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Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

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Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#211

Post by konschubert »

ericd wrote: post #133
ta1243 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…

Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mi…

You can build wind to compensate some of this.

And of course a ton of short term storage.

And then you build a bunch of cheap, inefficient gas peaker plants for the two weeks a year where neither are enough.

At the moment it looks like that will be a lot cheaper than nuclear. But if nuclear gets cheaper, that’s also a great option!

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#212

Post by ryandrake »

Devasta wrote: post #82
dougmwne wrote: post #52

I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip…

I feel the same. The entire planet enacted a total reorganization of society in a matter of weeks! Oil is worthless if we aren't all consuming, governments can give generous payments to those who need it without nonsense about how we will pay for it, it was a frightening but honestly optimistic time, we had problems but they can be solved, its only a question of willpower. Now we can see that vast quantities of peopl…

> I feel the same. The entire planet enacted a total reorganization of society in a matter of weeks!

I'm not sure what this refers to but it's not COVID response. At least where I live (the USA), outside of the major metro areas, nothing was enforced except school closures. The Stay At Home "mandates" (more like suggestions) and business "closures" were all pretty much unenforced and widely ignored. Even if our government, by some miracle, manages to enact effective climate rules and legislation, it will be ignored if not enforced. You can't just write a law or set a mandate and then say "Well, our job is done!"

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#213

Post by layer8 »

Winse wrote: post #200
layer8 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the urge to open a window at those levels. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where that’s the base level.

you probably won't ever live in world where that's the base level: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... .

Obviously, as I won’t be alive anymore by the end of the century. I was responding to your suggestion of a “beautiful warm catastrophe/boon” due to high CO2 levels. I don’t see the boon.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#214

Post by beretguy »

ta1243 wrote: post #164
beretguy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not solar, wind and storage? Because it’s nowhere near effective enough. ———- I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+

Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation

What’s your point? Economy has to be stable/grow at the expanse of humankind going extinct?

I posted videos in reply to this comment:

> Why not solar, wind and storage?

So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#215

Post by raxxorraxor »

saywhanow wrote: post #199
retendo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the number one reason that nuclear gets a bad rep because there is no compelling solution for getting rid of the waste?

The waste problem is solved. As with the rest of the nuclear discussion, it’s mostly hysteria. Here’s a guy kissing nuclear waste. It’s a bit tongue in cheek on the surface, but he’s PhD and there is quality information in the video. https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU?si=wE0FvscMgBpLUZ0g

The waste problem is pretty much not solved. Neither on the technical, nor the political front. That doesn't mean nuclear isn't an option.

Try to list the countries with a permanent nuclear storage site. Pretty short list.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#216

Post by timeon »

konschubert wrote: post #176
timeon wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society. Still needed to some extent even in your optimistic scenario. Because growth is increasing so is demand. New sources of energy are not displacing old ones. Just covering new demand.

Coal is being displaced already.

Sorry I forgot to include some data that motivated me to post it. If we are talking about coal, for example this graph [0]. There it seems that coal is actually growing.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#217

Post by wakawaka28 »

questinthrow wrote: post #203
wakawaka28 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature does not make these WEF/Davos "elites" do the things they do. They are so rich that they can move anywhere and do anything. They want us to eat bugs and have zero kids, before euthanizing us at an early age. If they can't do that, they'll find a way to start a world war to kill us off.

This response is totally unrelated to my post however it does bring up a good point. There is this narrative where we are all victims of the elites and everything bad is because of the elites and so on and so forth. This is just a means to cope and protect our ego because we basically arent doing anything to help our current situation so we need a scapegoat. It's common human nature

It's not a coping mechanism. These guys meet at least annually to imagine new ways to screw us. If anyone has an ego it's them, trying to tell us stupid shit about how to live our lives. They aren't scapegoats, they're wolves in sheeps clothing.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#218

Post by thiht »

retendo wrote: post #72
CM30 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people. I suspect this is because of a mixture of things: 1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter. 2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive…

Isn't the number one reason that nuclear gets a bad rep because there is no compelling solution for getting rid of the waste?

At least the waste is not dumped in the atmosphere. We have better waste management for nuclear than coal or oil.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#219

Post by thiht »

master-lincoln wrote: post #115
tompccs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.

Climate activists are to blame for much of climate change because they advocated against using one risky form of energy production? There were other options and the option of reducing energy usage (and standard of living). So I agree that activists might be responsible for nuclear energy decline in the west, but not that they are to blame for climate change because of that.

> the option of reducing energy usage (and standard of living)

That was never an option. It still isn’t.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#220

Post by guepe »

tonyarkles wrote: post #127
ta1243 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…

Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation c…

I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !
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