WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. 2 days ago:
The key difference on the materials is that you can use the materials endlessly with solar. With fossil fuels or even with fission, you have to constantly burn fuel. Sure, the actual fuel rods used in a reactor has a small volume. But those are made from enriched uranium, made from uranium oxide, made from uranium ore. The volume of waste generated is far larger than just the volume of the reactor core itself. But with solar? You only ever have to extract the materials once. Sure, the panels degrade over time. But after they degrade beyond usefulness, the material is still there. It’s like a lead-acid battery. They wear out after awhile, but they can be recycled. You eventually reach a point where you no longer have to mine any new materials to make new panels, or you only mine new materials as you want your electricity supply to grow. With any fuel-based power source, including fission, you have to keep extracting those fuels forever.
And don’t ignore the huge material requirement to build a reactor. You have to build a giant concrete dome around the damn things. Those domes are one of the few structures on Earth actually designed to survive a 9/11-style terrorist attack. They’re built to resist the impact of large jet aircraft. Plus the vast labyrinth of piping, heat exchangers, turbines, etc. All of this is of immense material cost. All-in, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mass of a GW of nuclear power plant is a lot more than the mass of a GW of solar plant. Nuclear power plants are hulking leviathans.
- Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. 2 days ago:
The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It’s called pagrivol[(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics). And that’s before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.
There simply isn’t a shortage of land for solar. Unless you’re talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn’t a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it’s an advantage that really doesn’t matter much in the real world.
- Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. 2 days ago:
We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.
There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.
The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.
The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.
- Comment on I've Hit The Perfect Weight 3 days ago:
Every scale has certain limitations on accuracy. A bathroom scale is just no where near the cost of a scale that can precisely measure to five significant figures.
- Comment on I've Hit The Perfect Weight 4 days ago:
This is one of my pet peeves - fraudulent scales. There’s no way in Hell that bathroom scale is that accurately measuring your weight. Yet it just displays it anyway to make the item feel more luxurious or high end than it really is.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 1 week ago:
Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?
Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 1 week ago:
At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.
We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.
Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.
The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.
Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.
- Comment on If the government raided your house and found a bunch of .mkv files but you insist its all legally obtained, how do they ascertain if they are actually pirated or not? 1 week ago:
I hope he sent them a forged receipt.
- Comment on Before social media/internet/cell phones/landlines/payphones; how would 2 friends living across the same city arrange in person meetings and stay in touch? 1 week ago:
Also, you’ve probably heard of a “calling card,” but these were actual physical things. If you dropped by someone’s home or business when they weren’t there, you could leave behind a card saying you were there and wanted to get in touch.
- Comment on Currency 1 week ago:
You know, if you were someone who eats there frequently, Big Mac coin forgery might actually be a profitable endeavor…
- Comment on in all fairness italian cuisine is a relatively recent invention 2 weeks ago:
The Etruscans, famously known for their tomato sauce.
- Comment on Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road? 2 weeks ago:
Because conservatives ultimately do not believe in anything beyond helping the in ground and hurting the out group. That is it. Everything else is just window dressing.
- Comment on This is really touching. Your eyes will moisten 2 weeks ago:
Here lies Philip J Fry.
- Comment on Grinch 2 weeks ago:
That’s a 31 year old woman and a 40 year old man. Both indubitably human.
- Comment on Grinch 2 weeks ago:
You have two species that can understand each other’s languages, live in close proximity, have the same body plan, and are both the rarest form of species - sentient intelligent tool users. The odds that they both evolved simultaneously and independently is vanishingly small. Maybe they’re a homo sapiens/neanderthal situation - two separate but related species. But odds are this is simply a case of racial persecution.
- Comment on Grinch 2 weeks ago:
The Whos, like all species, have a degree of diversity. Grinches are just a Who ethnic minority. Whoville is a Sundown Town; Grinches aren’t allowed in city limits after nightfall. Why do you think The Grinch lives in a cave? Hell, they don’t even let him have a name. He’s just “The Grinch.” They’re doing the equivalent of calling the one member of a minority group in town “The Black” or “The Jew.”
Whos are terrible people.
- Comment on Anon is Trump 2 weeks ago:
You need to improve your basic logic skills.
- Comment on Anon is Trump 2 weeks ago:
Bombs have a 20% accuracy rate, where “on target” is about 2 football fields around the target lol.
Since when, WW2? And the type of bomb I was referring are things like this.
It would take ten of those to wipe out the Greenlanders as thoroughly as the historic genocide of the Native Americans.
- Comment on Anon is Trump 2 weeks ago:
Nukes? The scary thing about Greenland is that the whole place is basically a handful of small towns. The 10 largest towns represent over 95% of the population. Forget nukes. A dozen large conventional bombs would be enough to genocide the Greenland population.
- Comment on Mamdani housing czar called ‘White, middle-class homeowners’ a ‘huge problem' during 2021 podcast appearance 3 weeks ago:
White middle class homeowners are a huge problem, at least in areas where they vote to restrict the supply of new housing. It is deeply immoral to vote to line your own pockets at the expense of the welfare of the next generation.
- Comment on Tender chicken 3 weeks ago:
Who says it has to be evil or cruel? I make a mean dish. It’s about average.
- Comment on Zootopia 4 weeks ago:
If you’re looking to get into the scrap metal business, I could sell you the Eiffel Tower.
- Comment on I Don't See How You Can Defend This 4 weeks ago:
Easy. Be Nazi scum.
- Comment on Wats the legal test for consumation? 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
A bunch of retroreflectors. Something like this. Hang them from strings in your windows. Retroreflectors reflect back light to their source. Don’t shine your own bright lights, just return some of the photos to the people that made them. And if by some miracle the cops do complain, say that they’re just decorative and meant to prevent birds from hitting your windows.
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 4 weeks ago:
All grass based crops encouraged group cooperation. Plants like potatoes remain safe in the ground until you need them. But all cereal crops require harvesting at a specific time. You can’t just harvest enough wheat as you need it. This means you inevitably have to have a stockpile of grain to get through the year. And a stockpile of already harvested and prepared grain makes you an instant target for raids by opposing groups.
Cereal crops of all forms necessitate cooperation.
- Comment on Mom with the real questions 4 weeks ago:
That’s simply not true.
- Comment on Mom with the real questions 4 weeks ago:
We actually got a full set of wedding china, and we got married in 2018. We’re elder Millennials. While I tell people that they should probably skip the hina, I actually enjoy it. Growing up my parents had a set of china that only came out for company and holidays, and it had a certain charm to it. And I’ve found our set serves a similar role. I actually keep it in the very same cabinet my mom had when I was a kid (she’s long since used a fancier cabinet that matches their dining set.)
But even in 2025, it can be nice to have a set of China. There’s just something special about having people over, either for social occasions or holidays, and being able to offer them a really nice place setting that isn’t part of your normal repertoire. I do got out of my way to use it though. You could just be stopping by my house for a chat, and if I offer you coffee, I’ll probably give it to you in fine china.
- Comment on I have an idea ☝️ 1 month ago:
“In my perfect ideal world, that we have no path to achieving, we could sustain our large population indefinitely.”
- Comment on Of course there is. 1 month ago:
I mean, how else are you going to try and march across the damn Soviet Union?
