[Jistern]

Actually, you were the one who taught me this. Please see...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31832490

Thanks.

Here's a link I suggest you include when posting on the subject...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-the-shipping-industry-is-betti...

"Also by 2024, the Viking Energy is poised to become the first vessel propelled by ammonia fuel cells...."

Hydrogen and ammonia per se are not very important. What's important is that as a result of cheap, plentiful, renewable energy, a huge opportunity now exists for an efficient and effective means of converting that energy into a useful fuel (or fuels).

Please understand that I’m not arguing that hydrogen, generally, and ammonia, in particular, are bad fuels. They seem to be very promising… today. But I can imagine that they might be replaced in, say, 25 years with “the next big thing.” What’s unlikely to change in, say, 25 years is this: cheap, plentiful, renewable energy.

When looking at energy these days, most engineers and business people are struggling with the following: they are so accustomed to energy being dear (being expensive) that they are having a difficult time wrapping their minds around the new reality. Namely, energy, much like most popular commercial agricultural products in the West from, say, 1650 to 1875, and steel from 1850-1875, and long-distance phone calls from 1985 to 2005, is on the cusp of becoming extremely inexpensive.

One of the results of cheap energy is obvious: energy efficiency will become much less important than it is today.

Imagine if you lived in Phoenix, Arizona. You’d probably be somewhat focused on conserving fresh water because, well, fresh water is expensive there, just as it is in the middle of most hot, arid deserts.

But what if you moved from Phoenix, Arizona to, say, Recife, Brazil? You probably wouldn’t bother much with conserving fresh water because, well, much of the time, you could quench your thirst simply by walking outside, looking up, and opening your mouth. (I’m being facetious).

Collectively, vis-à-vis useful energy, it is as if we were all quickly moving from Phoenix, Arizona to Recife, Brazil.

Of course the Hacker News hoi polloi will need to find a new casus belli once the global warming boogeyman abruptly vanishes ignominiously into the dustbin of history along with their pet energy fantasy, nuucuuler energy (read in the accent of President George W. Bush).

Finally, I’ve become extremely contemptuous of the arrogant and ignorant arguments in favor of nuclear energy on Hacker News that seem to pop up every month or so. These days wind and solar are generally cheaper and easier means of creating useful energy. (Sure, nuclear-powered submarines make sense, but that’s a very small niche case).

Bring on downvotes… cowards!

[ncmncm]

It is likely that, over time, hydrogen will be used more and ammonia less. It is even likely that batteries will begin to give way to hydrogen in cars, as batteries will never be anything like as cheap as hydrogen tankage.

Nukes will fade out with a whimper as they become increasingly unable to produce power at a price to match renewables'. The plants will be quietly mothballed, however much was spent on them, because we are not, as a society, chained to the sunk-cost fallacy.

The coming climate catastrophe will bite hard, over and over, for decades before it subsides -- if it does. Civilization might collapse, first. That would cut CO2 emission sharply, but it will remain for many generations, despite that trees would fill out abandoned fields once the fallout fades.

Economically, switching to non-polluting energy is a shoo-in. An economic model that drives sequestering atmospheric carbon is harder to imagine. Most extraction schemes just sell it to be burned again.

[Jistern]

"Imagination is more important knowledge" said some guy with messy hair who knew a thing or two about energy times something squared.

Just as castle towns went from refuges to death traps (starting about 800 years ago when cannonballs started knocking down castle walls), and were soon generally abandoned, large modern cities, as we know them, are on the cusp of both shrinking and transforming.

Once the vast majority of people stop commuting long distances to work and school, it's very likely that cars (as we know them) will become as common in cities as, say, horses. If you work 2 or 3 miles from where you live, and cars have been outlawed for most people, even in the middle of winter in Prince Albert in Canada or Irkutsk in Siberia, one could simply get into something like a fully enclosed, heated, pedelec velomobile with spiked tires and go to work.

This vehicle wouldn't be some ridiculously overengineered self-driving car like we see them today, but rather could be easily guided by computers placed every 25 feet along the roadway that communicate with each velomobile's onboard navigation and braking system.

Therefore, there'd be no need for mom to take the kids to school. Kids, even as young as 5 years old, could go on their own. Of course the vehicles would have video cameras built in, so that mom (or school employees dubbed "commuting monitors") could monitor/talk with her children as they commute to school.

