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[Pwnzerfaust]

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

This kind of assumes the other players are going to cooperate rather than defect if given the choice. But I think from their behavior, it's clear the other players in this game, those being China and India in particular, and Africa and Asia more generally, have no intention of cooperating. They seem to see always defect as their winning strategy, because the Western powers are too accustomed to cooperating. At the very least we need to be going for tit for tat. Preferably, we should force cooperation. Ideally, however, we should always do what maximizes the benefit for ourselves in the short and long run, even if that gives worse outcomes for the other players.

[Max™]

Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska? Are these even real places?  Literally nobody lives there, so yes, they are insignificant. The first real state on that list is Texas and guess what, most of Texas is empty and flat.

[wierd]

You are missing the forest for the trees Max.

Kansas is not a populous state, true, but it is still quite large.  There is potential for large, widespread wind deployment that can transmit power to other states.

Similar story with Nebraska and Oklahoma.  Combined, a non-insubstantial amount of energy from wind can be generated domestically, and provided over the power grid.

(Assuming you can get people to stop bickering over shadows, whooping noises and blinky red lights at night, or stop tilting at windmills (heh) over land ownership issues (which is silly to begin with, since NextEra wanted to LEASE the properties with long term leases, and was offering hugely fat payouts for land use) that is.)

[Trekkin]

Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska? Are these even real places?  Literally nobody lives there, so yes, they are insignificant. The first real state on that list is Texas and guess what, most of Texas is empty and flat.

Oh, I'm not arguing that wind is a great energy source for Texas. That would be part of why they've generated more power from wind than nuclear every year for the past five years (and, recently, coal) and just keep building more.

It's just funny to hear you dismiss a sixth of your state's power as a sideshow when your state is so obsessed with it.

[Max™]

I dismiss anything which isn't 30 years of secret nuclear development because we need 30 years of secret nuclear development.

It isn't a victory of wind power that it is doing better than nuclear, it is a victory for the anti-nuke cuntbags exclusively, because there is no plausible reason wind should have any significance in the power generation landscape, we should all be horrified and depressed  at how well stupid fuckers have demonized nuclear power such that a joke like wind is taken more seriously.

[Trekkin]

there is no plausible reason wind should have any significance in the power generation landscape, we should all be horrified and depressed  at how well stupid fuckers have demonized nuclear power such that a joke like wind is taken more seriously.

Presumably that's apart from it being cheaper per megawatt than nuclear power, on top of being more scalable -- two things which one might find particularly appealing in trying to provide electrical power to underserved communities. Regardless of why (all the fault of horrible people, yes yes, we know), the fact remains that nuclear plants are financially unappealing right now, even if they didn't output waste and had zero risk.

But hey, if you really think Trump's got the right idea on wind (and you have been vehemently agreeing with him) nobody's stopping you from spending thirty years secretly perfecting a saw that can split atoms or something. It's just that the outlook for nuclear power in 2049 is bleak; even the DoE's energy projections show about a 25% decline.

[Max™]

A broken idiot can be right once a day, and I wouldn't care if wind wasn't being pushed instead of nuclear because we need to get away from coal and shit dammit, you want radioactive waste, what you think coal does?

How many people die from coal power yearly vs how many died from nuclear power accidents ever?

The question isn't nuclear vs wind, it's nuclear vs coal/gas/etc, and nuclear just makes wind/solar rollout more viable which isn't even touching on things like transmission losses (it isn't windy and sunny everywhere all the time, much less where people are using electricity) and peaks.

As I've said before, fuck all the cunts who successfully made people think "barrels slopping over with glowing green ooze" instead of "hot rocks and steam turbines" like they should, those people are monsters.

[Pwnzerfaust]

Cool TED talk about the subject at hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXUR4z2P9w

The thesis is essentially that the anti-nuclear crowd is a bigger danger to the environment than people realize, because while the amount of renewable energy has gone up, the proportion has gone down -- because of anti-nuclear fearmongering. He uses Germany and California as prime examples.

[Max™]

Yup, and I say why be nice about it, make someone justify why they're anti-nuclear in the face of the reality that they're condemning everywhere that isn't right here to a lower quality of life for their comfort. They weren't fighting fair when they spread the nuke=bomb=catastrophe memes fourty or more years ago, why play nice now: they were lying cunts then, they're still lying cunts, you've either been duped by them and don't realize how awful the pro-environment+anti-nuclear position is... or, well...

