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

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

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 217 posts

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

#121

Post by rbanffy »

dredmorbius wrote: post #27
rbanffy wrote: post #24

Has anyone tried desalination with geothermal sources?

Two challenges off the top: ⚫ Geothermal is available in limited areas. Few of those are proximate to salt water (though in Japan, Hawaii, and the Philippines this might be the case). I'm not aware that freshwater supplies are critically limited in any of those areas, however. ⚫ Geothermal itself tends to have substantial water requirements as a heat transfer / working fluid. Replenishing groundwater liberated throug…

What if we used geothermal sources just to boil water, not generate energy to desalinate it, and just free that water vapor to the atmosphere?

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

#122

Post by vacri »

saulrh wrote: post #95
techdmn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years

You can take a landfill, put dirt over the top, and now you have parkland for people to use. It's happened to two intracity landfills within a couple of kilometers of where I live. The same can't be done with nuclear waste.

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

#123

Post by moocowduckquack »

saulrh wrote: post #95
techdmn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

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

The UK is currently committing to building a whole new set of boiling water reactors while still having not made up its mind about the location of the UK long term waste store, which is taking a while as for reasons of politics, the government is relying on voluteerism rather than geologic suitability to decide where in the country to put it.

We did have a breeder reactor in Dounreay. It is shut down now and the surrounding beaches are off limits for a while, due to old fuel rod fragments being pumped into the sea. The management were also prosecuted for dumping solid nuclear waste in landfill.

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

#124

Post by cgrubb »

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…

I think this is the mine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Ranch-Highland

This is the process:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_leaching#Uranium

Hard to evaluate how serious the problem is without knowing how toxic and radioactive the waste is and how large the underground aquifers are.

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

#125

Post by moocowduckquack »

sp332 wrote: post #112
DerpDerpDerp wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We think you're defending coal because you say things like "Coal doesn't need a replacement [...] a nuclear plant is not an acceptable way to generate energy" despite the fact that the coal plants are way more polluting and radioactive.

"Coal doesn't need a replacement, we need to start using energy responsibly." That means: stop using coal, and don't replace it with anything. Just stop using so much power.

Tricky to do that without a lot of people dying. Also, if you honestly think that, then what are you doing wasting joules chatting idly on the internet?

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

#126

Post by grecy »

DerpDerpDerp wrote: post #107
grecy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What in rural Wyoming would ever justify spending half a million dollars for a single water well? You need to think further into the future. What happens in 50-100-200 years when all the surface and near-surface water is spoken for, and there is literally not enough water for the population to even drink? (If you think I've being doomsdayish, this actually happens in Australia - a buddy of mine with a newborn in a…

I mean, on those time scales we could (more expensively) desalinate water using fusion power.

Just because we might have the ability to repair some of the damage we've done to the planet in the future, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to reduce that damage now.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #125
sp332 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Coal doesn't need a replacement, we need to start using energy responsibly." That means: stop using coal, and don't replace it with anything. Just stop using so much power.

Tricky to do that without a lot of people dying. Also, if you honestly think that, then what are you doing wasting joules chatting idly on the internet?

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by Drakim »

schiffern wrote: post #61
narrator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm all for figuring out how to use the nanobots we have (aka biology). Advantage: they self-replicate royalty free, something the nanobot company would never allow.

You just need a DRM server which each nanobot must obtain a proper license key from every cycle.

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

#130

Post by msandford »

pdonis wrote: post #113
rsync wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wonder in amazement how a chernobyl or fukushima isn't happening every year. Comparing Fukushima and Chernobyl is like comparing apples and turds. The debacle at Fukushima had nothing to do with the reactor design; it was due to the braindead siting of the backup diesel generators and their switchgear behind a seawall that got overrun by the tsunami. The reactor design itself was fine, and in fact has withstood loss…

Yeah but the notion that you can have a power plant which requires outside power in order to not melt-down is -- frankly -- retarded.

Imagine a coal plant that burns down 100,000 acres around it if the primary coal containment system (made up) loses power. Would anyone like that in their backyard?

Or a hydro plant that if power isn't continuously supplied to, not only could the dam breach and flood downhill but also somehow miraculously uphill too (not realistic but comparative to nukes).

That's what a nuclear power plant that can't slowly coast to a stop is like. I don't care how many backups and backups of backups you have, if physics isn't on your side if/when the plant loses power it's a horrible design.

EDIT: a few changes for clarity

Post reply on HN