I suppose the amount of energy needed to power such vehicles for would be, perhaps, 90% less than current conventional electric cars.

Perhaps compressed air (and people, gasp, actually peddling) might be used instead of hydrogen or batteries. Regardless of the energy source used, not much would be used (compared to current conventional cars) because commute distances would be shorter and vehicles would be much lighter than current conventional cars.

All of the above would apply when vehicles were actually needed. Much of the time I imagine people would, believe it or not, gasp, walk to and from work or school. Imagine that. People actually walking to and fro in a city.

[Jistern]

>> Nukes will fade out with a whimper as they become increasingly unable to produce power at a price to match renewables'. The plants will be quietly mothballed, however much was spent on them, because we are not, as a society, chained to the sunk-cost fallacy.

I agree.

>> The coming climate catastrophe will bite hard, over and over, for decades before it subsides -- if it does.

Shake yourself my man. That is 100%, complete rubbish. Don't conflate your personal agenda with reality. Sure, global warming is real, yet it is something we can and are dealing with. Don’t you remember how we all died from skin cancer as a result of the irreparable hole in the ozone layer?

Besides, as we transition to renewables (solar and wind at this point) we won't be burning much fossil fuel; therefore, global warming fear mongering will fade out with a whimper as it becomes increasingly difficult to sell.

It's like COVID. It destroyed civilization. Right? I mean, we're all just barely hanging on. Right? Oh yeah. Sorry, "Long COVID" is going to come for the rest of us any day. Sure. Right. Of course.

I suggest you go back and read some of the doomer “non-fiction” (which was actually fiction) from the hippie era such as the "Population Bomb" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb and "Diet for a Small Planet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet. Those authors were spinning dystopian tales that "shockingly" never came true…. just like the greenhouse effect, er, uh I mean global warming, no, no, no, I mean today’s climate change liars.

Every month or so they need to come up with some new set of falsehoods to feed to their minions. It’s as predictable as it is despicable. It reminds of William Randolph Hearst’s infamous Yellow Journalism.

To me it looks like we've got way too many jobless PhD's who can't get jobs as professors. Therefore, they stand on the street corners ranting and raving, "The sky is falling... er, uh… buy my book! I'll explain how you can survive! Buy my book (I need to pay my mortgage)!!!"

>> Civilization might collapse, first.

As a result of global warming? No way. As a result of World War III, sure that's possible.

>> That would cut CO2 emission sharply, but it will remain for many generations, despite that trees would fill out abandoned fields once the fallout fades.

Speaking of trees, you do realize that all of this “noxious and evil” CO2 is actually beneficial to vegetation. Right? In essence we had a bunch of “dead plants” (not really, but I’m oversimplifying to make my point easier to follow) that were underground. For the last couple of hundred years we’ve been burning them up. All of that “pollution” will eventually become “live plants”. And no, in the meantime the Earth isn’t going to turn into Mercury. Raising the temperature a couple of degrees might cause some rich movie stars in Malibu and Formula One race car drivers in Monaco to have their houses washed out to sea. Boo-hoo. I’ll be sure to shed some tears for them.

>> Economically, switching to non-polluting energy is a shoo-in.

I agree.

>> An economic model that drives sequestering atmospheric carbon is harder to imagine.

Here’s an idea: have Elon’s kids R2-D2 and C-3PO take it with them to their utopia on Saturn, or is it Jupiter?

My man. Please. Shake yourself. Carbon isn’t some rare, and dangerous element. Here ya go. Read and learn…

Carbon-based life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-based_life

Yeah. Sure. Over the last 200 years or so we’ve released too much CO2. But think of it like an oil spill. It’s a form of pollution. Gradually “Mother Earth” (I hate tree huggers) will reach a new equilibrium. Relax.

Do you remember “The War to End All Wars.” It was really, really, really, horrible. The Zone Rouge still exists. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

“The Zone Rouge (English: Red Zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War. The land, which originally covered more than 1,200 square kilometres (460 sq mi), was deemed too physically and environmentally damaged by conflict for human habitation. Rather than attempt to immediately clean up the former battlefields, the land was allowed to return to nature. Restrictions within the Zone Rouge still exist today, although the control areas have been greatly reduced.”

