The Green New Deal

The Great Zaganza said:
Heck, there is even a decent chance that this time, Fusion power really is only 15 years away.
Making all new Supertanker/Freighter nuclear powered could massively reduce some of the worst pollution caused by the most dirty fraction of oil that is currently used. They could also easily be decommissioned by sinking them in a Godzilla-free spot of the ocean.
But that would probably only be done with meltdown-proof reactor designs.
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I DON'T buy that FUSION power is 100 years away let alone 15. There is just too much material science required to deal with the intense heat of a nuclear fusion. OTOH, I can see SMALL MODULE FISSION REACTORS powering those huge ships.
 
acbytesla said:
I DON'T buy that FUSION power is 100 years away let alone 15. There is just too much material science required to deal with the intense heat of a nuclear fusion. OTOH, I can see SMALL MODULE FISSION REACTORS powering those huge ships.
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I, too, will believe in Fusion Power when I see it.
 
theprestige said:
Better than wood.

There's a time and a place for everything. Coal empowered the industrial revolution, which generated unprecedented amounts of surplus wealth, which in turn was invested in the foundations of just about every good thing civilization has produced in the past few hundred years. Without the quantum leap forward in productivity we got from coal, we wouldn't be in a position to talk about alternatives like solar and wind and nuclear. We wouldn't have global trade. We wouldn't have national power grids. We wouldn't have large-scale agriculture producing enough food to feed the entire world. We probably wouldn't have the vast medical establishment that underpins all our health care - even the crappy healthcare systems.

Coal may be worse than nuclear, but it's a damn sight better than wood, and wood was the only other option when coal came on the scene. I think that on balance, coal has been a great boon to humanity. Pollution and all.

Now, if you were to tell me, let's cut pollution without cutting productivity, by shifting from coal to nuclear, I'd support you 100%. But if you were to tell me, let's get rid of coal because coal is evil... Well.
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That was 250 years ago. I think coal's had its time.
 
I think we're well past the time for replacing coal and gasoline as largescale parts of the energy infrastructure. To what degree and for how long they (especially gasoline) will exist as niche products is another question.
 
acbytesla said:
I DON'T buy that FUSION power is 100 years away let alone 15. There is just too much material science required to deal with the intense heat of a nuclear fusion. OTOH, I can see SMALL MODULE FISSION REACTORS powering those huge ships.
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I don't think it's 15 but I don't think it's quite as far as 100 either.
 
Ironically I think we will get sustainable fission, but it will come after a broader energy revolution and will kind of only exist as a novelty / limited use tech.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
I, too, will believe in Fusion Power when I see it.
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I'm amazed at how much government money worldwide has been invested in fusion and the super-collider. While I wouldn't call it a waste, it seems foolish given the present state of technology. It sort of mirrors how I feel about most space exploration today. It's really cool but that money should be invested in material sciences and solving the energy problem and only after that issue is more resolved

First things first.
 
The problem with "First things first" is the "first" things are never going to go away.

The "But we have problems to solve, let's shelf inventing the cool new stuff" card can always be played, no matter how close to Utopia we ever get.

I get this puts me in the minority but advancing general knowledge through things like exploration, R&D, should be prioritized because, in my opinion, it's going to give us a much better return on investment (and not just in the literal monetary sense) in the mid to long term.
 
acbytesla said:
I'm amazed at how much government money worldwide has been invested in fusion and the super-collider. While I wouldn't call it a waste, it seems foolish given the present state of technology. It sort of mirrors how I feel about most space exploration today. It's really cool but that money should be invested in material sciences and solving the energy problem and only after that issue is more resolved

First things first.
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same argument has been made about the moon landing.
I see the quest for Fusion Power or the ultimate collider as the means to put money into basic research. Even if it comes get you there, along the way we will have discovered some new things.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The problem with "First things first" is the "first" things are never going to go away.

The "But we have problems to solve, let's shelf inventing the cool new stuff" card can always be played, no matter how close to Utopia we ever get.

I get this puts me in the minority but advancing general knowledge through things like exploration, R&D, should be prioritized because, in my opinion, it's going to give us a much better return on investment (and not just in the literal monetary sense) in the mid to long term.
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I don't want to be anti-big research science experiments. I think they are important. But IMV, solving the energy and global warming problem should be like winning WWII. Nothing is a priority over that. We need to be single-minded. Like General Groves said to a bunch of physicists in New Mexico. "We need to come down out of the clouds and get in the business of winning the war"
 
theprestige said:
I'm with Orwell. Once something becomes a cliche, that's your signal to discard it, reexamine the subject, and come up with new things to say about it.
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I've been studying energy development since high school when the debate resolution for the year was "The development and allocation of energy should be controlled by an International organization. That was the mid 1970s. Fusion is the holy grail of energy. It is a sun on Earth. Wouldn't it be wonderful? Harnessing that much power would be wild. But no one has ever had a dam clue how you contain a million degrees of heat for any period of time. Seems to me, huge breakthroughs in materials sciences would be required first.
 
acbytesla said:
I've been studying energy development since high school when the debate resolution for the year was "The development and allocation of energy should be controlled by an International organization. That was the mid 1970s. Fusion is the holy grail of energy. It is a sun on Earth. Wouldn't it be wonderful? Harnessing that much power would be wild. But no one has ever had a dam clue how you contain a million degrees of heat for any period of time. Seems to me, huge breakthroughs in materials sciences would be required first.
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Well the really really hot stuff is a good distance from the reactor walls, though.
 
acbytesla said:
I've been studying energy development since high school when the debate resolution for the year was "The development and allocation of energy should be controlled by an International organization. That was the mid 1970s. Fusion is the holy grail of energy. It is a sun on Earth. Wouldn't it be wonderful? Harnessing that much power would be wild. But no one has ever had a dam clue how you contain a million degrees of heat for any period of time. Seems to me, huge breakthroughs in materials sciences would be required first.
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That's why I'm of the opinion that on a long enough time scale we'll probably get there, by the time we do it's nearly inevitable that another form of energy will already have established itself as the backbone of our energy infrastructure.

It's like a.... horse buggy made of carbon fiber. There's no reason it wouldn't work, no reason you couldn't make one, and it would be a better horse buggy but the time you reach the point where you can make a carbon fiber horse buggy... you're no longer using horse buggies.
 
Because it's not about coal in the literal sense. It's about coal's symbolic representation of the entire "blue collar industry." We have to pretend that it's noble that a guy in West Virginia or Pennsylvania can go die in a hole like his daddy and his daddy before that even though now the entire coal industry employees fewer people then Arbys and even at its heyday it peaked at only 863,000 job which only like... Kroger and Taco Bell combined employees now or else we're pissing on the working man.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Because it's not about coal in the literal sense. It's about coal's symbolic representation of the entire "blue collar industry." We have to pretend that it's noble that a guy in West Virginia or Pennsylvania can go die in a hole like his daddy and his daddy before that even though now the entire coal industry employees fewer people then Arbys and even at its heyday it peaked at only 863,000 job which only like... Kroger and Taco Bell combined employees now or else we're pissing on the working man.
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I grew up in West Virginia. I can state confidently that the coal industry has never been a friend to the state or its blue collar workforce. It raped and poisoned (is raping and poisoning) the land and treated (treats) the employees like chattel, or worse.
 
quadraginta said:
I wonder where we would be if the money spent over the last hundred years (or even the last fifty) to maximise and protect the coal industry's profit margins had been spent on researching and developing more sustainable substitutes.



Not to mention oil and gas.
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Like coal, oil and gas have done the world a lot of good.
 
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