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Author Topic: 2020 Election Commentary  (Read 185103 times)

EOTB

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #420 on: October 25, 2020, 09:53:21 PM »
In these hyper-partisan times, people are almost never willing to admit any doubt or uncertainty. Instead, they are rigidly certain that their side is 100% correct, and the other side is 100% wrong.

It isn't so much "hyper partisan" as it is "compromise would make no one happy", and "talking and admitting doubt or uncertainty" is really the compromise platform expressed differently.  When what two groups desire necessarily exclude the other's end points there's little point in settling for a third loaf no one wants except the uniparty leading both sides - they wanted the compromise solutions implemented to date as a primary goal. 

The right has already heavily compromised.  It's gained them nothing, as the economic structure advertised as free market was instead a path to corporatism/oligarchy (that is now almost entirely supporting the left), and they traded cultural standards for that unwanted economic state.    The left mostly got the cultural victories it sought, and pitches the compromise corporatism as a path to managed "democratic" socialism.  So no, you're not getting good faith conversation anymore from the other side of the cultural aisle.  That was burned.  Perhaps by others than you, but still the smoke remains.
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Brad

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #421 on: October 25, 2020, 10:02:12 PM »
I've seen a few critiques about the waste generated by "green" power, like solar and wind. I'm wondering-

1. How much land has to be covered by solar panels to power the entire United States.
2. How much waste is generated by constructing solar panels. I hear it's not inconsequential, and very toxic.
3. How much waste is generated by broken and used up solar panels and wind turbines.

In 5-10 years, are we going to have a "crisis" generated by so-called green energy? Is it going to be a situation where we trade one environmental disaster for another?

Hydroelectric is easily the best of the "green energy" solutions. Dams last a long time...Hoover Dam has been around for almost 90 years and powers most of Nevada and a lot of southern California. Niagara Falls plants are far older than that and powers update NY and a lot of Ontario. As stated, easily the most efficient and best. Solar panels in their current state last something like 30(?) years. The real issue is damage; you have a panel out in a field, it'll get pummeled by hail or bird shitting on it or whatever. Windmills, those giant things, are total trash. They do not have a long life, have to be turned off in high winds (check out Youtube) and don't work for shit with low winds, etc. They are junk beyond powering a well like back in the old days, mostly because they require a lot of resources that will never be reclaimed. It costs far more energy to make a windmill than will ever be produced.

Honestly, burning wood is a good power source, and is probably be better than any renewable power source except hydro, but people seem to have a problem with smoke. For reasons? I dunno, this stuff gives me a headache even thinking about. Just work on fusion and be done with it.
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jeff37923

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #422 on: October 26, 2020, 12:51:53 AM »
Why not just shoot it into the Sun? 100% serious here...


Requires too much delta V for a rocket or even a stream of rockets to de-orbit all nuclear waste into the sun. If you have the capability to do that, then you can build solar power satellites and solve most of the world's energy problem with those.

There are alternatives instead of burial like the new designs of small Thorium based fission reactors or breeder reactors. Main problem is the burdensome regulations on anything nuclear related.

 https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2017/08/10/the_nuclear_regulatory_commission_working_itself_out_of_a_job_110241.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/08/whats-more-radioactive-than-nuclear.html
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HappyDaze

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #423 on: October 26, 2020, 06:01:37 AM »
Why not just shoot it into the Sun? 100% serious here...


Requires too much delta V for a rocket or even a stream of rockets to de-orbit all nuclear waste into the sun. If you have the capability to do that, then you can build solar power satellites and solve most of the world's energy problem with those.

There are alternatives instead of burial like the new designs of small Thorium based fission reactors or breeder reactors. Main problem is the burdensome regulations on anything nuclear related.

 https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2017/08/10/the_nuclear_regulatory_commission_working_itself_out_of_a_job_110241.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/08/whats-more-radioactive-than-nuclear.html
Thank you for those articles. I've only had time to read one of them this morning, but I plan to read the others after work.

Ghostmaker

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #424 on: October 26, 2020, 07:59:49 AM »
Hydroelectric is easily the best of the "green energy" solutions. Dams last a long time...Hoover Dam has been around for almost 90 years and powers most of Nevada and a lot of southern California. Niagara Falls plants are far older than that and powers update NY and a lot of Ontario. As stated, easily the most efficient and best. Solar panels in their current state last something like 30(?) years. The real issue is damage; you have a panel out in a field, it'll get pummeled by hail or bird shitting on it or whatever. Windmills, those giant things, are total trash. They do not have a long life, have to be turned off in high winds (check out Youtube) and don't work for shit with low winds, etc. They are junk beyond powering a well like back in the old days, mostly because they require a lot of resources that will never be reclaimed. It costs far more energy to make a windmill than will ever be produced.

