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About analogika
- Birthday 11/30/1999
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http://analogika.hamburg
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Germany
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I visited a friend's place in the States many years ago, and was a little aghast that the first thing they did when they came home was to switch on the lights and the TV in every room. Like, what? You have three (CRT) TVs, and you need them running in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom? I realised that part of it is that electricity has always been dirt-cheap in the US, so wasting it isn't so much a "fuck you and your concern for my children's future" the way coal-rolling is, as a "who cares?" kind of thing, but man, that was weird.
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Thinking about Keith Emerson
analogika replied to techristian's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
„The overall suicide rates by sex in the civilian noninstitutionalized working population were 32.0 per 100,000 among males and 8.0 per 100,000 among females. Major industry groups with the highest suicide rates included Mining (males = 72.0); Construction (males = 56.0; females = 10.4); Other Services (e.g., automotive repair; males = 50.6; females = 10.4); Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation (males = 47.9; females = 15.0); and Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting (males = 47.9).“ https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7250a2.htm -
The costs for nuclear power haven't dropped, and they aren't dropping. Nuclear power is horrendously expensive, and the costs for solar and wind have been dropping precipitously for decades, with none of the long-term liabilities. Nuclear may have had a future thirty years ago, when we could have pushed for effective re-use of nuclear waste (which doesn't solve the problem; it merely reduces its magnitude) and developed the appropriate reactor technology — economic viability be damned…! But the political will to push that through wasn't there, because it was obviously economically absurd and wasn't deemed necessary in the abundance of alternatives. And it may again have a viability in the future, when cheap, environmentally friendly nuclear power plants may eventually have been developed, passed certification, and been built to economically and environmentally valid standard — if ever. Currently, there are actual research projects whose results are, if ever, several decades off, and a bunch of "tiny reactor" companies promising near-term solutions, but whose tech docs are excruciatingly vague and obviously aimed solely at scammi… er, raising investor money for completely unrealistic goals. If we were to implement tech that converts existing nuclear waste, it would take many decades to come to fruition, while we have actual market alternatives available today that are far cheaper, unsubsidised, than currrent nuclear reactors if those weren't subsidised to hell and back. (If you think they aren't subsidised, start with liability insurance for a single accident — no nuclear power plant is insured, because no insurance company will touch it. So it's the governments holding the risk and ending up paying, should anything happen. Then, move on to the cost of securely storing and protecting hazardous waste for about ten thousand years. I love that the World Nuclear Association lobby group has a dedicated section discussing the "myth" that we don't have a permanent solution for disposal, which basically just says "Finland and Sweden are pretty far along in the search for a solution". 😂 I'm sure that in America, it's the power companies footing the bill for all of that, right? It certainly isn't anywhere else in the world.) For the next three or four decades, nuclear isn't solving anything. Maybe after that, if we can make it affordable and clean. And if we can move away from uranium — which will run out, eventually, as well.
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Second paragraph leading in is kinda the clincher: "It was proven out by a United States government research lab pilot plant that operated from the 1960s through the 1990s. But it was never economical enough to develop at scale." They spent thirty years working on the tech and failed to find a way to make it commercially viable. Which circles back to what I wrote above, which is that nuclear power is ridiculously expensive compared to renewables, once all ACTUAL costs have been factored in.
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Ad•vo•cate had me pick my jaw off the floor. And all my limbs. And my ego.
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I’m not sure what you’re arguing: in the interview section you link to, Plokhy makes an excellent argument against nuclear energy: that, no matter how “safe” we make reactor technology, there is no accounting for the human element or catastrophic environment: human failure, war, tsunami — there is no safeguard against these things. That is not “irrational”, and his argument is eminently sound and very clear. Yes, nuclear energy is “safer” than coal, statistically — but that’s entirely irrelevant. Nuclear power is at this point not competing with coal: it’s competing with other NON-fossil energy sources. It’s already clear that fossil fuels will need to be eliminated going forward (wherever possible), so their death toll will be dropping to zero over time. The other issue with nuclear power is that it’s EXPENSIVE. A brand new reactor in Finland finally came online last year, after a FOURTEEN-YEAR delay and fourfold increase in cost. And was within weeks powered down to a fraction of capacity, because it was much too expensive to operate and cannot compete with the price of renewables. New, smaller reactor designs and technology look promising, but they, too, will need to compete with what is essentially nearly free energy — once they actually become commercially viable and licensing begins, in three or so decades. If ever. I'm all for research and exploring options, of course. thanks for that link, btw. Super interesting.
