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Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

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Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#91

Post by Reason077 »

SECProto wrote: post #63
bee_rider wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m reading this report correctly: https://julkaisut.hel.fi/en/reports/environmental-report-202... It looks like the emissions for the Helsinki area are 2,345 kt per year, so I guess 21 kt is only a small part of that. Of course, no one project should be expected to solve everything! But it is depressing to see the scale of the problem.

1% reduction from one project seems pretty decent to me. Especially when it's just from reusing pre-existing caverns from oil storage to decrease the district heat emissions. Heating emissions for a city at 60° North are a big challenge to reduce, and combined heat and power is a huge efficiency gain - the heat is otherwise wasted, and thermal emissions are an environmental issue in their own right. The emissions cou…

Nuclear is often touted as a carbon solution (especially here on HN!) but the enormous cost and long construction times make it somewhat ineffective at reducing emissions compared to other technologies.

Given that governments and utilities operate with finite budgets, for each € invested in nuclear, we’re actually much better off investing in lower-cost, lower-risk projects and technologies (renewables, electrification, heat pumps, grid upgrades, insulation, storage, etc) that deliver more carbon savings per € spent much more quickly.

To put this in perspective: you could build on the order of 1000 Mustikkamaa heat caverns for the price of one nuclear plant!

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#92

Post by askonomm »

anttiharju wrote: post #89
euroderf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finns will say that Estonian sounds like some kind of really odd super-rural accent. Estonians will say they wonder why the heck it takes a Finn twice as long as an Estonian to say the same thing.

Haha yeah definitely! I was watching the news where Estonian people were interviewed. While there were Finnish subtitles I could understand maybe half of the sentences without them, but the words would be "really odd super-rural", which I found funny. Also, I'm not sure if it's a thing in Estonian, but I've heard in Lithuania or Latvian there's no distinction between spoken and written language. Example from Finnish:…

Same in Estonian.

Minä -> mä is Mina -> Ma (meaning "me")

Meie -> Me (meaning "us")

Tema -> ta (meaning "him/her")

I once did a duolingo course on Finnish and was surprised to find how much of it is almost literally the same, both in having almost the same amount of cases (we have 14, Finnish has 15), and that the overall structure is the same, meaning the biggest hurdle for me to learn Finnish is not so much the langauge, but the vocabulary. While a lot of Finnish words are almost identical in Estonian, there's also quite a few that actually mean things in Estonian, but totally different things than in Finnish.

A funny (or not funny?) example is "Raiska pappi", which in Estonian means "Spend/waste money", but in Finnish means "raping priest" or something like that.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#93

Post by ForHackernews »

TylerE wrote: post #81
ForHackernews wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were less investment in fossil fuel exploration, prices for fossil fuels could rise and airfare might be priced more appropriately. They would fly less because it cost more, or trains and boats might become more competitive. Moaning about individual "cognitive dissonance" is absolute nonsense when talking about global scale problems that require policy solutions. The activists' intuitions are more correct th…

What do you think trains and ships are fueled with exactly?

This level of comment is honestly insulting on this site.

In case anyone needs it spelled out: train and boat travel are vastly more energy efficient than air travel.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#94

Post by ForHackernews »

kortilla wrote: post #69
ForHackernews wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were less investment in fossil fuel exploration, prices for fossil fuels could rise and airfare might be priced more appropriately. They would fly less because it cost more, or trains and boats might become more competitive. Moaning about individual "cognitive dissonance" is absolute nonsense when talking about global scale problems that require policy solutions. The activists' intuitions are more correct th…

Protesting Chase doesn’t stop investments. It just pushes them elsewhere. Those activists are morons and stopping their flights would do far more to help than to protest a single bank. If they were protesting the government to massively increase oil taxes then you might have a point. Alas, they don’t have any economic intuition.

They're not protesting Chase, they're protesting fuel investments. If government did its job, this wouldn't even be needed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-...

> The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.

> Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course. Naughten, the Antarctic-ice scientist, reminded me that “climate is a spectrum; it isn’t an on/off switch.” Whenever we do make a different set of decisions, ones that make the math properly compute, we will be saving what we have left, preventing some layer of livability from being irrecoverably sloughed off and swept away.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#95

Post by heavenlyblue »

quacked wrote: post #60
nikanj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That tells you how pointless all the at-home energy savings are when everyone and their dog flies to a weekend getaway every month

I know people who attend sit-in protests at Chase Bank locations over fossil fuel divestment who also fly internationally 3-4 times per year for pleasure. The cognitive dissonance and lack of engineering intuition among the general populace is staggering.

