This is so depressing.

Some progress is better then no progress at all.

You know, it help if we went nuclear energy. And considering how close we are to being able to re-utilize the nuclear waste as more fuel, it shouldn’t be polluting anywhere near as much.

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n1ghtfury said:
You know, it help if we went nuclear energy. And considering how close we are to being able to re-utilize the nuclear waste as more fuel, it shouldn’t be polluting anywhere near as much.

You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

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TheChuggernaut said:
This is so depressing.

If only bitcoin was proof of capacity instead of constant hashing with high wattage asics.

n1ghtfury said:
You know, it help if we went nuclear energy. And considering how close we are to being able to re-utilize the nuclear waste as more fuel, it shouldn’t be polluting anywhere near as much.

Nuclear would actually be a more environmentally conscious alternative as well. As much as I like the sound of solar and wind, I did find it pretty unappealing how much it takes to put them into use in the first place. The mining of materials, the sheer amount of land needed to place them, the dangers posed to birds of the larger, more endangered varieties. I'd sooner recommend more use of natural gas than committing to current solar and wind technology, especially given the inherent limitations on both.

tobias_the_deer said:
You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

I'd have to look more into it, but I think I heard the waste could be recycled, assuming it was still radioactive? I apologize if I'm wrong, but even still I'd think if it was pulled from nuclear waste sites, it could be re-deposited in there. Why dig a new hole when one is already available, right?

Just go nuclear if you want clean energy

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drinkerofsoup said:
Nuclear would actually be a more environmentally conscious alternative as well. As much as I like the sound of solar and wind, I did find it pretty unappealing how much it takes to put them into use in the first place. The mining of materials, the sheer amount of land needed to place them, the dangers posed to birds of the larger, more endangered varieties. I'd sooner recommend more use of natural gas than committing to current solar and wind technology, especially given the inherent limitations on both.

I'd have to look more into it, but I think I heard the waste could be recycled, assuming it was still radioactive? I apologize if I'm wrong, but even still I'd think if it was pulled from nuclear waste sites, it could be re-deposited in there. Why dig a new hole when one is already available, right?

There is also the fact that solar farms destroy the soil they are placed in since the process irradiates the soil around the base.

tobias_the_deer said:
You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

This video goes over the very basics of some current and proposed solutions to the disposal of nuclear waste. It really is not too informative, but provides a good overview in a handful of minutes.

Good points, DrinkerOfSoup. Here is as bowl of info (sorry for the size):

"Nuclear would actually be a more environmentally conscious alternative as well."

True. It is comparable to wind power in terms of emissions, very good in use of land and much, MUCH safer that people give it credit. Nuclear is to power what airplanes are to trafic: accidents are rare, everything is closely monitored and media ALWAYS goes "OMG! SHIT WENT DOWN! READ NOW!!!1!!" for things that make engineers say: "Exactly like the simulations."
Sources
Emissions: https://energy.utexas.edu/news/nuclear-and-wind-power-estimated-have-lowest-levelized-co2-emissions
Land use: page 2, table 2, https://knowledge.unccd.int/sites/default/files/2018-06/2.%20Fritsche%2Bet%2Bal%2B%282017%29%2BEnergy%2Band%2BLand%2BUse%2B-%2BGLO%2Bpaper-corr.pdf
Safety:
https://hps.org/documents/nuclearpower.pdf
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2807%2961253-7
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/?sh=f933cb1709b7
(Yes, I put three sources for this point. Stop making a fuss about Fukushima people.)
OMG!: https://www.aim.org/media-monitor/the-media-and-nuclear-power/

"As much as I like the sound of solar and wind, I did find it pretty unappealing how much it takes to put them into use in the first place. The mining of materials, the sheer amount of land needed to place them, the dangers posed to birds of the larger, more endangered varieties. I'd sooner recommend more use of natural gas than committing to current solar and wind technology, especially given the inherent limitations on both."

True, it is a lot of work. But far from hopeless.
Renewables are within striking distance of being cheaper that fossil fuels.: https://share.america.gov/renewable-energy-costs-how-low-can-they-go/
New types of panels may not require mining at all, like bacteria. No joke!: https://www.solar.com/learn/bacteria-enhanced-solar-can-boost-production-in-cloudy-skies/
Bird problems are fixable: https://electrek.co/2020/08/21/wind-turbines-bird-friendly-black-blade/
Limitations are well known and under MASSIVE search for solutions. Here is one for storage, liquid metal battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BlyDVb5L3U

"I'd have to look more into it, but I think I heard the waste could be recycled, assuming it was still radioactive? I apologize if I'm wrong, but even still I'd think if it was pulled from nuclear waste sites, it could be re-deposited in there. Why dig a new hole when one is already available, right?"

