5 ms·

It takes time to get the water back where you can drink it. We had this discussion before when we talked about the drought in California.

by noja 11y ago

evgen 11y ago
It takes energy, not time. It takes a long time if you passively wait for random environmental processes to slowly replace the water, and a very short amount of time if you actively apply energy to the problem.
- radiorental 11y ago
  Where does this energy come from and, more importantly, how many does it cost. All of our problems could be solved with an unlimited amount of energy applied to them. Most of them were created that way too.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That actually highlights the problem perfectly. Energy is the metric that matters. With current knowledge and level of technology humanity has, we can make almost anything by applying energy to shuffling dirt. Need gasoline? We can synthesize it. Need gold? We can recycle it out of stuff. Need drinking water? We can make it out of almost anything. All that's needed is energy, which is something we don't have much of. Last time I checked we didn't have the world full of nuclear reactors. Until we hit a sustainable and ridiculous energy abundance, we can't assume we can fix any global problem with energy - there's not enough of it to go around. EDIT: Wording.
  - atemerev 11y ago
    Why not run the world on nuclear power? With breeder reactors, there is enough uranium for more than million years of current world electricity consumption. Nuclear energy is cheap, and modern reactor designs are safe.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Yes, I agree. I might have not worded my comment clearly enough. What I meant is: I don't see the world being full of nuclear powerplants right now, so we don't have a sustainable energy surplus to stupidly waste. EDIT: Fixed wording in the original comment; I hope it's clearer now.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      It's never cheap. It's plagued by construction cost overruns. We're having this problem with Hinkley Point C at the moment: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/11/edf-chief-executive-warns-france-over-hinkley-costs http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/11/edf-chief-ex...
      - atemerev 11y ago
        Even given the cost overruns, insurance, nuclear pools, etc it is quite cheap. The only problem with nuclear power is that it is highly centralized and requires significant upfront capital expenditures. And political consequences of radiophobia are so high that investing in nuclear power is limited. I think that solar and nuclear are the only sustainable power generation methods these days. The rest are either bad for the environment, or ineffective.
        mikepurvis 11y ago
        Radiophobe here. I can't accept the morality of handing stewardship of spent nuclear fuel to my children and their children for a thousand generations. Would you still want to be caring for a monster left to us by the people who wrote on cave walls? As far as a DGR, I'll believe it when a nation other than Finland has shovels in the ground to actually build one.
        atemerev 11y ago
        1) Breeder reactors are reducing the amount of spent fuel to store about 100x. Existing nuclear waste can also be reprocessed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio... 2) What monster could be left by stone-age people to us that modern technology couldn't handle? Modern spent fuel processing methods are great and quite safe (vitrification / underground disposal). I can't imagine a newsworthy worst case scenario with vitrified containers.
  - meric 11y ago
    Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power. One key questions for rulers and governments from antiquity is how to allow the population to gather energy to survive. It could be farming, or building oil wells and then hand out the profits or build a service economy around the oil. I couldn't figure out how to maintain a modern population without oil (more people same amount of land) until I saw this on HN the other day https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3 https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t... Zero input food. Can be used to generate ethanol. All you need is open ocean. Food for thought.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power. But we can with nuclear plants, and I'm thinking garden variety fission plants, not the always-30-years-from-now fusion ones. There are various areas where we use fossil fuels only because its more convenient - e.g. ground transportation. We can go electric with most of it. Fertilizers - I'm not sure if petroleum is a necessary chemical component or just energy delivery vector for the production process. Plastics are I think the only area where we can't easily sidestep fossil fuels. But with enough electricity we can still synthesize the compounds we need for those processes.
      - meric 11y ago
        I have thought about this problem and came to the same conclusion - we need to move to nuclear. But then if most of our energy needs are from nuclear, now we're going to be back in the same situation in 50 years running out of uranium. Or we could sit in top of our coal power plants slurping oil, wait for the magical thorium reactor and/or solar power to become another 10 times more economical.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Maybe not in 50 years, because it seems that we have a lot of fissile material available[0] that should last us for a long time - long enough to expand past this planet if we continue the growth curve, or at least to advance and deploy renewable solutions without a hurry. But yeah, with continued growth we would hit an energy ceiling in the future too. That ain't bad if reasonably managed - we could fix all the damage done to this planet and expand to the Solar System. But then again, humanity isn't exactly known for reasonable management. [0] - http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml
  - olau 11y ago
    No, it's not, that's a bit too simple. In reality, time is the metric the matters, human time. All that stuff you talk about costs human time to build. That's why it's not being built - it's cheaper to do something else. Once you have a robotic army capable of mining resources and building everything you want, including rebuilding itself, you can just have them throw up a bunch of solar panels and have enough energy for desalination.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I disagree. Human time is not a problem. Yes, in a moral world it would be the most important metric. But nowadays, labour is cheap and abunant. That's why we don't have robotic armies doing stuff all around us - it's cheaper to make people work. We're energy-bound as a civilization now (or, one could say, still).

