human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Quote:If you already have a nuclear power plant built, why not keep it running? But to build a new one? Those damn things produce the world's most expensive electricity:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How about nuclear?
Windmills and Solar Farms are snake oil.
Estimated capital costs of energy generation in the United States in 2023, by energy source (in U.S. dollars per kilowatt)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/654401/estimated-capital-cost-of-e
nergy-generation-in-the-us-by-technology/
Nuclear energy has the highest estimated capital costs of any energy technology used in the United States. As of 2023, capital costs for nuclear power plants ranged between 8,475 and 13,925 U.S. dollars per kilowatt. As the radioactive materials used and the waste created require careful handling, nuclear stations are among the most expensive to build. The number of U.S. nuclear power plants fell to 92 in 2022, from 112 plants in 1990.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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An increasingly common argument for curtailing solar projects is to preserve farmland. Some counties now set limits on the amount of agricultural land that can be turned into a solar farm.
Opponents argue that too much farmland being turned into solar farms will affect the country’s ability to feed itself.
The answer: No, solar will not use up all the farmland we need.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that for the U.S. to move completely to carbon-neutral power, it will require about 10,000 square miles of land.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81644.pdf
The Department of Agriculture already pays farmers to take about 24.8 million acres of less productive and environmentally sensitive land out of production. That’s 38,750 square miles – more than the entire amount of land that would be needed for green energy.
And in 2023, about 40% of the U.S. corn crop was used to produce ethanol. By some measures, an acre of solar power can make 70 times as much energy as an acre’s worth of corn turned into ethanol.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/02/04/green-en
ergy-fact-checked/72390472007/
94,640,000 acres for 2023 were planted with corn in the USA.
40% of those acres are for corn to make ethanol to fuel cars.
40% is 37,856,000 acres or 59,150 square miles, which is huge compared to 10,000 square miles for solar projects.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_corn_acres_planted
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If you already have a nuclear power plant built, why not keep it running? But to build a new one? Those damn things produce the world's most expensive electricity:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How about nuclear?
Windmills and Solar Farms are snake oil.
Untrue.
Solar power is the most expensive.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-
cost/
Quote:
Among the three options shown, nuclear power is right in the middle, with total costs in 2012 of about $96 per megawatt hour (MWh), most of which involves capital construction costs.
On the high end is solar power at $130 per MWh, and gas at the low end at $64 per MWh.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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PACCAR (owner of Peterbilt, Kenworth, and other commercial truck brands) and Toyota are joint-developing a hydrogen fuel cell semi truck.
The two companies have already built and tested a concept vehicle by putting two Toyota Mirai powertrains into a Kenworth truck body. (Mirai is a Toyota Sports Car.)
Fuel cells are easier than internal combustion engines to link together.
Under the name Project Portal, Toyota and PACCAR have already made prototype trucks. Essentially, the diesel engine and all its accouterments were removed from a Kenworth T680 truck. Two Toyota Mirai powertrains were installed in its place. This resulted in a truck with 675 horsepower and 1,325 pound-feet of torque. The prototype version only had about 200 miles of driving range, but it should be understood that this was meant more as a proof-of-concept than a final design. As with diesel trucks, the range is determined by the size of the fuel tank (or tanks).
Honda and GM Have Also Proven The Modularity Of Fuel Cell Systems
Toyota is not the only company exploring the possibilities of parallel fuel cells. Honda and General Motors are joint-manufacturing fuel cell systems in a factory just outside of Detroit. Although the two companies' cells only put out a relatively paltry 77 kilowatts (103 horsepower), they can be linked together to get practically any power output desired. In a decisive move to prove the technology, Honda is using hydrogen fuel cells instead of the customary diesel to power the emergency backup generators at its data center in Torrance, California.
Fuel cells are more inherently modular than internal combustion engines. While some amount of design finesse is required to make multiple modular fuel cell systems work as one unit, this is a far easier task than linking internal combustion engines. Fuel cells have no crankshafts that must be mechanically synchronized. Like batteries, fuel cells only put out electricity and nothing else.
More at https://www.topspeed.com/toyota-hydrogen-fuel-cells-trucks-plans/
Mirai Fuel Cell System
2023 Toyota Mirai Overview | Toyota
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:There is a huge difference between the price per kilowatt-hour of electricity and the price to build a kilowatt of electric power plant capacity, but that is for you to understand. Your statement: "Untrue" is nonsense, but you're too stupid to know what you did wrong. Don't go into engineering, 6ix. Stay with what you think you know: "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax." You and Trump beautifully work together to misunderstand every concept about Climate Change and electric generation. Don't stop being jackasses together.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Untrue.
Solar power is the most expensive.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-
cost/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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New ironmaking method could slash carbon emissions
By extracting metallic iron without producing carbon dioxide, the new process could even be carbon negative
By Robert F. Service | 5 FEB 2024, 12:00 PM ET
https://www.science.org/content/article/electrifying-new-ironmaking-me
thod-could-slash-carbon-emissions
The world mines 2.5 billion tons of iron every year, and reducing it to iron emits as much CO2 as the tailpipes of all passenger vehicles combined. So, scientists are looking for economically viable ways to produce metallic iron that don’t generate greenhouse gases.
Making iron, the main ingredient of steel, takes a toll on Earth’s delicate atmosphere, producing 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Now, a team of chemists has come up with a way to make the business much more eco-friendly. By using electricity to convert iron ore and salt water into metallic iron and other industrially useful chemicals, researchers report today in Joule that their approach is cost effective, works well with electricity provided by wind and solar farms, and could even be carbon negative, consuming more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it produces. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.01.001
“It’s a very clever approach,” says Karthish Manthiram, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved with the study. He notes that the process has other advantages, including working at a low temperature, and being amenable to working with intermittent renewable electricity. “It checks all the boxes.”
