Hehe, I walked right into this one. You’re right. I totally failed at trying to be a smartass.
Interests: Science, boardgames, urbanism, public transport and cycling, sports (doing not following it), brighter future (while being way too cynical)…
Hehe, I walked right into this one. You’re right. I totally failed at trying to be a smartass.
Why are you comparing fossil fuels and nuclear “per tonne” that makes no sense. You replace tens of tones of nuclear fuel per year any you burn millions of tones in a comparable fosil fuel plant.
And regarding the carbon emissions from enrichment… Just use nuclear to power your enrichment plants. This way your emissions are extremely low because you don’t need much fuel and you use nuclear energy to produce nuclear fuel. French example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricastin_Nuclear_Power_Plant
With energy positive here I mean useful energy positive, so electricity or high temperature heat.
You are technically wrong, the worst kind of wrong :)
DT and DD fusion reactions release energy. More energy than is put in. It’s the whole system that hasn’t been energy positive. We’re close to breakeven in terms of plasma (heating power vs fusion power, and it’s not like heating power is lost from the system it still heats the reactor) but to be useful fusion power needs to be >10x heating power so the whole system is more than self-sufficient.
(Established) scientists have a long history of ignoring new theories not science itself. But that’s because at the end of the day scientists are still human.
Science is not great at working on a very short time scales. But give it enough time so more evidence is gathered and possibly some stubborn influential people (that can’t accept a new theory) die and generally we get closer and closer to truth.
It all depends on what is actually trying to be communicated. With your definition most meals would be plant based so why even bother to say it. With definition where plant based means no animal products it communicates that it is fine for vegans and it’s likely less offensive for people allergic to word “vegan”.
It all depends on what is actually trying to be communicated. With your definition most meals would be plant based so why even bother to say it. With definition where plant based means no animal products it communicates that it is fine for vegans and it’s likely less offensive for people allergic to word “vegan”.
Language is interesting in this way. Same words in different contexts mean different things.
“Based on true events” = “Contains traces of what actually happened”
“Plant based” = “Does not contain animal products but can contain mushrooms even though they are not plants”
Homo sapiens also doesn’t originate from Europe.
How far back does it count? Humans originate from Africa so everything we do can be seen as Africans doing things with stuff from all over the planet. Or perhaps even that is not far enough. What’s the origin of the first mammal… The only contestant is change and life is good at mixing things up.
Indeed. It takes time.
And there needs to be an actual alternative to driving. You can’t just make driving worse and expect results. I’ve found that even small positive changes in alternative methods of commuting can have disproportionately positive effect. For example at work we simply installed better and more bike racks and it seems that after a while we have maybe twice the number of people regularly cycling compared to before. Basically because cycling accommodations got nicer a few more people started cycling and then others saw that it is not only feasible but also enjoyable so they started cycling… If we could only fix few sections of the road leading to our facility… Once can dream.
But yes, change takes time.
You basically need a few conditions to be met to make this useable: tide needs to be high enough, there needs to be suitable geological formation that enables building of such power plants, it has to be publicly acceptable to build there, and you need to connect it to the grid. The last two can especially cancel eachother out.
However, this assumes you use potential energy. What you are envisioning might be more like current power (so kinetic energy) where I’m not sure what the limitations are. Perhaps it’s not too practical to build huge plants underwater in locations with relatively constant current and connect them to the grid