It's 0.14% of what is used for irrigation in agriculture. In other words: almost nothing.
To be sure, fracking must be regulated. Very well and tightly regulated, especially concerning the chemicals used and the way fracking fluid is disposed. But I've grown up right next to some of the largest landstrip mines in the world and trust me: everything is better than that!
In other words, fracking is using up 0.14% of the amount of water used for agricultural irrigation. Most of that in dry parts of the United States (who would have guessed that?!).
Pumped storage is great if you happen to have a) the right kind of terrain and b) managed to put all the environmentalists of the country in a cage and threw away the key. It's too darn big. It takes huge amounts of water to store any meaningful quantity of power and you have to line the whole basin with concrete to prevent erosion.
It may balance power requirements over a day and a night. Even then there are those losses and instead of 800MW you get an average of 600-700MW. Plus the extra cost for the storage, its maintenance, transmission etc. Moreover, there are such things as seasonal fluctuations, even in India, that affect all photovoltaic power plants at once. So either you have another power plant handy as a requirement for having reliable power supply, or you need sufficient storage to last for several weeks or months.
Photovoltaics and wind turbines are NOT a replacement for other energy sources. But handled correctly, it can be a valuable addition and reduce the requirements on the rest. Right now, that is simply not nearly the case. Part of the reason is cost, part is deficiencies in technology in general, part of the reason is unrealistic expectations (and that's probably not all).
This post has been voted "interesting" twice... which makes up 20%. It has also been voted "underrated" 30% and "overrated" 30%.
So, what the hell are you guys doing? Certainly not reading and thinking about the post. All you do is go "oh, he is agreeing with my position", it must be underrated! And "oh noes, he said something against solar!! Is it flamebait?... well no. Is he a troll? Well, no.... so... so... so... it must be OVERRATED!"... oh yeah... slashdot.
There is a glut of photovoltaics on the world market ever since the european countries cut the subsidies. Most notably Spain and, more recently, Germany. Which is responsible for the sudden drop in prices. It is not better technology, despite what the propaganda claims (otherwise solar power companies wouldn't go bankrupt all over Germany).
And yes, solar thermal is more useful on paper. Unfortunately it takes up just as much space as PV and needs lots of water for it cooling towers. However, solar thermal depends on very stable weather patterns. It cannot tolerate cloudy days very well - so you'd best build it in a desert, where cooling water is kind of rare as you can imagine. You'd need 24 million cubic meters of cooling water per year for an equal sized solar-thermal power plant.
What would be needed for PV to work is storage. Hydrogen/methane seems to be the only plausible/scalable solution so far. Unfortunately, even with the best technology we have on the planet, you'll need at least 3kWh electricty to get 1kWh of electricity back out of storage. Thus the average power of the power plant will drop from 800MW down to about 500MW, assuming that at least some part of the power will be used directly. (The amount of storage that is necessary depends on a lot of factors, mostly what power is available from other sources and how variable the weather patterns and seasons are. So 500MW is just a ballpark figure.)
First of all: It will generate less energy than that. Averaged over the year about 800MW. The amount of energy it will generate between 6pm and 6am is roughly zilch. During the short time around noon, when it will generate on the order of 3+GW (depending on weather, season, condition of the solar cells etc.), there will be no industry capable of actually using it, because 2-4 hours of electricity a day is simply not worth the investment. (Before and after this time, the power drops off quickly.) Even 8 hours would be too short, because you'll need 2 or 3 factories working in parallel for 8 hours a day to produce as much as a single factory can in 16 or 24 hours.
Finally wrap your head around the fact that quality of service cannot be compared by using peak power generation.
P.S.: Yes, noon is just the right time to get your air conditioning started, but unfortunately, when it comes to India the question is mostly: What air-conditioning are you talking about?
> Today "skeptics" of climate change tell us that the science of climate change is wrong because of the possible irresponsible political applications of climate science to public policy.
Now THAT's a non sequitur if I've ever seen one. I certainly didn't say that climate change is wrong because of possible political applications. That's because it's nonsense.
What does follow from the example of eugenics, however, is that perfectly correct science has been abused to justify politics without considering further consequences which can be very dire indeed. The measures introduced under the rubric of eugenics have also been justified by the supposed consensus of experts in their day.