Fuel still has energy after its taken out of the reactor and recycling of spent fuel: Point five, line three, https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel
Why fuel isn't recycled: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Spent_nuclear_fuel
Fourth generation reactors seeing spent fuel, maybe: "OM NOM NOM!": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Finland is the only country with a "hole" under works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50
(Please ignore the parts about Olkiluoto 3, us finnish engineers don't want to reminded about it's sorry existance. Thank you.)

Enjoy the sauce sources!

corvo261 said:
There is also the fact that solar farms destroy the soil they are placed in since the process irradiates the soil around the base.

wasn't that discredited though???

tobias_the_deer said:
You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

iirc anything that can't be recycled is, once safe enough, put in containers and buried deep underground, up to a few kilometers deep.

Certainly more confined than fossil fuels, where the waste product is pumped directly into the air...

bakeneko said:
Some progress is better then no progress at all.

The joke is its a net negative

n1ghtfury said:
You know, it help if we went nuclear energy. And considering how close we are to being able to re-utilize the nuclear waste as more fuel, it shouldn’t be polluting anywhere near as much.

I've heard of the idea of diamond batteries. The main issue of nuclear waste is that it is too sparse for the energy to be properly utilized, and it is still technically carbon, so... someone thought of the idea of compacting the nuclear waste into artificial diamonds (or at least how I presume the line of logic went). Now the main question is what the heck kind of technology would use a battery with a lifespan of ~26,000 years...

corvo261 said:
There is also the fact that solar farms destroy the soil they are placed in since the process irradiates the soil around the base.

jacethehybrid said:
wasn't that discredited though???

I haven't even heard about this claim. This is either a trolling statement or an insider joke by some engineers*.
The only way that soil becomes radioactive is either:
A: It is mixed with radioactive material (nukes would do the job or fallout) or
B: It is dosed with so much ionizing radiation that the atoms themselves turn to radioactive isotopes (nukes again and nuclear reactors after years of use).

There is no way in hell that infrared, visible light or even ultraviolet light could make something contaminated by irradiation. You need at least X-rays for that, and those never come close to ground, as they are stopped by magnetic field, ozone layer, atmospere itself and sheer distance between the sun and earth. Any panels that had radioactive components would be stopped at border and start a witchhunt after whoever made them.

*Possible explanation:
"Irradiation is the process by which an object is exposed to radiation. The exposure can originate from various sources, including natural sources. Most frequently the term refers to ionizing radiation, and to a level of radiation that will serve a specific purpose, rather than radiation exposure to normal levels of background radiation. The term irradiation usually excludes the exposure to non-ionizing radiation, such as infrared, visible light, microwaves from cellular phones or electromagnetic waves emitted by radio and TV receivers and power supplies." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irradiation)

Technically yes, the panels are irradiated, but since it includes EVERY TYPE of radiation, heat and visible light included, it's not used much with solar panels. Partly because of the "all radioactivity is bad" error that people have, partly because serves no purpose when talking about solar.

data said:
I've heard of the idea of diamond batteries. The main issue of nuclear waste is that it is too sparse for the energy to be properly utilized, and it is still technically carbon, so... someone thought of the idea of compacting the nuclear waste into artificial diamonds (or at least how I presume the line of logic went). Now the main question is what the heck kind of technology would use a battery with a lifespan of ~26,000 years...

Give the engineer a toy to play with and they WILL come up with ideas how to use it. It has happened, it will happen again.
Here's mine:
Power for satellites too far from Earth to resupply and too far from the Sun to use photovoltaics (solarpanels)
Devices that are hard to access (pacemakers, implants, weather stations in the middle of nowhere)
Lazyness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RdTXJaqJs, 'nuff said)
Things that can be unused or forgotten for long periods of time (weapon systems, flash lights, smoke detectors)
Things that MUST WORK, battery charge be dammed (safety systems and backup power)
Remotes, period.

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n1ghtfury said:
You know, it help if we went nuclear energy. And considering how close we are to being able to re-utilize the nuclear waste as more fuel, it shouldn’t be polluting anywhere near as much.

Depending who you talk to a lot of people either have ideological stake that borders on blind tribalism or a shrewd financial stake in "Green" energy and see Nuclear/Fusion as a threat to their bottom line.

I don't use cryptocurrencies, but it's not like minining is wasting energy without doing anything, it's what the security of proof-of-work systems hinges on, so it's only wasting energy if you consider cryptocurrencies useless. Though there are other systems like e.g. there are currencies in which the effect of the calculation is useful in itself, but I forgot the name.

tobias_the_deer said:
You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

Most plants keep waste on site under the reactor. We could also just shove it deep underground where we found it, which is what others do.

rodere said:
I don't use cryptocurrencies, but it's not like minining is wasting energy without doing anything, it's what the security of proof-of-work systems hinges on, so it's only wasting energy if you consider cryptocurrencies useless. Though there are other systems like e.g. there are currencies in which the effect of the calculation is useful in itself, but I forgot the name.

