If you don't put in heat pumps, nuclear reactors are one of the more expensive ways to heat a home.
If you do put in heat pumps, nuclear reactors are still one of the more expensive ways to heat a home, but you need a third as many of them as compared to the no-heat-pumps case, if you insist on heating only with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is really only important if you also want spicy atoms, because it's by far the cheapest source of spicy atoms. Annoyingly, this is now a thing a lot of countries have a solid reason to want.
The not-so-hidden costs of collecting extremely diffuse wind / solar is the elephant in the room 10x bill for the supporting grid infrastructure.
Nuclear advocates, like myself, claim drop in replacement nuclear power reactors at existing coal / gas sites would largely obviate this.
Even adding new nuclear power reactors at greenfield sites would constitute a significantly reduced grid build cost, as the power is highly concentrated.
And nuclear is so say that nuclear power reactors employees are routine exposed to less radiation at work than they are at home in their kitchen with granite bench tops.
I can see that argument applying to wind, but for solar its the opposite because that is really easy to get closer to consumers than a conventional plant ever could be (i.e. on the rooftop).
At this point, I don't believe in a nuclear renaissance, because it seems to me that nuclear power got left behind too far; catching up in cost metrics is already hard enough, but matching growth rates (in "installed TWh/a" of wind/solar) seems virtually impossible by now. The only remaining holdouts (China, US, France, ...) are basically doing it as a hedge and/or to keep/obtain related engineering capabilities (and at the very least an easy path toward weapon-grade material).
It is clear to me that no one "actually believes" in nuclear power (by stating clearly: we are solve gonna current and future energy problems by mainly relying on freshly built nuclear power), so I can only see its relevance dwindling (I'd argue that China comes closest, but even they are much more in the hedging/securing capabilities category than anything else).
Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!
The Late Heavy, as I like to call it. Sounds like a Drum and Bass producer. Anyways:
The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), or lunar cataclysm, is a hypothesized astronomical event thought to have occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years (Ga) ago,[1] at a time corresponding to the Neohadean and Eoarchean eras on Earth. According to the hypothesis, during this interval, a disproportionately large number of asteroids and comets collided into the terrestrial planets and their natural satellites in the inner Solar System, including Mercury, Venus, Earth (and the Moon) and Mars.[2] These came from both post-accretion and planetary instability-driven populations of impactors.[3] Although it has gained widespread credence,[4] definitive evidence remains elusive.
The “definitive evidence remains elusive” from your quote is probably a hint: the LHB was a result of getting carried away extrapolating from the Apollo samples due to an early dearth of data, not a real phenomenon.
IIUC "recent" in this article means 124 million years ago.
This is after the meteorite killed "all" the dinoraurs.
Also, North America was joined to Eurasia, South America to Africa, Australia to Antartica, and India was a huge island in the middle of the "Indic" ocean.
Bad news, there has been a fourth great bleaching event going on since January of 23. This time 80+% of all reefs have been impacted and the consensus seems to be that its unlikely there will be any reefs left at all before too long.
I like the false equivalence between reducing air pollution and not doing hate crimes against Jewish people. I haven’t asked them all individually, but I’m pretty sure my Jewish friends all enjoy breathing clean air.
Right, don’t address the substance of the message, just drive-by-dismiss the concerns of a growing segment of voters.
My comment you responded to didn’t happen overnight.
You’re welcome to go through my comment history and address my concerns as detailed over the previous thirteen years, many of which are much more level headed and many contain references to thinkers much more intelligent and way more eloquent than anything I’ll ever write.
I do, and if I were you I would stop to think about your priors. You have stacked an awful lot of ideas on top of each other to build a world view that has lies, misinformation, and unsound science at the base of it. Worse, a lot of it is selfish, but in a way that only works if the entire global economy is a zero sum game. Enlightened self-interest can be right, and even noble, but only if you know the game well enough to comprehend why altruism is still important, and you don't. The world is NOT a zero sum game, and this kind of self-interest is the bad kind.
Some of the logic at the top of your pyramid would be sound, if the bottom wasn't a pile of mush. A few minor points:
1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity). It's been that way for awhile now, but one particular bubble tries really hard to stop people from learning that. If cost is your concern you should be pushing for more solar, and less of the fuel you literally set fire to and have to keep digging up forever until it runs out.
