressing issues) needs to be addressed to organize and mobilize in effective ways" which is what ChristianS and I were talking about with mutual aid, building dual power, and extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change. I've mentioned Freire a lot because I think Pedagogy of the Oppressed in particular provides some great insight into the fundamental aspects of going into communities and building the mutually beneficial understandings and frameworks that push us toward those goals in meaningful ways. If we need a proposal, here’s something. I thought of this in two seconds so there’s certainly all manner of implementation details involved that might make it infeasible, but it’s at least a framework besides “elect Democrats and then yell at Democrats to suck less.” I have some reservations about it myself but I’ll let other posters point out why it wouldn’t work (or, even better, suggest improvements!). A scheduled general strike. The demands of the strike are that all companies involved in energy production set up a general relief fund responsible for compensating refugees affected by climate disasters. If your town burns down, or gets leveled by a hurricane, or gets deleted by rising water levels, the energy industry is going to pay to resettle you. FEMA and private charity are currently woefully inadequate to accomplish this task, and even if they weren’t, why are government and private charity money being used to offset the externalities oil companies cause? Oil companies have known for decades that climate change was coming, yet they publicly promote denialism because they want to be able to reap the profits and let other people suffer the costs. Maybe this results in a bill getting passed to meet the demands. If so, great! Or maybe some executive order or other semi-legitimate government process accomplishes it. Good enough! But the energy companies themselves might want to make a deal; a general strike hurts them, too, and they’re always worried government regulation is going to fuck them in inefficient and counterproductive ways that help nobody. Better to cut a deal themselves and not let some Senator sneak in some clause about having to give every Iowa farmer $10,000 or some shit. Happy to discuss this proposal specifically but first it might be more productive to start with discussing the concept of a general strike -what is it? When should it be used? How can it even be accomplished? I don’t have great answers to any of those questions but I’d love to know others’ opinions.
Good luck getting people to do that.
On the other hand I think it would absolutely be effective, but people are so disconnected from that kind of power being feasible that they discount it and thus it gets taken off the table.
In this respect GH and some of his personal ideas and especially frameworks around guys like Freire would actually be societally useful.
People aren’t going to risk losing their jobs without a wider societal reframing of what’s both desirable and practically feasible on a micro and macro level.
I think if you could mobilise mass strikes they would be THE most potent political weapon, but unless you do the underpinning priming they’ll lack the capacity to elicit much change.
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Mohdoo, multiple people have asked you for sources multiple times and you've done nothing but dodge and make assertions.
Referencing previous work and demonstrating that your statements are backed by evidence is the absolute core of science. You are not doing anything like this, despite being challenged by multiple people with backgrounds at least as qualified to comment.
We have multiple academics in this thread, even several people in the nuclear industry itself. This isn't some bar where you can just flash a degree and go "trust me, i do science".
I like you, but it's time to put up or shut up.
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Even with SpaceX's Starship fully operational, (100-150 metric ton payload,) you wouldn't want to launch nuclear waste out of earths orbit. I'm just an average joe, but nuclear to me has seen some progress with the microreactors, I'd go with nuclear power over bloated wind turbines any day of the week.
No energy is really renewable or green. To create one wind turbine you need hundreds of tons of raw material, (which requires fossil fuel vehicles to extract,) then ship to refine the materials, (fossil fuel trucks,) then refine them (fossil fuel) then ship to the final customer and build. Finally in operation you get the actual "renewable wind energy." Then after 20-30 years their life is up, and you throw the blades into a landfill and bring out the heavy equipment to go digging for more raw materials.
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On October 14 2021 10:22 Belisarius wrote:
Mohdoo, multiple people have asked you for sources multiple times and you've done nothing but dodge and make assertions.
Referencing previous work and demonstrating that your statements are backed by evidence is the absolute core of science. You are not doing anything like this, despite being challenged by multiple people with backgrounds at least as qualified to comment.