The massive destruction of food for ethanol on a scale of hundreds of millions of tons annually is one such consequence of politicking through the creation of a climate of fear.
So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing ending up favoring somebodies paper whom the anonymous reviewers happen to know or like, or whose conclusions they agree with is a well known problem. As is peer reviewers delaying papers that disagree with their own research, despite impeccable research.
The problem is not that the peer review process used here was acceptable and should in fact have continued. The problem is double standards.
> Global Climate Change has become the consensus position of Climatologists the same way that Evolution has become the consensus position of Biologists
Yeah, it's cherry picking to use the 1990 report, but when you use the 2001 report you'll just say that the models are not made for the "short term". When the "long term" is finally the present, you just revert to saying it's "cherry picking" or "the science is MUCH BETTER today" (but of course not verifiable because they are not made for "the short term").
Add to this expressions like "extreme weather events" that some climate shill found either in a fortune cookie or a horoscope.
"Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. We have to change the minds of the American people. Because presently the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done. And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. We have to buy a lot of those ads. Let's rebrand global warming, as many of you have suggested. I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this."
And what they came up with was "climate change" and "extreme weather events". Elusive words that any quack or astrologist would use to make what he says compelling and non-committal at the same time.
I must have also had two more bouts of weekly hallucinations going on for 4 months of a semester each, in which self-declared environmentalists were lecturing me and the rest of a class of 30 to 100 students on the environmental benefits of biofuels without mentioning even once that they compete with growing food. Are you kidding me? It we've had more than our share of environmentalists protesting against *delays* in the large-scale application of biofuels in Germany and enthusiastic exclamations of biofuel being used in lorries, ships, airplanes etc. as a sign of a green future. The Green Party being first among them.
The only thing they will do is to remove zones of brackish water from the environment, that are usually highly prized by greenies as having high biodiversity and such stuff. Of course this is all swept to the wayside once you can make "green energy" out of all this green stuff. You'll even find conspiracy theories thrown out by eco-nuts blaming "big oil" for preventing such "innovative alternative technology" from coming to market. If that should happen, very soon they will have an epiphany, realize that in fact those osmotic power plants destroy important ecological niches... and by this point, of course, osmotic power plants are run by "big energy" without any respect for the environment. And of course, everybody in the green movement has always been against such a stupid idea.
How far fetched is this scenario... look no farther than bio-ethanol.
You mean like the people who found out that genetic traits carry over from one generation of animals or plants to the next had great success in breeding, were perfectly correct... and went on to say that we should rigorously apply the same to human beings no matter how atrocious those methods would be in any human context?
Being right in one question does not confer upon anybody any distinction whatsoever to be right with the next question as well. All you are doing is making one great big appeal to authority in order to avoid any factual discussion of the topic.
No, my problem is also with the deliberately disingenuous science by people who take "publish or perish" as an excuse to put out "scientific" papers according to their news value, instead of their scientific merit.
The scientific merit of papers in climate science is questionable in any case, since the concept of "replicability" is virtually non-existent. They are not replicable, period. Because the raw data and computer models used are not published and quite jealously guarded, on the grounds of preventing people to "pick the apart". Which, if you believe it or not, is what science is all about. Mercilessly picking apart the models, finding possible sources of error, correcting those, make predictions, compare prediction with measurements... throwing models into the dust bin, when it tuns out they didn't work and BE HONEST about it.
Not we didn't have a 50 meter rise in sea level in the last 20000 years. We had a sea level rise of roughy 150m in the last 20000 years. Permafrost soil thawed at rates that cannot be repeated these days, because there is so much less of it these days than during the iceage. Temperatures rose by several degrees, deserts didn't expand, there was much more fertile land on the globe that used to look like Siberia or Canada before the end of the ice age.
Of course, we all know that tundra and taiga have vastly preferable climate to any other climate zone. That's why people move there by the hundreds of millions.
Well, for a decade or two the entire scientific community agreed that the climate in the western USA had permanently changed. For the better, mind you. That was in the 1870ies and 1880ies. And then... things went back to normal and all explanations for the supposedly permanent changes that scientists came up with were rendered moot.