Flying is only 1% of the total emissions

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#96

Post by TylerE »

ForHackernews wrote: post #93
TylerE wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think trains and ships are fueled with exactly?

This level of comment is honestly insulting on this site. In case anyone needs it spelled out: train and boat travel are vastly more energy efficient than air travel.

If fossil fuels rise, the cost of transportation of EVERYTHING goes up and the entire economy explode. Do you want 50% annual inflation? What you saw during COVID would only be a taste.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#97

Post by ForHackernews »

TylerE wrote: post #96
ForHackernews wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This level of comment is honestly insulting on this site. In case anyone needs it spelled out: train and boat travel are vastly more energy efficient than air travel.

If fossil fuels rise, the cost of transportation of EVERYTHING goes up and the entire economy explode. Do you want 50% annual inflation? What you saw during COVID would only be a taste.

Your comments are an insult to readers' intelligence. Efficiency is good. Cutting fossil fuel use ASAP is crucial for the future of humanity. Shifting demand from air travel to high speed rail and from air cargo to ocean freight are unalloyed goods.

If you want to bleat nonsense about imagined 50% inflation, please go do it on twitter.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#98

Post by TylerE »

ForHackernews wrote: post #97
TylerE wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If fossil fuels rise, the cost of transportation of EVERYTHING goes up and the entire economy explode. Do you want 50% annual inflation? What you saw during COVID would only be a taste.

Your comments are an insult to readers' intelligence. Efficiency is good. Cutting fossil fuel use ASAP is crucial for the future of humanity. Shifting demand from air travel to high speed rail and from air cargo to ocean freight are unalloyed goods. If you want to bleat nonsense about imagined 50% inflation, please go do it on twitter.

I suggest you read the HN guidelines about personal attacks.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#99

Post by SECProto »

Reason077 wrote: post #91
SECProto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% reduction from one project seems pretty decent to me. Especially when it's just from reusing pre-existing caverns from oil storage to decrease the district heat emissions. Heating emissions for a city at 60° North are a big challenge to reduce, and combined heat and power is a huge efficiency gain - the heat is otherwise wasted, and thermal emissions are an environmental issue in their own right. The emissions cou…

Nuclear is often touted as a carbon solution (especially here on HN!) but the enormous cost and long construction times make it somewhat ineffective at reducing emissions compared to other technologies. Given that governments and utilities operate with finite budgets, for each € invested in nuclear, we’re actually much better off investing in lower-cost, lower-risk projects and technologies (renewables, electrificati…

> for each € invested in nuclear, we’re actually much better off investing in lower-cost, lower-risk projects and technologies (renewables, electrification, heat pumps, grid upgrades, insulation, storage, etc) that deliver more carbon savings per € spent much more quickly.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think all those are key, and need to be focused on immediately. Those help to reduce demand, but (with the exception of renewables) don't help improve supply. If we want to eliminate carbon emissions worldwide, nuclear will be a key component (along with massive renewables). For example, the Japanese grid has been developing various renewables on superdrive since 2011, yet they are only at 20% renewable, with national carbon emissions ~500gCO2/kWh - dramatically higher than when their nuclear fleet was operational. Germany has been pushing renewables for close to two decades, but they closed down their nuclear plants and are similarly at ~500gCO2/kWh. France has had a nuclear-based grid for a couple decades and while it has its own issues, their emissions intensity is ~50gCO2/kWh. Ontario is hydro and nuke, they're ~100gCO2/kWh (some storage and more renewables would help them dramatically reduce emissions from gas, but current conservative premier spent billions scrapping that plan)

> To put this in perspective: you could build on the order of 1000 Mustikkamaa heat caverns for the price of one nuclear plant!

Yes, all you need is 1000 old oil storage caverns already dug sitting there waiting to be filled with water...

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#100

Post by dylan604 »

deadlyllama wrote: post #88
dylan604 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those protestors did not have tickets on those flights, somebody else would be able to purchase them. It's not like the plane isn't going to fly that route because of this. So whether the protesters fly or somebody else, the plane is still make the emissions you're concerned about.

If enough people didn't buy tickets, then the airlines would have to reduce capacity on the routes, and that would reduce emissions.

what's more likely, people stop traveling by plane, or these seats will remain filled? I'm all for making changes, but let's make them realistic ones with actual chances of getting implemented. the world is a big place, and air travel is not going to be replaced by steamships. we've been there, done that, and tired of the slowness. progress, not regression. improve the engines for air travel. don't expect air travel to stop
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