Guess what? We figure out how to deal with the pollution we create.

>> Most extraction schemes just sell it to be burned again.

Most extraction schemes are absurd. CO2 isn’t a problem worth worrying about anymore due to cheap solar and wind rapidly replacing fossil fuels. People who have dystopian fantasies are a real problem. You are suffering from “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Climate change has been unpleasant for many people. Sure. I agree. But really, it’s something we can and are dealing with. Furthermore, all that’s really going on is we’ve been “burning too many dead plants too quickly.”

Of course as fossil fuel use plummets over the next couple of decades climate change won’t be a suitable topic to sell books. Not to worry, unemployed PhDs will come up with some dystopian tale of “doom and gloom” to sell to people who are into that sort of nonsense.

Whatever is going wrong in your life: deal with that. Stop focusing on “big problems” you can’t solve and hardly affect you at all.

Besides, climate change isn’t all bad anyways. It has enabled some excellent grapes to be grown for wine in southern England.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/climate-change-makes-engl...

“DORKING, England — The damp and cool English terrain hasn't traditionally been known for producing quality wine.

But vineyards are sprouting up all over the countryside as climate change makes England increasingly suitable for making sparkling wines to rival those of France's Champagne region — winning prizes at international competitions.”

Doomers. Ugh. They are people who are happy to be miserable about problems that don’t directly affect them.

[ncmncm]

If you imagine rising atmospheric CO2 is not a big enough problem to collapse civilization, you are just not paying attention.

At the point where ocean pH falls enough that the basis of the ocean ecosystem collapses, ending access to protein for at least a billion people, global war will follow.

When 100 million people find they cannot grow food where they are, anymore, or even survive outdoors on certain days, they will move to where they can. But people already live where they would go. That pushes fascists into government. Global war will follow.

Before anything that directly threatens civilization, indirect effects like that will force war, and shortly collapse civilization. It will go fast. Nuclear weapons will come out. Global supply chains will vanish never to return.

If you don't think global thermonuclear war would collapse civilization, you are not paying attention. Millions of people would survive it. Probably. Not us.

It might still be possible to forestall this outcome. But not from in denial.

[ncmncm]

By the way: if you think the ozone hole was other than an imminent catastrophe, you utterly failed to understand it. It took herculean effort by thousands of people around the world, from diplomats to chemists, to avert that catastrophe. They mostly succeeded.

You seem to be in the position of the guy who insists Y2K was a big nothing because nothing happened. But it turned out that way precisely because $billions were spent to bring that about.

Your house stays warm in winter not because the cold is no problem, but because you have an active system ensuring, at substantial cost, that the temperature stays up.

Consider yourself schooled, and let the realization percolate.

It turns out now that their remedy, HFCs, also have ~2500x GHG heat forcing potential over CO2. Fluorine compounds already released account for 10% of heat forcing beyond natural level. The implication is that even if we were to remove all the added CO2, we still could not get back to the preindustrial condition.

There is a very large effort going on as I write this to phase out HFCs and substitute a new refrigerant less harmful if released. Big industrial refrigeration systems have returned to using ammonia refrigerant as a way to avoid involvement in another big rollout.

[politician]

I appreciate your style of acknowledging the points you agree on even as you dispute other statements. In this spirit:

>> Economically, switching to non-polluting energy is a shoo-in.

> I agree.

I also agree, but I have some questions about your position re nuclear.

Solar panel lifetime is approx ~20 years. Is the e-waste from solar panels a pollutant? If not, is the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor a pollutant? If so, how do you reconcile the apparently inconsistent position that solar is non-polluting but nuclear is not?

[ncmncm]

Ultra-pure silicon is not a pollutant. It is a resource.

You could say the same about nuke waste. But the pollutant threatening us with global collapse is CO2.

Placed elsewhere than desert, lifetime can be rather longer. But prices are still falling. In 20 years, how cheap will replacement be?

The point of renewables is renewal. Lately, this means opex near zero. It will come to be impossible to compete with generation and storage that have near zero opex, and capex less than a few years of your opex. No one will buy your power for the price you have to quote just to stay open, never mind pay down your construction loan.

[pfdietz]

Which e-waste from solar panels are you talking about? Be specific.

