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How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

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Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#111

Post by ThomPete »

jacobush wrote: post #81
ThomPete wrote: post #64

I am glad to see Bill Gates being more vocal about this. There has been an unrealistic optimism when it comes to how easy it is to find alternatives to what we are currently using. What people forget is that things like plastic ever-present not because of some evil conspiracy by oil companies to push an inferior material on the market but because it's superior to all other materials we know of. The problem isn't prod…

Superior except that it would not be superior in all these cases if the unaccounted for externalities were considered.

The externalities include positive ones so yes it would be superior by far.

There literally is no realistic alternative to plastic right now.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#112

Post by godelski »

smackthatthro wrote: post #77
godelski wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's three necessities I see in a green scale initiative: carbon tax, nuclear, and sequestration (CC). I also have a hard time taking anyone serially if they don't talk about how we need a diversified energy portfolio nor understand the difficulties of energy density. I feel like many repeat popular points but do not spend time trying to understand. I think that's how we get politicians that consider climate chang…

Anti-scientific, or we learned from our mistakes? We can barely build a bridge that lasts for 50 years, but somehow we are going to magically build containment units for waste which last 1,000s? The science has shown us that Nuclear electricity is incredibly dangerous, and that humans are mostly too incompetent to maintain it safely. I say this as the child of a Nuclear Physicist who spent half of his life working on…

>Anti-scientific, or we learned from our mistakes?

I would say that when you are valuing the opinion of the public and/or political groups over the opinion the scientific consensus (i.e. the IPCC and other) then that is the definition of anti-scientific. (As to Chernobyl, I would also call building a positive void coefficient reactor is also anti-scientific, considering it was against recommendation).

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#113

Post by godelski »

ddxxdd wrote: post #73
dev_dull wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more about why they don't make sense? My understanding is that they're extremely desirable. They're a drop-in replacement for millions of hydrocarbon plants. They can scale up/down with demand. They produce enormous amounts of energy and emit no C02. Think of the materials and industrial waste to produce 1 nuclear power plant versus all of the battery, solar cells, and turbines to equal the same in po…

>Think of the materials and industrial waste to produce 1 nuclear power plant versus all of the battery, solar cells, and turbines to equal the same in power and scalability. Please, also think of the carbon footprint of those materials. Every ton of cement produces 1 ton of CO2. Every ton of steel produces 1.8 tons of CO2. The mere process of building a hydroelectric dam and wind turbine involves emitting CO2 into t…

I do want to say that nuclear does have lower life cycle emissions compared to solar [0][1].

[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/WNA/Publicat...

[1] there's also an IPCC study that's bigger than this and shows the same thing but I'm on my phone.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#114

Post by godelski »

imtringued wrote: post #84
godelski wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to break in here because that's a large range in prices. To explain those, they are because the different amounts of storage capacity. These very drastically in location. So somewhere like SoCal needs less than in the Bay area because SoCal is almost always sunny and windy. The Bay has plenty of shady days (go talk to the people at LLNL, there's plenty of people there working on this problem). Alternative…

>This is a "well this works and we can start building it right now." I have never heard this argument. The problem with nuclear power plants is that you always need the next generation plant design that solves the flaws of the previous generation. Almost every pro nuclear strategy involves new types of reactors that by definition haven't been proven. Of course we can always just build more current or old generation n…

We could make wide progress with current generation plants. Evidence? France. Also a ton of research studies. I'm not sure why you think we need gen IV reactors. Sure, that'd be nice, but gen III is good enough. I've never heard the argument that we "need" new l newer designs. The argument I've heard there is that it's safer and cheaper so probably easier to get public opinion on the side of the scientific consensus.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#115

Post by godelski »

imtringued wrote: post #87
Ygg2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear ever will That's a bold claim. Batteries could also suffer from law of diminishing returns. It might not be physically possible to store energy much more densely, without catastrophic failures.

Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries? Economies of scale can result in far greater cost reductions than are possible simply by reducing the amount of needed materials for a given capacity.

> Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries?

So you can put them in cars, boats, planes, and other things.