After decades of one-up-manship and changing goalposts for "global warming"... oh no... look, they call it "climate change" these days. Of predicting less rain for Germany when weather was rather dry (about 10 years ago), of predicting more rain when the weather was rather wet or a few years (lately), of predicting that we may never see snow again when there was little snow for a stretch of a couple years (early 90ies to early 00's), of predicting that climate change will lead to catastrophic winters (after snow falls picked up lately). Then there is the nostradamic expression of "extreme weather events" for which no definition has ever been offered so as to be able to write more headlines. And so on and so forth.
Trust is a rapidly depleting resource when it is shamelessly abused for politicking.
No, it won't happen. It is an experimental facility and the planners didn't see fit to put some high temperature components into it. Very similar to the first fission reactors, power will be removed at low temperature to keep the engineering effort under control.
It's about the fusion process first, the power generation is easy enough and will come once the physics of the reactor is sufficiently understood to turn it into an engineering and financing excercise.
Plans to build ITER started in 1983. That's 30 years ago. It was planned as a cooperation with the Soviet Union. Failure of the USSR to exist (and be solvent) when it neared realization delayed it. After new plans were made in 1996 or so, it took another decade just to agree on which country would have the honour of building it.
There has been little progress towards fusion in the meantime, because you need better fusion reactors - better hardware - to do that. As it is, the best hardware so far was build in 1983, the Joint European Torus(JET). There are some other reactors that are roughly on par with it (perhaps slightly better), but nothing that would mark serious progress.
When it comes to fusion reactors, size matters. When you build a reactor twice as big in every dimension, you will get roughly 8 times the fusion yield. When you double the magnetic field strength, it doubles too. ITER is more than twice as big as JET and has just over four times the magnetic field strength. The lack of progress stems from the deplorable fact that nobody has build anything in-between over the last 30 years. This makes the problems for ITER even worse, since there is now no experience in that realm and extrapolation of physical characteristics may break down at some point.
Quite the opposite actually. The smaller you build something, the easier it is for it to survive. The larger the house, the larger the area where the wind can push, the larger the forces that all the walls and structural members have to handle. Nobody would use the same thick walls of the first or second floor of a 14 storey building, if you weren't going to put the other 12 floors on top of it. It would be ludicrously overengineered for such a small thing.
It is much easier to build a small building to last a tornado than a big one. It is only hard to do so, if you think that two-by-fours are the paragon of stability.
Joplin Hospital begs to differ. Yet, it was still standing and moved by all of 4 inches (which, however, was sufficient to make it uneconomic to repair). People died either because they couldn't be moved away from the windows in time (being in a bed in a hospital). Or because they depended on ventilators for breathing that lost power due to wind/hail/rain damage on powerlines and emergency backup.
Reinforced concrete is perfectly sufficient to withstand an EF-5. Unfortunately, most buildings in the US are made of reinforced cardboard.
It sounds like that because KSP is based on what real rocket engineers actually do in the real world. You can see this in just about any major rocket family. Although, admittedly, the changes are a bit larger than what people usually do. But that's a function of most companies not having the technological reserves to increase the thrust of their engines by 50%. (Actually, the Merlin 1D has 135% more thrust than the original Merlin 1A. But 50% more than Merlin 1C.)
For comparison: getting 20% more thrust with the Vulcain II engine was hailed as a major improvement of the Ariane 5... and developing just those two engines cost about as much ($2.1bn) as all of what SpaceX has done so far, including development of 3 different rocket designs, the Dragon spaceships, as well as building and launching them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's 0.14% of what is used for irrigation in agriculture. In other words: almost nothing.
To be sure, fracking must be regulated. Very well and tightly regulated, especially concerning the chemicals used and the way fracking fluid is disposed. But I've grown up right next to some of the largest landstrip mines in the world and trust me: everything is better than that!
In other words, fracking is using up 0.14% of the amount of water used for agricultural irrigation. Most of that in dry parts of the United States (who would have guessed that?!).
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/w...
Shut the fuck up if all you have are not arguments but LIES!
Pumped storage is great if you happen to have a) the right kind of terrain and b) managed to put all the environmentalists of the country in a cage and threw away the key. It's too darn big. It takes huge amounts of water to store any meaningful quantity of power and you have to line the whole basin with concrete to prevent erosion.