We have multiple academics in this thread, even several people in the nuclear industry itself. This isn't some bar where you can just flash a degree and go "trust me, i do science".
I like you, but it's time to put up or shut up.
What are you saying needs to be sourced? The idea that Germany and every other nation on the planet has not found a way to get around the top 3 energy sources? Working in energy research, everything I am seeing in this thread is by the book /r/science reader syndrome. It is good we aren't talking about the semiconductor industry right now, otherwise people would be saying graphene is the future. I see an overwhelming amount of people wondering why we don't just spend a few million dollars cultivating the various awful forms of biofuels.
Explain what you want sourced and I'll do my best, but I am not here to lecture people on manufacturing practices, the availability of rare earth metals, the relative cost analysis of different energy sources, or the challenges in scaling/output of the various forms of renewable energy. I have spent a good chunk of my life in this topic and its not like I am saying renewables suck. I am saying there is a reason every single country has reached the same conclusion. Germany would not empower Russia and rely on them if they didn't need to.
The only person I have seen who works in nuclear is micronesia and I think he works on a nuclear submarine or does nuke sub stuff. It is entirely possible he is aware of advances in reactors since the 60s. I can't think of anyone else who has posted here who has shown a hint of professional-level knowledge of renewable energy sources.
As I said above, /r/science has a pretty awful impact on people's perceptions on how viable certain energy sources are. People see something on Reddit about lithium ion batteries having a 600% advancement at -30 C and are like "wow i'm so excited for next year's iphone XD". It is truly revolting.
Costa Rica is an example of a country extremely well positioned to use a lot of renewable energy.
Most of Costa Rica's energy comes from renewable sources.
The majority of this energy, 67.5 percent, comes from hydropower. Additionally, wind power generates 17 percent, geothermal sources make up 13.5 percent and biomass and solar panels comprise 0.84 percent. The remaining 1.16 percent is from backup plants.
That hydropower is amazing. But Germany and France can't power their entire countries with hydropower. Maybe I am wrong, but my understanding is that pretty much all countries that can milk hydro power will do so. Here's another example of Sweden:
The reason for Sweden’s low emission rate is that about 75 per cent of electricity production in Sweden comes from hydroelectric (45%) and nuclear (30%) power. Sweden currently has three nuclear plants with six nuclear reactors in commercial operation.
More than 17 per cent of the electricity comes from wind power. Also, combined heat and power (CHP) plants account for around 8 per cent of the electricity output in Sweden, and these are mainly powered by biofuels.
https://sweden.se/climate/sustainability/energy-use-in-sweden
Note: "biofuels" in this context are ethanol, diesel and gas.
In comparison, France generates only ~13% of their electricity from hydropower. The simple fact of the matter is that hydro power isn't always possible everywhere. And there are ecological impacts of hydropower sometimes.
Wind is another great one but it isn't always plentiful. And for areas that use a ton of energy, it is simply not enough.
Another thing to consider is how much power is used per capita, shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption
France: 6,702 per capita
Costa Rica: 1,994
So Costa Rica looks like an amazing situation and yet they have 1/3 the requirements of France per capita. So some countries not only have better natural resources, but also easier requirements/targets to hit.
I support generalized power rationing even in the absence of shortages. We should strive to use less, but asking some countries to do that would mean going into poverty. Anyway, this post is really long at this point so I am just going to hit post. Let me know what else you want to know.
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On October 14 2021 11:38 Husyelt wrote:
Even with SpaceX's Starship fully operational, (100-150 metric ton payload,) you wouldn't want to launch nuclear waste out of earths orbit. I'm just an average joe, but nuclear to me has seen some progress with the microreactors, I'd go with nuclear power over bloated wind turbines any day of the week.
No energy is really renewable or green. To create one wind turbine you need hundreds of tons of raw material, (which requires fossil fuel vehicles to extract,) then ship to refine the materials, (fossil fuel trucks,) then refine them (fossil fuel) then ship to the final customer and build. Finally in operation you get the actual "renewable wind energy." Then after 20-30 years their life is up, and you throw the blades into a landfill and bring out the heavy equipment to go digging for more raw materials.
