4 ms·
Yes, but it will be orders of magnitude less than the sum total energy of solar energy across the total surface of the earth.
by Uily 5y ago
Yes, but it will be orders of magnitude less than the sum total energy of solar energy across the total surface of the earth.
- eru 5y agoSimilarly: Nuclear power plants, as nearly all power plants, work by heating water. That heat has to go somewhere eventually. But the amounts you'd need to make any difference to the atmosphere (compared to solar radiation) would be truly humongous.
- anonporridge 5y agoI don't know if this would be any extra heat, because the radioactive material would already be decaying anyway if it was left in its natural state. Maybe the same problem where radioactive material would be left mostly underground and insulated where its heat would leak slowly. Then again, part of the Earth's core heat comes form radioactive decay. So in a way, geothermal is an indirect form of nuclear fission.
- eru 5y agoNuclear power plants don't just capture the energy from natural decay. Though the precise mechanism doesn't matter too much for my comment. Just assume I'm talking about fusion plants.
- anonporridge 5y agoYeah. All civilization consumes around 17 TW of energy while the sun is constantly bombarding the Earth with 173,000 TW. We could rebase all of civilization on geothermal and the extra heat in the atmosphere would be a rounding error to the sun's energy.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoI don't think "it's a rounding error" is enough analysis here. A couple of meters of sea level rise, a couple of degrees temperature rise; these could be termed rounding errors.
- Retric 5y agoNot degrees, thousandths of a degree, so possibly something like a centimeter if sea level rise. Considering nuclear and fossil fuels directly release stored energy and solar increase albido this isn’t a 1:1 increase in energy. Further the earth radiates more energy from hot places than cool, still you can approximate it as something like: Black body radiation is temperature in kelvin to the 4th power. (285 * (170,017^0.25 / 170,000^0.25) - 285) is an increase of ~0.007 C / (whatever our current percentage of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, or solar).
- anonporridge 5y agoIt's far less than the variance of direct solar irradiation hitting the Earth given varying differences in distance from the sun in the Earth's orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant#Solar_irradiance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant#Solar_irradianc... It looks like direct solar radiance is actually 173,000 TW plus or minus 6,000 TW.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoSo if our energy consumption increases by 4% per year (current global average) for ~110 years, we'd need to capture / produce as much energy as the Sun hits us with. Crazy!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 5y agoThat would also mean going from kilowatts per person to megawatts per person, so yeah that's pretty crazy.