To that end, Paul Kempler, a chemical engineer at the University of Oregon, and colleagues wondered whether an industrial process for making chlorine from saltwater could be repurposed for ironmaking. In this “chlor-alkali” process, water containing sodium-chloride is placed in an electrochemical cell resembling a battery that contains two electrodes submerged in a liquid electrolyte. The positively charged electrode, the anode, pulls electrons from chloride ions, causing chlorine atoms to pair up into chlorine gas. At the same time, electrons flowing in from the cathode split water molecules into pieces that pair with the sodium ions and one another to make sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas.
To tweak the setup to purify iron, Kempler’s team added iron oxide particles to its cathode. Now, the electrons sent to it would also release the oxygen atoms from iron oxide and again form sodium hydroxide—as well as leave behind solid metallic iron. The process is highly efficient, the researchers claim. In fact, they estimate that selling the chlorine and some of the sodium hydroxide at current market prices should enable the overall process to produce iron at roughly the same price as making it in blast furnaces. And because sodium hydroxide can bind CO2 and convert it into carbon-based minerals, the process could be used to help capture CO2, making it carbon negative.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Biden's climate policies are as bad as his foreign policies and should be ended. The whole focus on "zero carbon" instead of conservation and rehabilitation is just a big wet kiss to some companies, and a way to throw money at speculators.
Unfortunately, it sounds like Trump's policies ... drill more oil and gas... are also whacked. Eventually oil and gas will run out. We need to find a sustainable energy source, and a way of living on this planet without wrecking it.
Solar makes sense... for California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. But battery storage STILL costs $15,000, and that's just to limp along overnight to run a few lights, the frig and freezer, keep the modem going, and maybe run a couple of fans of the weather is really hot. I don't know where battery prices are coming down bc it's not reflected in household battery storage. It's far cheaper to get a trifuel generator and just crank it up when needed.
And I have nothing against fuel cells - they are remarkably efficient at extracting energy from fuel- but so far the idea of running mobile applications on hydrogen is impractical. Hydrogen has a lower BTU per CF content and it's ridiculously hard to trundle around enough hydrogen to get any kind of range.
"But because hydrogen is so much lighter, or less dense, you need approximately 3 times the volume of hydrogen as compared to natural gas to get the same amount of energy. So, to get the same “bang for your buck” out of hydrogen as compared to natural gas, you would either need to increase the pressure of the fuel supply or increase the volumetric flow"
All of the difficulties of hydrogen v methane.
https://www.powereng.com/library/6-things-to-remember-about-hydrogen-v
s-natural-gas
I guess I'll believe it when I see it.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:There is a huge difference between the price per kilowatt-hour of electricity and the price to build a kilowatt of electric power plant capacity, but that is for you to understand. Your statement: "Untrue" is nonsense, but you're too stupid to know what you did wrong.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Untrue.
Solar power is the most expensive.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-
cost/
That's not what the WEF says.
Apparently you didn't read their article I linked, because you have the mind of a 5 year old.
But I don't believe shit the WEF says either, so who knows.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:6ix, you confirmed for the one trillionth time that the kind of people who vote for Trump are assholes, which I knew long before you were born. Have you wondered why you have difficulty thriving in America, 6ix? Since you can't accept that you are a stupid asshole, you immediately were attracted to Trump's explanation that your struggles are not your fault. For example, Trump tells you that your CO2 emissions are not changing the climate because "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax". Trump absolves you of all responsibility. Nothing is your fault, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's not what the WEF says.
Apparently you didn't read their article I linked, because you have the mind of a 5 year old.
But I don't believe shit the WEF says either, so who knows.
For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU's climate service.
World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts.
This first year-long breach doesn't break that landmark "Paris agreement", but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.
Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Newly completed solar and battery project, the largest of its kind in the U.S., comes online: 'This is a pretty big deal'
"This facility is a transformational project in the industry and is providing resiliency to the grid."
By Jeremiah Budin | February 10, 2024
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/largest-solar-and-battery-proje
ct-mojave-desert/
The largest solar and battery storage project in the United States has just come online.
The 4,660-acre project — named Edwards & Sanborn and developed, owned, and operated by Terra-Gen — is located in the Mojave desert in Kern County, California. It consists of 875 megawatts (MW) of solar and 3,320 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy storage, reports Electrek.
In total, the massive Edwards & Sanborn consists of 1.9 million First Solar PV panels, 120,720 LG Chem, Samsung, and BYD long-duration energy storage batteries, and 400 miles of wire.
In addition to being the United States’ new largest solar and battery project, it holds another title. The project’s contractor, Mortensen, says that it is the largest public-private partnership that the U.S. Air Force has ever taken part in, as a section of the land it is on belongs to the Air Force, per Electrek.
“Now fully operational, this facility is a transformational project in the industry and is providing resiliency to the grid,” Brian Gorda, vice president of engineering at Terra-Gen, said.
Now that it is online, Edwards & Sanborn is providing clean, renewable power to the City of San Jose, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and the Clean Power Alliance, among others.
Compared to other U.S. states, California has set aggressive goals for transitioning to clean energy. The state has an official goal of cutting planet-overheating pollution to 40% below 1990s levels by 2030 and relying on 100% renewable energy by 2045.
To that end, it also recently announced that it was closing loopholes for new developments that rely on natural gas. In addition, the state’s first offshore wind farm recently came online.
“This is a pretty big deal and should be big for SoCal. Keep it coming!” wrote one Electrek commenter.
“In aggregate, these projects are going to make a huge difference. I hope all the big power companies in the US have these systems in mind. Generating and storing energy is much more versatile than generating alone,” wrote another.
“Very impressive,” a third chimed in. “Apparently Tesla is not the only company that makes battery storage products. The competition is coming.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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