How many of you have taken the Energy Red Pill and realized that Renewable Energy is going to save the World?
>iea.org
If you listen carefully you can hear the cry of the nuclear shills, maybe we will get a few fascinating specimens to start shilling in this thread itself.
Other urls found in this thread:
uraniumfromseawater.engr.utexas.edu
forbes.com
scientificamerican.com
technologyreview.com
aviation.com
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
nature.com
twitter.com
I just had an epiphany today that I could help the world by becoming an environmental engineer. But i can't even give one fuck about material science and there's like 3 courses of materials and a course on statics i would have to take. Maybe in another life.
To be honest, material sciences are kind of key to technological advanced in pretty much every area of science, not just environmental engineering. Only 'Software Engineering' gets a pass.
>Renewable Energy
No such thing.
...
Might be a marketing term, but the source of energy from PVs and Wind Power is not going to run out anytime soon for another few billion years. That is a pretty safe bet for the future.
This wouldn't be renewable either for instance:
Fusion and Breeder reactors.
meanwhile we have enough Uranium and Thorium on the planet to last centuries.
You dense motherfucker, it's vulgar jargon for electricity generated from non-depletable (a.k.a. "renewable") sources.
You know it, stop being a prick.
>material sciences
I don't know anything about the theory about material science and it's more like an umbrella term, but there is still so much future potential in that field.
It's amazing how the properties of certain materials can change so much if you just change the structure a little bit or layer them differently.
>meanwhile we have enough Uranium and Thorium on the planet to last centuries
>last centuries
AHAHAhahahahAHAHahahah. Few centuries? You call that 'renewable'? Sun is going to shine for several BILLION years nigga. All we need is crystalline Silicon (sand) and we are good for that period of time.
We are setting up solar at an average rate of 30,000 from 2016-2021. This is more capacity additions than Coal or Natural gas, which it is now slowly replacing. It is over, PVs and Wind have already won.
*30,000 panels an hour
Someone just had their first physics class :)
Why don't we have both?
uraniumfromseawater.engr.utexas.edu
>global energy capacity
So basically, not actual production, but made up numbers?
Fuck, I thought this thread was about energy pills.
>Why don't we have both?
Nuclear takes too long. Renewables have already surpassed their total energy production capacity some time back.
A recently added, large 648MW Solar Park in India took about 6 months to install and take online. A 600MW Nuclear Reactor would have taken 1 year for site selection, 1 year for environmental studies, 2 year for clearances, and 7 years to build. This isn't a technology that is going to save us from Climate Change. Only Renewables can be deployed with adequate Speed, Cost, and Reliability.
You don't even need to believe in climate change alarmism hype to recognize that solar and wind are cheaper and still plummeting in cost even without subsidies.
Even if that were true (it isn't). Perhaps if you idiots hadn't sabotaged Nuclear Energy for the last 4 decades then we would have even better and safer reactors.
Not only that, but you aren't even taking into account the fact that Solar Farms take up more space and are more expensive Kw/H than Nuclear Reactors. Furthermore, Solar and wind energy aren't viable anywhere and anytime, while Nuclear Reactors can be built anywhere are can produce energy in spite of sunlight or weather conditions. Not to mention the fact that, at most, Solar and Wind turbines operate at 60% capacity, while Nuclear Reactors operate at 90% capacity.
Just fuck off.
>This isn't a technology that is going to save us from Climate Change
And renewables isn't a technology that's going to solve World Hunger.
Nuclear sabotaged itself due to runaway decommissioning, project delays, high fuel costs, and safety issues. Plus proliferation.
Solar is more distributed, inherently safe, and cost-competitive to fossil fuels already. It requires comparatively little maintenance, low/no skill workers, and being mass deployed as we speak. +300 GWe today, and estimated +1000GWe by 2021.
>cost-competitive to fossil fuels already
That's fucking bullshit and you know it. Solar wouldn't be a fad if it weren't for government subsidies.
not even renewable energy, just basic engineering common sense. when you pipe water from a centralized location to individual houses, it's retarded, it wastes energy and has high suseptibilty to contamination or breakage. decentralizing water, food and power is the way of the future. Rainwater collection, grey water filtration into black water and black water plant filtration. Then your classic on-site power production wind, solar. Hydro for some locations.
This
Austrailia just closed down a huge solar panel farm because the cost of maintenance was greater than the value of electricity produced.
Your graph juat proves my point. When you factor in health, time for rollout, and decomissioning costs Solar PVs are already competitve.
PVs LCOE along with Wind is only going to go down further and further, even though it is already quite competitive today in certain areas.
>Build nuclear plant
>Mohammed becomes an employee and sabotages it causing a meltdown in the name of Allah
This.
