Yeah, solar runs out too. I mean, if you're going to talk about things that are thousands of years in the future, I can talk about things that are millions of years in the future too.
Wow, that's a lot of hand waving you've got going on there. Nothing to see here, move along!
Except that it was an accident - they didn't plan to have a barrel of waste overpressurize and pop in a transport tunnel, shutting down the entire facility and requiring several billion dollars of cleanup, and the delay of other barrels of waste ready for transport to this location.
Sure, if this would have happened 15 years from now after everything they planned on putting down there was already down there and the place was sealed up - fine. But that was not the operating environment. They were lucky nobody was in the place when this happened, or they would be dead right now.
Oh, but right - it wasn't an accident because it wasn't the absolute worst case scenario. Sell crazy somewhere else, we're all stocked up. And I say this as someone who would be happy to see more nuclear power deployed, but also isn't a fucking lunatic.
Right. If only those assholes in the 1950s would have designed a perfect system without the benefit of 60 years of hindsight and iterative process improvement, and without the 60 years of improved understanding of nuclear physics, and 60 years of improved tools. You know, like computers actually existing now instead of doing the whole fucking thing on blue paper and chalkboards with a slide rule.
Not saying you are wrong, but let's put the same metrics to use on other energy sources: how much economic damage, loss of valuable land, and social ramifications of losing entire cities to sea level rise from the continued emission of burning oil and coal?
Every source of energy has it's costs. With properly run nuclear*, you get an amount of waste that is very dangerous, but concentrated and manageable. With fossil fuels, you get less dangerous waste, dispersed into the atmosphere until it causes global catastrophe. With solar, you get mine tailings from producing the panels. With wind, you get localized weather changes, bird deaths, low frequency noise pollution. With hydroelectric, you get fish kills, flooding of thousands of acres of land into a reservoir. Etc. etc. And none of them are perfect for 100% of our needs.
So let's go with the least harm principle, and get the fuck off fossil fuels as fast as possible, by whatever means we have possible today, instead of waiting for what might be tomorrow while we still spew gigatons of shit into the air.
* yes, it's debatable if this has ever existed. The United States Navy makes a compelling argument with running many dozens of reactors over the last 60+ years with zero incidents. Commercial power plants make a compelling counter-argument with their long list of low-level fuck-ups, and a few very high-profile fuck-ups.
Yeah, except nowhere in this article is anything about nuclear power actually mentioned. This article, and storage facility, are for the waste coming from nuclear weapons production and research.
I guess that's "nuclear energy" in a way, but commercial nuclear energy generation has vastly different waste outputs, with completely different handling procedures. For example, you usually don't have liquid radioactive waste that needs blotting up and stored in barrels, because you haven't dissolved the nuclear material in nitric acid in order to extract the remaining plutonium and uranium from all the other crap you don't want.
Clearly all kitty litter bags should now have a warning label: "Warning: usage of this product for the cleanup of liquid radioactive waste may result in release of gases that may overpressurize any containment vessel."
I still have never figured out how North Korea would somehow spontaneously get plutonium created at a breeder reactor in Tennessee. I guess the argument is "well if we spend billions and billions of dollars to prototype and refine the design until it actually works, then all of a sudden they have one too without all the pesky engineering and construction costs?
It's not a fucking MP3 - it can't be copied perfectly with zero cost.
Yeah, except that this story has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power generation. All of this waste, and this waste disposal site, is designed for material coming from the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and the output of the DoE national laboratories.
So the FUD is implicit - anything that is bad about any nuclear technology at all, mdsolar will post just because people will automatically relate it to nuclear power. I still don't know why he thinks that nuclear is such a threat to his dream of solar panels everywhere, being that solar deployments are growing, and panel prices are falling, and panel efficiencies are rising; and there's all of 1 or 2 nuclear reactors under construction in the US, for the first time since 1979.
Now only if there was some way to test some of the stuff you're griping about without sending it to orbit. Oh wait, all of it can be tested with facilities that already exist.
And why would any welding need to be done in space? We've already built a huge space station without it. Just make sure there are fittings already there before you launch it.