Honestly, burning wood is a good power source, and is probably be better than any renewable power source except hydro, but people seem to have a problem with smoke. For reasons? I dunno, this stuff gives me a headache even thinking about. Just work on fusion and be done with it.
There's only so many places you can put a hydro plant, as well.

Solar/wind power would be nice as backup/auxiliary sources, but they fail as a primary power source unless you have an excellent method of storing the extracted energy (which we don't).

Nuclear and geothermal are the way to go in the long term, but of course the NIMBY crowd will be all over you.

SHARK

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #425 on: October 26, 2020, 08:12:21 AM »
Greetings!

I thought I have read about the Belgians--or maybe it was Denmark--or the Dutch--that have embraced windmills and just love the things. Why is it they make good and efficient use of windmill farms, but somehow, here in the United States it is an inefficient, money-wasting fiasco?

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SHARK
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Ghostmaker

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #426 on: October 26, 2020, 09:17:20 AM »
Greetings!

I thought I have read about the Belgians--or maybe it was Denmark--or the Dutch--that have embraced windmills and just love the things. Why is it they make good and efficient use of windmill farms, but somehow, here in the United States it is an inefficient, money-wasting fiasco?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK
I would want to see specifics on how they're running their windmills. And mind you, it's Belgium.  Not exactly a LARGE country, albeit densely populated.

Trond

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #427 on: October 26, 2020, 09:21:28 AM »
Greetings!

I thought I have read about the Belgians--or maybe it was Denmark--or the Dutch--that have embraced windmills and just love the things. Why is it they make good and efficient use of windmill farms, but somehow, here in the United States it is an inefficient, money-wasting fiasco?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I have heard that Texas is big on wind power too.

SHARK

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #428 on: October 26, 2020, 09:59:07 AM »
Greetings!

I remember when I was studying "Politics of the Future"--a high-level political science class that was into all the weird things, new economies, ecology, new sciences and discoveries--it was a very cool class. There was several related classes, and I took all of them. My professor was definitely conservative, and had a balanced and vigorous approach to all kinds of things. He also threw us about a dozen books from a variety of thinkers, scholars, journalists, and such that demonstrated conclusively that there was in fact, a "Deep State" and groups of inter-connected uber-rich families that had been involved with building and organizing an essential oligarchy over the last century, involving families from the United States, Britain, Europe, and Japan. Hence, a uber-rich, power-hungry globalist elite seeking to control and manipulate economies and governments on a mass, global scale is not some crazy conspiracy, but based in real facts and evidence, with very real people and organizations. We also discussed global politics, modern warfare, global terrorism, the military-industrial complex, ecology movements, and new kinds of energy development. The evidence seemed to indicate that contrary to the environmentalist nuts--there was no magic formula, super technology, or some such that was going to revolutionize anything. My professor did however, suggest that a combination of new technologies, new resources, and new industrial and environmental and economic policies and processes, taken and organized together, could potentially serve to be a reasonably effective solution to our various environmental and energy challenges and needs. One of the partial solutions that could prove helpful was windpower, using the huge windmill farms. He discussed the various efforts in some of the Northern European countries, like Denmark and Holland. I don't have the citation or immediate source, but it was discussed in the textbooks we used, as well as the professor's own lecture materials, videos, interviews and so on. That was all from some 20 years ago, as well. I would hope that things have improved, but the environmentalists and the eco nuts seem crazier than ever before, and I don't know for certain we have made huge strides in making economies and environments much better off than in previous years, though I suspect there has been some degree of progress, just not the radical crazy kind demanded by the environmentalist crazies like AOC and her ilk.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK
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Pat
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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #429 on: October 26, 2020, 10:48:08 AM »
The evidence seemed to indicate that contrary to the environmentalist nuts--there was no magic formula, super technology, or some such that was going to revolutionize anything. My professor did however, suggest that a combination of new technologies, new resources, and new industrial and environmental and economic policies and processes, taken and organized together, could potentially serve to be a reasonably effective solution to our various environmental and energy challenges and needs. One of the partial solutions that could prove helpful was windpower, using the huge windmill farms. He discussed the various efforts in some of the Northern European countries, like Denmark and Holland.
The biggest problem with wind is intermittency. Power grids require stable power, so when they use sources that fluctuate during the day, there needs to be a backup power source that's able to meet any slack in capacity, almost instantly. Which means for whatever amount of intermittent energy you use, you need to have that same capacity available in batteries, or be able to turn on and off other power sources on demand.

Except batteries are hideously inefficient, which ends up ballooning the amount of power you have to generate in the first place. And more stable power sources don't scale up and down efficiently, so there's either a huge overhead in varying their energy output, or you just run them at full capacity anyway and just dump the power when the intermittent energy sources are running at high capacity. Either can easily overwhelm the ostensible benefits of green energy.