It takes time to get the water back where you can drink it. We had this discussion before when we talked about the drought in California.

by noja 11y ago

It takes time to get the water back where you can drink it. We had this discussion before when we talked about the drought in California.

evgen 11y ago

It takes energy, not time. It takes a long time if you passively wait for random environmental processes to slowly replace the water, and a very short amount of time if you actively apply energy to the problem.

radiorental 11y ago
Where does this energy come from and, more importantly, how many does it cost. All of our problems could be solved with an unlimited amount of energy applied to them. Most of them were created that way too.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
That actually highlights the problem perfectly. Energy is the metric that matters. With current knowledge and level of technology humanity has, we can make almost anything by applying energy to shuffling dirt. Need gasoline? We can synthesize it. Need gold? We can recycle it out of stuff. Need drinking water? We can make it out of almost anything. All that's needed is energy, which is something we don't have much of. Last time I checked we didn't have the world full of nuclear reactors. Until we hit a sustainable and ridiculous energy abundance, we can't assume we can fix any global problem with energy - there's not enough of it to go around. EDIT: Wording.
- atemerev 11y ago
  Why not run the world on nuclear power? With breeder reactors, there is enough uranium for more than million years of current world electricity consumption. Nuclear energy is cheap, and modern reactor designs are safe.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes, I agree. I might have not worded my comment clearly enough. What I meant is: I don't see the world being full of nuclear powerplants right now, so we don't have a sustainable energy surplus to stupidly waste. EDIT: Fixed wording in the original comment; I hope it's clearer now.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    It's never cheap. It's plagued by construction cost overruns. We're having this problem with Hinkley Point C at the moment: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/11/edf-chief-executive-warns-france-over-hinkley-costs http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/11/edf-chief-ex...
    - atemerev 11y ago
      Even given the cost overruns, insurance, nuclear pools, etc it is quite cheap. The only problem with nuclear power is that it is highly centralized and requires significant upfront capital expenditures. And political consequences of radiophobia are so high that investing in nuclear power is limited. I think that solar and nuclear are the only sustainable power generation methods these days. The rest are either bad for the environment, or ineffective.
      - mikepurvis 11y ago
        Radiophobe here. I can't accept the morality of handing stewardship of spent nuclear fuel to my children and their children for a thousand generations. Would you still want to be caring for a monster left to us by the people who wrote on cave walls? As far as a DGR, I'll believe it when a nation other than Finland has shovels in the ground to actually build one.
        atemerev 11y ago
        1) Breeder reactors are reducing the amount of spent fuel to store about 100x. Existing nuclear waste can also be reprocessed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio... 2) What monster could be left by stone-age people to us that modern technology couldn't handle? Modern spent fuel processing methods are great and quite safe (vitrification / underground disposal). I can't imagine a newsworthy worst case scenario with vitrified containers.
- meric 11y ago
  Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power. One key questions for rulers and governments from antiquity is how to allow the population to gather energy to survive. It could be farming, or building oil wells and then hand out the profits or build a service economy around the oil. I couldn't figure out how to maintain a modern population without oil (more people same amount of land) until I saw this on HN the other day https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3 https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t... Zero input food. Can be used to generate ethanol. All you need is open ocean. Food for thought.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power. But we can with nuclear plants, and I'm thinking garden variety fission plants, not the always-30-years-from-now fusion ones. There are various areas where we use fossil fuels only because its more convenient - e.g. ground transportation. We can go electric with most of it. Fertilizers - I'm not sure if petroleum is a necessary chemical component or just energy delivery vector for the production process. Plastics are I think the only area where we can't easily sidestep fossil fuels. But with enough electricity we can still synthesize the compounds we need for those processes.
    - meric 11y ago
      I have thought about this problem and came to the same conclusion - we need to move to nuclear. But then if most of our energy needs are from nuclear, now we're going to be back in the same situation in 50 years running out of uranium. Or we could sit in top of our coal power plants slurping oil, wait for the magical thorium reactor and/or solar power to become another 10 times more economical.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Maybe not in 50 years, because it seems that we have a lot of fissile material available[0] that should last us for a long time - long enough to expand past this planet if we continue the growth curve, or at least to advance and deploy renewable solutions without a hurry. But yeah, with continued growth we would hit an energy ceiling in the future too. That ain't bad if reasonably managed - we could fix all the damage done to this planet and expand to the Solar System. But then again, humanity isn't exactly known for reasonable management. [0] - http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml
- olau 11y ago
  No, it's not, that's a bit too simple. In reality, time is the metric the matters, human time. All that stuff you talk about costs human time to build. That's why it's not being built - it's cheaper to do something else. Once you have a robotic army capable of mining resources and building everything you want, including rebuilding itself, you can just have them throw up a bunch of solar panels and have enough energy for desalination.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I disagree. Human time is not a problem. Yes, in a moral world it would be the most important metric. But nowadays, labour is cheap and abunant. That's why we don't have robotic armies doing stuff all around us - it's cheaper to make people work. We're energy-bound as a civilization now (or, one could say, still).