[wierd]

I am not anti-nuclear.  All energy used by life on earth comes from nuclear energy. (The sun is fusion, geothermal energy is fission. We are not near enough to a large gravitational mass to have that as an energy source.)


What I am, is a staunch adherent to the absolute, and non-negotiable need for REAL regulatory oversight of manmade nuclear energy.  It's the strongest source of energy we know, and it needs the proper diligence.

Fukushima Diaichi? Everything about that can be attributed to lax regulation and oversight.  I am not against nuclear plants; I am against poorly run nuclear plants, and "profits over all!!" mentalities. Many people are the same way, but have gotten so soured by the flagrant degree of regulatory capture that happens in "big expense ticket" operations like nuclear, that they feel proper oversight is not "realistically possible", and so they come out against nuclear in practice.

It's one of the reasons I am so pro fusion, even though we are still many years away from working scale reactors.  The risks involved are much lower, and with the inevitability of lax oversight happening eventually, at least the damage done by a "disaster" would be minimal compared to fission.

In the mean time, we can limp along getting second hand nuclear energy from wind and solar, and try to wrestle the corpses of the petrochem magnates off our futures as best we can.

[Trekkin]

For the record, I'm not anti-nuclear either. I'm anti-angrily-shitting-on-WWS-to-be-3edgy5me-about-nuclear, though.

Nuclear's great, but the plants are necessarily huge and expensive; the smallest one still operating is 582 MW, and even the SMART PWRs that were supposed to make nuclear accessible worldwide bottom out at 100 MWe. Where you need that capacity locally and can handle the up-front cost, it's a great solution. That's just not feasible everywhere, and you can't build half a nuclear reactor today and run it while you build the other half tomorrow the way you can with wind and solar farms.

So, yeah, it is wind vs. nuclear, in that it's wind vs solar vs hydro vs nuclear vs geothermal vs coal vs oil vs gas vs biofuels (etc) everywhere, all the time.

[Kagus]

Are we pushing AmeriPol off the rails into an environmental discussion again? Because I'd actually really like to know what the big issue with biofuels is, I thought it sounded like a great enviro-friendly concept that allowed for chemical energy storage (which is awesome for everyone not living in the middle of the big grid) and was adapted from something we had a lot of, namely biowaste.

But then it seems like it just kinda fell off the radar, and I'd like to know what the big fuckup was.

[wierd]

Economical non-starter. (without the incentives programs, it costs more to make the fuel than you get selling it.)

Terrible land use. (Food crops used to make radically expensive fuels)

With biodiesel-- production of toxic substances. (Methanol is used to perform the transesterification, which then contaminates the glycerol rich fraction with a seriously toxic substance. Ethanol CAN be used, but is harder to work with as it is less tolerant of the presence of water during the reaction-- It has a tendency to make SOAP instead of fuel, if even tiny amounts of water are present.)

Direct combustion of spent/used food oils -- Large particulates in the exhaust. See also, "smog", see also "black lung".

[Trekkin]

Are we pushing AmeriPol off the rails into an environmental discussion again? Because I'd actually really like to know what the big issue with biofuels is, I thought it sounded like a great enviro-friendly concept that allowed for chemical energy storage (which is awesome for everyone not living in the middle of the big grid) and was adapted from something we had a lot of, namely biowaste.

But then it seems like it just kinda fell off the radar, and I'd like to know what the big fuckup was.

There's a lot of individual problems that wierd has mentioned relating to food vs. fuel and the transport costs associated with waste-to-energy biodiesels, since it's tethered to population centers and thus to big grids anyway, but behind all of them is the present unprofitability of cellulosic biofuels at scale. There's just not a good enough way to turn cellulose into fuel yet, despite how old the underlying chemistry is, and in the absence of that, we have to turn sugars or oils into fuels instead, which is less efficient, takes more water, competes with food, etc.

So mostly it's that designed cellulases aren't recoverable enough yet. But we're getting there.

[PTTG??]

The problem is, it's a shitty form of solar panels, and we already have non-shitty solar panels.