Can you do this with a bone-stock Atlas-V tomorrow? No, there would need to be some retrofit. But that retrofit will likely cost far less than multiple launches of Atlas-V rockets to put multiple payloads in orbit, if you can re-use the second stage tank.
This is why we have engineers "do the math" and figure out if it's cost effective or not, and they're far smarter than either you or I. Because they are literally rocket scientists.
Summarizing your point: the good news is that the engineers aren't just going to yell "YEEEEE HAWWWW" and start welding chairs and shit into a fuel tank, and then light the fuse. They do the math. They'll know what the added mass is, and what the reduced fuel volume will be. They'll add systems for venting the remaining pressurized fuel into the hard vacuum of space.
NASA looked at doing this 50 years ago in Apollo, but never got funding. They also looked at doing it with the Shuttle ET. There's even a guy who proposes doing it with SLS. It's not a new concept.
It's the concept of the wet workshop that goes back to the Apollo days. The thought was that if funding continued, they could either retrofit the tanks of a spent S-II stage after you already spent the energy to get it into orbit into a workshop / living area, and then push it deeper into space to use; or you have the equipment already mounted in there and sealed up, and when you reach orbit you vent the remaining fuel to space and then go in and deploy your gear.
A 'dry workshop' version of this was actually employed for building Skylab - they emptied the fuel tank from the upper-stage S-IVB engine and turned it into the workshop, adding the folding solar arrays and some heat shielding that ripped off during the launch, causing the first Skylab mission to be one of rescue and repair.
Sure. But do those releases ever actually make it to end user devices?
Predominantly, no. Because the Android ecosystem is such that device manufacturers have to incentive to keep old devices working - there is no margin in it. They would much rather you buy a new device that they already have the new software on, and they get money for developing.
The "fairness doctrine" never really helped, because it just caused the media to water down the problem in order to not piss anyone off. For example:
Congressional Republicans decide that the world is not a sphere, and must be flat.* Congressional Democrats send 180 Congressmen to give speeches from the Well in the US House of Representatives about how idiotic that is.
The headline? "Democrats and Republicans disagree on geometry of Earth"
That's what the so-called Fairness Doctrine gets us. When did we get the idea that facts were unfair, or biased?
I agree that the media is a fucking joke today compared to past eras, but that's more a function of corporate profitability and shrinking newsrooms than pandering to a specific audience. You can't write an investigative piece about something if you don't have any investigative journalists left working for you.
*note that I am not Republican bashing here - I'm just giving an absolutely ridiculous example meant to make the point very clear.
Tesla has made an offer to purchase - the purchase has not been completed yet, and SolarCity is in a competitive offer phase where they can take other offers.
I know reading comprehension is hard, but please try to follow along. Previous poster said:
The oil industry and fossil car industries are desperate that people not realise how convenient it is to have a charger in your garage. You come home every day and plug in your electric car. When you get up the next day, your car is fully charged.
The previous poster made the assumption that everyone has a garage to put a charger into, that they can come home every day and plug into. Why jump all over my shit for pointing out how that doesn't apply to the roughly 110 million people in the US who rent? Why aren't you questioning his assumption that everybody has a garage that already has 220v high amperage circuits inside, ready to go?
I didn't say that I do. But there are people that do. All the time. But good job throwing your derision at me because people may have different needs than your own.
Also, where are the millions that live in apartments supposed to charge their EVs? Are they magically going to get charging stations in the parking lots from their property management companies?
And if you decide that you're going to take a road trip somewhere? Or, god forbid, need to travel distance by car for work? Or, haul a 4x8 sheet of plywood?
EVs are great, but they don't fit everyone's needs yet. Stop acting like they are a solution to all problems, because they aren't. Yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, solar runs out too. I mean, if you're going to talk about things that are thousands of years in the future, I can talk about things that are millions of years in the future too.
You've hyperbolized the situation.
Yeah, and all of a sudden that orange has a much better ROI than this club made out of a trunk from the orange tree.
Wait, two vastly different things are vastly different?
Wow, that's a lot of hand waving you've got going on there. Nothing to see here, move along!
Except that it was an accident - they didn't plan to have a barrel of waste overpressurize and pop in a transport tunnel, shutting down the entire facility and requiring several billion dollars of cleanup, and the delay of other barrels of waste ready for transport to this location.
