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[Hanslanda]

We really should have considered the relative costs of landing the moon on a man instead.

I support this resolution and nominate the US President for the prestigious and noble position of target.

[Madman198237]

That is one thing I've been wondering about though... In the event of drastic and rapid switching over to green energy sources, how realistic would it be to retrain petroleum/coal workers to prepare them for jobs in the new industries? How high are the educational requirements, and how much of their current educations can be built upon for retraining? Specialists are probably going to be up shit creek, but how many lower-skilled positions could be adapted?

Well, if we utilize nuclear power then a lot of the specialist types will be OK. You'll need people who know how to run the reaction chamber proper, of course, but after that it turns into steam and steam turbines, identical to setups used in coal plants.

Wind, hydroelectric, solar, etc. are not really plentiful enough to reasonably fill the gaps (i.e., without turning a substantial chunk of the surface of the planet into a solar panel and damming every river), but they'd also require completely different expertise anyway. Though it is probably not that hard to go from maintaining a turbine spun by steam to maintaining a turbine spun by wind to maintain one spun by water...depending on the exact setup I imagine.

[Reelya]

Well, solar would apparently need about 0.6% of the land area of the USA, which is assuming pure photovoltaic power @ 2008 performance levels. Based on the report cited here:
https://solar.gwu.edu/how-much-land-would-it-take-power-us-solar

That's, you know, do-able. The above source cites 1948 sq ft of solar panels per person to power people to USA-levels of consumption, and since the total world population has an average density of about 148 people per sq.mile, it works out at 1% global land-coverage to power everyone on the planet to USA levels of electricity consumption with just 2008-grade solar panels.

Of course, USA is near the top of the charts for being energy-hogs, so basing anything off USA-levels of consumption is a massive over-estimate. World per-capita electricity consumption is 1/4th to 1/5th of USA-levels, so would need a land-usage of ~0.2%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption
with some market-driven changes in consumption, along with improved solar panel designs and energy-saving measures, it would be practical to have 100% of baseload power provided just by solar panels, covering maybe 0.1% of total land area, much of which can be rooftops.

A couple other ways to look at this are in this article:

https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

... this one comes up with a world figure of half-a-million sq km of solar panels to power the world for total energy needs (not just electricity). That's out of 150 million sq km of total world land area, so about 0.33% of total land area, which is pretty much in line with the above estimates. To put this in perspective:

According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years.

There are 1.2 million square kilometers of farmland in China. This is 2 1/2 times the area of solar farm required to power the world in 2030.

And here, where it's pointed out that the amount of land destroyed by coal mining means that it has a bigger land-footprint than a solar plant:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=how+big+is+a+coal+planet

So, we have no qualms destroying or otherwise extracting resources from areas of land far in excess of the amount we'd need to convert to solar, but somehow the only time we have the "there won't be space!" argument is in relation to alternative energy.

Also ... another important point is that you're not going to rip up economically valuable farmland to build your solar plants, you're going to purchase economically marginal land and develop a solar plant there, because that raises the economic value / resource potential of that chunk of land. Solar plants will spring up in otherwise-useless tracts of land that are located nearby to urban centers. Solar is going to be a good thing because it generates a resource out of otherwise useless bits of land, such as marginal land and/or rooftops and the like, which means real economic growth potential.

[Trekkin]

Well, if we utilize nuclear power then a lot of the specialist types will be OK. You'll need people who know how to run the reaction chamber proper, of course, but after that it turns into steam and steam turbines, identical to setups used in coal plants.

That's true conceptually, but reactor turbine systems are more complex; leaving aside BWRs since we're unlikely to build any more, PWRs' turbines are still a part of the secondary coolant loop with its attendant radiation monitoring requirements, since radioactivity in the coolant loop indicates a leak in the steam generator. There's also some additional emergency plumbing for much the same reason.

In general, though, renewably powering the grid is a relatively solvable problem, retraining and all, compared to transportation.

[Madman198237]

The thing is that if you know how to run/build/maintain a steam turbine for a coal generator, you know the mechanics of steam and machine well enough to quit easily transfer to a functionally identical system on a different reactor. It doesn't have to be a physically identical system since the functional differences are all in the means of heating the working fluid.

