Whitewashing energy to neutralize climate critique

that doesn't rely on money as a means of (re)distribution?

In other words, how to have a Green New Deal without socialism?

Radioactive waste proliferation and buildup has made nuclear power unpopular since its inception, but business has focused on overcoming this critique by devising methods for supposedly burning up fuel more completely.

Even if such fuel-efficiency techniques are successful, the mining of nuclear material from underground is still unsustainable in the long-term

and, what's more, because water vapor behaves as a greenhouse gas as it condenses into clouds where temperatures are falling, the waste heat that will grow as nuclear fission and fusion would expand would continue to cause climate change even in the absence of high CO2 concentrations.

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that doesn't rely on money as a means of (re)distribution?

In other words, how to have a Green New Deal without socialism?

Do you not realize that every advanced nation in the world - every one - redistributes wealth? There are no exceptions. It is not a marker for national failure, it is a marker of national success.

And there is nothing supposed about it. Sodium-cooled reactors can completely consume all actinides.

It'll last long enough for us to put giant mirrors in space to redirect tons of sunlight to the earth.

Sunlight is only going to be free energy for a finite period you know. The day will come when there is no more sunlight in the universe.

What do you expect our descendants to do when that day comes? Just lie down and die? Or start consuming non-renewable energy?

I doubt that water vapor will ever be a serious cause of climate change.

Even if it was true

what would the long term effect on the climate and planet be of gradually moving the radioactive underground energy of the planet above ground and accelerating its decay?

Increasing Earth's sunlight input and thus daily energy absorption would also intensify the water cycle and cause warming.

ALL heat adds water vapor to the atmosphere. ALL energy ends up as waste heat after it is used. That is basic thermodynamics, i.e. the law of energy conservation.

livinglava wrote:

what would the long term effect on the climate and planet be of gradually moving the radioactive underground energy of the planet above ground and accelerating its decay?

Zero.

livinglava wrote:

Increasing Earth's sunlight input and thus daily energy absorption would also intensify the water cycle and cause warming.

I doubt that the increase will be by a significant amount.

livinglava wrote:

ALL heat adds water vapor to the atmosphere. ALL energy ends up as waste heat after it is used. That is basic thermodynamics, i.e. the law of energy conservation.

If it ever becomes a problem, efforts can be undertaken to artificially cool the earth.

You can't take a planet and gradually move the radioactive material up to the surface and convert it into kinetic energy without killing the long-term viability of the planet. Look at Mars. It has barely any core heat or magnetic field. That is what Earth will eventually become if nuclear power is maintained to satisfy unsustainable energy/power consumption by humans.

Humans always expand their economic activities to the limits of the margins they have to operate within. If you keep expanding the energy supply, they will keep using more energy and eventually cause scarcity, which pushes the price up and thus stimulates more generation.

ALL heat causes water to evaporate and/or remain suspended in the air as vapor. As night falls, it will take less and less temperature drop to cause misty cloud cover to form and thicken. That night-coat of water vapor will blanket nighttime infrared losses, the same as CO2, methane, or any other greenhouse gas. The Earth will not cool as much at night and it will cause warming and intensify storms, etc.

The problem with industrial solutions is that they always rely on releasing stored potential energy as kinetic energy.

We need to take stock of how the planet works in terms of natural cooling that occurs due to night and winter shading, which allows atmosphere to compress under its own weight and thus cool and condense/precipitate water, which clears the air and allows infrared to radiate away from the planet.
Our technologies have to support that basic planetary function, among others.

That means focusing technological solutions on ways satisfy needs while reducing overall energy use, not generating and using more energy.

We're not even capable of removing uranium and thorium from the mantle. And if we were, it would take a very long time for us to remove enough to make a difference.

At any rate, we only need to use nuclear reactors until we get giant mirrors in space to redirect sunlight to the earth.

livinglava wrote:

Humans always expand their economic activities to the limits of the margins they have to operate within. If you keep expanding the energy supply, they will keep using more energy and eventually cause scarcity, which pushes the price up and thus stimulates more generation.

Yes. Good.

The impact will be weak though, and we'll be able to counter it if it causes a problem.

I don't agree that they always rely on kinetic energy, and I don't agree that kinetic energy is a problem.

The crust insulates the mantle. As we mine away the crust, the upper mantle will cool faster. You have to think in terms of long geological time. As long as we think in terms of a few centuries at a time, the centuries of unsustainability will build up into millennia and so forth. Sustainability is about living in the now in such a way that it doesn't degenerate as it progresses into the distant future.

Earth doesn't need more sunlight or any other form of energy.

Earth receives the correct amount of energy via sunlight

and the problem is we don't use it well because we addict ourselves economically to unsustainable level and intensities of energy. With energy we are like crack or opioid addicts who can't deal with normal boredom or pain because we've gotten used to unnecessary interventions that make us artificially vulnerable/sensitive to deviations from the artificial norms.

No, not good.