[ncmncm]

Junked Si panels have Si crystals with a vanishingly low concentration of dopants, and metal foil on the surface easily dissolved off with acid. The crystals go into the crucible where the dopants will be refined out.

There are also CdTe panels, in relatively small proportion, even more easily reclaimed: dissolve the Te and Cd in acid, and refine that back to pure metal. Glass is glass.

Later there will be perovskite panels, with overwhelmingly less mass, so of correspondingly less moment.

[Jistern]

>> I appreciate your style of acknowledging the points you agree on even as you dispute other statements.

Thanks. Hacker News is full of arrogant, ignorant engineers whom I despise. I’m brash, harsh, and opinionated. I have a take-no-prisoners style of arguing . Nonetheless, I’m neither arrogant nor ignorant. Really. I’m not.

I carefully consider my interlocutor’s arguments, and I readily admit when I have made a mistake or, gasp, actually been w-r-o-n-g. I don’t argue to win; I argue to learn. My goal isn’t to persuade my interlocutor; rather, my goal is to ascertain the truth.

Sure, these seem “simple and obvious”, yet, in reality, relatively few people on Hacker News actually engage their interlocutors in such a fashion.

Ironically, despite being a “non-engineer” I’m generally far more rigorous in applying the scientific method than most of the Hacker News hoi polloi. Furthermore, although I know it seems incredible (by which I mean “lacking credibility”, not “wow, man, that’s incredible”), yet as a non-engineer I’m better at engineering than most engineers I’ve worked with. Nope. That’s not arrogance; that’s an accurate assessment.

Frankly, that was a very depressing observation to me when I first realized it because I don’t enjoy engineering, and because I don’t consider myself to be good at engineering.

Furthermore, I am tired of embarrassing engineers whom I work with. It’s not fun for me; it’s a hassle. And, of course, they hate it. Engineers typically want to be right to satisfy their egos; whereas, I almost invariably want the products they create to work properly for my customers. In other words, they typically engage in self-righteousness; whereas, I’m focused on truth-seeking. Self-righteousness and truth-seeking are generally, although not always, mutually exclusive.

By the way, I’m not claiming to be selfless. I’m not. I like to learn.

I often need to expose many of the “theories” engineers proffer to me as little more than wishful thinking (a house of cards). It’s annoying and time-consuming. They become myopically focused on some bad technological solution; I want a good solution. I am barely interested in technology per se. To me technology (such as software applications) are like a bunch of hammers, screwdrivers, and chisels.

But if I don’t disabuse them of the falsehoods they are clinging to, they will almost invariably provide code to me that proves Weinberg’s Second Law: “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”

>> In this spirit:

>> Solar panel lifetime is approx ~20 years.

I've read figures like that too. Therefore, I'll grant you that point.

>> Is the e-waste from solar panels a pollutant?

Sheesh. Please stop nitpicking. From what I’ve read, solar panels can easily be produced to be over 90% "recyclable." Why are their quotes around the word recyclable?

Because recycle means this, "return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclic process." In reality, everything can be recycled. But what is commonly meant by the term is "easily recycled."

No. I'm not nitpicking. I remember complaining to one of the two excellent engineers I've ever had the privilege to work with about plastic going into landfills where it would sit for thousands of years before decomposing. He calmly looked at me… like I was a complete and total idiot. That look is hard for me to forget, although it’s probably been 15 years.

He simply said something like, "You know, one day robots will go down into landfills and retrieve everything that is useful. It's just a matter of time." That hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized instantly he was right, and that I was wrong. It was then that I began to look at landfills like, say, iron mines instead of terrible places which should be minimized and avoided.

In other words, when we toss stuff into a landfill, we are merely creating a new type of mine. Obviously, cases where, say , groundwater is being polluted, would be problematic (and should be avoided). Nonetheless, normally a landfill is just a man-made mine in my mind. (alliteration unintentional).

Soon after that conversation I lost almost all interest in the entire concept of “worrying about recycling everything” because I realized that most of the stuff that is valuable in the landfills will probably be recycled in 100 or 200 or 500 years. As for the stuff that isn’t valuable in landfills, it will simply remain in the ground, like over 99% of the stuff that is sitting in the ground around the world.

>> If not, is the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor a pollutant? If so, how do you reconcile the apparently inconsistent position that solar is non-polluting but nuclear is not?

