keepthepace
@keepthepace@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Wind/solar motorcycle [with 50 km solar/wind range] looks like an April Fools' joke ... but it's legit 2 weeks ago:
Yeah the turbine on top does not make sense while driving. It could be something used while it is parked.
Yes, there are contraptions that can extract energy from downwind or upwind vehicles. This is not one of those. On any decent road speed that thing will drag like hell.
- Comment on Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that. 3 weeks ago:
Exactly. Cobalt does not lose its interesting properties if it is mined in a country with good environmental regulations by unionized well-equipped adults, or even better, robots. What changes is that then it becomes a bit more expensive.
It is the way international trade is organized that is problematic, not the fact that we use minerals.
- Comment on 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change 1 month ago:
It’s not visible but the toll of radiation on other living beings and the environment is, and should not be neglected imo.
When I am saying that the death toll from Fukushima is between 0 and 1 it is because the effect of radiation is accounted for and that the level of exposure we are talking about makes it possible that it raises additional deaths by 1. When a zone is declared radioactive, humans tend to avoid it, which does wonders for all other lifeforms.
because the ocean is not a dumpster.
Oh I think I used a mistranslation, I did not mean to say “water bed” but "water table. I am not talking about using the ocean as a dumpster. It would be a very poor idea. We are talking about geological storage, which means within the rockbed, in geologically stable regions. All the projects I am aware off are land based. And when they are below the water table, there is very little ways for it to raise to the surface.
- Comment on 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change 1 month ago:
- delay
- cost
Are mostly political and mostly due to anti-nuclear opposition. France did a oil to nuclear electricity transition in 10 years while increasing (a lot) is total capability.
It was technologically, politically and economically feasible in the 70s. I agree that one should not dismiss the political aspect of the question, but I am unwilling to consider it as a stronger argument than “yes but conservatives are resisting renewables”. If we are having a political discussion, then we should consider that political positions are subject to change.
- Weapons proliferation risks
True. The more nuclear power, the more plutonium out there. That’s the only good argument in the 7 I believe. It is still pretty hard to enrich uranium or plutonium to weapon grade. If you could do that, I don’t think it would be much harder to simply start from uranium ore (which are present in much more places than commercially mined, most nations have deposits).
- Meltdown risk
Dams killed more people than all nuclear plants incidents. Coal mines accidents much much more. The result remains the same whether you count in absolute number or per TWh generated.
Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan in 2011
Number of death: between 0 and 1. Reminder: it was caused by a tsunami that killed 19000 people, including several during dam failures.
Saint-Laurent France in 1980
Number of death: zero. France is a very nuclear-heavy country, yet the power plants that have killed the most in France are… dams again. 423 deaths.
- Mining Lung Cancer Risk
It says that almost 400 death can be attributed to uranium mining between 1950 and 2000
1950 alone had 643 miners die in coal mines in the US alone. In China it is much more: arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp
- Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution
Fun thing about these indirect emissions is that they are made of estimates from electricity used. The more nuclear or sustainable electricity in your mix, the lower willbe used there.
- Waste Risk
Stable solid waste stored under the water bed poses no risk. Here again, the dispersion of waste is mostly due to political opposition to geological storage.
- Comment on Europe greenwashing with north Africa’s renewable energy, report says 2 months ago:
I agree that capitalism needs to be criticized and neo-colonialism as well, but not under the guise of ecology. You can transition out of fossils while remaining in capitalism, you can get out of capitalism without getting out of fossils. These problems are important but perpendicular.
I would not expect, nor need from these people to talk about the benefits of wind turbines.
Why not? In the countryside I used to live in, I had the same person ask me to sign a petition against nuclear power plants and 3 weeks later against a solar farm project that would cut down trees. That militant activist was not aware of the amount of fossils that was going into the local electricity mix. She was genuinely surprised when I showed her that she is actively lobbying against a transition out of fossil fuels.
Locals are not dumber than centralized powers but they are not smarter either.
- Comment on Europe greenwashing with north Africa’s renewable energy, report says 2 months ago:
I know that during the Victorian era, women had more rights in Islamic countries than in UK. Women-initiated divorce was possible in some MENA countries long before it was possible in many European countries. Repudiation (male-initiated divorce) was also way easier and easier than the costly female-initiated one (where they had to repay their dowry)
That’s an extremely low feminist standard for 2025 to say “well we are not worse than the worst part of history”.
It does talk quite a lot about renewable energy.
It never talks about the positive impact it has on CO2 emission. Which is the whole point. Talking about the negative externalities of this effort is like focusing on all the side effects of a life-saving surgery without ever mentioning the life saving aspects!