In most common cryptocurrencies you are wasting computing power just to show that you can afford to waste computing power and your dedication to wasting power shows that you are trustworthy enough to add transactions into the system. The problem is that perhaps, in a world of limited resources and looming climate crisis, we could establish trust in ways that don't involve wasting the power output of a medium-sized country and loads of manufacturing capacity of semiconductor foundries.

tobias_the_deer said:
You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

Depending on what radioactive material you use, there won't be any waste until 10 years after initial operations. And even then, if you use thorium (I think), the amount of waste produced after that time will be the size of a penny.

softfur10 said:
In most common cryptocurrencies you are wasting computing power just to show that you can afford to waste computing power and your dedication to wasting power shows that you are trustworthy enough to add transactions into the system. The problem is that perhaps, in a world of limited resources and looming climate crisis, we could establish trust in ways that don't involve wasting the power output of a medium-sized country and loads of manufacturing capacity of semiconductor foundries.

Canada's hydro plants alone produce 4 times as much excess (unused) energy as all of Bitcoin mining. The showing you can waste energy is done to prove to others that they can't attack this financial system without having even more capacity to waste energy, so in a sense the "waste" is proof of security. And perhaps we could establish trust in better ways some day, but what we have here with Bitcoin is basically the best thing we could get to after centuries of trying to figure it out. Maybe in a few centuries we will find something better.

Power consumption required to mine bitcoin also doesn't scale with it's adoption. Bitcoin will always use roughly the amount it does now; less when better mining ASICs come online. The best way to deal with CO2 emissions (and with all emissions in gneral) is an effluent tax. All materials considered harmful have a tax placed on them. By varying the tax and observing how usage changes, the regulatory agency can gauge how necessary emission of a given effluent is; if one is easily replaced with a safe alternative, its usage will decrease a lot with only a small tax. Further, this prices the harm done by an effluent in to all goods that use the effluent: BTC producers would need to pay a carbon tax that represents how much damage the carbon they want to buy is causing, so that damage would then be priced in to BTC and incentivise even more energy-efficient hashing silicon to be produced. The issue of course is that it isn't global policy, but this only matters for those few effluents which have international neighborhood effects, like CO2 or CFCs.

One of the miracles of BTC is that it can transform waste energy into permenant value that can then be transmitted over the internet to areas where energy is expensive. It's wireless power transmission, albeit of the value of the power not the power itself. Areas with a lot of excess power naturally have cheap electricity, so that is where miners will congregate. Bitcoin is by extension not mined in areas where power demand is high relative to supply, but miners can use it to exchange for goods and services, even if it is exchanging it for fiat. The value of the excess energy is being exchanged for goods and services where there isn't energy excess.

thechuggernaut said:
This is so depressing.

And mostly untrue. While Crypto can consume a lot of energy, it's not profitable to buy energy at the same cost as most regular consumers pay, as crypto dosen't generate that much money

What ends up happening most of the time is that they consume energy that would otherwise be wasted

Tere is also the fact of how the media oversensationalized the issue. The consumption is high, but it's significantly smaller than several already established industries

I like the idea of Molten salt Reactors.
The positives outway the negatives.

celestia97 said:
I like the idea of Molten salt Reactors.
The positives outway the negatives.

Molten Salt is poggers, but I feel the general public would trust Thorium reactors more

marsthesergal said:
You're completely correct, just look at France. But that does leave one question...where will we put the used up radioactive waste?

The science is down to the point where we aren't making barrels of the stuff anymore if done with modern techniques, instead creating safe means of disposal, and there are ways to not even create nuclear waste if the right materials are used. Your fears are valid, but only if we use ancient versions of the tech.

Mr._Spooky said:
Depending who you talk to a lot of people either have ideological stake that borders on blind tribalism or a shrewd financial stake in "Green" energy and see Nuclear/Fusion as a threat to their bottom line.

Im of the opinion that Nuclear is one of the best options (which type of nuclear power is best is a debate for another time)

the only issue is it takes a while to build a Nuclear power plant (over 5 years), so im also all for incentivising the use of home solar, and pushing for more solar and wind farms as a sort of bridge for nuclear power, and as an additional source of power, so we arn't relying on one singular type of power.

finnishpuzzle said:
[replying to someone elses comment about 26K years battery life]
Give the engineer a toy to play with and they WILL come up with ideas how to use it. It has happened, it will happen again.
Here's mine:
Power for satellites too far from Earth to resupply and too far from the Sun to use photovoltaics (solarpanels)
Devices that are hard to access (pacemakers, implants, weather stations in the middle of nowhere)
Lazyness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RdTXJaqJs, 'nuff said)
Things that can be unused or forgotten for long periods of time (weapon systems, flash lights, smoke detectors)
Things that MUST WORK, battery charge be dammed (safety systems and backup power)
Remotes, period.

I'm a bit late, but RTG's, (radioactive heating element with a thermocouple converting the heat to electricity) are already used exactly like that and has been used in lighthouses, spacecraft and similar difficult to reach places that require high reliability