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[nenjin]

No editor had to do any real work when using this kind of material. The headlines basically write themselves.

[MrRoboto75]

Gotham Chortles at Joker's Boner

[Trekkin]

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.

Well, even for fossil fuels, dispatchability varies inversely with efficiency at municipal scales, so there's already interest in grid energy storage from a sustainability standpoint even prior to using renewables. It may be feasible to smoothly taper off nonrenewable energy generation as we increase grid storage capacity on that basis.

Portability remains a problem, though. I'm still optimistic about direct synthesis of high-test peroxide as a partial solution, but not everyone's enthusiastic about running cars off T-Stoff.

[SaberToothTiger]

How viable are hydroelectric power plants?

[Kagus]

How viable are hydroelectric power plants?

Environmentally detrimental, if I recall.

Muhfuggin' lightning beavers.


Also, the turbines apparently also double as fish blenders. Who knew?

[Gentlefish]

There's people calling for the removal of dams due to salmon run issues but the fish ladders seem to do a pretty good job of letting them through.

Fishing pressure just keeps getting worse every year.

[Egan_BW]

when beavers do it its creating valuable wetlands when humans do it its destroying the environment talk about a double standard huh

[Teneb]

How viable are hydroelectric power plants?

Environmentally detrimental, if I recall.

Still less than fossil fuels, but yeah.

[Madman198237]

How viable are hydroelectric power plants?

Environmentally detrimental, if I recall.

Still less than fossil fuels, but yeah.

They're only detrimental if you care about the multiple-square-mile lake that you're usually forming on the back side of the dam.

Though on a more serious note, a properly-managed dam reservoir can be a good thing for an area that suffers sporadic drought...until you turn into California and the droughts don't stop.

[Trekkin]

How viable are hydroelectric power plants?

Environmentally detrimental, if I recall.

Still less than fossil fuels, but yeah.

Depends on the climate. Anaerobic decomposition of vegetation in the resevoir can release large amounts of methane.

[EnigmaticHat]

The real question is: when the world runs out of gas, what will the military run its vehicles off of?  Ethanol?  Or are we going to get environmentally friendly electric tanks?

[Lord Shonus]

The real question is: when the world runs out of gas, what will the military run its vehicles off of?  Ethanol?  Or are we going to get environmentally friendly electric tanks?

More likely, the result will be things like reclaimed-atmospheric-carbon gasoline, hydrogen fuel cells, or similar "technically feasible but in no way practical" notions.

[Reelya]

An organization that spends $1 billion on a single plane isn't going to worry about oil running out. A plant to synthesize the needed fuel for the entire military would probably cost less than one current-gen stealth bomber.

More likely, the result will be things like reclaimed-atmospheric-carbon gasoline, hydrogen fuel cells, or similar "technically feasible but in no way practical" notions.

Those are a little exotic, when they can just ferment some plant-stuff and make fuel cheaper. The reason they use oil now is it's so cheap, so if oil runs out, they're going to just go for the next cheapest thing, which is bio-fuel using existing known processes, rather than develop sci-fi tech for atmospheric carbon capture, which will likely be a relatively expensive fuel source. It's hard to compete with plants with a carbon-capture machine, since plants are self-powered (containing nano-scale molecular solar panels basically), self-replicating and self-repairing.

[McTraveller]

I keep trying to figure out how to go more green in my own personal life... but then every day on my commute I see more forest razed for development.

People keep talking about green revolutions, and yet they really don't put their money where their mouths are:  we don't even need to do things like promote renewable power, we need to stop razing forests that get replaced with heat islands.  Especially in my geographic area - there is already a ton of already-razed land.

But the system is so backwards that it actually costs more to re-build the decaying urban and suburban areas than to wipe out forests and wetlands and farmlands.  So what happens?  The forests and stuff get razed and replaced with subdivisions (which also increase traffic congestion), while the concrete wastelands just decay further.  There is seriously a 5 degree F temperature increase on my commute from where I live (interestingly, in a count that is resistant to suburban development) to my workplace only 13 miles away.  The difference: crossing a county border into one that is hell-bent on developing every last square inch of its land into fairly expensive planned communities and shopping centers because of the tax revenue.

Fixing that doesn't even take any kind of technological revolution like replacing combustion-powered vehicles.  It doesn't even mean waiting for national legislation.  It just means having local city councils with guts to say, no, we are going to keep our green spaces and traffic low.  But do they do that? Nope!

[Starver]

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.

I don't remember having such a badge, on various "touristy" visits to reactors (Doonreay, Sellafield a couple of times, a couple of others I can't be sure about, but maybe Hinkley Point and Sizewell, and I always wanted to visit Trawsfynydd, but there was never time whenever I was just passing). Even the time when it was a school trip to Sellafield (or Calder Hall or Windscale, whatever you know it best as) which included entry to the reactor-hall. Which was actually less radioactive (during normal operation, while the "Everything is OK, don't worry" huge echoing BIP...   BIP....  BIP...  was sounding, with the cue to evacuate being either alarms or lack of a BIP... ) than outside.

But there was a 'gateway' machine to go through (both ways) to check for scintillations from each person, including putting hands and feet into slots for particular attention. The girl who was a little too hasty and got the "you've removed your hands too quickly" warning sound, on leaving the zone, had to be calmed down quite quickly. I don't know why it was such an alarming alarm. Presumably the "over threshhold" alarm was even more alarmingly alarming, but we never heard that one.