I don’t intend to answer those questions directly, but I hope I will indirectly. My problem with nuclear power plants used to, say, produce electricity for cities (as opposed to say, “nuclear power plants” to power US navy submarines) has nothing whatsoever to do with pollution per se.

I don't care much about nuclear waste one way or another. It's simply something that needs to be dealt with. In other words, I view nuclear waste as a cost, not a boogeyman. Nuclear waste is no big deal in my eyes. I don’t mind burying nuclear waste in some mountain somewhere until, say, we find some bacteria that will gobble it all up and render it harmless.

My problem with nuclear power plants has to do with cost: they are too expensive compared to solar and wind today. Furthermore, solar and wind look like they will keep dropping in price.

If nuclear were significantly cheaper than solar and wind, I'd very probably be advocating for nuclear. The dangers associated with nuclear are overblown by the general public, but they are real nonetheless. Therefore, at the same price point, I’d pick solar and wind over nuclear.

But these days, solar and wind are much cheaper than nuclear power plants. Therefore, building new nuclear power plants isn’t a feasible option for, say, providing electricity to a city.

These days any working engineer who generally advocates, say, constructing nuclear power plants to generate electricity for cities, is almost certainly a bad engineer. There might be some exceptions, but I don’t know of any.

Sure, in 10, or 20, or 30 years from now a new form of nuclear energy might produce electricity cheaper than wind and solar. I realize that. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Nuclear power has a lot of promise.

The main point you should focus regarding energy production in this: we are on the cusp of cheap, readily available electricity. That matters; that matters, a lot. As you might know, in 1850 steel was expensive; yet by 1870 it had become cheap. As a result skyscrapers started appearing in cities such as Chicago, New York, Rotterdam, and Turin. The Romans and the Japanese had steel. But it was super, super, super expensive compared to wood and bricks. (Oh, wait, what’s that you say? The Romans had famous concrete too? Huh. Well, I guess you learn something every day).

Cheap electricity is poised to change the world, much like cheap steel did about 150 or so years ago. How that electricity is produced doesn’t actually matter much for engineering projects. For example, when the Bessemer process was replaced by the Basic oxygen steelmaking process, I doubt many structural engineers at the time cared much about the technology. What they probably cared much about was obtaining cheap steel that met their requirements.

Finally, here is the most important point of all for you. (Yes, I saved the best for last). Engineers often become sooooo infatuated with “their toys” (their preferred technology) that they often become extremely biased and unscientific. I have excoriated many engineers for lying to me about their preferred technology.

No, I am not exaggerating. They lied to me; and I did indeed excoriate them. My tongue lashings were necessary because engineers often act like helpless drug addicts when they are enthralled with a piece of technology. They will “lie, cheat, and steal” to use what, to me, is a mere widget (tool).

Again, I am not exaggerating; I’ve lost a lot of time and money when working with engineers who have flat out lied to me in order to use their favorite technology, although it was obviously the wrong technology for the job.

Bring on the downvotes… cowards!

[ncmncm]

Funny, I once made almost the same remark as your "excellent engineer" to a real mining engineer, and he looked at me the same way as yours did you. Mining, he explained, is about getting out ore as nearly uniform in composition as possible, and designing a simple process to separate the tailings from the valuable part, and then applying a maximally simple chemical treatment to the latter, yielding product. A landfill is worst case for mining: everything is maximally diluted, and totally non-uniform.

That said, plastic in a landfill is anyway well sequestered. So, I thought there was no point in trying to recycle plastic. But I have been disabused, again: making plastic from petroleum tar releases many times as much carbon into the air as is contained in the plastic, and much more than recycling would. So, if we must have plastic, it is better if it comes from a recycle bin, even if the tar it would otherwise be made from will just end up cracked and burned for bunker fuel.

That said, plastic we put in the recycling bin generally just goes straight into the landfill anyway, but costs manual handling by the recycling service in between.

So it is hard to draw any sort of lesson about what to do with plastic trash. But anyway glass of all colors can be very efficiently turned into wall insulation and other stuff.

The Roman concrete we find in still-intact structures has certain desirable qualities, such as self-healing fractures, and getting stronger with exposure to seawater, but is 1/10 as strong as modern concrete. Their early concrete lacked the better qualities of later formulations.