Comment on rollin' coal
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months agoNothing more nuclear than the sun.
That said, the primary appeal of uranium/thorium fuel is in energy density. Its a cheap way to localize consumption and distribution of electric energy, which has its own ecological costs. Nuclear can and should be comparably efficient to solar and wind. Radioactive decay is as much a part of the natural cycle as solar radiation or lunar tidal force and there’s no shame in harnessing it, so long as we manage the waste efficiently (a thing that molten salt thorium reactors do exceptionally well).
Some states are trailblazing a path towards functional reactor design faster than others
mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s not about shame, it’s about too much energy added to a system causing imbalance. Large scale use of nuclear or fossil energy does the same thing as adding tons of nitrogen to a lake (eutrophication). It’s temporarily great for the few nitrogen lovers but otherwise destroys the ecosystem.
By using nuclear or fossil energy, humans are causing the equivalent of eutrophication of our own environment.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
To my knowledge, electric energy generated by heated water is not producing any kind of effect comparable to nitrogen dumped into a lake or CO2 into the atmosphere. If there’s some source suggesting otherwise, I’d be curious to read it.
I think you’re confusing fossil fuels with fossil fertilizers. And eutrophication just isn’t a major concern in a planet that’s losing biodiversity and biomass to excess heat.
mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You’re not understanding my analogy.
Eutrophication is the addition of too much food for one type of living thing in an environment, allowing it’s population to grow too large for the ecosystem to support. This is exactly what the Green Revolution was for humanity.
I’m talking about fossil energy in general, all forms of it. Fossil fertilizers are one form of fossil energy.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I haven’t seen any evidence of this. At best, you could argue its been wheat, rice, and corn undergoing eutrophication. Perhaps cattle. But outside a few exceptionally well-fed western enclaves, we’re operating below the standard intake of our hunter-gatherer predecessors. Blame our sedentary lifestyle or our aging population, but most humans consume below the 2750-3000 calorie diet of our ancestors.
Then you’re talking more on the industrial scale than the physical. And that’s got far more to do with our tolerance for waste than our appetite for raw inputs. For basic needs like light and heat and travel, we’re significantly more efficient thanks to a host of modernizations like insulation and mass transit.
Forester@yiffit.net 4 months ago
What?
Do you have any idea how many things we can do with basically free energy? Like for instance, desalinate and clean sea water and pump it back into our exhausted aquifers. Or scrub carbon from the atmosphere with gigantic manual filter aways. Or just store excess power in grid scale batteries and cycle plants on and off as needed.
mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes, all of those things make it more likely for human numbers to grow even more, and in the process making more species extinct, and habitats destroyed.
Physics and biology tell us we are living unsustainably. Free energy just makes exploitation of the planet more efficient, wipe out nature even faster with more humans.
If we expect to exist in 100 years, degrowth is the only answer, green energy is a scam.