Sure, if this would have happened 15 years from now after everything they planned on putting down there was already down there and the place was sealed up - fine. But that was not the operating environment. They were lucky nobody was in the place when this happened, or they would be dead right now.
Oh, but right - it wasn't an accident because it wasn't the absolute worst case scenario. Sell crazy somewhere else, we're all stocked up. And I say this as someone who would be happy to see more nuclear power deployed, but also isn't a fucking lunatic.
Right. If only those assholes in the 1950s would have designed a perfect system without the benefit of 60 years of hindsight and iterative process improvement, and without the 60 years of improved understanding of nuclear physics, and 60 years of improved tools. You know, like computers actually existing now instead of doing the whole fucking thing on blue paper and chalkboards with a slide rule.
What a bunch of assholes.
Not saying you are wrong, but let's put the same metrics to use on other energy sources: how much economic damage, loss of valuable land, and social ramifications of losing entire cities to sea level rise from the continued emission of burning oil and coal?
Every source of energy has it's costs. With properly run nuclear*, you get an amount of waste that is very dangerous, but concentrated and manageable. With fossil fuels, you get less dangerous waste, dispersed into the atmosphere until it causes global catastrophe. With solar, you get mine tailings from producing the panels. With wind, you get localized weather changes, bird deaths, low frequency noise pollution. With hydroelectric, you get fish kills, flooding of thousands of acres of land into a reservoir. Etc. etc. And none of them are perfect for 100% of our needs.
So let's go with the least harm principle, and get the fuck off fossil fuels as fast as possible, by whatever means we have possible today, instead of waiting for what might be tomorrow while we still spew gigatons of shit into the air.
* yes, it's debatable if this has ever existed. The United States Navy makes a compelling argument with running many dozens of reactors over the last 60+ years with zero incidents. Commercial power plants make a compelling counter-argument with their long list of low-level fuck-ups, and a few very high-profile fuck-ups.
Yeah, except nowhere in this article is anything about nuclear power actually mentioned. This article, and storage facility, are for the waste coming from nuclear weapons production and research.
I guess that's "nuclear energy" in a way, but commercial nuclear energy generation has vastly different waste outputs, with completely different handling procedures. For example, you usually don't have liquid radioactive waste that needs blotting up and stored in barrels, because you haven't dissolved the nuclear material in nitric acid in order to extract the remaining plutonium and uranium from all the other crap you don't want.
Clearly all kitty litter bags should now have a warning label: "Warning: usage of this product for the cleanup of liquid radioactive waste may result in release of gases that may overpressurize any containment vessel."
That would have solved this!
I still have never figured out how North Korea would somehow spontaneously get plutonium created at a breeder reactor in Tennessee. I guess the argument is "well if we spend billions and billions of dollars to prototype and refine the design until it actually works, then all of a sudden they have one too without all the pesky engineering and construction costs?
It's not a fucking MP3 - it can't be copied perfectly with zero cost.
Yeah, except that this story has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power generation. All of this waste, and this waste disposal site, is designed for material coming from the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and the output of the DoE national laboratories.
So the FUD is implicit - anything that is bad about any nuclear technology at all, mdsolar will post just because people will automatically relate it to nuclear power. I still don't know why he thinks that nuclear is such a threat to his dream of solar panels everywhere, being that solar deployments are growing, and panel prices are falling, and panel efficiencies are rising; and there's all of 1 or 2 nuclear reactors under construction in the US, for the first time since 1979.
Now only if there was some way to test some of the stuff you're griping about without sending it to orbit. Oh wait, all of it can be tested with facilities that already exist.
And why would any welding need to be done in space? We've already built a huge space station without it. Just make sure there are fittings already there before you launch it.
Can you do this with a bone-stock Atlas-V tomorrow? No, there would need to be some retrofit. But that retrofit will likely cost far less than multiple launches of Atlas-V rockets to put multiple payloads in orbit, if you can re-use the second stage tank.
This is why we have engineers "do the math" and figure out if it's cost effective or not, and they're far smarter than either you or I. Because they are literally rocket scientists.
