Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is WWS in this context?
Wind, Water, Sunlight.
Sometimes I really wish people would just write things out instead of trying to save time with needless acronyms...
Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
201–210 of 304 posts
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#202Everytime you take your car think about the discomfort you felt by reading the headline.
On the one hand, it is easy to see the direct link. OTOH, you can't blame a person - or company - for playing according to the rules of the game. It comes down to: "Why should I eschew a car and take 250% longer to travel places on COVID infested public transport, when my neighbour Bob jumps in his BMW SUV and drives." We need leadership from lawmakers or nothing meaningful will happen.
Anyone who thinks they are going to make a difference by abstaining from driving their car is woefully misinformed.
We have cargo ships right now that are burning dirty oil and producing massive amounts of pollution. It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars.
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#203Maybe it's time to start talking about ways humanity can geo-engineer our way out of this instead of just sitting here waiting to suffer. The US Air Force has been interested in this topic for decades, but there's no way to know how viable any of that research actually is. Some of the speculative documents I've read propose using carbon black dust as a way to artificially reflect heat, like https://web.archive.org/we…
Sounds like the precursor idea to Snowpiercer. Then again, I can easily see Jeff Bezos operating a train like that in the movie, so maybe it was less fiction than I thought.
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#204I am from Pakistan and have quite a few cities there were temperature goes up to 50 degrees Celsius. I am living in UK these days and feel that UKs cold will kill me. Summer is the only one or two months when I feel alive.
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#205Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.
Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount. Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.
> Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.
Are there numbers for this? One one hand solar might provide more energy than nuclear if you're only interested in heat generation, but on the other hand using heat to desalinate (ie. boiling water) is also less efficient than using reverse osmosis.
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does nuclear need fresh water? I'd imagine salt water would wreck all the equipment, and you probably don't want to use up all the fresh water you generate...
You need very pure water for most portions of a nuclear power plan.
that'd depend on the reactor type, no?
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the more compelling geoengineering strategies I've seen discussed has been Olivine weathering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine
"All the CO2 that is produced by burning one liter of oil can be sequestered by less than one liter of olivine." [1]. Given that formulation I assume that the amount of olivine needed is the same order of magnitude as the 1 liter of oil to produce the CO2. The world is consuming 97 Mio barrels of oil per day [2]. I doubt we can mine that amount of olivine on a daily basis. Is it even available in that quantity? How i…
We can muster whatever we want if there's sufficient need/desire.
In energy-tech, a useful metric is energy-return-on-energy-investment -- a saudi oil well returns 40 units of energy for each unit of energy required for extraction, tar sands are something like 3:1, solar panels are something like 5:1.
Taking that mindset, what's the ratio of CO2-sequested-for-CO2-required-to-mine? Yes, we can get better numbers if we electrify all the heavy machinery and power it with solar, but given that heavy mining trucks are largely fossil fuel powered, where are we today?
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.
Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount. Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.
Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.
That statement doesn't make any sense to me. If you need more power, install more panels. Space certainly isn't an issue in like northern Africa. It is cheaper to order a gigawatt or more of solar panels than building a new nuclear reactor, and faster to set up too. Even Germany today has way more solar capacity than it ever had in nuclear, and it is less a great place for solar than Africa.
Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.
Yes, solar is dirt cheap energy and you wouldn’t need much of a battery (or any?) in this case, since you can store the excess product water in a tank. I power my water maker with about 1400 watts and can make 35 gallons an hour. The panels, electronics and water maker were ~ $5000. I did the work myself at a slow pace, so not sure what the labor costs would be. I set my system up in about 2 weeks. The requirements a…
$5000 in a third world country is quite a lot.
For context, according to CEIC data [1], the average salary in Algeria is about $300 per month. That "dirt cheap" project of yours is more than a year's worth of labor.
Locally priced goods may be cheaper, but the US does benefit from a more direct shipping line with China (where most of these products come from, especially cheap solar panels). There's repair costs to be taken into account and if these become a necessity, you'll also have to take into account some kind of protection for when those without the means to buy one of these setups become desperate.
It's true that solar is relatively safe and cheap compared to other power sources, but projects like these are difficult to map to places where they can make a life-or-death difference. If things were that easy, we'd probably cover a patch of Sahara desert with solar panels and power the entire African continent for decades, with power to spare to export to other continents.
[1]: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/algeria/average-monthly-wages