I'll restate what I said before: SpaceX's Starship is a TERRIBLE product for launching waste into space, because it isn't intended to do so. Imagine if we transported oil on boats by just filling boats with barrels, rather than filling oil tankers. Imagine if international package delivery services uses single person, small planes to transport packages. The products to launch waste into space don't exist. That is a cultural/political problem that I hope changes.
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On October 14 2021 12:30 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 11:38 Husyelt wrote:
Even with SpaceX's Starship fully operational, (100-150 metric ton payload,) you wouldn't want to launch nuclear waste out of earths orbit. I'm just an average joe, but nuclear to me has seen some progress with the microreactors, I'd go with nuclear power over bloated wind turbines any day of the week.
No energy is really renewable or green. To create one wind turbine you need hundreds of tons of raw material, (which requires fossil fuel vehicles to extract,) then ship to refine the materials, (fossil fuel trucks,) then refine them (fossil fuel) then ship to the final customer and build. Finally in operation you get the actual "renewable wind energy." Then after 20-30 years their life is up, and you throw the blades into a landfill and bring out the heavy equipment to go digging for more raw materials. I'll restate what I said before: SpaceX's Starship is a TERRIBLE product for launching waste into space, because it isn't intended to do so. Imagine if we transported oil on boats by just filling boats with barrels, rather than filling oil tankers. Imagine if international package delivery services uses single person, small planes to transport packages. The products to launch waste into space don't exist. That is a cultural/political problem that I hope changes.
I agree with your general gist, I was just jumping on the space angle, since that's my newest hobby. SpaceX is fucking amazing.
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Back of the envelope: reaching escape velocity takes about 63 MJ per kg. A kg of gasoline has about 46 MJ of energy. If you could extract every bit of energy and convert it to kinetic energy with 100% efficiency (and if you know anything about physics you know it’s impossible to get anywhere close to that) it would take ~1.3 kg of gasoline worth of energy to launch 1 kg of trash, and that’s an absolute theoretical limit.
After energy efficiency and aero drag and everything I think rockets are generally ~1% efficient? I might be misremembering, some other space nerd can correct me. Anyway, launching trash into the sun is an absurdity and it doesn’t take much scientific training to understand why.
On October 14 2021 08:10 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 04:22 ChristianS wrote:On October 14 2021 02:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On October 14 2021 01:54 Mohdoo wrote:On October 14 2021 01:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
fwiw I'm not "hand waving go do revolution" I'm just pointing out that the technical discussion is pettifogging the actual issues of the social, political, and economic (structural, not resources) barriers (and their disheartening impacts) I was discussing with ChristianS.
