pencilguin

Wind farms are a thing because a wind turbine can only be so big: for more power, you put up more of them. They are so cheap because all the costs are transparent, there is noplace to bury wholly-legal graft. A big farm amortizes fixed project management cost.

Capacity factor of nukes is not so much more than of wind turbines, though if you have a bunch of nukes, it would be rare to have many of the nukes down at once other than for urgent retrofits. Steam turbines are down a lot, so nukes are always built with two or more.

But the main thing is that nukes cost far, far more than the wind farm that produces as much; or, a wind farm at the same price produces many times the power, with near zero lead time and possibly negative decommissioning cost. After their contribution to the grid gets large enough, you build out storage, which incrementally reduces the fraction of time you spend burning NG or, later, ammonia.

A farm of small nukes would cost quite a bit more to build than a big nuke of the same capacity, because all the systems are duplicated throughout. On the up side, the farm might be built incrementally with much less of the graft always attached to monster public works; you might save 75% vs a big nuke just on that basis. If you could get the first one going early, its revenue might help pay for subsequent units.

But whatever the heat source, anything with a steam turbine is just not competitive anymore. That is another reason why fusion is a dead end: it is just very hard to compete with zero opex.

...which involves drilling.

None of these dams ever produced more than the tiniest fraction of even just the commercial value of the fisheries they destroyed. They totally didn't care.

The value extracted from the dams was never more than a tiny fraction of just the commercial value of the fishery each eliminated, wholly leaving aside the matter of causing extinctions.

California's system with dams near peaks of the Sierra Nevada range, feeding penstocks to thousands of meters below, is both massively more efficient and causes nowhere near the ecological damage of the river valley dams being torn down.

Those were largely built in the 1920s with pulley-operated (pre-hydraulics) equipment trailered up on abysmally bad roads... that still exist, unimproved.

And, a compiler that knows custom SIMD optimizations for every algorithm anyone might ever need, and can recognize when you have coded one of them so it can substitute its SIMD version.

The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.

Not just back to +1.5C, but to where you would have been by that time.

Meanwhile, the whole ocean ecosystem has collapsed as acidification continued on up. The primary protein source of a billion+ people has vanished. They do not starve quietly.

Gaslighting unwelcome.

It would be disastrous if a program in any way like this went ahead, because it would be seen as a substitute for fixing the root problem, would steal funding from the latter, and would do nothing to stop the ocean acidification that threatens the roots of the global ocean ecosystem.

I tried a Beyond Meat burger. It tasted so much like the real thing that I did not finish it. It had that rusty-nail sharpness I have not missed at all.

I have been vegetarian for ~30 years. Pork and ham are the only meat I have missed. Knowing how pork is produced in the US, I would never buy any of it.

Unfortunately, fake meat is as "packaged and processed" as it is physically possible for stuff sold as food to be, making it not really food at all. That is too bad, because meat production is a huge driver of the looming global climate catastrophe, enough so that people switching to a meat substitute would cut their CO2 footprint more than giving up their car. But it is hard to recommend switching from actual food to merely food-shaped stuff. That said, a huge fraction of Americans habitually eat stuff not really food, already. If those were to switch to a meat substitute, their diet would have no more non-food than before. Unfortunately, those are the least likely to switch, no matter how closely it matches the real thing, unless it gets substantially cheaper than real meat.

Just one?

There are numerous mainland Chinese and Russian certificate authorities listed. I always have to go through and disable them. How did they get in there in the first place, and what keeps them there?

Instead of siting polar panels in the desert, it would be overwhelmingly more efficient use of resources to float the solar panels on the canals and reservoirs involved, cutting evaporation and bio-fouling while keeping the panels cool for better efficiency and longevity, and also more easily cleaned of dust. California has begun experimenting with PV on canals, while in India it is already in full production. So, panel area is moot.

Brine may be returned to the sea via a long leaky hose, eliminating effects of excess salt concentration on wildlife by distribution along its length. There is no need to produce extremely concentrated brine, anyway: there is plenty of seawater, and it takes less energy to extract fresh water from less-concentrated brine.

You don’t need expensive PV and reverse osmosis to separate fresh water from brine: greenhouses can do the job at much less capital cost, with incoming water used to cool the glass that fresh water will condense onto the bottom of, and heat exchanged from outgoing brine to incoming brine after it drains off the condenser and spreads out over black evaporation pans.

In some places, condensing the fresh water is unnecessary; the water vapor may be released for the wind to carry off, to rain out into mountain streams collected behind alpine dams. North/central California is ideally situated for this mode, with myriad dams in long use in the Sierra Nevada range.

