Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vertical farming does not save space

lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 464 posts

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#291

Post by Nasrudith »

shuckles wrote: post #193
dale_glass wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother? What reason is there to believe a generator with blades attached to it is going to lose to a generator with a containment building and reactor attached to it?

Isn’t the issue that the windmill also needs a large battery to meet demand?

That is solar - wind can work through geographic distribution alone without so much as a potato battery. A local area may be becalmed by wind but since temperature differentials produce wind and the earth rotates into and out of the sun the only things which would lead to no wind render the power generation question a moot point.

Grid scale batteries make wind cheaper by allowing less overproduction but they do that for everything by assisting grid balance and acting as a form of high frequency trading which is productive in ways other than increased market liquidity.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#292

Post by SomewhatLikely »

For anyone who wants to get into the technical details on efficiency of growing crops under lighting, here's an informative talk from Bruce Bugsbee of Apogee Instruments: https://youtu.be/wsaufB5F8dk

He shows that wheat, which was the example used in the article, would cost 100x more growing under lighting, but for greens and microgreens the lighting costs are only a few percent of the market value of the crop so those are very viable as indoor crops.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#293

Post by gh02t »

a1369209993 wrote: post #256
dataflow wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What signs do you see that it might work at all (and that it's not a hopeless endeavor)? As a layman it's so hard to understand how something so hot and so confined could ever be made to react reliably with continuous fuel and energy production to produce power on a large scale.

I don't think anyone is proposing continuous fuel (even fission reactors typically don't work like that - you have to shut them down to swap out the fuel rods periodically). The idea is that you inject (say) some deuterium into a blast chamber, it explodes like a miniature thermonuclear bomb, and you gather the explosive energy in vaguely the same way a internal combustion engine (like in cars) gathers energy from fu…

The blast chamber that you chuck nuclear weapons in is not a good analogy, I suspect we don't know how to build such a thing that has a net positive energy yield when you factor in how much energy it takes to build a thermonuclear weapon and the terrible thermal efficiency such a contraption would have. Inertial confinement fusion is basically a more manageable version of this idea and we still haven't hit breakeven there. Magnetic confinement fusion is widely believed to be the more viable path to commercial fusion energy anyway. Right now fusion is largely a game of chasing margins to get things efficient enough that first the plasma is self sustaining (ignition) and then second yields a net positive of energy. ITER or its successor will hopefully achieve the first goal (ITER was originally supposed to but is no longer targeting full ignition, at least initially), then hitting the second goal is what will be needed to be practical as a power source.

Also, just to add to your point there are (basically) continuously fueled fission reactors, see e.g. CANDU as well as some more exotic actually continuously fueled designs that use liquid fuels. Continuously fueled designs would probably be more desirable if they weren't such a proliferation concern but that's a different story.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#294

Post by Guthur »

pfdietz wrote: post #239
tinco wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fission is only not competitive because of regulation and safety measures, is it not?

Not. Nowhere has it done well. It's just too complex with too many interdependent parts. Construction has proved to be beyond the competency of those trying to build plants. And now, it's just too late. The iteration time for nuclear designs is measured in decades, going up against renewable and storage technologies iterating in periods of a few years. Fusion would make fission look dead simple. If fission reactors c…

And we will soon find out that renewables are not reliable enough and require a higher degree of planning than we are typically good at.

Texas recently is a prime example, wind turbines froze and gas turbines had co2 regulations that made it difficult to ramp up. Other issues aside these were major contributing factors and indicative of the challenges many states will have.

We can't control the weather and many of these renewable are dependent on it. In comparison every fossil or nuclear based energy source has well developed supply chains, control and planning. Issues will be likely compounded because severe weather often times means increased energy needs as well.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#295

Post by SimianLogic2 »

User7894 wrote: post #208
SimianLogic2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just using a 9-plant Aerogarden Bounty right now (think it was ~$175 on Black Friday). My wife says I can upgrade to an indoor Tower Garden or Lettucegrow if I do 3-4 cycles on this thing without getting bored. I also built six 4ftx4ft raised (dirt) beds in our back yard a few years back. I plant fairly densely (usually using 1x1 squares for most things, 2x2 for tomatoes) and I'm thinking about trying one of the…

Look at BA Kratky. My variant consists of 10Gal mixing tubs (Lowes $6) a bit of blue dow foam board, toothpicks, and rapid rooter growplugs Barina grow lights. Masterblend, CaCO3, and Epsom salt. Six trays (one per week. Pest pressure and growing season makes leafy greens not practical.

I think I'm following your build. It seems like Kratky requires a lot more space up-front than an aeroponic system that you refill over time, but it's good to know that I can get even lazier if I clean out some space in the garage.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#297

Post by wffurr »

jshevek wrote: post #272
throwaway894345 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent's point, and I don't know if it's well-founded or not (and consequently I'm not endorsing it, only clarifying), is that adding more waste doesn't seem to worsen the problem. As an aside, if you must snark, it's best to do it when you're following the thread of the conversation.

Yes, even further the guidelines suggest that snark has no place on HN. One day we may undo the damage done by the massive influx of C19 redditers. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: Replying to the misrepresentation of my words: I did not state that HN is turning into Reddit. HN is not turning into reddit. The culture of HN has been damaged, however, by the lack of acculturation of last years inf…

Setting aside the fact that I ignored the guidelines because I felt that a downvote for the post I was replying to wasn’t sufficient disagreement for a) how wrong it was and b) how it ignored the point, what’s a C19 redditor?

I did a quick Google search and only came up with the C19 core magic set.

Also you could check my profile and see that I’ve been posting on HN since 2012.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#298

Post by [deleted] »

SomewhatLikely wrote: post #292

For anyone who wants to get into the technical details on efficiency of growing crops under lighting, here's an informative talk from Bruce Bugsbee of Apogee Instruments: https://youtu.be/wsaufB5F8dk He shows that wheat, which was the example used in the article, would cost 100x more growing under lighting, but for greens and microgreens the lighting costs are only a few percent of the market value of the crop so tho…

[deleted]

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#300

Post by marcosdumay »

benjaminjackman wrote: post #157
skissane wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we look into the relatively near future, fusion energy is going to account for a rapidly increasing share of energy production by the end of this decade. I really don't think by the end of this decade there will be any commercial fusion production. I'm sure we will be closer but it is still some decades away. ITER proposes to follow up their current research reactor with a successor (DEMO) which they plan to sta…

I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant advances in superconductors achieved after ITER was planned out. Also, if the new superconductors do work out, it's very likely that all other forms of energy generation and grid level storage will become almost immediately obsolete and any additional focus moving forward would be only on improvi…

If ITER proves its style to be a success (what may happen this decade, but I'm not holding my breath), we can expect a decade (about half the time of the original) to just complete the first generation of commercially viable reactors (what ITER will not be).

After that, lithium supplied T grows exponentially with the reactor usage, with a doubling time of a bit less than a decade. So, if it becomes the bottleneck (what means, if people to everything else right) you can expect some 3 or 4 decades before fusion even becomes a major power source.

Post reply on HN