2) Giving money to hostile Arab nations who hate you is not going to stop anyone from "took 'er jorbs"ing you. In fact, you would have more money if your car didn't literally burn your money constantly and also require expensive oil changes and other maintenance constantly.
3) Pretty much everything you said about loans and housing is based on absolute fabrications, or extreme exaggerations. Even if it weren't, other people receiving assistance doesn't actually cost you anything. The national debt has INCREASED at a record pace under Trump, exactly as it does during every Republican presidency, and it's not because Trump loves helping people so much.
Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913. During my lifetime there has never been a Republican president who was fiscally conservative in the slightest. Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades, if your body can physically handle it for 40-50 years. It's good and honest work, and we need more folks to go into them. It's also likely to be more stable and less demanding than the kind of work most of us here do.
5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots. Robots are getting cheaper every day. Moving them here will get us a few (even richer) billionaires. Not more jobs (at least not the kind you're probably thinking of). It will also increase the cost of ALL THE THINGS.
The worst part of this mistake is that while normal people spend most of their money billionaires spend only a miniscule fraction of their income. Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time, or is engaged in parasitic interest gathering via obscure financial instruments. Giving money to billionaires is kind of like throwing it in the garbage. Giving it to the middle class is good for everyone, because they buy things and drive demand.
Lastly, I'm also a Xennial, and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
Its not the same at all though, because the right uses the deficit to excuse their selfish bullshit, like letting children starve, then they go on to increase it by more than the other side whenever they have power.
We get wildly different results, even with the similar spending.
The government exists to benefit the people, not the other way around, and only one side gets that.
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now
No, that's simply not true.
It's cheaper for MOST of the year, but overall, it's more expensive. Because you can't just tell people, "Well, now, during this cold January, please don't waste electricity because our panels are producing almost nothing." You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
> Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
It's very strange. In all cases of interaction with the USAID that I know about directly from those interacting with it, and not from media sources, in EVERY case it was liberal propaganda or direct anti-Trump propaganda. And none of the starving children that I know about directly from those who interacted with them, and not from the media, have ever received any food aid from.
I know, of course, that this is an anecdotal case, but I prefer to trust people with whom I am at least superficially acquainted, rather than media companies that are apparently run by pedophiles.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots.
Because the era of US hegemony is ending, and at some point you simply won't be able to live off the rest of the world. At that point, you'll either have production or you'll simply starve to death. Because food (and robots) don't fall from the sky. And if you don't produce it (and don't take it from the rest of the world through your hegemony), you'll starve and die.
> Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time
American workers spend as much money EACH YEAR as billionaires accumulated over generations (mostly in the form of productive capacity, not idling in the piles)
> and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
The best choice is to rob the rest of the world and live off them? Well, congratulations on making the better choice that allows you, unlike the REST OF THE WORLD, not work for less than $2 an hour (as 90% of the Earth's population does, thanks to American hegemony).
You need backup with hydrocarbon fuels synthesized from water and CO2, like all the living beings have done for billions of years.
Storing energy in hydrocarbons has a lower efficiency for short term storage, but it has a better efficiency for long term storage, in which case batteries would auto discharge.
So energy storage must use a combination of batteries for short term (for a few days at most) together with methods useful for long term (from a few months to many years), including hydrocarbon synthesis, pumped water, etc.
Synthesizing hydrocarbons from concentrated CO2 has already been done at large scale almost a century ago. Now there are much better methods, e.g. using the electrolysis of CO2.
The most difficult part remains capturing the CO2 from normal air and not from exhaust gases where it is concentrated.
This is a difficult engineering problem, but one solved by bacteria billions of years ago, and which probably would already have some good solution if any serious and well-funded research effort would have been done in this direction, instead of only talking about how it would be desirable but without any concrete action.
> You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
I love the wild mental gymnastics and cherry picking data these people put themselves through in order to delude themselves in to believing solar is cheaper than gas.
How can it be, when you need to build both. Or freeze in the dark.
As you said, in practice you either need batteries that don’t exist and would be prohibitively expensive because they would sit idle most the year where only hours to days of backup are required, but in winter you need weeks of storage and the output from the panels are significantly reduced so you need to massively overbuild…
OR you need to build gas peaker plants, which also sit idle most the year, but need to be run frequently and maintained to ensure they’re ready to run when needed.
The real world data is available for anyone who wants to run the numbers.