Yeah, I know, we have Teslas. But do you know it's twice the weight of an ICE alternative? Weight matters a lot. While we've made a lot of progress in the last few decades, the best research batteries are still 100x below any fossil fuel in terms of energy density.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#116

Post by jacobush »

ThomPete wrote: post #111
jacobush wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superior except that it would not be superior in all these cases if the unaccounted for externalities were considered.

The externalities include positive ones so yes it would be superior by far. There literally is no realistic alternative to plastic right now.

Excuse me what are those? I can list just a few negatives just off the top off my head, hormonal dysfunction in humans and animals, microplastics in the sea, no way to know if plastic contains carcinogens, are safe for food or not, contain heavy metals, litter, and new problems we don't even know about yet, because there is a never ending stream of new products and materials getting shoved out in our lives.

And what a defeatist attitude - what about enumerating the plastics we, standardising and regulating additives etc? Today it's total chaos with a very thin veneer of recycling.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#117

Post by thereisnospork »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #108
thereisnospork wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, its perfectly doable to make those atoms wind up as O2, it is just expensive. All we need to do to solve climate change, today, is accept a drastically lower standard of living. Hence why it isn't happening, (and won't happen until people start dying).

> accept a drastically lower standard of living With sequestration costs at $100 - $300 per tonne for worst-case industries, climate change will cost trillions world-wide. That's a lot of money, but hardly a "drastically lower standard of living". Compare with Iraq war, or Apollo + Vietnam. Much less sacrifice than WW2.

Even at those optimistic costs that is $2-6,000 dollars per person (20 tonnes/American-year), 8 to 24k per family of four. I'd call that a drastically lower quality of living for an average American, to say nothing about a working person in the 3rd world who probably doesn't make 2,000USD in a year.

I'm not suggesting sequestering is going to be the end of society or the economy, just that people won't start sequestering until something is imminently threatening them.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#118

Post by ThomPete »

jacobush wrote: post #116
ThomPete wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The externalities include positive ones so yes it would be superior by far. There literally is no realistic alternative to plastic right now.

Excuse me what are those? I can list just a few negatives just off the top off my head, hormonal dysfunction in humans and animals, microplastics in the sea, no way to know if plastic contains carcinogens, are safe for food or not, contain heavy metals, litter, and new problems we don't even know about yet, because there is a never ending stream of new products and materials getting shoved out in our lives. And what…

How do you think we do most modern operations and healthcare, how do you think we manage to have cars be extremely lightweight and i could go on.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#119

Post by qiqitori »

godelski wrote: post #115
imtringued wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries? Economies of scale can result in far greater cost reductions than are possible simply by reducing the amount of needed materials for a given capacity.

> Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries? So you can put them in cars, boats, planes, and other things. Yeah, I know, we have Teslas. But do you know it's twice the weight of an ICE alternative? Weight matters a lot. While we've made a lot of progress in the last few decades, the best research batteries are still 100x below any fossil fuel in terms of energy density.

Which Tesla is twice the weight of an equivalent ICE car?

The Model S (2019) appears to look roughly the same and appears to be roughly the same size as the Audi A7 (2019), and is just a bit heavier (Tesla curb weight 4883 lbs, Audi 4332 lbs).

https://www.cars.com/research/compare/?acodes=USC90TSC024F0,...

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#120

Post by jacobush »

ThomPete wrote: post #118
jacobush wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me what are those? I can list just a few negatives just off the top off my head, hormonal dysfunction in humans and animals, microplastics in the sea, no way to know if plastic contains carcinogens, are safe for food or not, contain heavy metals, litter, and new problems we don't even know about yet, because there is a never ending stream of new products and materials getting shoved out in our lives. And what…

How do you think we do most modern operations and healthcare, how do you think we manage to have cars be extremely lightweight and i could go on.

Fine, but are these unaccounted positive externalities? Don't you choose plastic exactly because you want its nice properties? But looking back the next day I think I may have over-reacted a bit to your comment. Of course plastic is in many ways very nice. Let's keep a fair subset. But we could benefit from paring down the variations, and the volume, a lot, IMHO.
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