I feel the criticism is not at all in renewables. It is in the relationships between rich countries and former colonies, whether they are trading oil, electricity or cocoa.
I’d rather live in a world without exploitation or coercion in our production system but I’d also rather live in a world where this system is used to transition out of fossil fuels than not.
- Comment on Europe greenwashing with north Africa’s renewable energy, report says 2 months ago:
There are several weird things in that report. There are definitely valid criticism of neo-colonialism, but I don’t see how it ticks the greenwashing box. The decarbonation achieved thanks to renewable power plants in MENA is real, it is not just a marketing campaign. Could it be done better? Yes. Does it help the climate crisis? Yes.
I also find this title weird: “Leveraging Communal, Traditional, and Ancestral Models in Pursuit of Feminist, People-First Wellbeing Economies”. In MENA, traditional/ancestral ways are not exactly femininist. Dont let the fight against colonialism trap you into believing that non-western ways are necessarily superior in every aspect.
You know what is absent in that report? Discussion about the climate impact of transtioning from hydrocarbon industries into renewable. This has been a constant criticism of Greenpeace and a pretty serious blind spot for an environmental organization: not caring much about CO2. Now I agree that CO2 emissions are not the only problem in the world and that it should not prevent us to fight the other problems, but criticizing a renewable transition without a word on its actual efficacy is really missing the point.
- Comment on In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees 2 months ago:
Thing is, I don’t think NASA and SpaceX compete. NASA is not a for-profit company and was happy to see successful private companies in the sector. They’ll happily be a SpaceX client so that they can focus on actual research and do things that are not profitable (yet)
- Comment on California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy 2 months ago:
And a weird way of saying that intermittence is solved…
- Comment on It took 68 years for the world to reach 1 terawatt of solar PV capacity. It took just two years to double it | RenewEconomy 5 months ago:
- Comment on Cry Harder, Kid 5 months ago:
If you have never seen a scallop run away, google it.
- Comment on She-Ra Lives! 5 months ago:
Personally I find it weird that we do generalities about a this population as it is very likely that they had all different cultures on the tribe level.
- Comment on Amateur Entomologists 5 months ago:
Nah the game is about friendship and time travels. The boss is kinda irrelevant.
- Comment on Amateur Entomologists 5 months ago:
The court was one of the best moments!
- Comment on Penguins 🐧 5 months ago:
PENGUINS! IM TALKING ABOUT PENGUINS!
- Comment on Amateur Entomologists 5 months ago:
Chrono Trigger is fun!
- Comment on Amateur Entomologists 5 months ago:
In DnD I believe it is called a Tarrasaque
- Comment on DNA Horror Movies 5 months ago:
I’d roll my eyes over the last one but instead I just spinned them.
- Comment on Womp womp 5 months ago:
Yes, they get confused with us evil engineers.
- Comment on Why solar will soon dominate & what that means for the world 5 months ago:
Hopefully we will get to the time where atmospheric carbon scrubbing will be acceptable to discuss.
- Comment on smart engineering 5 months ago:
That’s not the history of that thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven
- Comment on IS THIS REAL CHAT?? 5 months ago:
THANK GOD YES! Imaginary matrices are a pain to multiply!
- Comment on Why solar will soon dominate & what that means for the world 5 months ago:
I think the first place that will switch seriously to solar will attract a lot of energy-heavy industries that can have intermittent production but I suspect it will just be a bonus for the first country to do it.
- Comment on Why solar will soon dominate & what that means for the world 5 months ago:
To me that mostly means free or cheaper than zero electricity during peak time. That’s going to cause a total shift of mentalities as many “too inefficient” things will become a possibility.
- Comment on A decline in arable land 5 months ago:
Is this a bad thing? I always heard that here in France we have increasing forest coverage.
- Comment on Ahoy me hearties 5 months ago:
Alexandra Elbakyan deserves a Nobel and a presidential pardon. I doubt any other person alive now has made more for science.
- Comment on Pick some unrelated lectures, they said. 5 months ago:
But… but… these are my maths shoes!
- Comment on Publishers Always Innovating 5 months ago:
Yes, PDFs are much more permissive and may not have any semantic information at all. Hell, some old publications are just scanned images!
PDF -> semantic seems to be a hard problem that basically requires OCR, like these people are doing
- Comment on Publishers Always Innovating 5 months ago:
I love that PDFs are so difficult to transform into HTML, too
FYI, if that’s relevant to your field, every new article published on arxiv.org now has a HTML render as well.
And on many older publications, transforming “arxiv.org” into “ar5iv.org” leads to an HTML rendering that is a best-effort experiments they ran for a while.
- Comment on Publishers Always Innovating 5 months ago:
You are welcome.