I was in Adelaide and participated in the discussions where Dr Barry Brook[1] and others ran the numbers over ten years ago. Exhaustively ran the numbers, both with real world data from recently built solar and wind, and optimistic projections of future improvements
The fundamentals haven’t changed. Even if the panels themselves were free, the amount or steel and concrete required to replace total global energy requirements with solar and wind is… it’s incomprehensible.
If I recall correctly, it worked out to requiring something absurd like more copper, steel, and concrete, than humans have produced to date (2013 figures) since the start of the Industrial Revolution, every year for the next fifty years just to replace existing energy production and distribution infrastructure, and in so doing we would double or triple atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We’d then have to work out how to pull those emissions back out of the atmosphere, which wound require further resource use to produce the infrastructure to generate the energy required to extract and sequester the carbon dioxide.
Compare to what we’re doing now which has barely scratched the surface in replacing global energy requirements, with no reduction in carbon dioxide levels.
It all makes a pretty strong case for existing nuclear technology (Gen IV / Gen IV+) to give us time (hundreds of years with existing know uranium reserves) to perfect fast breeder technology so we can use Thorium as nuclear fuel for thousands of years.
A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source.
But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable renewable sources like solar and wind that definition is now insufficient and under counts the true like-for-like cost of solar.
By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.
> By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.
This is wildly incorrect. Batteries have gotten cheaper, solar has gotten cheaper, and even accounting for storage solar now wins by a wide margin even in "wintery" climates.[0]
Ten years ago you were right, but the cost has been falling by a huge percentage every year for about 15 years straight now. There will never be another time when it makes sense to dig up fossil fuels, ship them all over the world, process them, and then set them on fire when we can just slap up a solar panel and store the power for something approximating free on a 20+ year timeline.
Even if we discount the tax breaks (which we should since Trump is a doofus) both the LCOE and LCOS (levelized cost of storage) of PV + battery are lower than for natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc. Wind beats it by a small amount but less of our land is suitable for wind.
That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from the graph) ~8% more expensive than combined-cycle plants.
But 4 hours isn't near a full night. At least 12 hours of battery storage would be necessary for that, possibly more depending on light angles and the relative supply-versus-demand loading at different times of day.
Roughly from the graph on page 8, that 4 hours of battery costs $22/MWh over solar alone. Presuming no further solar panels were needed, extending that 4 hours to 12 to cover the night would cost around $44/MWh more, bringing the total cost of 24h-reliable solar+battery to around $97/MWh -- WITH tax credits. Without tax credits it would be $20-$30 higher, but the graph is too low resolution to be precise. That compares poorly to the $65/MWh for combined-cycle for one single night -- which gets no tax credits accounted for in that graph.
You are literally wrong about almost everything you've just said and have been for many years.[0]
There's a great video on Youtube from Technology Connections on youtube if that's more your speed. He talks a bit about how you're being lied to about it regularly and explains the technology a bit.[1] You really should watch it as he explicitly addresses each of your issues here including "what about the batteries."
Solar is literally, and provabley, cheaper than gas. Including the cost of batteries, which are recyclable. That's why something like 96% of investment in new energy is in solar or wind now. It's not activists, it's literally the cheapest way to do it now.
> over ten years ago.
There's your problem. The cost has been coming down by over 90% per year for the last decade. It WAS more expensive, a decade ago. The fundamentals HAVE changed. The panels ARE almost free, and the amount of steel and concrete are negligible.
> great video on Youtube from Technology Connections
I don't understand why you're trying to cite conspiracy theories propaganda that's aimed at people with double-digit IQs. His videos are filled with distortions and manipulations, and do not address the real challenges facing the energy sector.
And no, there's no mention of batteries there; it's literally a straw man fight, showing their applicability to daily solar power generation cycles while almost completely ignoring their applicability to annual cycles.
> Solar is literally, and provabley, cheaper than gas. Including the cost of batteries
This is simply not true, considering that people actually need more electricity during the few weeks of the year when solar panels produce the least. It's precisely these few weeks that make solar energy more expensive than fossil fuels.
Just take a weekly chart of the actual energy output of the panels for the year, and calculate the price relative to the worst week
I don't understand why we need to engage in conspiracy theories and pretend that humanity hasn't abandoned fossil fuels because the Jews who rule the world love oil or something (and not because it's simply cheaper).
> That's why something like 96% of investment in new energy is in solar or wind now.
That's because the pedophiles who run the world can charge me 30 cents for electricity instead of the 3 cents it would cost if it were generated by fossil fuels.
