Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Trekkin]

At some point it is necessary to acknowledge that there are irreconcilable differences of opinion that no amount of comprehension or diplomacy will fix. 

Oh, sure there are. They just get signal boosted to heck and back by otherwise persuadable people holding them up as examples of how the other side is insane, and for a hundred performant reasons people end up thinking they have to express them to "really" hold some ideology or other, since we constantly put our allies through purity tests and at some point pretending to believe in the crap you don't care about seems like a fair price to pay for the stuff you do. That's how we get crank magnetism, which drives more of our culture than people like to admit.

Ultimately, I don't necessarily think I'm wiser than anybody else; I just see a specific cognitive trap I've been trained to identify and avoid popping up in our discourse and it makes us all sound a whole lot less rational than we actually are -- which, of course, is why it's a trap, because it feels too good to think other people are stupid and tells us too little. Then we start looking for reasons to dismiss contrary information instead of understanding it.

As much as it's appealingly simple to think that flyover country is full of backwards idiots in cowboy hats who are literally jumping at shadows and huffing coal dust with their opium, the top three states by wind power generation are Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa. (Kansas is #5.) They're not being built in cities, either, so apparently it's possible to convince at least some of your irreconcilably different hopeless idiots to support wind turbines.

[Max™]

In regards to nuclear waste, just have to share this

https://twitter.com/Spocks_Brian/status/1133414385794408448

Take this into account when you frame it as a racist/classist issue.

Global warming is about "we've got ours, fuck everyone else" at it's core, but it's painted in the obviously palatable colors of saving the planet which nobody wants to be against. Knowing this one can try to deny it by making sure others get theirs too, which means you need something besides renewables like nuclear power or magic I guess.

I'm all for solar and wind but load leveling is a thing and giant batteries aren't a thing yet (and gods below the material needs) so you need some kind of generation full time to take up said load.

Acting like we can just cut back on all our modern ways of living implicitly means "everyone else should be happy with less than we have" and there is the dark side of the environmental movement until it manages to distance itself from the population control side of things.

[Lord Shonus]

giant batteries aren't a thing yet

You're behind the times. Hydraulic storage isn't technically a "battery" in the sense that most people use, but it is an extremely effective means of storing electricity. You use excess electricity to pump water into a giant reservoir, and run the water through a simple turbine when your electricity supply drops. This is already implemented, with a current global capacity of 127 gigawatts. There are other mechanical solutions using weights or flywheels as well.

[Max™]

Molten salt is a thing too, and it's effective, but these still aren't as fast as a big box of boiling water and hot rocks.

[Trekkin]

giant batteries aren't a thing yet

You're behind the times. Hydraulic storage isn't technically a "battery" in the sense that most people use, but it is an extremely effective means of storing electricity. You use excess electricity to pump water into a giant reservoir, and run the water through a simple turbine when your electricity supply drops. This is already implemented, with a current global capacity of 127 gigawatts. There are other mechanical solutions using weights or flywheels as well.

There's also SMES, which is used for just this sort of short-term power quality improvement and is more dispatchable than nuclear since there's no need to moderate changes in core temperature.

[Max™]

(You know what you need to initially pump that storage medium up the energy hill? That's right, energy!)

[Lord Shonus]

That is why it is called "energy storage" and not "energy generation".

[Dunamisdeos]

You guys make me want to post all the troll physics memes It's so hard not to.

[Max™]

The best solar plants use local storage to level load, wind should but I see it as a side show and pay no attention to it, it's never going to amount to any significant percentage of regular load so I don't care. Tidal has the benefits of wind but it's predictable, but you gotta avoid killing whales and shit, cause fuck you, I'll cut your ass over some whales. Hydroelectric is similar with the whole atmospheric pump doing the lifting for you.

These are all fine and dandy but they really need a heavy duty base to maintain things at a workable level with the rest floating on top given their geographical and temporal limitations.

There are geographical limitations on nuclear plants because of stupid cunts like Sanders going along with NIMBY shitheads, and there are temporal problems because of stupid fucking greencunts lobbying to make it ridiculously difficult to get new ones built, with tons of chances for hurdles to get tossed up in front of it.

[Jopax]

There is something to be said about trying to save the environment by flooding every single river valley that can take it tho :V

[Pwnzerfaust]

That is something which pisses me off about old white fuckbags like Sanders, for all the good his socialist-flavor ideas could do, the stupid old cunt is anti-nuclear. If you are anti-co2 for some reason (read: anti-poor people improving their standard of living) then you are either pro-nuclear or a monster.

Aren't those estimates sort of bullshit however? I recall a lot of those pro-nuclear things completely omit the costs to build the plants, or to decommission the plants, or store the waste, and only look at daily operating costs / outputs.

https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power

Nuclear is super-expensive if you factor in all costs. Also, there really aren't enough reserves to dig up to expand nuclear. It's estimated total cost-effective sources total 230 years of fuel at current rates. 2/3rds of that are not-yet-discovered but predicted sources. So there are about 80 years of known, viable sources of uranium. But that's at current rates which total 5% of worldwide energy needs. Scale that up merely by 4x to account for 20% of energy needs, and the known proven uranium reserves run out in 20 years, much too fast to even locate the remaining sources or develop tech to extract more uranium cheaply. Add to that that solar is only going to get cheaper and cheaper every year. Plus, the plants would take decades to come online, and the building process will create tons of CO2 in the meantime. It's a losing proposition.

Sure, we can say "but thorium" to get around the uranium issue. Except, then we're banking on a sci-fi answer of coming up with currently non-existent tech.

None of the alternatives are remotely viable, so if you want to get off fossil fuels but don't want nuclear and understand that nuclear waste is a bullshit bogeyman then you should have to come out and say "I hate poor brown people and don't want them to improve their standard of living ever."

I don't hate brown people. But if it's between others' standard of living and my own, I'm going to pick my own every time.

It's nothing personal. I'm just selfish and want what's best for me and mine.

That said, I feel nuclear should be broadly expanded.

[Loud Whispers]

In the long run the selfish strat weakens everyone's positions, by forcing otherwise cooperative people into taking selfish strats too

[Trekkin]

wind should but I see it as a side show and pay no attention to it, it's never going to amount to any significant percentage of regular load so I don't care.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Such insignificance!

[SalmonGod]

I drive by a wind farm in Illinois every time I go to Chicago or to visit family in Wisconsin.  I think it's really neat looking, and it's the best scenery feature of the whole trip.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Think I know the one. Either side of the highway, red lights at night? It's cool during the day and eerie at night.