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Just quoting myself to add: Even using hydrogen for fuel cells to power electric motors is super inefficient: The electric engine has an effectivity of 95% (vs. around 30%-35% for combustion), but just the conversion of H2 into electricity only yields around 55% of the energy. So hydrogen-electric mobility has a yield of about 35% of the total energy invested, hydrogen-combustion drops to about 15%, while battery electrics run at around 75%-80% yield. (Image cropped, because the other columns concern synthetic diesel and synthetic petrol, which are even more horrendously ineffective, since they capture CO2 and convert that, only to burn it again, releasing 2/3 of the captured energy as heat.)
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When the forum algorithm censors you......
analogika replied to ABECK's topic in The Keyboard Corner
"Lydia, you're looking sharp today!" -
When the forum algorithm censors you......
analogika replied to ABECK's topic in The Keyboard Corner
The truth is that other people's names are not your choice. -
The real issues are threefold: One is that hydrogen is an incredibly inefficient energy storage medium. Using energy to produce and store hydrogen, and then burning that (with most of its energy going into heat) is horrifically more "expensive" than just storing that energy in a battery and applying that directly to a motor. The other is that something like 95% of all hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels. The only alternative, hydrolysis, can be technically environmentally friendly if powered by renewables, but it will take many decades to get there in quantity, because electrolysis takes so much energy to produce. Meanwhile, renewables will power more and more easily-electrified segments of society, rather than being used for production of a super inefficient intermediary energy medium like hydrogen. Third, "green" hydrogen will be so expensive and available in such limited quantities for many, many years yet, that it is ridiculous to assume that it could be used on frivolous pastimes like mobility, which are so much more easily electrified. A lot of chemical industry cannot be electrified because it absolutely depends upon burning stuff — and that is where all available green hydrogen will go, at least in my lifetime.
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There's some fact-checking issues in what you write: Petroleum plays almost no role whatsoever in the production of electricity in the United States: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php Globally, it's about 3% — and falling: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix (Nuclear is dropping sharply, as well, because it's just ridiculously expensive compared to renewables.) The other point here is that this isn't static. Renewable energy production is growing at a tremendous pace, globally, and prices have come down enough almost everywhere to make everything else almost stupidly expensive by comparison. (If nuclear is cheaper, that's only because the local government is subsidising the hell out of it.) Whatever energy mix is powering EVs today is only going to become MORE environmentally friendly in six months, let alone six years. Additionally, all of the environmental aspects of lithium need to be put into perspective next to petroleum-based mobility. The vast majority of lithium is conventionally mined, and it is much less "messy" than oil — compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Niger_Delta And that lithium is mined once for a ten-to-fifteen-year run, after which the battery is recycled or repurposed into energy storage for another decade. Petrol just keeps requiring fracking, piping, refining, shipping. Speaking of which: It's generally ignored that the production and distribution of petrol and diesel requires massive amounts of energy itself. It's difficult to come by hard data here, since it includes things like cross-continent pipelines etc., but it seems realistic that just the energy required to get the gasoline for a given driving distance out of the ground and into the tank is equivalent to about half the energy required by an EV for that distance. Again, hard data is difficult here, since at least some of the energy during required during refining is produced by burning off extraneous gas and oil derivatives — which in turn comes with its own environmental issues, of course. I agree that the cost of battery replacement is a show-stopper, and IMHO, battery development is moving so rapidly that we'll see a bunch of major news in the next few years, as the industry standardises on sodium batteries (they're already in the market). Also, charging coverage isn't nearly where I'd want it to feel comfortable, yet. But even given the price, the flux and rapid movement in technology, and the various aspects that aren't ironed out yet, and given the fact that mobility will be moving away from lithium batteries, EVs are ridiculously more effective TODAY than fossil-based mobility. All that said: my next vehicle is due this summer and will be a (used) fossil engine, but I'm not under any illusion that anybody will want to buy it off me in six years' time.