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[nenjin]

And the octopus thread is busy talking geopolitics.

[Dunamisdeos]

The geopolitics thread is talking about octopus engineering.

[PTTG??]

Solar panels are very, very easy to recycle, and they last at least 30 years. People have panels still in use today from the first generation of them.

Nuclear waste is... it's nuclear waste! I mean, it's the standard by which hard-to-dispose-of substances are measured!

[Kagus]

Nuclear waste is... it's nuclear waste! I mean, it's the standard by which hard-to-dispose-of substances are measured!

Well, some of it is. The low-level radiation waste, which is the most bountiful, is also the most easily disposed of as it becomes non-radioactive (or at least not harmfully radioactive) in fairly short order and/or can be recycled for other uses. It's the high-level radiation waste that's difficult and especially time-consuming to deal with, but that accounts for... 1.8% of total waste product? If I remember correctly?

Which I probably don't. The ol' noggin doesn't like holding on to things that aren't socially awkward circumstances from 10+ years ago.


Speaking of nukyular... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/22/putins-unlimited-range-nuclear-missile-crashed-22-miles-us-intelligence/

[smjjames]

Nuclear waste is... it's nuclear waste! I mean, it's the standard by which hard-to-dispose-of substances are measured!

Well, some of it is. The low-level radiation waste, which is the most bountiful, is also the most easily disposed of as it becomes non-radioactive (or at least not harmfully radioactive) in fairly short order and/or can be recycled for other uses. It's the high-level radiation waste that's difficult and especially time-consuming to deal with, but that accounts for... 1.8% of total waste product? If I remember correctly?

Which I probably don't. The ol' noggin doesn't like holding on to things that aren't socially awkward circumstances from 10+ years ago.


Speaking of nukyular... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/22/putins-unlimited-range-nuclear-missile-crashed-22-miles-us-intelligence/

If the thing is supposed to be fueled by a small nuclear after a certain point, it doesn’t make sense to try and use it before you know for sure it’s going to work, gotta be expensive having it crash, not to mention the cleanup.

Also, we actually toyed with the idea in the late 50’s, mid 60swhich would go at hypersonic ramjet speeds, even made a working engine before it got shelved due to being too provocative and ICBM tech was proving easier to develop.

Maybe time to dig those up again? If Putin is going to flaunt the ban on nuclear cruise missiles, two can play at that game.

[Dunamisdeos]

Nuclear waste is... it's nuclear waste! I mean, it's the standard by which hard-to-dispose-of substances are measured!

Well, some of it is. The low-level radiation waste, which is the most bountiful, is also the most easily disposed of as it becomes non-radioactive (or at least not harmfully radioactive) in fairly short order and/or can be recycled for other uses. It's the high-level radiation waste that's difficult and especially time-consuming to deal with, but that accounts for... 1.8% of total waste product? If I remember correctly?

Which I probably don't. The ol' noggin doesn't like holding on to things that aren't socially awkward circumstances from 10+ years ago.


Speaking of nukyular... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/22/putins-unlimited-range-nuclear-missile-crashed-22-miles-us-intelligence/

If the thing is supposed to be fueled by a small nuclear after a certain point, it doesn’t make sense to try and use it before you know for sure it’s going to work, gotta be expensive having it crash, not to mention the cleanup.

Also, we actually toyed with the idea in the late 50’s, mid 60swhich would go at hypersonic ramjet speeds, even made a working engine before it got shelved due to being too provocative and ICBM tech was proving easier to develop.

Maybe time to dig those up again? If Putin is going to flaunt the ban on nuclear cruise missiles, two can play at that game.

We all know where this ends, where every component on the missile from the thruster to individual LED's is powered by its own proportionally tiny nuclear reactor. People will gain superpowers just from being in the same zip code.

[sluissa]

Nuclear waste is... it's nuclear waste! I mean, it's the standard by which hard-to-dispose-of substances are measured!

Well, some of it is. The low-level radiation waste, which is the most bountiful, is also the most easily disposed of as it becomes non-radioactive (or at least not harmfully radioactive) in fairly short order and/or can be recycled for other uses. It's the high-level radiation waste that's difficult and especially time-consuming to deal with, but that accounts for... 1.8% of total waste product? If I remember correctly?

Which I probably don't. The ol' noggin doesn't like holding on to things that aren't socially awkward circumstances from 10+ years ago.


Speaking of nukyular... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/22/putins-unlimited-range-nuclear-missile-crashed-22-miles-us-intelligence/

If the thing is supposed to be fueled by a small nuclear after a certain point, it doesn’t make sense to try and use it before you know for sure it’s going to work, gotta be expensive having it crash, not to mention the cleanup.

Also, we actually toyed with the idea in the late 50’s, mid 60swhich would go at hypersonic ramjet speeds, even made a working engine before it got shelved due to being too provocative and ICBM tech was proving easier to develop.

