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Comment Re:Politics of radioactive waste (Score 1) 105

It appears you missed the part about politics interfering with efforts to deal with radioactive waste. We've had a major political party that was openly opposed to nuclear power in any form from 1972 to 2020.

Sigh. Learn some history. There are people here who actually were around then.

No, the Democrats were not "openly opposed to nuclear power in any form" in 1972. Jimmy Carter was supportive of nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement hadn't coalesced yet, and the Greens were mostly busy protesting whaling.

The Three-mile island event (at nearly the same time as the movie "The China Syndrome") changed the attitude toward nuclear power, but that was at the very end of Carter's presidency, and it was Reagan that had to deal with the change. If you want to name the party that killed nuclear power in the US... it was the Republicans. There were zero approved permits for new nuclear plant constructions during the entire 12 year Reagan and Bush (I) administrations. I will blame the after effects of Three-mile island, but it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who dropped the ball.

They opposed any means of proper disposal of radioactive waste, preferring instead to use the piles of spent fuel at nuclear power plants

As did the Republicans.

as a means to stoke fear in the public of nuclear power.

Your speculation about motives is utter nonsense.

Even if you accept Forbes as an accurate source, that article only says that support of nuclear power was not in the Democratic Party's published platform after 1972. That's a far cry from saying that they were "openly opposed."

Even though the Democrats have it on paper that they support nuclear power,

Wait, what? You just finished saying that they were "openly opposed to nuclear power in any form". Now you're saying that they were openly supporting nuclear power. You can't even keep your story stright for two paragraphs.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 155

You see the homes, kitchens, vacations, etc. of people like Alec Baldwin and you realize wow, the finishes might be slightly fancier but in reality it's not fundamentally different -- not to any relevant degree

Here we are saying that most Americans have houses not very different from Alec Baldwin, and yet whenever electric vehicles are mentioned on slashdot, you can just bet comments are going to say "but half of America can't charge at home!"

Which is it? We all live like Alec Baldwin, or we can't even charge electric vehicles at home.

Comment Re:Not toxic [Re:Not enough] (Score 1) 104

You need 6.7 million square meters of solar panels minimum to match Nuke plant.

A typical nuclear plant is sited inside a keep-out area of roughly 1000 acres. That comes to 4 million square meters. So you're saying that solar panels don't take much more area than nuclear plants. OK.

As a quick comparison, about 800 million square meters of the United States are used for cattle grazing. That's three trillion square meters. Area really isn't the problem.

Thats a ridiculous amount of waste

That's very little waste, since solar panels are recyclable. There isn't a very big market for recycling solar panels today because few solar panels have reached their end of life, but when it's needed, twenty or thirty years from now, the materials solar panels are made from are all recyclable.

Comment Oxygen is toxic! Don't expose yourself to it! (Score 1) 104

Phosphorus, especially in its modification called White Phosphorus, is one of the most toxic substances known to Man.

That's like saying that oxygen is one of the most toxic substances known to man, in its modification known as ozone. Phosphorus is not toxic; it is in fact one of the essential elements for life. The backbone of DNA molecules are phosphates; no phosphorus, no life.

And the amount of phosphorus in solar panels is absolutely trivial-- it's a dopant, about 100 ppm in the emitter of the cell, a layer roughly a micron thick. It is not "white phosphorus".

Comment Not toxic [Re:Not enough] (Score 4, Informative) 104

What is China going to do with all those millions of panels after 20 years? Lots of toxic chemicals in those panels.

That's a myth promulgated by the fossil-fuel industry.

The major components of solar panels, are, by mass: glass, aluminum (frames), silicon. All of these are recycleable; none of these are toxic. After that you have the polymer attaching the glass to the cells, and the wiring.

Compared to the amount of landfill that industrialized nations produce -- 2.13 billion metric tons annually, in 2020-- solar panels are trivial.

Comment History forgotten [Re:Already done!] (Score 1) 126

Solar panels are cheap because of China, not because of "development effort" of the "decades-long research" done by rich nations.

It may look like that from this side of the millennium, but no, the history is simply in the process of being forgotten. This was a big effort.

Pretty much ALL of the present solar technology we see in megawatt production today is an outgrowth of the old Large Silicon Solar Array ("LSSA") program of the late 70s/early 80s (although the University of New South Wales group led by Martin Green needs to get some credit, too).

The program was originally part of RANN ("Research Applied to National Needs") and transitioned to ERDA (the Energy Research and Development agency) which then became part of the Department of Energy. LSSA became LSA, and then got renamed FPSA ("Flat Plate Solar Array"-- distinguishing it from concentrator solar arrays). So it had a lot of names.

You are taking like that research was given for free

Of course not. It was paid for by taxpayers (from the rich nations.)

I was there. You weren't.

If you want more details, dig up any of the old IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists' Conference ("PVSC") proceedings from the 70s and 80s and look at the program summary papers, typically the plenary talks toward the beginning.

... China makes solar cheaper. Not the west.

China makes solar cheaper because they invested in scaling up technologies developed by the west.

Comment Re:But China is the world leader here (Score 1) 16

China has built phenomenal amounts of renewal power and their emissions peaked this year, with a modest (1%) decline. Here's a good source from the World Economic Forum. It notes the complexities and fragility of the decrease, but also shows the underlying path which lead to it.

Sounds interesting. You forgot to paste the link, could you post it?

Comment Re: This is a non-story (Score 1) 136

Except... basically all the warming already is done. Further increases in CO2 basically don't contribute to warming.

Incorrect.

Warming is proportional to the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration. This is the Arrhenius relationship; it's been know for over a century. (For reference, this is why climate sensitivity is expressed as degrees of warming per doubling.)

You could say that "that means that as CO2 increases the slope levels out", which is true, but we are still in the linear range.

An interesting paper (although not peer reviewed), basically re-doing Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 calculations but with updated spectral lines. Did you actually read past the first paragraph? Their conclusion was that for the one-dimensional adiabatic warming due to carbon dioxide, they calculate 2.3 Kelvin per doubling of CO2. Points to note:

1. they express warming as degrees per doubling: they are agreeing with the Arrhenius relationship that warming increases as the logarithm of the concentration.
2. Their calculated value of 2.3 K/doubling is within the error bars of the IPCC estimate (which is the average of many models), although on the low side of the average estimated climate sensitivity. But, it's a simplified one-dimensional model, so it's not expected to be identical to the full 3D models.

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