> And no, there's no mention of batteries there; it's literally a straw man fight, showing their applicability to daily solar power generation cycles while almost completely ignoring their applicability to annual cycles.
Why is it every single time someone in this thread speaks up they are just plain wrong?
Here is a direct link to the part about batteries. He talks about them for about 15 minutes which is something like a quarter of the video. There is even a chapter mark to take you to that part. He also mentions them half a dozen more times throughout the video and warns in the beginning that people like you will chime in with misinformation without watching the video. You proved him right.
He talks about that too. I'm not going to bother linking. Actually watch the video or move on.
> Just take a weekly chart of the actual energy output of the panels for the year, and calculate the price relative to the worst week
I don't have to. The United States government did and even considering the cost of storage, it's still cheaper than all the alternatives. Has been for years now. See my earlier comments for links.
Private investors have done the same math, and that's why almost all new electricity generation being built is solar. It's the basically free money. Nobody with a brain can legitimately think that digging goop out of the desert, doing expensive processing to it, shipping it to the other side of the earth, and literally lighting it on fire (repeatedly forever) is more efficient than "slap up a solar cell and a battery then enjoy free energy for 20-40 years".
> hat's because the pedophiles who run the world can charge me 30 cents for electricity instead of the 3 cents it would cost if it were generated by fossil fuels.
Why would Donald Trump do that? He promised the oil execs anything they wanted for a billion dollars. Again, see my other replies for the receipts on that one. And see Trump inviting Epstein to his wedding for the other part.
*EDIT* To save you the clicks:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/... <-- Note that this specifically includes LCOS as well as LCOE. That's the cost of storage, and even with it solar + battery still beats everything but wind by WIDE margins.
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity)
You’re going to have to show your calculations with references for LCOE - Levelised Cost of Electricity. I’ve run the numbers, you can find them and references in my comment history, and I’m not impressed with solar. Solar needs batteries, or some other type of storage, and there are roughly none of those in service so we can only theoretically predict life time costs. I can’t be fucked repeating myself here at the moment for the benefit of someone who thinks I’m a right wing nut job or whatever. Wind too.
> 2) Giving money <blah blah> more money
Again, you’re going to have to show the numbers here. Prove that an equivalent electric vehicle I need for my job is going to be cheaper on a total cost of ownership basis. This is going to be difficult to prove as there isn’t an equivalent EV that can do the miles per day required. And even if there is, can it do it for 500,000km on the same engine and gearbox / battery whatever? Without getting StacheD[1] in my garage while I sleep? It remains to be seem.
> 3) Pretty much …
No no no. The correct answer is: I’m an Australian living in Australia, reading my own governments policies, the social welfare entitlements to new arrivals, seeing the result of zoning restrictions across the road, and experiencing the results of the locals having a fertility rate below replacement, 100,000 abortions a year, resulting in the “need” to import 500,000 foreigners a year from counties no one wants to live in. I actually prefer white culture, I think it’s better, and that we should import more people from the countries we traditionally have, including India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam, and the Europeans too. I’m not racists, I just like the level of multiculturalism we had not this shoot up a Jewish festival / pro Palestine bullshit.[2]
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades
No shit cunty. I am a tradesman with … 28 years experience in and adjacent to fabrication / manufacturing / primary industries. I’ve also worked as remote-hands for the likes of Google and Akamai in data centres, so a bit of technical experience. I also have some higher education qualifications, and acquaintances in academia.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs?
Now listen here mate ;) because lots of people, but particularly men, some women too, enjoy making things, breaking things, building things, and getting dirty. We’ve been doing it for millennia and it’s got us this far. It’s my belief that taking that away from society is going to turn out to be a general bad idea, if it ever eventuates.
> I'm better off now than 10 years ago
So am I, for various reasons. Mostly luck really. But that doesn’t negate the numbers. Houses cost more years of income, food costs more hours of labour, eggs cost more than chickens! on a per kg basis. Rent around here tends to cost more than one third of income, which is the definition of housing stress. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a young person starting out today. The young people around here who are winning are in the trades and come from families who made at least some good choices and can offer finance from the Bank of Mum & Dad, so there’s some hope for ‘em.
I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t smoke.
