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Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

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Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#91

Post by [deleted] »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #89
pilom wrote: post #6

Funny for this to come up now. I'm reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner now which is all about water policy in the western US. The short answer is that we consume WAY more water than all of the precipitation on the entire region can support so we end up depleting the aquifers. Eventually (likely within my lifetime) those will dry up and they we will have to either start diverting water from Canada and Alaska, or d…

It's bad enough to consume more water than is replenished by precipitation, but it's even worse considering that the recent century or so of precipitation (i.e. the entire development of the West) may have been a pretty wet outlier compared to the last millennium.[0] At the same time, I've learned never to underestimate the power of people to respond to incentives, and I don't want to overstate the doom-factor. But i…

[deleted]

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#92

Post by rsync »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #29
peterwwillis wrote: post #17

For example, in eastern Wyoming, an analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves. That, plus an untested assumption that all the deep layers below it could only contain poor-quality water, led regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs…

The current nuclear industry has some serious downsides. The only reason established nuclear is presented as ecological is due to the discussion about climate impact. Without the CO2 blinkers on though, it is pretty fucking messy.

Three step process:

1) buy perrows book "normal accidents"

2) read the nuclear accident chapters

3) begin marching in the streets at the sign of any new old-style nuclear plants, or the continued operation of the existing ones.

optional:

4) wonder in amazement how a chernobyl or fukushima isn't happening every year. That type of nuclear power generation really is that terrible.

(note - I am actually pro-nuclear-power ... just not the way we do it now)

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#93

Post by Crito »

gaius wrote: post #74
narrator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kurzweil would probably respond that nanobots and the singularity will fix everything.

Kurzweil believes that being very very small allows you to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics. There's no physics to back this up...

What do you mean? I can't find anything about that and Kurzweil on google.

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#94

Post by sourkremlin »

gaius wrote: post #74
narrator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kurzweil would probably respond that nanobots and the singularity will fix everything.

Kurzweil believes that being very very small allows you to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics. There's no physics to back this up...

Sure there is. The second law of thermodynamics (which I am assuming you are referring to) only applies to an isolated system and describes its tendency toward thermal equilibrium -- it doesn't apply when you are able to add energy to the system.

Am I misunderstanding you?

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#95

Post by saulrh »

techdmn wrote: post #82
ars wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Photovoltaic solar produces lots of waste, more than nuclear. And it requires lots of land. Solar thermal is much more efficient but it's expensive and no one seems to be doing it in scale. And it too requires lots of land. And don't say we have lots of land, we do, but it's remote, so you need a lot of infrastructure to make use of it. We can do that (we did for hydrocarbons), but it's not a slam dunk. Becaus…

I continue to be confused about how nuclear can be considered better / cheaper / cleaner without factoring the cost of storing the waste for 10,000 years. We seem to struggle with unintended consequences of waste management on the decade scale, let alone several millennia.

Plastic bags last longer in landfills than nuclear waste will last in a repository; plastic photodegrades in about 500 years, multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years [1]. Nuclear waste is fundamentally static; unlike tailings, it pretty much stays where you put it. Coal plants actually produce titanic amounts of radiation, vastly more than nuke plants, thanks to impurities in coal, and that radioactivity is going straight into the atmosphere [2]. Nuke plants don't produce that much waste in the first place; thirty tons a year, compared to millions of tons of radioactive, caustic fly ash [3, 4]. And, finally, the kinds of nuclear reactors we can build these days simply don't produce waste that lasts that long; a good breeder reactor eats anything that's immediately dangerous (short half-life -> lots of radiation) or long-term dangerous (long half-life -> not much radiation) [5].

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_plant#Radioactive_trace_el... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#High-level_waste [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Environmental_problems [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#96

Post by cbr »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #85
gwern wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in rural Wyoming would ever justify spending half a million dollars for a single water well? I do not think an example like the massive urban conglomeration of Mexico City (greater area: 21.2 million people) naturally analogizes to such areas.

They redirect water from Northern to Southern California. Why not from rural Wyoming to, say, Colorado? We may have 5M people here, and are chronically short of water. The water from Colorado (via the Colorado River) also supplies Utah, Arizona, Southern California, Nevada, and Mexico with water. All of those areas need more water; even if Colorado stays at its current demand level, you could imagine one or more of t…

    Pretty much every drop of the Colorado River
    is owned by someone.
The river is actually overcommitted:

    When the Colorado River Compact was drafted in
    the 1920s, it was based on barely 30 years of
    streamflow records that suggested an average
    annual flow of 17.5 million acre feet past Lee's
    Ferry. Modern studies of tree rings revealed
    that those three decades were probably the
    wettest in the past 500 to 1,200 years – and
    that the natural long-term annual flow past
    Lee's Ferry is probably closer to 13.5 million
    acre feet, as compared to the natural flow at
    the mouth of 16.3 million acre feet.  This has
    resulted in more water being allocated to river
    users than actually flows through the Colorado.

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#97

Post by Crito »

mrottenkolber wrote: post #86
ars wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And coal power is like a constant never ending fukushima. It's gut, but un-informed feelings like yours that are the cause of so much environmental destruction. > I knew people first hand who died from chernobyl's toxic rain. And I know of people who today are suffering from asthma and lung cancer from coal's toxic exhaust. And newsflash: There are way way way way more of them.

Why do you assume I am defending coal? It's irrational confidence like yours that nuclear power is in any way safe, and therefore a good replacement. Coal doesn't need a replacement, we need to start using energy responsibly. That means not using energy when we don't have it. A nuclear plant is not an acceptable way to generate energy.

Arguing against nuclear is de facto arguing for coal. Current options for renewable baseload power generation are limited. This will with any luck change sometime in the future, but in the present less nuclear means more coal.

Using less power is not a realistic proposal. You should not expect that to be taken seriously.

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#98

Post by cbr »

ars wrote: post #65
schiffern wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And solar is rapidly out-competing and out-innovating both.

Maybe. Photovoltaic solar produces lots of waste, more than nuclear. And it requires lots of land. Solar thermal is much more efficient but it's expensive and no one seems to be doing it in scale. And it too requires lots of land. And don't say we have lots of land, we do, but it's remote, so you need a lot of infrastructure to make use of it. We can do that (we did for hydrocarbons), but it's not a slam dunk. Becaus…

    Solar thermal is much more efficient but it's expensive
    and no one seems to be doing it in scale.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_System... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS10_solar_power_plant

Re: Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

#100

Post by gaius »

sourkremlin wrote: post #94
gaius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kurzweil believes that being very very small allows you to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics. There's no physics to back this up...

Sure there is. The second law of thermodynamics (which I am assuming you are referring to) only applies to an isolated system and describes its tendency toward thermal equilibrium -- it doesn't apply when you are able to add energy to the system. Am I misunderstanding you?

Simply that nanotech can accomplish miracles. You have to power your nanobots somehow, and you have to dump the heat they create by doing work.
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