Summarizing your point: the good news is that the engineers aren't just going to yell "YEEEEE HAWWWW" and start welding chairs and shit into a fuel tank, and then light the fuse. They do the math. They'll know what the added mass is, and what the reduced fuel volume will be. They'll add systems for venting the remaining pressurized fuel into the hard vacuum of space.
NASA looked at doing this 50 years ago in Apollo, but never got funding. They also looked at doing it with the Shuttle ET. There's even a guy who proposes doing it with SLS. It's not a new concept.
It's the concept of the wet workshop that goes back to the Apollo days. The thought was that if funding continued, they could either retrofit the tanks of a spent S-II stage after you already spent the energy to get it into orbit into a workshop / living area, and then push it deeper into space to use; or you have the equipment already mounted in there and sealed up, and when you reach orbit you vent the remaining fuel to space and then go in and deploy your gear.
A 'dry workshop' version of this was actually employed for building Skylab - they emptied the fuel tank from the upper-stage S-IVB engine and turned it into the workshop, adding the folding solar arrays and some heat shielding that ripped off during the launch, causing the first Skylab mission to be one of rescue and repair.
Unhappy or not, they're still paying the bill. It's not like they have an option to change ISPs.
They aren't getting a single unhappy dollar (or otherwise) from people that aren't subscribers.
Sure. But do those releases ever actually make it to end user devices?
Predominantly, no. Because the Android ecosystem is such that device manufacturers have to incentive to keep old devices working - there is no margin in it. They would much rather you buy a new device that they already have the new software on, and they get money for developing.
The "fairness doctrine" never really helped, because it just caused the media to water down the problem in order to not piss anyone off. For example:
Congressional Republicans decide that the world is not a sphere, and must be flat.* Congressional Democrats send 180 Congressmen to give speeches from the Well in the US House of Representatives about how idiotic that is.
The headline? "Democrats and Republicans disagree on geometry of Earth"
That's what the so-called Fairness Doctrine gets us. When did we get the idea that facts were unfair, or biased?
I agree that the media is a fucking joke today compared to past eras, but that's more a function of corporate profitability and shrinking newsrooms than pandering to a specific audience. You can't write an investigative piece about something if you don't have any investigative journalists left working for you.
*note that I am not Republican bashing here - I'm just giving an absolutely ridiculous example meant to make the point very clear.
How do you deal with snow on and around your existing solar panels?
Well, there's always a $12 broom...
Tesla has made an offer to purchase - the purchase has not been completed yet, and SolarCity is in a competitive offer phase where they can take other offers.
Except that SolarCity installs plenty of systems in New York, and is building their manufacturing facility in Buffalo.
I know reading comprehension is hard, but please try to follow along. Previous poster said:
The oil industry and fossil car industries are desperate that people not realise how convenient it is to have a charger in your garage. You come home every day and plug in your electric car. When you get up the next day, your car is fully charged.
The previous poster made the assumption that everyone has a garage to put a charger into, that they can come home every day and plug into. Why jump all over my shit for pointing out how that doesn't apply to the roughly 110 million people in the US who rent? Why aren't you questioning his assumption that everybody has a garage that already has 220v high amperage circuits inside, ready to go?
Unfortunately, it enables Audi drivers to do other things besides paying attention to driving.
Wait, most Audi drivers are already doing that. Carry on.
Oh! They're giving you a signal for when to activate launch control and put both pedals to the floor!
That's convenient!
I'm glad that someone else sees this - the assholes that got BMW drivers a bad reputation all moved to Audi.
I didn't say that I do. But there are people that do. All the time. But good job throwing your derision at me because people may have different needs than your own.
Also, where are the millions that live in apartments supposed to charge their EVs? Are they magically going to get charging stations in the parking lots from their property management companies?
And if you decide that you're going to take a road trip somewhere? Or, god forbid, need to travel distance by car for work? Or, haul a 4x8 sheet of plywood?
EVs are great, but they don't fit everyone's needs yet. Stop acting like they are a solution to all problems, because they aren't. Yet.
Strange, you replied to someone asking about where to get a 10,000 cycle battery with what is happening in a lab.