____
Edited to add:
> Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
It sort of doesn’t though. Most of the effects of alcohol consumption that result in a hangover are caused by an accumulation of acetaldehyde[5] in the blood, the clearance of which is rate limited by an aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme[6]. That is to say, the clearance of acetaldehyde isn’t rate limited by water …
And the dehydration hypothesis can be debunked empirically by anyone who drinks, for example, beer, which, around here, tends to contain less than 7% alcohol by volume, so beer drinkers are getting a lot of water already and yet they get hungover too. So it can’t be the water.
You can’t say I’m not thorough, and if you check my comment history you’ll find a multi-year period where most of my comments contained extensive references, because that used to be the done thing around here.
_____
Try not to characterise everyone who disagrees with you as wrong, uneducated, out of touch, or whatever. Some of us have been watching and living this slow moving train wreck and we reckon our country deserves better. We’re not uneducated, we are politically engaged, we don’t place all the blame on brown people or whatever. We voted No to the Voice[3] because we see ourselves and each other as literally one nation. We’re not racists, we’re not homophobic or whatever, but the + can go fuck themselves.[3]
Anyways, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and appreciate the conversation (Y)
6. aldehyde dehydrogenase ADLH2 - ALDH2 plays a crucial role in maintaining low blood levels of acetaldehyde during alcohol oxidation.[7] In this pathway (ethanol to acetaldehyde to acetate), the intermediate structures can be toxic, and health problems arise when those intermediates cannot be cleared.[3] When high levels of acetaldehyde occur in the blood, facial flushing, lightheadedness, palpitations, nausea, and general "hangover" symptoms occur. It also is thought to be the cause of a medical condition known as the alcohol flush reaction, also known as "Asian flush" or "Oriental flushing syndrome". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase
"The picture is complex. Recovery here, fresh losses there.
While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."
This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions
"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.
Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."
Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage
Unless you have other evidence that this particular report is exaggerating without justification you can't solely rely on the fact that their opinions/results would benefit them as evidence they are providing misinformation.
It's possible for information to be factual and opinions to be justified from a source while that source also benefits from the information/opinions existing.
I can easily provide counter examples from countless situations that occur each year.
----
If you feel that all scientists and researchers have a lower level of trust because of negative actions of some, that's wrong of course because their reputations aren't connected, but you try to confirm it. For example, find out if a cooler than normal El Nino season would help coral feeds (or whatever)
What you did was tell us you don't trust the information, not because of something specific, but a concept/rule you believe.
Considering you originally misrepresented their findings, perhaps by accident, you should have done more to make your case.
And, the two major byproducts of burning hydrocarbons are water and carbon dioxide.
Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.
Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.
Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.
From Wikipedia:
The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.
Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending.
Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.
Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance.
"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."
We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.
You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.
> burn petrol.
Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?
Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.
How is that supposed to help?
I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.
Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.
Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.
I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.
With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.
Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.
Context is for kings though. In the context of what occurred when it occurred, you’re right.
For a while there, Australia was known as ‘the lucky country’ because despite the folly of politicians, and general fallibility of humans, we had wealth for toil.
Diesel, kerosene, rocket propelled RP1, and fuel oil / bunker fuel in the case of cargo ships.
It’s not a coincidence that where easy of handling, storage safety, and high energy density are needed everything seems to converge on compression ignition medium to long chain liquid hydrocarbons.
More accurately, the calculation needs to factor in the fact that battery weight doesn’t decrease as charge is used.
Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.
How can batteries compete with that constraint?
Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.
I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.
An A320 can store 24k liters of fuel. Jet fuel stores 35 MJ/L. So, the plane carries 8.4E11 J of energy. If that was stored in a battery that had to be charged in an hour 0.23GW of electric power would be required.
So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.
Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.
Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.
It makes no difference, we’d still need gigawatt scale electricity production, with some multiple of that at peak, just for a fairly unremarkable airport.
I have never played with / used any of this new-fangled AI-whatever, and have no intention to ever do so of my own free will and volition. I’d rathert inject dirty heroin from a rusty spoon with a used needle.
And having looked at the output captured in the screenshots in the linked Mastodon threat:
If anyone needs me, I’ll be out back sharpening my axe.
Call me when the war against the machines begins. Or the people who develop and promote this crap.
I don’t understand, at all, what any of this is about.
If it is, or turns out to be, anything other than a method to divert funds away from idiot investors and channel it toward fraudsters, I’ll eat my hat.
Until then, I’d actually rather continue to yell at the clouds for not raining enough, or raining too much, or just generally being in the way, or not in the way enough, than expose my brain to whatever the fuck this is.
Come April, all the production and construction capacity will be commandeered for the war machine.
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