I think the whole discussion on nuclear is almost entirely irrelevant to the barriers preventing substantial progress on climate change from the US and to the thread generally. In your eyes, what do we do to convince US voters climate change is worth addressing to the extent that we need to? What mechanism do you see to convince people their lives should radically change today so as to prevent their lives from changing even more in 50 years? As you know, I advocate for authoritarianism to get that done, but I think you tend to be a libertarian left kinda guy, so I am curious what you see as a rough outline for changing people's minds. I think we're better served with a question like: "How do we get the people that recognize climate change (or the plethora of other pressing issues) needs to be addressed to organize and mobilize in effective ways" which is what ChristianS and I were talking about with mutual aid, building dual power, and extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change. I've mentioned Freire a lot because I think Pedagogy of the Oppressed in particular provides some great insight into the fundamental aspects of going into communities and building the mutually beneficial understandings and frameworks that push us toward those goals in meaningful ways. If we need a proposal, here’s something. I thought of this in two seconds so there’s certainly all manner of implementation details involved that might make it infeasible, but it’s at least a framework besides “elect Democrats and then yell at Democrats to suck less.” I have some reservations about it myself but I’ll let other posters point out why it wouldn’t work (or, even better, suggest improvements!). A scheduled general strike. The demands of the strike are that all companies involved in energy production set up a general relief fund responsible for compensating refugees affected by climate disasters. If your town burns down, or gets leveled by a hurricane, or gets deleted by rising water levels, the energy industry is going to pay to resettle you. FEMA and private charity are currently woefully inadequate to accomplish this task, and even if they weren’t, why are government and private charity money being used to offset the externalities oil companies cause? Oil companies have known for decades that climate change was coming, yet they publicly promote denialism because they want to be able to reap the profits and let other people suffer the costs. Maybe this results in a bill getting passed to meet the demands. If so, great! Or maybe some executive order or other semi-legitimate government process accomplishes it. Good enough! But the energy companies themselves might want to make a deal; a general strike hurts them, too, and they’re always worried government regulation is going to fuck them in inefficient and counterproductive ways that help nobody. Better to cut a deal themselves and not let some Senator sneak in some clause about having to give every Iowa farmer $10,000 or some shit. Happy to discuss this proposal specifically but first it might be more productive to start with discussing the concept of a general strike -what is it? When should it be used? How can it even be accomplished? I don’t have great answers to any of those questions but I’d love to know others’ opinions. Good luck getting people to do that. On the other hand I think it would absolutely be effective, but people are so disconnected from that kind of power being feasible that they discount it and thus it gets taken off the table. In this respect GH and some of his personal ideas and especially frameworks around guys like Freire would actually be societally useful. People aren’t going to risk losing their jobs without a wider societal reframing of what’s both desirable and practically feasible on a micro and macro level. I think if you could mobilise mass strikes they would be THE most potent political weapon, but unless you do the underpinning priming they’ll lack the capacity to elicit much change.
Yeah, maybe people won’t engage with it, idk.
Tbh I usually roll my eyes a bit when people talk about a general strike because it usually seems like a rhetorical device for leftists to sidestep answering how they’d ever get any of their desired changes enacted. Conceptually it’s a bit fraught - it could achieve some dramatic change, sure, but it’s not exactly a system of government. It’s more of a “once in a blue moon to kick things back onto the right track” than a “use this to effectively administer daily affairs of government” kind of power mechanism.
And how do you actually organize one? Labor organizations aren’t what they used to be, and even back in the day they weren’t necessarily equipped to organize something like this: across industries, across cities and states, without a clear answer to “what are your demands?” or even “who are you negotiating with?”
That’s not to say it’s impossible. Apparently some labor groups were preparing for a general strike in the event Trump stole the election somehow. I don’t think “make Biden president instead of Trump” is the cause GH would pick to instigate a general strike, but I think that could have happened. So many people would feel shocked and outraged and impotent, all at the same time, and it would feel so clear that the rules didn’t apply any more. Even if nobody was saying to strike it would have felt fucking weird to go to work the next day knowing my government wasn’t democratically elected any more.
But if not that, what? How would everybody get on the same page? Climate change is slow, with very few *big events* to get everybody riled up. I don’t know if a big dramatic mobilizing event is a requirement, but I don’t know how you get everybody on the same page at the same time.
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On October 14 2021 12:30 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 11:38 Husyelt wrote:
Even with SpaceX's Starship fully operational, (100-150 metric ton payload,) you wouldn't want to launch nuclear waste out of earths orbit. I'm just an average joe, but nuclear to me has seen some progress with the microreactors, I'd go with nuclear power over bloated wind turbines any day of the week.
No energy is really renewable or green. To create one wind turbine you need hundreds of tons of raw material, (which requires fossil fuel vehicles to extract,) then ship to refine the materials, (fossil fuel trucks,) then refine them (fossil fuel) then ship to the final customer and build. Finally in operation you get the actual "renewable wind energy." Then after 20-30 years their life is up, and you throw the blades into a landfill and bring out the heavy equipment to go digging for more raw materials. I'll restate what I said before: SpaceX's Starship is a TERRIBLE product for launching waste into space, because it isn't intended to do so. Imagine if we transported oil on boats by just filling boats with barrels, rather than filling oil tankers. Imagine if international package delivery services uses single person, small planes to transport packages. The products to launch waste into space don't exist. That is a cultural/political problem that I hope changes.
