In terms of thematic similarity, sure.
But in terms of magnitude of the impact, microplastics aren’t nearly as dangerous as lead, asbestos, or cigarettes. Those lead to huge quality of life downgrades, and take decades off of a life.
A society that replaces cigarettes with ubiquitous microplastics exposure will still improve the population’s health outcomes, by a lot.
However, there’s probably a reason traditional power plants never use jet engines for power production.
They don’t use used jet engines, no. But a gas turbine for a gas power plant shares many engineering principles with jet engines, and often many shared parts.
And generally, for stationary plants, the heat of the exhaust can be used to boil steam and get another cycle’s worth of work out of the heat, for even greater efficiency.
Please describe how sunshine alone will sustain this unchanged.
Because you’re ignoring the hugely inefficient baseline of how much sunlight we have historically been able to harvest.
From this page, sunlight-to-biomass efficiency of wild plants is less than 1%. For crops specifically bred over thousands of years to grow as much useful biomass as quickly as possible in each season, the number ticks up to 2%. But even that number also fails to account for the periods in which fields lay fallow between seasons, or for crop rotation.
Then, once you have that biomass, converting it into a useful form of fuel for burning, or food for biomechanical energy, has huge efficiency losses along the way.
Meanwhile, solar panels achieve approximately 25% solar efficiency.
That’s how we can collect far more energy from the sun today than at any point in the past. Biology is inefficient compared to photovoltaics.
Nuclear plants that are already running are very cheap to continue running.
That’s mostly beside the point, though, because, as you explain, they’re very expensive to construct, and that’s before even getting to the ones that never get completed because the cost overruns get the project canceled.
So I’m always in favor of running existing nuclear plants as long as possible, but am pretty skeptical of building any new nuclear plants.
Most usable energy on Earth comes from fusion of hydrogen into helium in the Sun, creating radiation that hits the Earth. That’s solar energy, of course, either thermal or photovoltaics, but also the wind caused by uneven warming, the evaporation and condensation of water that flows downhill for hydro power, the chemical bonds formed by photosynthesis making renewable biofuels or older fossil fuels.
Some portion of energy on Earth is gravitational potential energy and the kinetic energy of stuff moving around settling into a lower energy state: the moon dragging the oceans around, the heat of the Earth’s core spinning and tectonic plates moving from the momentum of all the dust that got pulled into what is now a planet. Geothermal and tidal energy mostly come from these planet scale phenomena.
Some portion of energy is the release of energy stored in nuclei formed from some past supernova, of less stable isotopes of atoms heavier than iron. Some portion of geothermal is traceable to this kind of nuclear decay, and obviously we can isolate and enrich those nuclear elements into fission fuel for nuclear power, as well.
Hard to categorize the second and third categories into solar power, though. Yeah, it comes from astronomical phenomena tracing back to how our solar system and planets were formed, from the materials they’re made out of, and found their way into their current shapes and orbits, but is that solar power?
New nuclear plants take like 10 years to build, and need to plan out a 50+ year useful life in order to be worth the up-front construction costs.
I wonder what the state of energy production in 2075 will be, where a nuclear power plant designed in 2025 and completed in 2035 will still have 10 years in order to break even on cost, competing with whatever the state of the art is on generation in 2075. Fusion? Widespread solar+wind+geothermal+batteries? Something we haven’t even dreamed of?
That’s why I’m skeptical of nuclear fission these days. It locks us in too long.
since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones
Most jurisdictions aren’t allowed to build nuclear, for nonproliferation reasons. That’s because nuclear technology can be used for nefarious purposes, and requires a highly functioning security apparatus in order to enforce safety requirements. So as a society we’ve tried to keep it out of the hands of those that the great powers have decided can’t be trusted with the tech.
Which then raises the uncomfortable question of whether we should trust ourselves, the current great powers, with this technology? If we plan out a 50-year useful life for a power plant, do we trust that the governments and companies operating that plant (and its supply chains and its waste management) will still be doing things safely in 50 years?
These days, I’m less sure.
The part where the bull’s penis penetrated the donkey’s anus. There were 51 mountings, 34 of which resulted in penetration. There was lots of cuddling both before and after.
In contrast, attempts by the same bull to mount another donkey resulted in the other donkey actively resisting, and using tail movement and body movement to avoid penetration.
I don’t see how sexuality can’t be inferred from a penis penetrating a butthole. 34 times. Over the course of four days of observation.