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Vertical farming does not save space

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Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#311

Post by a1369209993 »

Aeolun wrote: post #266
a1369209993 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait, are you saying we know how to build a World Wonder that produces infinite energy, but we’re not doing it? What’ll we do if Ghandi builds it first?

Because we don't have enough energy demand to make it worthwhile. Even if we had enough money (and political will) to fund it, we'd be better off spending it on a space elevator, since we can actually use that enough to cover the costs.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#312

Post by yazaddaruvala »

Armisael16 wrote: post #308
wainstead wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Judging vertical farming based on the performance of wheat is not valid. When I saw the test crop was wheat, I scrolled to see if there were any other crops, saw that there weren't, and abandoned the article because wheat has among the worst yields per area (in terms of kg of edible product per sq meters). I want to stress this point. Crops like wheat, rice, and corn are not suitable for vertical farming. No vertic…

Why not corn? My understanding is that it’s one of the most efficient crops in calories/acre terms (which is presumably what you actually care about, not kg/acre).

My guess is that counterintuitively but unsurprisingly, you actually want to use crops that were previously inefficient to grow. Low yields per acre crops are more suitable to indoor vertical farming because of the benefit climate control, and lack of pests provides.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#313

Post by 8note »

Guthur wrote: post #294
pfdietz wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Canada has winter every year. Thus doesn't happen there. Canada has wind turbines, too

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#314

Post by southerntofu »

exporectomy wrote: post #226
benjaminjackman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What makes you think fusion power will be cheaper than solar, wind, fossil fuels or fission? Efficiency isn't really a good metric when the fuel is free. We see that in solar power where expensive high efficiency devices lose out to cheaper less efficient ones. It's more about capital cost and operating cost per unit of energy.

To elaborate on the topic, there is ample evidence that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive source of energy, when you take into account the government (for example here in France) entirely subsidizing the construction and hypothetical demolition.

I say hypothetical because french attempts at "safely dismantling" nuclear power point are not going so well and are over-budget by an order of magnitude.

Then these people who can't even build/dismantle a plant (see the many Areva scandals) would like us to believe they can build an underground storage area for highly radioactive materials that's gonna be safe for at least 100 000 years? Despite growing evidence of the contrary

There's also growing evidence that nuclear and renewables tend to be incompatible, mostly because nuclear means a grid with huge centers of energy production, far away from energy consumption (the opposite is true with renewables).

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#315

Post by Armisael16 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #312
Armisael16 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not corn? My understanding is that it’s one of the most efficient crops in calories/acre terms (which is presumably what you actually care about, not kg/acre).

My guess is that counterintuitively but unsurprisingly, you actually want to use crops that were previously inefficient to grow. Low yields per acre crops are more suitable to indoor vertical farming because of the benefit climate control, and lack of pests provides.

I don’t understand why those would preferentially help low yield crops more than high yield crops.

That would be very surprising to me.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#316

Post by perl4ever »

skissane wrote: post #126
maxharris wrote: post #59

Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. In that case, there’s not much sustainable about it. This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only sources of…

> 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…

When I read that timeline, it doesn't sound serious to me. If you're planning to do something in 40 years, then you don't have the faintest clue how to do it now, which means you don't know when you will know how to do it. It could be 5 years or 1,000 or never. You don't know what you don't know.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#317

Post by strken »

sir_bearington wrote: post #263
pfdietz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market forces already exist. And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere. But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuc…

No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone . Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage. By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen even…

You or I could go out today and buy off the counter parts, build a scale model of a pulley system, and use it to store power. We could have done that a century ago.

To the best of my knowledge, fusion only demonstrated net-positive energy production this decade, and hasn't yet reached ignition in a man-made device.

They're not the same.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#318

Post by jmchuster »

tux1968 wrote: post #203
jmchuster wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, which is why it doesn't make sense yet for countries like the US, where there is enough open land and connective infrastructure to grow plants with free sun energy. If you were to use solar, then you'd need a country that has a lot of land that would be better used on solar panels rather than farmland, so maybe one that is mostly tundras or deserts.

I was really only addressing the notion that vertical farming took up more land. If we have as much extra land as you say, the point is irrelevant anyway. But you need to remember that there are real costs to industrial farming on land. The use of pesticides, fertilizers and topsoil loss. There are a lot of benefits to vertical farming if it can be made to work economically.

Well, the primary costs today are water and labor. Fertilizers and such don't really cost much, which is why we always just overfertilize and now are causing runoff problems.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#319

Post by [deleted] »

tux1968 wrote: post #203
jmchuster wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, which is why it doesn't make sense yet for countries like the US, where there is enough open land and connective infrastructure to grow plants with free sun energy. If you were to use solar, then you'd need a country that has a lot of land that would be better used on solar panels rather than farmland, so maybe one that is mostly tundras or deserts.

I was really only addressing the notion that vertical farming took up more land. If we have as much extra land as you say, the point is irrelevant anyway. But you need to remember that there are real costs to industrial farming on land. The use of pesticides, fertilizers and topsoil loss. There are a lot of benefits to vertical farming if it can be made to work economically.

[deleted]

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#320

Post by perl4ever »

gh02t wrote: post #287
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.

Stars and fusion nuclear weapons exist. And I'm only half joking. The energy yield of fusion is there and the basic physics are pretty well understood. Progress has been agonizingly slow but steady. We generally understand what needs to be done to get there, but it's a slow and complicated process that will take a long time and several more expensive, large-scale tests like ITER to push it along. The payoff is still…

>barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project

The Manhattan project cost about $30 billion in today's dollars, I believe.

We have IPOs that raise close to that amount of money these days (e.g. Alibaba).

It's half a percent of federal spending in 2020 (admittedly not a normal year).

GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation.

Your matter of fact claim that there's not enough capital in today's world for fusion power development really makes me wonder.

Once upon a time, I read a comment by someone somewhere that "everyone" (who is "in the know") knows fusion break-even is infeasible, but the research is relevant to maintaining nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Besides, if fusion power was possible...wouldn't Elon Musk be working on it?

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