This has been the most awful train of posting I've seen in a while. Stop floating the idea of putting nuclear waste in space.
You have got to be fucking retarded. Do you realized that just to get into low earth orbit, you need a fucking absurd amount of energy. That is all starship can do. It's using some of the most efficient engines ever built by humanity. It is the second largest rocket by payload to low earth orbit ever built by humanity.
Spaceflight is an absurdly expensive and difficult endeavour without trying to purpose build a spacecraft for launching nuclear waste, a really really low value, high mass product.
More than a quarter million metric tons of highly radioactive waste sits in storage near nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities worldwide, with over 90,000 metric tons in the US alone.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/nuclear-waste-pilesscientists-seek-best/98/i12
You're talking ~2500 trips a year into low earth orbit, just to get the waste into space. In case you're not aware, the two best rockets in the world, a falcon 9 and atlas V do not have perfect records.
That's just for the waste alone. You're going to need a significant mass of shielding so the spacecraft is reusable, a problem which we're going to entirely sidestep by ignoring.
You've still only got 250,000 tons in low earth orbit. In order to drop the waste "into the sun" as you're proposing, you need to get it to slow down.
It's orbiting earth at 25,000km/h. Earth goes around the sun roughly 100,000km/h
Thankfully, you don't need to do that. You just need to get 8.8km/s of dv, equivalent to ~32,000 km/h of acceleration.
Just to get it into orbit, lets say we built something absurdly efficient, far beyond the capabilities of today.
Let's take the a theoretically better than SpaceX Raptor engine with a specific impulse of 380s(equivalent to its vacuum impulse). Let's put it on a magical platform that lets it get into space with literally nothing other than the waste strapped on top. As it turns out, we just need to figure out how much mass to drop into space with a theoretically perfect spacecraft with 0 mass engines launching just the waste into orbit with zero gravity/aerodynamic losses.
Turns out that number is roughly 1000kg of fuel for every 1kg into space, just to get into low earth orbit.
Once in low earth orbit, given you've got infinite time, you can use a good ion engine to get the mass to the sun. Let's get a good one with 10,000s specific impulse, again, massless.
You'd still need 2x that mass in rocket fuel once in space to get it to the sun (xenon), 500,000t of Xenon.
The world produces ~6t of xenon per year.
You could argue different propellants in orbit, but those are less efficient and you're going to wind up launching thousands of times more mass into orbit once you consider engines with mass, any form of spaceship with containment/support for nuclear waste etc.
I don't know if it's convincing at all to you, because it's such a stupid idea that you're arguing in favour of, but hopefully we can stop talking about it in the thread.
User was warned for this post.
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Just FYI Lmui, I already said we don't need to launch it into space. We have plenty of space for storage as it is. And when we do run out of space for it, we'll have technology that is easily up to the task. Nothing we have right now can do it, as you pointed out. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.
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Dude this is such a weird hill to die on what are you doing
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That's not how it works. You don't put a tagline at the start of your paper that says "yo if you're not sure on anything lmk and i'll look up a source", you state the basis of your assertions as you make them.
I'm not particularly interested in this debate but I am interested in science, and the way you've been communicating here for the last few months is a textbook example of what causes people to lose trust in science.
Multiple people have asked you in the last three pages for specific sources for specific things, and you have done nothing but handwave back. I am not going to go through your walls of text and stick a [citation needed] at the end of each sentence when people have already done that and you've just faffed at them instead.
eg.
On October 14 2021 02:46 EnDeR_ wrote:
Mohdoo, if you want to state that the future is 'nuclear, coal and gas', I'd like to see a good ref for that because the authoritative scientific literature I'm familiar with is not tilting in that direction at all.