Maybe time to dig those up again? If Putin is going to flaunt the ban on nuclear cruise missiles, two can play at that game.

We all know where this ends, where every component on the missile from the thruster to individual LED's is powered by its own proportionally tiny nuclear reactor. People will gain superpowers just from being in the same zip code.

http://citylabs.net/products/

I mean... those are already sort of a thing as well.

[smjjames]

To nobody’s surprise, no Democrats are invited to meeting on Russia docs. I hope they realize the optics of it, whether or not any Democrats requested seeing it, as Sarah Sanders claims the Democrats didn’t.

Though maybe Schiff will get a copy, as the article mentions, dunno.

[Dunamisdeos]

I mean, their public policy on such things has been that every single thing that throws shade on Trump is immediate gospel, and everything else is not to be considered. Even some of my democrat family members are growing tired of it.

I doubt anyone involved wants them there.

[hector13]

As opposed to the Republican side being any doubt being cast on allegations made against Trump and his cohorts is immediate grounds for exoneration?

[smjjames]

Not to mention that it just makes the whole episode look completely political (which it is).

[Dunamisdeos]

As opposed to the Republican side being any doubt being cast on allegations made against Trump and his cohorts is immediate grounds for exoneration?

Yeah don't get me wrong, this is 100% true lol

[Max™]

Solar panels are very, very easy to recycle, and they last at least 30 years. People have panels still in use today from the first generation of them.

Nuclear waste is... it's nuclear waste! I mean, it's the standard by which hard-to-dispose-of substances are measured!

Well, you think that because it's been insisted for decades that a nuclear plant is a big bomb which leaks neon green sludge constantly.

The best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to keep using it in reactors designed to reprocess it until it isn't cost-effective any longer to boil water by extracting heat from those particular rocks.

The major issue I see with climate change vis-a-vis food production, is the increased violence of weather, not the introduction of more rain, or more drought.

Wheat and rice plants don't really appreciate being ripped out of the ground by tornadoes or hurricanes.

A hurricane is a heat engine which transports energy from warm equatorial waters to space (well, the stratosphere) and cooler latitudes.

The rotation and height of a Cat 5 hurricane both bump right up against the bounds of the overall surface-troposphere-stratosphere system. Without speeding up the rotation of the planet and possibly increasing the height of the tropopause in higher latitudes it is physically impossible to get a hurricane going much faster than 300 mph.

Different bounds apply with an EF5 tornado but the height of the tropopause also seems to play a part in setting the upper limit of tornadic rotation around 300 mph.

I don't have a problem with people not knowing this though, it's a very obscure sort of coincidence anyways.

I must admit to being annoyed at the idea that a Carnot engine is going to somehow work better if the temperature differential were reduced. So if you want to argue that the equatorial-polar temperature gradient is going to decrease then knock yourself out, but you don't also get to argue that storms will behave as if it were going to increase.

You're not paying the discounted costs of 20 years from now.

... but you'd also then get 20 years worth of extra power out of them. So that's apples and oranges of whether you need the extra capacity now or later. If you need the additional power now, then building additional nuclear plants isn't one of your available choices to cover that.

The point is, if you need additional capacity in 20 years you plan ahead. e.g. if a nuclear plant takes 20 years and solar takes 5 years, then a fair comparison is to estimate the price to start the solar plant in 15 years vs the price to start the nuclear plant today. From a business point of view it would make no sense to base that on today's price of solar panels rather than a good projection of the price for when you actually need to purchase the parts.

Plus, if you're not spending that money for 15 years, you avoid locking up capital or taking on debt for that amount of time, all of which accrues interest. 15 years worth of compound interest saved/earned on billions of dollars works out to be a lot of money.

I mean, if it wasn't for the efforts fighting any nuclear plant construction at all it wouldn't take 20 years, most of that is getting approval and jumping through hoops last I checked.

[Reelya]

I mean, if it wasn't for the efforts fighting any nuclear plant construction at all it wouldn't take 20 years, most of that is getting approval and jumping through hoops last I checked.

That doesn't change the reality of it. When dealing with concrete proposals, you're meant to account for all real-world influences. e.g. there's literally zero point talking about how quick it would be to build plants if people didn't exist and you didn't have to account for them. We're talking real world, not idealized equations.

20 years is what it takes, and that's that. e.g. it could be instant if we had a robot slave army who can shoot concrete out of their arms. But that's not reality, any more than hand-waving away the human interaction part of it is reality. Every limit is in fact a real limit, whether that's the fact that there are limits on how much labor you can hire, the machinery you can use, or the regulation you need to go through to get the thing approved. After all, power plants are for society, so naturally, society has a big part in the planning for that, and you can't just hand-wave away the interaction-with-society bit as not being "real" because it's not the physical pouring of concrete. Labor supply is political, being allowed to use materials is political, the funding to make the plant a reality is political. everything is political. You can't hand-wave it away as not being a real part of the process of making the plant.

[MrRoboto75]

But that's not reality

yet