It may balance power requirements over a day and a night. Even then there are those losses and instead of 800MW you get an average of 600-700MW. Plus the extra cost for the storage, its maintenance, transmission etc. Moreover, there are such things as seasonal fluctuations, even in India, that affect all photovoltaic power plants at once. So either you have another power plant handy as a requirement for having reliable power supply, or you need sufficient storage to last for several weeks or months.
Photovoltaics and wind turbines are NOT a replacement for other energy sources. But handled correctly, it can be a valuable addition and reduce the requirements on the rest. Right now, that is simply not nearly the case. Part of the reason is cost, part is deficiencies in technology in general, part of the reason is unrealistic expectations (and that's probably not all).
This must be some kind of record.
This post has been voted "interesting" twice ... which makes up 20%. It has also been voted "underrated" 30% and "overrated" 30%.
So, what the hell are you guys doing? Certainly not reading and thinking about the post. All you do is go "oh, he is agreeing with my position", it must be underrated! And "oh noes, he said something against solar!! Is it flamebait? ... well no. Is he a troll? Well, no .... so ... so... so... it must be OVERRATED!" ... oh yeah ... slashdot.
It's cheaper.
There is a glut of photovoltaics on the world market ever since the european countries cut the subsidies. Most notably Spain and, more recently, Germany. Which is responsible for the sudden drop in prices. It is not better technology, despite what the propaganda claims (otherwise solar power companies wouldn't go bankrupt all over Germany).
And yes, solar thermal is more useful on paper. Unfortunately it takes up just as much space as PV and needs lots of water for it cooling towers. However, solar thermal depends on very stable weather patterns. It cannot tolerate cloudy days very well - so you'd best build it in a desert, where cooling water is kind of rare as you can imagine. You'd need 24 million cubic meters of cooling water per year for an equal sized solar-thermal power plant.
What would be needed for PV to work is storage. Hydrogen/methane seems to be the only plausible/scalable solution so far. Unfortunately, even with the best technology we have on the planet, you'll need at least 3kWh electricty to get 1kWh of electricity back out of storage. Thus the average power of the power plant will drop from 800MW down to about 500MW, assuming that at least some part of the power will be used directly. (The amount of storage that is necessary depends on a lot of factors, mostly what power is available from other sources and how variable the weather patterns and seasons are. So 500MW is just a ballpark figure.)
First of all: It will generate less energy than that. Averaged over the year about 800MW. The amount of energy it will generate between 6pm and 6am is roughly zilch. During the short time around noon, when it will generate on the order of 3+GW (depending on weather, season, condition of the solar cells etc.), there will be no industry capable of actually using it, because 2-4 hours of electricity a day is simply not worth the investment. (Before and after this time, the power drops off quickly.) Even 8 hours would be too short, because you'll need 2 or 3 factories working in parallel for 8 hours a day to produce as much as a single factory can in 16 or 24 hours.
Finally wrap your head around the fact that quality of service cannot be compared by using peak power generation.
P.S.: Yes, noon is just the right time to get your air conditioning started, but unfortunately, when it comes to India the question is mostly: What air-conditioning are you talking about?
> Today "skeptics" of climate change tell us that the science of climate change is wrong because of the possible irresponsible political applications of climate science to public policy.
Now THAT's a non sequitur if I've ever seen one. I certainly didn't say that climate change is wrong because of possible political applications. That's because it's nonsense.
What does follow from the example of eugenics, however, is that perfectly correct science has been abused to justify politics without considering further consequences which can be very dire indeed. The measures introduced under the rubric of eugenics have also been justified by the supposed consensus of experts in their day.
The massive destruction of food for ethanol on a scale of hundreds of millions of tons annually is one such consequence of politicking through the creation of a climate of fear.
When you google "peer review problems" the first hits are:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/
and this
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access
and this
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/
So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing ending up favoring somebodies paper whom the anonymous reviewers happen to know or like, or whose conclusions they agree with is a well known problem. As is peer reviewers delaying papers that disagree with their own research, despite impeccable research.
The problem is not that the peer review process used here was acceptable and should in fact have continued. The problem is double standards.
> Global Climate Change has become the consensus position of Climatologists the same way that Evolution has become the consensus position of Biologists
Then we should be afraid. Very afraid.