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United States42006 Posts
On October 14 2021 11:38 Husyelt wrote:
Even with SpaceX's Starship fully operational, (100-150 metric ton payload,) you wouldn't want to launch nuclear waste out of earths orbit. I'm just an average joe, but nuclear to me has seen some progress with the microreactors, I'd go with nuclear power over bloated wind turbines any day of the week.
No energy is really renewable or green. To create one wind turbine you need hundreds of tons of raw material, (which requires fossil fuel vehicles to extract,) then ship to refine the materials, (fossil fuel trucks,) then refine them (fossil fuel) then ship to the final customer and build. Finally in operation you get the actual "renewable wind energy." Then after 20-30 years their life is up, and you throw the blades into a landfill and bring out the heavy equipment to go digging for more raw materials.
This is ridiculous. The adjective bloated doesn’t apply to wind turbines and the carbon footprint of creating a wind turbine is a negligible proportion of the carbon not consumed due to the energy output. Wind turbines are absolutely green and renewable, you’re just repeating some idiotic right wing talking points without spending a second to consider what you’re saying.
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On October 14 2021 15:01 Belisarius wrote:That's not how it works. You don't put a tagline at the start of your paper that says "yo if you're not sure on anything lmk and i'll look up a source", you state the basis of your assertions as you make them. I'm not particularly interested in this debate but I am interested in science, and the way you've been communicating here for the last few months is a textbook example of what causes people to lose trust in science. Multiple people have asked you in the last three pages for specific sources for specific things, and you have done nothing but handwave back. I am not going to go through your walls of text and stick a [citation needed] at the end of each sentence when people have already done that and you've just faffed at them instead. eg. Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 02:46 EnDeR_ wrote:
Mohdoo, if you want to state that the future is 'nuclear, coal and gas', I'd like to see a good ref for that because the authoritative scientific literature I'm familiar with is not tilting in that direction at all.
It’s probably best to just move on from the topic. I don’t think this is worthwhile for anyone involved. I won’t be losing any sleep over a few people on the internet not being convinced. I’ll continue about my life just fine lol
On October 14 2021 14:56 ChristianS wrote:
Dude this is such a weird hill to die on what are you doing
Not sure what you mean by this, but I assure you I am not protecting some bogus sense of honor or whatever. You can assume I’m totally full of crap or wrong or whatever. Probably better to do that than clog up the thread anyway. Since this is an industry I actually have experience in I wanted to offer my perspective, but I’m not going to actually sit down and prepare lecture notes. Believe me or not, it won’t make a difference to me
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On October 14 2021 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 02:45 justanothertownie wrote:On October 14 2021 00:31 Mohdoo wrote:On October 14 2021 00:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ ) There are no other options. You have 3 options for the next 10 years: Coal Gas Nuclear Nothing else actually exists. Everything else goes way beyond fantasy. It simply isn't possible, solar included. I say this as someone who worked in solar research for years. Yeah, no point in discussing with you, sorry. Let me just say that the way you view things is not very open-minded or scientific. Sounds like you have no experience here. Care to elaborate on your background in electronic materials or sustainable energy? I've worked on solar research and done a lot of analysis regarding energy needs and what targets are necessary to actually do something. What have you done? One thing to make clear: the goal is ZERO coal and natural gas use. Not just lessening it. We can pay ourselves on the back for generating s watt of energy using bacteria and various other things, but we’re talking national scale here. When Germany started their demented process of scaling back nuclear, there’s a reason they are bending the knee to Putin for natural gas.
There is seriously no point in discussing this with someone who thinks there is no alternative to coal gas and nuclear (btw. in Germany coal is only profitable due to the government supporting the respective energy companies - nuclear is not cheap either if you consider All the costs that come with it, there is a reason only Asia is really building a lot of new power plants) and that we can just throw the waste into space. I never imagined hearing this drivel from the arbiter of science.
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EPT