Nuclear Fission will NEVER be safe. You can't beat the suicidal/disgruntled operator scenario. An individual/group of individuals can ALWAYS sabotage a nuclear reactor. Look at what happened to MH17 with that suicidal pilot. Same thing can happen at a Nuclear Plant.
molten salt
multiple redundancies
better SCRAM designs.
None of these can always stop dedicated insiders with some patience.
Sabotaging the containment vessel, and it is game over.
>tfw taking solid state physics rn
feels good mang
Note that this is also true of fossil fuel plants and those kill people regularly, even without the assistance of allah.
forbes.com
>Solar Farms take up more space
True but they can use the most worthless land for that for which no one else has a use.
>more expensive Kw/H than Nuclear Reactors
Hardly comparable considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that went into subsidizing the nuclear industry because of its military application. What's more, nuclear energy is only going to be more expensive over time as it's dependable on depletable resources that will become ever more scarce over time. Renewables have marginal costs close to zero because they don't need to pay for fuel. So their prices can only come down over time due to increases in efficiency and economics of scale.
>Solar and wind energy aren't viable anywhere and anytime
That's why storage is imprtant. But they're more viable than anti-renewables think. I know numbers for Germany: about 60% of Germany's electricity could come from renewable without any storage whatsoever. Just adjusting the grid would be enough. 80% can be achieved with pressure air storage utilizing old salt mines, which is a very cheap solution. It's only the last 20% for which you need either more sophisticated storage or on-demand power sources.
>Nuclear Reactors can be built anywhere
Lol, no. Nuclear reactor hace extreme cooling demands and therefore need to be built near a sufficient water source. E.g. in France 75% of all surface water consumption is for cooling water. This has serious repercussions:
>can produce energy in spite of sunlight or weather conditions
No, it can't. When the French river Loire freezes over, e.g., the nuclear power plant Saint-Laurent has to be shut down. France needs to import electricity during winter when energy is most expensive. They just make up for it by selling volume during the other seasons. Occasionally summers can also become a problem when there's drought. This problem will probably increase in the future due to climate change.
cheeky reminder you cant run an aeroplane on batteries
anything is possible if you just believe hard enough, user
Nuclear energy, at the moment, certainly is not renewable in any capacity.
Sure, people are creating facilities that reuse spent nuclear fuel, but there isn't a facility that reuses the twice-over spent nuclear fuel.
I think a huge problem is how we're gonna store the energy. What do you propose?
>never been to eia.gov
>popsci hoser
>can't mine quartz,silicon without diesel
>can't make silane gas without hydrogen from natural gas
>dat filename
>no time to build
>not enough money
>wwiii soon
Brainlet.
A container that allows the energy to be conserved in high amounts with little escaping.
Converters? Constant use of the energy instead of storing it.
That is the energy pill.
Not that person but it's true, the idea of a "sustainable" or "renewable" wind turbine and solar panel energy sources is laughable. Jevon's paradox. These things take massive resource inputs to manufacture and deploy and only in ideal locations do they come close to returning the amount of energy invested in the first place, they are in fact another resource drain.
Nuclear is already a curse for the clever monkey in so many ways, he can shit radioactive waste but hasn't even built a good toilet for it yet, in fact some of it comes out gun barrels! I like nuke plants but humanity just isn't ready for it, half the monkeys - and there are so many now - still believe in cloud fairies for fuck sakes! That is the scariest combination of ignorance and science ever assembled together in one place.
A monkey eating plant food and getting off his swollen fat ass burning calories doing something productive is the only renewable energy. People forget how much petrochemicals and fossil fuels are used to make our food now, we eat oil. Things will just scale down naturally through the 21st century to more sustainable population levels as fossil fuels deplete me thinks. That means a lot of war, famine and plague.
>These things take massive resource inputs to manufacture and deploy
This is complete bullshit and false information. Wind Turbine EROI is actually the best in the business. Solar PVs also have good, positive EROI.
Until you can make solar panels purely through green processes - and without the use of oil...
Then you have to justify the greenness by showing the carbon balance ends up a net positive during solar panel life span.
It has been proven to be net positive through virtually every study.
You think MIT and other top-notch organizations would be funding and pushing Solar PV research if it didn't work? The delusion of nuklets is fucking insane.
Absolutely this. I mean, planes and nuclear power is so similar:
- Both have a single, small group of operators with totalitarian control over the machine.
- Both barely have any safety measures to stop people going rogue.
- Both are completely open to the public, and they barely have any security apart from a few locked doors and weekend-course safety instructions
These plants are too accesiable to terrorists and bad guys. We need to have a post-9/11 for our nuclear power plants soon, otherwise some rogue swiss fuck might crash one into a mountainside!
Solar only works because of subsidies and guarrentees that their useless power will be puchased.
I can confirm this.
