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> metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these.
by CodeGlitch 6y ago
> metallurgy, manufacture the concrete, or synthesize the petrochemicals in the absence of fossil fuel energy
I think you could use biomass to bootstrap these. Biosmass wouldn't be sustainable, but once you have the metallurgy, etc in place you could then build wind turbines.
- bobthepanda 6y agoBiomass doesn’t burn hot enough.
- jabl 6y agoHow do you think they made iron before the industrial revolution? Hint: charcoal.
- bobthepanda 6y agoGoing back to just pig iron would be pretty terrible. The Old World cleared nearly all of its forests getting to that point.
- jabl 6y agoTrue, it wouldn't support anything close to the scale of steel production today. But it could be a step in a bootstrap process. Build some hydro/nuclear/wind power plants, then you can start looking into hydrogen reduction for steel production.
- Symmetry 6y agoEnough people know that Wootz steel is possible through mixing wrought and cast iron in the right sort of vessel that we'd have at least some steel with decent carbon content. Or pattern welding will be fine for most things.
- bigger_cheese 6y agoWith careful management and modern forestry techniques I believe sustainable (or close to sustainable) charcoal production is possible, I can remember seeing CSIRO do a study using Australian Mallee trees. These grow fast enough such that you can rotate which part of the plantation you are harvesting to enable something close to continuous production. I can't find paper https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/pub?pid=csiro:EP115427 https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/pub?pid=csiro:EP115427 is closest thing google turns up. You also get eucalypt oil as a by-product from harvesting these trees wikipedia tells me this has a high enough octane rating to serve as a fuel in it's own right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_oil Now this might be difficult to achieve in a near collapse. I'm not sure the size of plantations you would need I assume would be pretty massive.
- bluGill 6y agoYou run out of biomass before you can bootstrap yourself enough to build wind turbines. Sure the dutch built windmills, but they didn't have refined metals in to make a generator.
- egberts1 6y agoHydroelectric, slow but effective to establish an electric kiln that works with titanium.
- bilbo0s 6y agoYou need to know the location of the minerals. Or you better hope the war didn't kill all the people who do know the location of, say rutile and ilmenite deposits. Then there's the matter of getting enough people down into the mines to get enough out. Historically this was done via slavery, but those ancient civilizations first needed to acquire giant, mean, ugly armies in order to get the slaves. Where do you find a few hundred thousand unarmed people to enslave after a nuclear war? Actually, first you would have to find a few hundred thousand armed people and convince them to join your army to enslave all the other people. And you would have to have quite a bit of luck. If you didn't, one, or maybe even a group, of the few hundred thousand soldiers you found to be in your army might figure out that they can just kill you and it will be their army. The ancient way was hard. The entire process would not be as easy as many believe.
- varjag 6y agoYou still need that generator.
- adrianN 6y agoWhen the Dutch built windmills it wasn't the lack of metallurgy that prevented generators. It was just that generators weren't invented yet. Electricity was barely understood during the Dutch Golden Age.