Vertical farming does not save space • Hacker News Board

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#431

Post by wainstead » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 3:58 AM UTC

bpodgursky wrote: post #346

wainstead wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Judging vertical farming based on the performance of wheat is not valid. When I saw the test crop was wheat, I scrolled to see if there were any other crops, saw that there weren't, and abandoned the article because wheat has among the worst yields per area (in terms of kg of edible product per sq meters). I want to stress this point. Crops like wheat, rice, and corn are not suitable for vertical farming. No vertic…

> Water from precipitation is a fraction of the water needed in areas like the American central plains where the Ogallala Aquifer has been pumped out for decades This isn't true. Much (at least a couple of years ago, most) corn in the midwest is not irrigated. Rainfall is common enough over the summer that it almost always works out OK, and if it doesn't, you write it off to crop insurance. Edit: double checked, stil…

Indeed, I stand corrected! While the Ogallala is still in trouble from over pumping, you’ve shown corn is mostly rain fed.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#432

Post by belorn » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

dale_glass wrote: post #382

sir_bearington wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Introduce carbon taxes and all of a sudden nuclear becomes a lot more viable. Existing plans for renewables are for them to exist in a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplementing them when the conditions are right. Make it so that using fossil fuels for even 20% or 10% of electricity generation is prohibitively expensive, and people will switch to nuclear power. Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So wa…

"Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So was Belgium. Both of those have achieve majority nuclear power generation, and France over 70%." That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more competitive now. Nobody is building more nuclear right now. True, there's paranoia, but there's also economics. And I'm not talking about fossil fuels either. Here's what I expect to happen to…

One can look at Sweden and the green parties strategy for dealing with grid instability. Government are interested in a stable grid so they pay fossil fueled power plants to operate in backup mode. That way the power plant get paid twice, once by the government and then for any power that they manage to sell.

The second part to the plan is to spend a lot of tax money expanding the power lines to nearby country in order to increase the capacity for importing energy from nearby countries coal based power plants.

As a conclusion I agree that the people that build power plants don't care about the system as a whole. The government however do care about stability and mine is perfectly fine with spending tax money on that. Politically, voters are not going to be upset that money is spent on grid stability, even if then ends up in the hands of owners of fossil fueled power plants.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#433

Post by gh02t » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:27 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #424

gh02t wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the raw numbers in terms of cost I don't think quite gives the right picture, you have to think about scale of investment. Whole (large) towns and biggest-in-the-world facilities were raised and the brightest minds committed. And it would likely take longer. Maybe a better comparison would be to the Manhattan project and the atomic weapons research apparatus in the decades that followed. Current input to fu…

>you have to think about scale of investment That's what I was doing... >currently fusion is not an appealing private investment outside of philanthropy. There are a lot of up front costs and uncertainty for a payoff that is way down the road As opposed to the Mars rocket business? As opposed to money-losing biotech? Bitcoin, now representing around $1 trillion in total? Is the disinterest in long term investments wh…

It's not a few billion dollars, it's hundreds, and probably decades before it pays off. Private investors have dabbled with alternative approaches to fusion that promise lower costs, but none of them have really panned out and it's pretty much all fallen to government sponsored research.

I expect private investment will pick up eventually, when the technology is a little closer to market. I'm not at all disagreeing that we should be investing more in it and that it's looking increasingly urgent, it's still a relatively small effort compared to other things.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#434

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

Seb-C wrote: post #398

bildung wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a political problem which has nothing to do to with technology or costs themselves. No, nowhere in the world is nuclear power economically competitive. Construction costs are about 3x-4x the cost per kW compared to solar or wind. [0 page 11][1] > nuclear is doing fine and growing in many countries, including China. No, net nuclear plants in Asia are not increasing. [0 page 4] [0] https://www.diw.de/document…

> No, nowhere in the world is nuclear power economically competitive. I only said that the problems in France are mostly due to politics, and so that we cannot use this specific example as an argument. This does not imply any affirmation from me about the absolute costs. > No, net nuclear plants in Asia are not increasing. Your link (0) page 4 only shows that the construction rate is not especially increasing lately.…

> I only said that the problems in France are mostly due to politics

The problems in France are because they screwed the pooch on building the latest reactor design. This wasn't politics, it was failure to execute.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#435

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

jariel wrote: post #363

gh02t wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a nuclear engineer working at a laboratory known for fusion research. Commercial fusion power at any scale is not happening by 2030. 2040 or 2050 are more realistic and may still be a stretch.