Sorry that is nuclear due to its military applications. Wind was entirely developed by the private sector, and Solar came from the Space program.
When the subsidies stopped, nuclear screeched to a halt.
>bloomberg.com
Renewable doesnt need subsidies in many parts of the country, and that is only going to grow.
>im voting for gary
Seriously no one cares
The main problem with renewables is that they're unreliable. You can't run a grid off of an energy source that might or might not be there.
So... when will rare earth mines become the next oil?
Will Zimbabwe become the new Arab states?
>Save the world
>By going through an extraction process that drye entire rivers and contaminates the few drops of water while the industrial process requires low wages with even more level of heavy metal contamination and standard fuckery to get things done at the rate people "need"
>Save
>silicon
>rare earth
Whew.
>Sorry that is nuclear due to its military applications
Only to some extent.
Its true that it started with huge goverment grants to get it working and produce plutonium and other "nice" things, but over time nuclear powerplants became efficient enough to become profitable.
The only problem is the base, if we switched to gas cores and used MHD(magnetohydrodinamic generators) we woould get more bang for our buck.
Also thorium reduces costs in all areas while keeping efficiency.
The only thing stopping these are the lack of interest and funds, nuclear development is expensive and hard but yields much better results only because fissionables are much more condensated energy than renewables that are just a way to transform energy.
Yes, because they're only made of silicon, lets ignore all the elements that are involved in the production and the product itself,
And lets not even talk about how these elements are extracted and purified, it would make renowables seem "dirty" just because you need them in huge surfaces with constant maintenance and erosion from the very forces they extract energy from.
Yeah, lets just do that.
The most energy intensive thing in them is the silicon. The only element that is somewhat rare is the indium for the indium tin oxide transparent conductor. There is not much of this in a solar cell. Alternatives based on zinc and graphene are currently in the lab.
user at this point we need both. It is no longer a choice to deny nuclear.
Just look at this uranium harvesting offshore wind turbine: 5 MW power wind, 5 MW power nuclear!
We need both folks. Same guy behind the wind turbines also has a proposal for how we could use pumped hydroelectric energy storage for water desalination. Turns out the optimal head for pumped storage is also the same head for carrying out reverse osmosis. Plus because of the hydroelectric flow out to the ocean, these things would be built within tens of kilometers of the ocean, you can easily dispose of the brine. Disposing of brine turns out to be one of the most expensive costs of desalination.
But solar *is* nuclear (fusion).
Haha, we nuclear shills always win in the end. Since I hold the patent on nuclear energy, I'll be collecting my sun tax now, thank you.
And what about the condensators? The control systems? The batteries?
Im not arguing that the process is energy intensive, I'm arguing that the extraction and fabrication methods involved are "cheap" and dirty and renewables require a lot of surface so you end up requiring more materials than a nuclear powerplant to get into the same level of production.
You need a DC to AC invertor, and you are good. You can now connect to the grid and add electricity.
For storage there are a lot of innovative solutions, including pumped storage, compressed air, old Electric Car batteries, etc. Many of these technologies do not require any sort of expensive or exotic materials, else they would not be used. Grid-scale storage can be the dumbest, least efficient system as long as it is cheap.
Burn the coal first, don't let it go to waste.
This is a fallacy.
Healthcosts from burning coal greatly outweigh whatever savings you might get from using something slightly more pricey.
We can't. We've bought into the 100 years of natural gas propaganda.
>We've bought into the 100 years of natural gas propaganda
What exactly is this?
Burn coal where you don't give a shit about that. Like China.
maybe someday we can have a holiday where we all mass-burn coal...
Coal day...
Or maybe coal will become the new present for Christmas...
Let's use matter as energy.
norway exports 75% of its energy to other countries
it generates 95% of its electricity on hydro
wind is the cuckiest shit i know
vps are fucking trash unless you have a gorillion square miles of it
Due to high prices in the early 2000s, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling (not new technologies) became popular due to economics. This was the beginning of the shale gas boom. Thousands of companies were flooding in. At one point, land leases went from anywhere between $10,000 to $30,000 per acre. This lead to immense overproduction. At the onset of the 2008 economic crisis, shale prices collapsed, and so to, investment. To spur investment capital, the natural gas lobby spread propaganda that American had 100 years of natural gas. It caught on. There was greater emphasis on exports, closing coal plants to replace them with natural gas. There were companies who would do nothing, but buy up land leases, pump the story in the press, and turn around to sell them to whichever sucker bought the hype. This entire boom is built on junk finance. A bubble that will soon pop.
The average well peaks and enters terminal decline in less than a year. Shale is source rock. It's all a last gasp effort.
400Whr/kg is all Musk says you need. Gee, I wonder what some of the advanced prototypes are getting...
...
...
>Red Pill
gtfo pill-popping im/pol/itic /pol/esmoker
nailed it
It really is nice how stable the lithia batteries are too.