Yeah, it's cherry picking to use the 1990 report, but when you use the 2001 report you'll just say that the models are not made for the "short term". When the "long term" is finally the present, you just revert to saying it's "cherry picking" or "the science is MUCH BETTER today" (but of course not verifiable because they are not made for "the short term").
Add to this expressions like "extreme weather events" that some climate shill found either in a fortune cookie or a horoscope.
All of this is the fallout from Al Gore's Orwellian "Campaign of Mass Persuation" that he launched publicly in 2006.
"Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. We have to change the minds of the American people. Because presently the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done. And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. We have to buy a lot of those ads. Let's rebrand global warming, as many of you have suggested. I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this."
And what they came up with was "climate change" and "extreme weather events". Elusive words that any quack or astrologist would use to make what he says compelling and non-committal at the same time.
Try buying some Ammoniumnitrate over the counter and tell me that the Haber-Bosch process hasn't been perfected yet.
It's not a "coping strategy" when you're 10000 miles away.
Thank you for illustrating my point with a real life example.
I'm pretty sure I was just hallucinating webpages like these:
http://edugreen.teri.res.in/explore/renew/biomass.htm
http://www.seai.ie/Archive1/Files_Misc/REIOBiomassFactsheet.pdf
http://www.ratical.org/renewables/biomass.html
http://www.biofuels.fsnet.co.uk/challenge.htm ["The author of this paper, following a long-standing interest in renewable energy, obtained a small Sustainable Communities Award from the Millennium Commission in 1998 to study the viability of electric vehicles and, subsequently, sustainable transport fuels. As a result of this research he was one of the first people in the UK to be awarded a Millennium Fellowship."]
http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/etcfc/docs/Biodiesel-CleanGreen.pdf
etc.
I must have also had two more bouts of weekly hallucinations going on for 4 months of a semester each, in which self-declared environmentalists were lecturing me and the rest of a class of 30 to 100 students on the environmental benefits of biofuels without mentioning even once that they compete with growing food. Are you kidding me? It we've had more than our share of environmentalists protesting against *delays* in the large-scale application of biofuels in Germany and enthusiastic exclamations of biofuel being used in lorries, ships, airplanes etc. as a sign of a green future. The Green Party being first among them.
The only thing they will do is to remove zones of brackish water from the environment, that are usually highly prized by greenies as having high biodiversity and such stuff. Of course this is all swept to the wayside once you can make "green energy" out of all this green stuff. You'll even find conspiracy theories thrown out by eco-nuts blaming "big oil" for preventing such "innovative alternative technology" from coming to market. If that should happen, very soon they will have an epiphany, realize that in fact those osmotic power plants destroy important ecological niches ... and by this point, of course, osmotic power plants are run by "big energy" without any respect for the environment. And of course, everybody in the green movement has always been against such a stupid idea.
How far fetched is this scenario ... look no farther than bio-ethanol.
There is a reason why there is a difference between "reactor grade" and "weapon grade" plutonium.
You seem to have trouble with English grammar. Please visit an English language course and try to re-parse the first sentence of my comment.
You mean like the people who found out that genetic traits carry over from one generation of animals or plants to the next had great success in breeding, were perfectly correct ... and went on to say that we should rigorously apply the same to human beings no matter how atrocious those methods would be in any human context?
Being right in one question does not confer upon anybody any distinction whatsoever to be right with the next question as well. All you are doing is making one great big appeal to authority in order to avoid any factual discussion of the topic.
No, my problem is also with the deliberately disingenuous science by people who take "publish or perish" as an excuse to put out "scientific" papers according to their news value, instead of their scientific merit.
The scientific merit of papers in climate science is questionable in any case, since the concept of "replicability" is virtually non-existent. They are not replicable, period. Because the raw data and computer models used are not published and quite jealously guarded, on the grounds of preventing people to "pick the apart". Which, if you believe it or not, is what science is all about. Mercilessly picking apart the models, finding possible sources of error, correcting those, make predictions, compare prediction with measurements ... throwing models into the dust bin, when it tuns out they didn't work and BE HONEST about it.
