India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark(hindustantimes.com) |
India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark(hindustantimes.com) |
The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).
Ministry for the Future: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...
Excerpt here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-ministry-for-the-futur...
If true, this summer and maybe winter maybe brutal.
115C with 10% humidity (71.66F wet bulb) here is hot, but as long as you have water, you're better off here than in Florida with 85F at 90% humidity (87.46F wet bulb).
People die in Thailand from the cold at 10°C. There's a strong physiological acclimatization factor, plus the way dwellings are set up to handle the heat. Which is to say wet bulb temperatures of 28°C in Europe are incomparable in terms of fatality rates to the same temperatures in central India -- perhaps that was your point.
It won't stop if it's ventilated with outdoor ambient air:
40C air can hold 51 g of water per m3 of air. 60C air can hold 130 g of water per m3 of air [1]. The curve is exponential.
So, it works as long as the transformer is hotter than ambient air, even at the most humidest (100% RH). The transformer's heat will drop the relative humidity of the air near its surface, and the heated air can absorb more water again.
If the humidity is below 100% RH, what changes is that the evaporating water could cool it to below ambient air temperature, same effect as in swamp coolers.
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/maximum-moisture-content-...
And to lighten the mood, the US has more yoga teachers than coal miners:
https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...
Yoga teaching hasn’t been automated yet, and may never (a startup using robots to give yoga classes likely would be a hit on social media, and might initially be successful, but I am not sure that would last)
Other techbro geniuses have talked up giant pumpships just blasting water in the air, but these techbro geniuses couldn't teach a community college intro physics, much less attempt to thermodynamically balance a planet's gas exchange. It's a dumb idea on almost every level, which is impressive in its own way.
The investment upside here is basically limitless. If you make something livable, you can charge rent to everyone there. Wreck the planet, save some spots, charge rent. King of the world. Oh don't want to pay your rent? Oops now you're cooking in your own juices. I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing. But the masters of industry have a hard time doing big real things these days, so who knows. No no go ahead build your titanic ornamental fountain that'll work great.
It'll come down to war, and then hucking nukes, in the end.
[0] Something that stops working on its own when not maintained is probably a good design goal here.
[1] "Do you want Snowpiercer? Because that's how you get Snowpiercer"
From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.
Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.
Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.
I don't really understand this "too late" failure of judgement unless you're assuming there's some end of the world style event coming no matter what we do.
No, it's just enormous amounts of death and suffering proportional to the amount of oil and gas and coal we keep burning and digging up every day.
In term of politics however, that is a much harder sell. When EU got together and voted on green policies, two strategies emerged. One side wanted renewable energy that is supported by natural gas, and thus natural gas got defined as "green". From central to northern Europe it has also been a core strategy to combine renewable generation with thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels, and looking at party platforms (which obviously is public accessible to anyone who want to read them), thermal power plants are a described as critical in order to enable renewable energy. The other side calls for nuclear energy, which EU also defined as "green".
In the transport sector, we also have two main strategies, that being electric and bio fuel/green hydrogen. The green hydrogen has failed to become anywhere close to economical viable, and currently the stage of the struggle is for chemical processes to change from dirty hydrogen produced from natural gas towards green. So far the progress is slow and has costed billions in subsidies, and converting the transport sector is still multiple decades away from becoming economical viable. The electrification process is developing much better, but it too is struggling under both the constraint of the grid and the cost side. Currently the best example is Norway, which strategy was to have the government subsidize car purchases by around 50%, and more than that in terms of car ownership. The grid however is still the major bottleneck when transportation converts to electric.
On the bio fuel side, the way it get described is that by-products are the main ingredient, but in practice only a fraction come from that process and the rest is corn, soy and sugar beets, which in turn is produced using artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas (a common theme).
This all means there is a common shared resource in most of those strategies, which is natural gas. When prices of natural gas increases, the grid cost increase in places which has a high dependencies on renewable energy. The cost of farming increase, resulting in higher bio fuel costs (and food costs).
If we want to serious ramp down fossil fuel use we need to remove natural gas from the political strategies. No peaker plants and no bio fuels produced by farmers using artificial fertilizers. That generally only leaves a few very expensive options, for example nuclear, green hydrogen, massively expanded grid transmissions, and government pouring money to get people and companies to volunteer in the change toward non-fossil fueled options.
We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.
I tried to look that up, but all I could find is that it trends downwards: https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/...
Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph.
Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.
They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.
Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
This doesn't mean much on its own. People have to die from something eventually, if someone is living a longer life due to not dying for other reasons, they get older and are more susceptible to heat.
Further south - England and Poland and all those coastal areas - are tempered by the ocean. Summers just aren't as hot.
Even further south - Italy and Greece - air conditioning is common. You know, because it is hot there. Further south = hotter summers = air conditioning. Further north = moderate summers = little cool air needed.
> Asia observed the highest heatwave-related mortality, accounting for 47.97% (85,611 deaths) of the global excess death, followed by Europe (37.23%, 66,443 deaths), the Americas (13.15%, 23,467deaths), Africa (1.61%, 2,881 deaths), and Oceania (0.05%, 83 deaths).
That of course muddles the picture by combining both American continents, though further down it quotes 9,666 for "Northern America" in table 1; though the Europe number also includes all of Russia. Those numbers are from 2023. Additionally, Europe has more than twice the population of North America. Without doing the maths, the gap claim sound about right; however, that doesn't necessarily mean it's due to a lack of air conditioning in Europe.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582...
