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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

    Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

    Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.




  • I’m not the specific target of the question since my family always turns out to vote, but I’d imagine some of the big ones are people not knowing that they have a legal right in many states to take paid time off work to vote, general apathy, voter suppression making it very difficult to vote in some areas, and given the swing in turnout between presidential and non presidential elections, a lot of people who only pay attention to the presidential elections because they get nationwide coverage dispite your local and district votes bro by a whole lot more important when it comes to effects on your life and keeping extremists from implementing their policies.






  • Current gobal hydrogen demand is in the region of a 100,000,000 metric tons per year. That is not too small a market to be worth creating green hydrogen, and the fact that green hydrogen cannot come close to meeting even that demand would seem to prove that more demand for hydrogen is not the problem. Indeed if too expensive for applications that actually need to use hydrogen, why would expanding applications that waste half of it like cars be at all helpfull?


  • Neglecting that we actually study and know how fast large batteries degrade with age and time, and thusly know that they do last far more than ten years, it does actually matter that hydrogen is to expensive to make with excess green energy and that no company is willing to buy it precisely because green hydrogen made from excess green energy is so many times more expensive to make then grey hydrogen.

    If it is saves more money to electrify and save wear and tear on equipment by shutting down when there is an excess power than could ever be made by making and selling green hydrogen with it, people arn’t going to make much green hydrogen. Put another way, green hydrogen being so expensive that even with free electricity it is still too expensive to compete is a problem for green hydrogen.

    Maybe raising taxes on grey hydrogen to the point green hydrogen can compete might be worth it, but that is a very different solution to a very different problem then what you originally claimed, which was that there wasn’t enough demand for hydrogen.

    Indeed given the actual problem facing green hydrogen, which is that it is too expensive to produce compared to the more common grey hydrogen, increasing demand for hydrogen is actually directly harmful to the planet from a global warming perspective.


  • Except there is already a massive market for hydrogen. It is needed, produced, and used in bulk for a vast collection of industrial processes. The problem is that green hydrogen is simply expensive to make, gains very little from being done at scale, and when it comes to competing with other energy storage techs any that don’t inherently have to throw half the energy away as waste like hydrogen does are always going to have an advantage.


  • Sonori@beehaw.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    10 months ago

    A similar policy with Canada would likely lead to similar effects, as while it is more open than that of Mexico there are still significant economic limitations imposed by travel restrictions. You are however unlikely to get Canada or Mexico to agree to complely unrestricted trade given the history of Amarican companies annexing their northern neighbors.



  • Sonori@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzsomewhere a postdoc is crying
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    10 months ago

    Depends on how far out it is from the nearest star. Inside the orbit of jupiter exposed ice will sublimate into steam thanks to heating from sunlight, outside it remains ice. This is actually what a comet is, namely a ball of ice from the outer solar system orbiting in close to the sun and sublimating off. The steam is so loosely bound thanks to the tiny gravity of the comet that the solar wind blows it away, creating the visable tail.





  • Not to cast dispersions on the everything starts with the jews in Israel narrative, but didn’t most of the political movement to force the sale of US TikTok to a US owner and the current law to do so long predate Oct 7 and the more even distribution of support shown on TikTok months afterword. Like I hate to break it to you but congress, especially this congress and the maze of think tanks that draft their laws, just arn’t that fast and efficient at implementing new policy.




  • Fusion also produces most of the nuclear waste that a fission plant does thanks to undergoing the same nutron activation process, and while it lacks spent fuel rods, thouse are already infinitely recyclable, so the only real waste saveings would be in low grade waste like dust covered clean suits and such.

    This also doesn’t help the case for Fusion very much given that even with these disposal costs ITER has costs four to six times any average fission plant for a donor reactor that has no generating capacity and which is mearly to prove that the physics work, something we did for fission with the Chicago pile in 1942 at an estimated inflation adjusted cost of 53 million dollars.

    If it’s this expensive for a proof of concept, it is very unlikely that any full plant would be much cheaper. Compare it to things we can actually deploy at scale today like onshore wind or battery backed solar, and it is pretty clear that Fusion is an expensive but important science project, not a serious proposal to power the electrical grid.