Not we didn't have a 50 meter rise in sea level in the last 20000 years. We had a sea level rise of roughy 150m in the last 20000 years. Permafrost soil thawed at rates that cannot be repeated these days, because there is so much less of it these days than during the iceage. Temperatures rose by several degrees, deserts didn't expand, there was much more fertile land on the globe that used to look like Siberia or Canada before the end of the ice age.
Of course, we all know that tundra and taiga have vastly preferable climate to any other climate zone. That's why people move there by the hundreds of millions.
Well, for a decade or two the entire scientific community agreed that the climate in the western USA had permanently changed. For the better, mind you. That was in the 1870ies and 1880ies. And then ... things went back to normal and all explanations for the supposedly permanent changes that scientists came up with were rendered moot.
After decades of one-up-manship and changing goalposts for "global warming" ... oh no ... look, they call it "climate change" these days. Of predicting less rain for Germany when weather was rather dry (about 10 years ago), of predicting more rain when the weather was rather wet or a few years (lately), of predicting that we may never see snow again when there was little snow for a stretch of a couple years (early 90ies to early 00's), of predicting that climate change will lead to catastrophic winters (after snow falls picked up lately). Then there is the nostradamic expression of "extreme weather events" for which no definition has ever been offered so as to be able to write more headlines. And so on and so forth.
Trust is a rapidly depleting resource when it is shamelessly abused for politicking.
No, it won't happen. It is an experimental facility and the planners didn't see fit to put some high temperature components into it. Very similar to the first fission reactors, power will be removed at low temperature to keep the engineering effort under control.
It's about the fusion process first, the power generation is easy enough and will come once the physics of the reactor is sufficiently understood to turn it into an engineering and financing excercise.
Plans to build ITER started in 1983. That's 30 years ago. It was planned as a cooperation with the Soviet Union. Failure of the USSR to exist (and be solvent) when it neared realization delayed it. After new plans were made in 1996 or so, it took another decade just to agree on which country would have the honour of building it.
There has been little progress towards fusion in the meantime, because you need better fusion reactors - better hardware - to do that. As it is, the best hardware so far was build in 1983, the Joint European Torus(JET). There are some other reactors that are roughly on par with it (perhaps slightly better), but nothing that would mark serious progress.
When it comes to fusion reactors, size matters. When you build a reactor twice as big in every dimension, you will get roughly 8 times the fusion yield. When you double the magnetic field strength, it doubles too. ITER is more than twice as big as JET and has just over four times the magnetic field strength. The lack of progress stems from the deplorable fact that nobody has build anything in-between over the last 30 years. This makes the problems for ITER even worse, since there is now no experience in that realm and extrapolation of physical characteristics may break down at some point.
Quite the opposite actually. The smaller you build something, the easier it is for it to survive. The larger the house, the larger the area where the wind can push, the larger the forces that all the walls and structural members have to handle. Nobody would use the same thick walls of the first or second floor of a 14 storey building, if you weren't going to put the other 12 floors on top of it. It would be ludicrously overengineered for such a small thing.
It is much easier to build a small building to last a tornado than a big one. It is only hard to do so, if you think that two-by-fours are the paragon of stability.
Joplin Hospital begs to differ. Yet, it was still standing and moved by all of 4 inches (which, however, was sufficient to make it uneconomic to repair). People died either because they couldn't be moved away from the windows in time (being in a bed in a hospital). Or because they depended on ventilators for breathing that lost power due to wind/hail/rain damage on powerlines and emergency backup.
Reinforced concrete is perfectly sufficient to withstand an EF-5. Unfortunately, most buildings in the US are made of reinforced cardboard.
It sounds like that because KSP is based on what real rocket engineers actually do in the real world. You can see this in just about any major rocket family. Although, admittedly, the changes are a bit larger than what people usually do. But that's a function of most companies not having the technological reserves to increase the thrust of their engines by 50%. (Actually, the Merlin 1D has 135% more thrust than the original Merlin 1A. But 50% more than Merlin 1C.)
For comparison: getting 20% more thrust with the Vulcain II engine was hailed as a major improvement of the Ariane 5 ... and developing just those two engines cost about as much ($2.1bn) as all of what SpaceX has done so far, including development of 3 different rocket designs, the Dragon spaceships, as well as building and launching them.