171–180 of 231 posts
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No, that's not possible due to conservation of angular momentum. Only tidal effects can transfer some of it to the sun.
Tidal effects mostly transfers it to the moon, the sun has almost no tidal effects.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides...>
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> things like solar and batteries. Magnets too - let's just go magnets everywhere. Reality is solar isn't viable everywhere. And it's not optimal to put it in places where you use the sun to grow food. We should follow a holistic approach. * Wind where it's windy. * Solar where it's sunny - ideally on buildings/away from farms. * Hydro where possible. * Nuclear where it makes sense, i.e. stable geography, low occuren…
Why doesn't Geothermal make your list?
There was a decent science fiction serris based on this premise: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/700919.Signal_to_Noise https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/737628.A_Signal_Shattere...
"Decent"
There was a decent science fiction serris based on this premise: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/700919.Signal_to_Noise https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/737628.A_Signal_Shattere...
The first one was where I first encountered the idea of the "One Electron Universe":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
A major plot point of these books is an alien technology that enables teleportation by somehow tapping into the Earth's angular momentum.
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> things like solar and batteries. Magnets too - let's just go magnets everywhere. Reality is solar isn't viable everywhere. And it's not optimal to put it in places where you use the sun to grow food. We should follow a holistic approach. * Wind where it's windy. * Solar where it's sunny - ideally on buildings/away from farms. * Hydro where possible. * Nuclear where it makes sense, i.e. stable geography, low occuren…
What do you base all these claims on? Plenty of papers show Solar + wind + storage is viable practically everywhere. Also there is a ton of research on planning energy systems and what technology mixes make sense. This stuff has to be economical. Energy costs are measured in percentage of GDP. Simply liking nuclear doesn't make it viable. Especially in a world with PV meaning you can't sell energy during the day. The…
You don't want a state primarily on solar if you get a super cell darkening the sky for a week.
You want a mix of renewables, but you don't strictly want to rely on the food graces of mother nature at all times.
Boiling things down to just price is a very simplistic view.
Wouldn't this eventually slow down Earth's rotation? The rotational kinetic energy of our planet is 1/5 M * R^2 * w^2 with (approximately) M = 6e34 kg, R = 6.3e6m, w = 7.4e-5 rad/s, which gives approximately 5e36 joules. Yearly we need roughly 3e16 Wh. Yeah ok there's plenty. Woah! (also, I may be off by some orders of magnitude)
Where does the angular momentum go?
A bad question, as it has been doing that literally (rotationally) since before life started. This power is busy generating the magnetosphere. We would not be enjoying our nice oxygen atmosphere and would be as dead as Mars if Earth's rotation wasn't also powering a dynamo.
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The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. Nuclear doesn’t make sense economically compared to things like solar and batteries.
I haven't seen any data that backs that up based on general principals. Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements - however well founded. Also, remember that nuclear, unlike solar, has a lot of room for improvement still, both in how it's done, and how it's regulated. Solar has already been tremendously optimized, while nuclear has not. The cost argument seems to be advances by the same peo…
I'm a lftr fanboy, but nuclear had its time to optimize.
I can't believe you're calling Chernobyl "minor". Go take a vacation there if you disagree.
Anyway, nuclear is not cost competitive in the real world, imo it never will be with solid fuel, nor will it be safe. Certainly not with standards like yours.
It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the last 70 years.
Solve the waste problem and you solve nuclear. Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) I used to have a neighbor who worked for the DOE, all of the viable solutions are blocked by people who don’t want it in their backyard. Can’t really mo…