Hawaii successfully demonstrated using deep sea water solely as a coolant to condense fresh water directly from ambient humidity.

There is no idea so bad that nobody will embrace it.

Each dollar diverted to nukes from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.

The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. The money spent on the nuke itself would pay for many times that much solar and wind. The solar and wind would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately, not many years later. Displacement would increase throughout construction, and power generated early would help fund subsequent construction.

Carbon capture cannot be any kind of solution to excess carbon emission rate.

However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many decades, doing harm the entire time.

I am corrected.

Right.

Of course everybody cribbed from everybody else. You can't draw any meaningful conclusions from stuff like this.

Citing Irish tales from 2200+ years after the supposed event do not help credibility.

California has got reliable power from geo for quite a few decades, as has Iceland. Iceland is not awash in geysers.

Geo costs more than renewables, but that was not at issue. It is anyway cheaper than nukes, in places where it is used.

You seem sincerely misled. If you consult more reliable sources, you can cut past the propaganda machine, on this and on other topics.

There has always been plenty of money available to people willing to seek to mislead you in this way. It is absolutely legal to publish falsehoods, even in what looks like legitimate media. People who lie to you about X will happily lie to you about Y.

It is embarrassing to learn you have allowed yourself to be misled, but they are often very, very good at it. The US was fooled into invading Iraq, as in previous wars.

Geochemists say uranium concentrates in the crust, for chemical reasons -- which is, in fact, where we find it.

Nature used up the best ore billions of years ago. We did get radiation-resistant microbes in exchange.

Geothermal works fine, in numerous places worldwide today, as may be seen simply by looking.

It just costs more than wind and solar. Same as nukes. Unlike nukes, geo was once competitive without heavy subsidy, in places.

The jump from lab demonstration to commercial viability is exactly the place where almost every tech trick fails.

So there is no need to pay this thing any attention. Geothermal under ideal conditions is not competitive. Steam turbines have operating costs solar and wind do not.

This is the same reason nukes are a dead end, and D-T fusion besides. It doesn't matter how cheap your heat source is if you need to pay for operating a steam turbine to get any power out. Solar and wind provide high-grade energy directly, so are impossible to compete with anywhere they work.

There are uses for direct heat piped underground to heat buildings, but you don't need to bore to 10km, or even 3km, to get enough heat for that.

Wind and solar will get massive capacity overbuild. Cheaply. When the time is right, storage will, too, and not before.

Likewise, fission: costs too much to bother.

Fusion already powers the planet. We just need to build out the solar panels and wind turbines to collect as much of it as we care to find uses for.

It is not possible. It is not even a millionth of the way to possible.

It is, instead, cheap concern trolling. Worry instead about money diverted, from building out wind and solar that actually address looming climate disaster, to chase wills-o-th'-wisp.

It does not, in fact. But it is hard to keep your drill bit enough harder than the rock to cut it.

More commonly, unknown knowns:

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you, it's the things you think you know that just ain't so."

Usually credited to Josh Billings.

It is, e.g., what turned the Iraq invasion into a national disaster. What was wasted on invading Iraq, to no purpose, could have paid, instead, for the entire transition to wind and solar, decades sooner.

Numerous billionaires minted off the fiasco would not now be actively undermining democratic institutions.

This thing bobs to the top of HN every few weeks.

1. No, there is absolutely no hint of any danger of extracting too much heat, no matter what random problem you make up. Really.

2. A 10km deep hole gets you 1/600th of the way to the center of the planet, much less than e.g. the skin of an apple or the enamel on a billiard ball. So, it would tell you nothing about stuff deeper, never mind bollocks it.

3. Geothermal energy is not a major growth sector even where heat is right near the surface. Geothermal, like nukes, costs too much to ever be competitive again.

Wind & solar cost less already, and get much cheaper every year. There is no need for, or value in, more expensive alternatives. It is a good thing that solar and wind are simple and uninteresting.

Places where both wind and solar do not suffice can continue importing fuel, as they do today, indefinitely. Eventually, it will be synthetic, or delivered by transmission lines. Tropical solar farms will synthesize ammonia for export.

Your conclusion in (1) does not follow. You don't know how long the price of (e.g.) NRGV will be irrationally inflated, so you cannot afford to bet on when it will collapse.

Your conclusion in (2) does not follow. Jane Street works on a time scale of, at most, milliseconds.

We may be sure that Berkshire Hathaway, which does operate on longer time scales, holds no NRGV shares.

That makes no sense. Why would anybody agree to a penalty for something they have no control over?