You number, approximately right but means nothing and the link AC => Less deaths by Heat Wave isn't supported by any fact.
Others factors like percent of the population > 70y, difference between usual temp / mean temperature in an heat wave and access to fresh and clean water should be more correlated than "AC implantation per hundred inhab".
For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible.
Current plans are to take the waste out and store it in a more responsible manner. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_clos...
Super fun considering relatively few homes in western Washington have AC…
We thought about hotels, but anything in our town was booked. That was not a fun time.
[1] Miraculously we managed to find an AC tech who would come out to look at it. "It's dead." I don't know what he did then, but he did something else (maybe removed a cutout valve?) and said "Here, this will keep it working but might only be for a couple of hours or a couple of days and is absolutely not warrantied or guaranteed or anything". It did keep working for about four more hours before giving up completely.
The issue that is being taken is about "too little too late", which is being interpreted as "since even in the best case scenario we're going to have dramatic consequences, any action is going to be fruitless", the counterpoint being that the new best case scenario (which is not a good one because it is late to take action, and is mostly equivalent to what once was thought to be the worst case) is still much less worse than the new worst case one.
I think you are talking about the reduction in total electricity generation.
This (and similar stats) get tied to the "environmentalists are killing industry/civilization" arguments.
Except, since the nuclear phase out started in 2000 the electricity generation has only dropped about 70TWh. And about 50 TWh of that was exported. And it's not clear if those numbers include the 12TWh of German behind-the-meter solar, which would leave electricity use flat at a time when LED lighting was reducing demand, similar to many Western nations.
They became a net electricity importer (once again the sign of total civilizational collapse to some) and then returned to being a net exporter this year.
But even when importing they had gas and coal capacity they could have used, they just got cleaner energy cheap from other countries to meet their demand.
So why is cheaper energy than gas or coal a problem?
A real problem they have is that their current elected leader hates wind power. If you want to be angry at Germans protesting cheap, clean energy I'd start there.
If it is cheaper is less clear case. Having all those peaker plants at standby is expensive and require a lot of subsidizes, and there need to be transmission both from the peaker plants and wind farms, which is also paid mostly through subsidies. German subsidies to both fossil fueled power plants and renewable energy producers has only increased by time. The owners of peaker plants can also recover most of losses from periods of optimal weather, not only by subsidies, but also by increasing prices during non-optimal weather as there is very little competition during periods of high demand and low supply.
Not everyone agree with this strategy. EU has no plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the energy grid, despite having a clear plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the transport sector. With the war in Ukraine and war in Iran, the strategy of peaker plants are also looking to be poor in terms of economic and national security.
EU need to issue a full phase out of all fossil fuels in the energy grid by banning any construction of new power plants that burn fossil fuels by 2030 and a final decommission date by 2040. The solution to non-optimal weather has to be done through some other way. The discussion of renewables vs nuclear will then be mostly irrelevant.
This is a myth, you just need to overbuild the renewables like solar, add some storage, and then have _some_ capacity from other sources to handle the dips.
This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
> where would you store nuclear waste
The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
As much as any large scale energy project.
Per kW it is quite effective.
The implication of GP's reasoning is that were Green not yelling about nuclear these would already be built because the projects would have started long ago.
>> where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)
People don't want solar farms, windmills, or oil rigs in their backyard either. Fun fact, coal emits orders of magnitude more toxic waste (including nuclear!) than nuclear itself; it's just stored in the atmosphere.
Also people largely don't want to cook themselves to death because the atmosphere has turned into a literal oven.
Instead they read the news, yap "oh my god 50degC shadowside that is horrible", turn the newspaper page and Gell-Mann-amnesia-forget about it because it's happening at the other side of the world, comfortably sitting on their couch with their HVAC pumping heat outside further contributing to the problem.
>> contributes little to global energy mix atm
Catch-22. Because there's not enough nuclear reactors.
France has a ~ 70% nuclear 10% renewable 10% fossil 10% hydro mix.
> France generates roughly two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, well above the global average of just under 10%. This heavy reliance on nuclear energy allows France to have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity in the world at 85 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the global average of 438 grams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
>> uranium is limited.
Uranium is aplenty.
> more than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver [~40x!], and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence
The problem is enrichment, and it is not even a technical problem. We're doing more difficult things producing nanometer scale compute wafers by the millions.
Nuclear has drawbacks. I don't think it is the endgame. I'm still waiting for anyone to come up with a less bad solution that actually a) addresses nuclear drawbacks and b) works, because all I see is yelling at nuclear and the proposed alternatives are either unobtainium or nothing at all, both equivalent to the status quo that turns the planet into a death trap.
> As much as any large scale energy project.
We have data on this. Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.
Right up there with big IT and Defence projects, "Nuclear waste storage sites" and "the Olympics".
Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either. I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.
Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.
Solar projects are more likely to be under budget than over.
The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.
> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?
Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.
The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.
That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.
Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.
And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.
Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.
And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.
You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.
But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in.
A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck.
Finland did it well though.
It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl.
[0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly?
And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.
Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management...
2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-...
Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf
Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion.
Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...
However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.
On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.
On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.
Existential threats, paper challenges.
Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.
Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.
… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.
They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.
But done even better on wind and solar.
I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?
I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.