Why is /pol/ here?
Ooops, I mixed up the LiS and Lithia batteries there.
nature.com
>Here we report a cathode consisting of nanoscale amorphous lithia (nanolithia) confined in a cobalt oxide, enabling charge/discharge between solid Li2O/Li2O2/LiO2 without any gas evolution. The cathode has a theoretical capacity of 1,341Ahkg−1, a mass density exceeding 2.2gcm−3, and a practical discharge capacity of 587Ahkg−1 at 2.55V versus Li/Li+. It also displays stable cycling performance (only 1.8% loss after 130 cycles in lithium-matched full-cell tests against Li4Ti5O12 anode), as well as a round-trip overpotential of only 0.24V. Interestingly, the cathode is automatically protected from O2 gas release and overcharging through the shuttling of self-generated radical species soluble in the carbonate electrolyte.
>Just adjusting the grid
I think you forget the fact that Germany does not have a stand alone grid. In fact all of Europe is connected together so if Germany outputs too much renewables (happens) then they can distribute that to other countries.
In the US, we'd need miles and miles of transmission lines because population is more spread out and the resources are typically far away from load pockets.
>pressure air storage utilizing old salt mines
This may be only a local solution to the problem. Not every state has access to this resource and it won't solve the problem entirely.
The reality is that we will need both baseload (i.e. natural gas and nuclear) and peaking plants (i.e. natural gas) to cover the variability issues with renewables. There is no silver bullet solution .
>I think you forget the fact that Germany does not have a stand alone grid.
Not really. One of the major points of grid adjustment ist to address the fact that today there's much electricity rerouted through e.g. Poland. Germany needs a better connection between the wind farms producing electricity in the north and the big consumers in the south in order to not rely in the grids of the neighbors so much anymore.
But in any case it's a political decision of the EU to have a common energy market in Europe and a common grid. The economies of scale and the potential for flexibility that result from that are a no-brainer.
>In the US, we'd need miles and miles of transmission lines because population is more spread out and the resources are typically far away from load pockets.
Not necessarily. Most of the population lives near the coast where the best wind potential is.
>In the US, we'd need miles and miles of transmission lines because population is more spread out and the resources are typically far away from load pockets.
True every country needs to find a tailored solution that suits it. But the situation in Germany with old salt mines is similat in many other European countries because of a similar geologic history.
>This is complete bullshit and false information. Wind Turbine EROI is actually the best in the business
When you factor everything in not really, there are only so many populated windy places to deploy them, further you get away from the grid the larger the drop and it becomes substantial. They can only be used to supplement a grid not drive it unless you plan on some uninvented mass electrical storage system which would be an environmental nightmare - all those batteries!
I think the bullshit "green" energy revolution has some benefits, it can fit into niches but overall the only real solution is to reduce demand, it will probably be done by reducing populations and standards of living. I for sure am a pessimist but thinking realistically. There hasn't been anything discovered yet that will have enough surplus energy to rebuild our way of life and power it into the foreseeable future, running of a cliff inside a few generations now unless something drastic happens. Nuclear war may be the energy pill OP from /pol/ wants and needs.
>runaway decommissioning
Except most decommissioning have come in under budget
>project delays
Driven by anti-nuclear loonies like yourself.
>high fuel costs
Utter bullshit. Nuclear fuel costs are only a few dollars per MWhr
>safety issues
The only civilian nuclear power that has killed members of the public have been in the Soviet Unions
>Plus proliferation.
No nation has ever used nuclear power as a starting point for nuclear weapons. In fact, every nuclear weapons state built weapons before nuclear power and some such as Israel have no nuclear power.
>Solar is more distributed
So you have to build more transmission infrastructure driving up costs.
>inherently safe
Tell that to the people in China who have to refine rare earths
>cost-competitive to fossil fuels already
Not when you factor in capacity factor, infrastructure costs and fossil fuel backups.
>requires comparatively little maintenance
Funny then that wind turbines in Europe that are only 15 years old are being decommissioned then.
>low/no skill workers
To install perhaps, but the people who build them won't agree.
>being mass deployed as we speak
On the backs of obscene subsidies that are crippling Western energy intensive industry and feel-good environmentalism.
>Tell that to the people in China who have to refine rare earths
There are no major rare earths used in PVs, why the fuck is this so hard for you to understand? You are just spewing misinformation, similar to how you perceive the anti-nuclear shills.
>Driven by anti-nuclear loonies like yourself.
Literally the only thing stopping Nuclear is its poor return on investment and high capital startup costs. Solar PVs are beautiful because you can add as you go and bring in more investors at any time. You don't need the Billions of $$$ when you start.
Nuclear Fission is going nowhere, better to invest and wait on Fusion tech.