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

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:16 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #156

rbanffy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water would rain down eventually and replenish natural reservoirs. This, of course, further limits where the plant must be located (coastal areas would not be adequate for this)

There's no assurance the water would rain down where you wanted it to. Since the Earth is radiating its heat anyway , just over more area, you're also only transferring that evaporation to specific locations (though it's possible that goethermal heat would radiate into space without heating and vaporizing water in some cases). On a net basis the effect would likely be too small to matter. I suspect utilizing the heat…

Post by arethuza » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:31 AM UTC

yardie wrote: post #171

deskglass wrote: post #71

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That redevelopment would have been extremely reasonable if they were the mayor of Sunnydale. Also, unless that were the only school in the area, your question may have been unproductive. The marginal value to society of a commercial installation can be greater than that of a school.

I'm going to need context for this. People will commute for hours per week to buy/rent a home in a good school district. I'm looking into school right now where homes in the neighbourhood are $1MM+. I can't afford that so I'll try and get our kid in through the special snowflake waiver. People will spend ungodly amounts of money to move to an area with decent schools.

Post by scotty79 » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:29 PM UTC

techdmn wrote: post #82

ars wrote: post #65

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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.

Post by webmaven » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:09 PM UTC

unabridged wrote: post #154

jessaustin wrote: post #147

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Why don't they do that then? Why do I keep seeing news of waste languishing in temporary storage, being "secretly" moved to different temporary storage, drifting in dust form over entire communities, leaking out into groundwater, etc.? Maybe DOE should hire some HN experts so they'll learn how the job ought to be done? As much money as the nuclear industry has stolen from taxpayers, I think they can afford you.

They tried to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... But "environmentalists" stepped in and ended funding. Now we are stuck with the current situation of pretty much every power plant for themselves and storage all over the country.

Post by khafra » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:22 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #105

gaius wrote: post #100

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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.

If you harvest solar energy you can do a whole lot of work without worrying about any new heat. Harvesting a tiny fraction of the total solar energy available (on Earth) would look an awful lot like a miracle.