Also, it doesn't matter if there's potential radiation in that working fluid so long as it's either a simple operation (listen for Geiger counter, run away if you start hearing clicks) or run by somebody in the control room, etc.

[Gentlefish]

Having been to a nuclear reactor facility myself, they hand you these neat one-time-exposure badges that they then take from you after the visit.

I'm guessing they use similar badges for workers that may last longer or allow a stronger dose-over-time before alerting/becoming useless.

[Egan_BW]

(listen for Geiger counter, run away if you start hearing clicks)

Pretty good advice in general to be honest.

[Gentlefish]

You'll hear geiger counter clicks standing outside or even near concrete. Radiation literally is everywhere (mostly).

The trick is to know the background radiation of your workstation.

[Trekkin]

(listen for Geiger counter, run away if you start hearing clicks)

Pretty good advice in general to be honest.

Yes, it is, given enough clicks. It's very bad advice if you're one of the people responsible for running the thing causing the clicks; however theoretically simple shutting down the turbines is in isolation, it must be borne in mind that it's being done while the reactor is also being shut down.

Nothing's ever as simple as it works in theory, unfortunately.

Having been to a nuclear reactor facility myself, they hand you these neat one-time-exposure badges that they then take from you after the visit.

I'm guessing they use similar badges for workers that may last longer or allow a stronger dose-over-time before alerting/becoming useless.

It varies by facility; those badges are film dosimeters, which are still the cheapest type.

[Bumber]

That's, you know, do-able. The above source cites 1948 sq ft of solar panels per person to power people to USA-levels of consumption, and since the total world population has an average density of about 148 people per sq.mile, it works out at 1% global land-coverage to power everyone on the planet to USA levels of electricity consumption with just 2008-grade solar panels.

Of course, USA is near the top of the charts for being energy-hogs, so basing anything off USA-levels of consumption is a massive over-estimate. World per-capita electricity consumption is 1/4th to 1/5th of USA-levels, so would need a land-usage of ~0.2%

Did you account for everyone switching to electric cars?

[Trekkin]

That's, you know, do-able. The above source cites 1948 sq ft of solar panels per person to power people to USA-levels of consumption, and since the total world population has an average density of about 148 people per sq.mile, it works out at 1% global land-coverage to power everyone on the planet to USA levels of electricity consumption with just 2008-grade solar panels.

Of course, USA is near the top of the charts for being energy-hogs, so basing anything off USA-levels of consumption is a massive over-estimate. World per-capita electricity consumption is 1/4th to 1/5th of USA-levels, so would need a land-usage of ~0.2%

Did you account for everyone switching to electric cars?

He did not -- or, more accurately, the study he's (indirectly) quoting did not.

It is important to note that in all cases the “solar electric footprint” represents only the portion of the ecological footprint representing electricity use, and does not include heating, transportation, and other non-electric energy demands.

Emphasis mine.

[thompson]

Land use is never going to be an issue with solar in regions with high isolation. Solar doesn't really make sense in places where sun exposure levels are low (like northern Europe), but that doesn't seem to stop people building systems there so...

The bigger issue with solar/wind is that they are not dispatchable, so you need some means of large-scale energy storage. Of course, in the real world they'll just use natural gas and pretend they plan to fix that tomorrow. Still an improvement, but there's a risk we'll end up locking gas into the system.

Edit: Small clarification. I'm not suggesting a renewables + gas energy mix is a bad thing. It is totally feasible today and is an obvious starting point for a transition to lower CO2 intensity.

[Max™]

I'm really the only one amazed by the masterful use of irony in the huffpo headline: BEZOS EXPOSES PECKER?

[Hanslanda]

I'm really the only one amazed by the masterful use of irony in the huffpo headline: BEZOS EXPOSES PECKER?

Apparently, yes.

[Egan_BW]

I propose that we meet our energy demands via something something tesla

I'm really the only one amazed by the masterful use of irony in the huffpo headline: BEZOS EXPOSES PECKER?

yup