Help me answer this: If it's 'likely' to happen, then why are we not allocating 10's of billions towards it right now, to accelerate it so that it happens in 5 years? Many, many things can be done in parrallel. Some effort would be wasted, bit it'd be worth it. If fusion works, it's basically going to be priceless in terms of impact and value. Even starting to account for climate change ... we could suck Co2 out of t…

It's not likely to work in the sense of being profitable to build the reactors. There are fundamental engineering constraints that make it unlikely to be competitive.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#436

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #399

selectodude wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state…

> But is it more expensive than... Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie. > We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usab…

Reprocessing went out of fashion because it's economically pointless. Separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value -- it costs more to fabricate fuel from it than it would to use freshly enriched uranium.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#437

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #300

benjaminjackman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant advances in superconductors achieved after ITER was planned out. Also, if the new superconductors do work out, it's very likely that all other forms of energy generation and grid level storage will become almost immediately obsolete and any additional focus moving forward would be only on improvi…

If ITER proves its style to be a success (what may happen this decade, but I'm not holding my breath), we can expect a decade (about half the time of the original) to just complete the first generation of commercially viable reactors (what ITER will not be). After that, lithium supplied T grows exponentially with the reactor usage, with a doubling time of a bit less than a decade. So, if it becomes the bottleneck (wh…

It would take far longer than a decade, and I think likely would never happen at all.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#438

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

extropy wrote: post #269

asimpletune wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem with ITER is that it’s only point is to demonstrate ignition. It’s completely unfeasible as an actual power plant. I’m not saying it’s not useful, but rather it has a close to 0% chance of producing a scalable power plant, whereas some of the other smaller scale operations are less likely to reach ignition, but if they do so more likely to result in a viable design at scale.

It's purpose certainly is to demonstrate net positive energy production. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER Thereby the machine aims to demonstrate, for the first time in a fusion reactor, the principle of producing more thermal power than is used to heat the plasma. The total electricity consumed by the reactor and facilities will range from 110 MW up to 620 MW peak for 30-second periods during plasma operation.[6…

It could demonstrate net power production, at a power density 400 times worse than a fission reactor. It will not have, and not demonstrate, the tritium breeding blankets necessary for a commercial reactor. And the materials in the first wall (CuZr alloys) are not suitable for a reactor operating in near steady state.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#439

Post by hultner » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #402

hultner wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, I’ve worked on large scale projects to enable farming in deserts using underground vertical farms.

Where can I learn more about these underground vertical farms in the deserts?

Hmmm, that’s a good question, I couldn’t find much information publicly available and I can of course not disclose internal. But there’s a little in this annual report from 2015. There’s an rudimentary illustration on the second page. Unfortunately it doesn’t include many of the details which I found most impressive, we had just started the project in 2015, so that might be why.

https://assets-global.website-files.com/5ef8b3d80f5e290ff335...

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#440

Post by skissane » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #424

gh02t wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the raw numbers in terms of cost I don't think quite gives the right picture, you have to think about scale of investment. Whole (large) towns and biggest-in-the-world facilities were raised and the brightest minds committed. And it would likely take longer. Maybe a better comparison would be to the Manhattan project and the atomic weapons research apparatus in the decades that followed. Current input to fu…

>you have to think about scale of investment That's what I was doing... >currently fusion is not an appealing private investment outside of philanthropy. There are a lot of up front costs and uncertainty for a payoff that is way down the road As opposed to the Mars rocket business? As opposed to money-losing biotech? Bitcoin, now representing around $1 trillion in total? Is the disinterest in long term investments wh…

> As opposed to the Mars rocket business?

SpaceX talks a lot about Mars, but so far they've mostly stuck to Earth orbit, because that's where the money is. They are starting to do some Moon-related stuff – because both NASA and space tourists will pay to go there. Even Starship, which was designed as a vehicle to get to Mars, most of its actual use is going to be Earth orbit or lunar, it is going to be very many years before its Martian use cases outnumber its Earth/Moon ones.

SpaceX will probably fund a few unmanned trips to Mars out of their own pocket – land a couple of Starships containing supplies that might be useful to future colonists. But I'm sure straight after doing that they'll be knocking on NASA's door suggesting that NASA pay them for some Mars missions... imagine how many (and how big) rovers you could fit on a Starship.

Musk has said he wants SpaceX to develop the necessary transport technologies to support colonisation of Mars – and they'll try to use non-Mars-related revenue sources to pay for that development. But he's also said the role of actually setting up a Martian colony (as opposed to just providing transportation to get there) won't fall to SpaceX.

I have a theory – which could just be wild speculation on my part – at some point Musk is going to set up something like a "Mars Colonisation Foundation" as a non-profit tasked with colonising Mars. And when he dies he's going to leave it the vast bulk of his assets to it (I'm sure he'll leave his family enough to live comfortably, but they don't need billions to do that). And the "Foundation" will end up owning a big chunk of SpaceX, and will be a major customer of SpaceX, but will remain separate from it. It will actually try to pay for the colonisation of Mars, not SpaceX themselves. And it will stick at it as long as it takes (even if it takes a few lifetimes to pull it all off.)