I don't have a good feel for how this all works out. I can find studies on the lifecycle cost of windmills, but they only consider the construction costs, maintenance costs, and energy output. If they end up having to stand up new coal plants on still days to make up for the shortfall in wind energy, the pollution and waste generated to turn on and then turn off those plants might be greater than just running those plants at a steady capacity and ditching wind power. Nuclear is cleaner, but even harder to scale up and down, which means if you want to use a nuclear plant as backup for shortfalls in wind or solar, that you have to continually generate enough nuclear energy to replace all your wind and solar energy, making it entirely pointless. The Planet of the Humans documentary suggests that's the case, but they're also myopic, focused on specific cases instead of looking at the big picture.

The environmental costs of a specific windmill or coal plant are irrelevant, because they don't exist in isolation. It's about the total cost over the whole grid, when we replace one type of energy with the other. And I've never seen a good, authoritative, and detailed breakdown.

Brad

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #430 on: October 26, 2020, 11:39:05 AM »
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

jeff37923

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #431 on: October 26, 2020, 11:51:09 AM »
More climate change stuff: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/scientist-suggests-eating-human-meat-to-tackle-climate-change-a4230561.html

How can anyone possibly support this nonsense?

I remember that article from last year, IIRC the presenter was laughed out of the conference.

I support the spin-off of that idea, though. Using human corpses as compost. Sounds weird, but solves a lot of space limitation and moving organics problems that affect space colonization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/a-project-to-turn-corpses-into-compost.html

https://www.ecowatch.com/washington-human-body-composting-2637805371.html?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3
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jhkim

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #432 on: October 26, 2020, 01:31:45 PM »
A bunch of stuff on energy production...

1) Regarding nuclear power - there is a popular perception that nuclear power is dangerous, which drives the not-in-my-backyard-ism. But that's hugely incorrect by the science. The problem is that people don't blink twice at breathing in toxins from tailpipes and smokestacks. They accept that there are "bad air days" in cities where they stay indoors, and in general that there are unhealthy toxins and carcinogens all around them. Just look at all the warning labels on common items.

But if anything is labelled as "radioactive" - even at non-harmful levels - then people are conditioned to panic by ongoing cultural portrayals that ignore the science, like HBO's Chernobyl mini-series. In truth, the track record of nuclear power is that it is many orders of magnitude safer than any fossil fuel.

2) Regarding solar and wind toxic waste --  Wind power creates almost no toxic waste. Solar creates a significant amount of toxic waste -- more than nuclear, but no more than many other industries. And it's solid or liquid waste that can be safely disposed of without going into the environment. It's not even close to the amount of toxins that are dumped into the air and wider environment by coal power.

3) Wind and solar are subject to variation depending on the local conditions. Under good conditions, like in Denmark, wind power is a huge boon. But not every region has high prevailing winds. In Germany, wind power is much more mixed. Pat is correct that they can both be unreliable depending on the weather conditions. In most places they aren't a good choice for primary energy, but they are an excellent supplement. For example, in desert-like areas where electricity use rises in the day to power air conditioning, then solar power nicely offsets the changing usage.


Why not just shoot it into the Sun? 100% serious here...
Requires too much delta V for a rocket or even a stream of rockets to de-orbit all nuclear waste into the sun. If you have the capability to do that, then you can build solar power satellites and solve most of the world's energy problem with those.

There are alternatives instead of burial like the new designs of small Thorium based fission reactors or breeder reactors. Main problem is the burdensome regulations on anything nuclear related.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2017/08/10/the_nuclear_regulatory_commission_working_itself_out_of_a_job_110241.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/08/whats-more-radioactive-than-nuclear.html

Thorium and breeder reactors could be even better, but the problem of nuclear waste is overwhelmingly an irrational one. Nuclear waste is no more dangerous than tons of other toxic waste, and is much more carefully disposed of in current practice.

Ghostmaker

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #433 on: October 26, 2020, 03:32:59 PM »
But if anything is labelled as "radioactive" - even at non-harmful levels - then people are conditioned to panic by ongoing cultural portrayals that ignore the science, like HBO's Chernobyl mini-series. In truth, the track record of nuclear power is that it is many orders of magnitude safer than any fossil fuel.

Chernobyl isn't even really a fair evaluation of the pros and cons of nuclear power, considering the nature of the accident. An inherently flawed reactor design, lack of containment vessel for the reactor, inexperienced workers... it's like evaluating amateur musicians based on the performance of William Hung.

Brad

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Re: 2020 Election Commentary
« Reply #434 on: October 26, 2020, 04:24:53 PM »
Chernobyl isn't even really a fair evaluation of the pros and cons of nuclear power, considering the nature of the accident. An inherently flawed reactor design, lack of containment vessel for the reactor, inexperienced workers... it's like evaluating amateur musicians based on the performance of William Hung.

Didn't that dude make millions of dollars?
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.