The way we should be using scientific and technological skill is to do more with less energy by reducing energy per capita in ways that increase quality of life.
Lighting efficiency is measured in lumens/watt but you could also measure other aspects of energy use and consumption in terms of more subject measures, like comfort/watt or happiness/watt and then avoid those technologies that don't produce comfort or happiness efficiently.

Earth has a fixed mass, size, etc. that determine its cooling characteristics. A planet is basically a giant air-conditioning system that shades and compresses air to cool it down while radiating the energy away as infrared.
What we are doing is pressing the cooling system to its limits by converting potential energy to kinetic energy, and the waste products of the conversion are greenhouse gases that build up and block infrared radiation that allows the cooling system to function properly.

You either don't understand the physics I've explained or you're ignoring it because it doesn't suit what you want to believe.

I'm explaining it but you're not getting it. More energy means more water vapor in the air. More water vapor in the air means more blanketing of heat at night instead of it radiating away. CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases are a problem, but so is water vapor, so you can't keep adding more energy to the daily energy diet of the planet without getting more heat, water vapor, greenhouse effect, and stronger weathering/erosion/entropy.

I'm only proposing using nuclear power until we get giant mirrors in space to redirect massive amounts of sunlight to the earth.

But people need it in order to drastically increase their energy usage.

Earth receives the correct amount of energy via sunlight

Space mirrors to redirect sunlight to the earth are perfectly sustainable.

I disagree. I see massively higher energy usage as extremely desirable.[/quote
Why? Do you want every yard to have its own Niagara Falls? What's wrong with just allowing nature to grow and live and carving a few paths through it and little niches within it to live and work that don't displace it?

[quote]
Greater efficiency is good as well. But we can have more energy and greater efficiency.

Then we take steps to cool the earth artificially.

It's more that I don't think that this is an insurmountable problem.

All we need to do is cool the earth ourselves.

Neither the Earth nor humans need more energy.

What they need to do is use their technological savvy to make do with less energy better.

The reason we fail to continue reducing overall energy use in this way is because using more produces more to sell and people think they are doing better when they get more for their money, even though they are usually just getting more junk that piles up, assuming it's not hot/cold air that literally just blows away as soon as it is produced.

That's insane.

All energy results in entropy. Reducing per capita energy usage reduces overall entropy and allows nature to restore resources.

Artificial demand has resulted in misconceptions of need. You don't need to wear short sleeves in the winter or long pants and ties when it's hot.

People just need to adapt to natural conditions better as they did before the industrial revolution.

Technology can benefit us, but we should be using it to reduce artificial energy dependency, not increase it.

All energy turns into waste heat. All heat causes more water vapor to dissolve into the atmosphere. All that energy in atmosphere results in wind and rain/storms that weather and erode the land faster into the ocean.

Instead of thinking of ways to get more energy to Earth, you should be thinking of what exactly it is you want to do/make with that energy, why, and how you could satisfy the same need with less energy and other resources.

Why?

Do you want every yard to have its own Niagara Falls?

What's wrong with just allowing nature to grow and live and carving a few paths through it and little niches within it to live and work that don't displace it?

What is it about having more energy that appeals to you?

Do you understand entropy?

You can't.

Cooling systems use energy to compress and cool air, which means the cold produced will always be surpassed by the waste heat of the machine.

The planet as a whole is a cooling machine, which works by gravitational compression and radiation of heat, just like a refrigerator, but because the compression occurs due to gravity instead of a motor, there is no waste heat. Because of the natural cold/cool produced by the planet, water can condense and trees/plants can grow that reflect away more solar energy than they absorb. It is better to allow trees to perform this reflecting function than trying to build reflective roofs everywhere because all those roofs and their maintenance use and thus dissipate energy, while the trees and plants that grow do so by absorbing latent heat from the environment.

Think of living cells like nano-machines that milk energy out of their surroundings instead of requiring energy to be generated by burning/using up potential energy stored up in fossil fuels. The Earth has evolved to divert energy away and store it, even fossilizing it; not the reverse, which is what we are always trying to do because we are basically lazy and arrogant and think we can make our lives easier by improving on nature. We need to pay better attention to the negative side-effects of our fixes.

It's not, but the solution is to understand and harness natural living 'machines' that have already proved sustainable throughout the history of the planet. Why would you want to try to do everything with industrial machines and systems that have been evolving for the last couple centuries while ignoring all the incredibly effective machines that have been evolving for billions of years?

You do that by restoring forests and reversing deforestation; and by reversing fossil fuel dissipation by using up fuels at a rate slower than they form and sediment.

livinglava wrote:

Neither the Earth nor humans need more energy.

Humans didn't "need" to advance beyond stone age hunter gatherers.

Building a society that consumes massively more energy, on the other hand, will require producing massively more energy.

livinglava wrote:

What they need to do is use their technological savvy to make do with less energy better.

"High efficiency" is good, but "massive amounts of energy combined with high efficiency" is even better.

Producing and consuming more energy is a good thing. We just need to do it sustainably.

Not at all. Increased energy use will make our lives much better.

All energy results in entropy. Reducing per capita energy usage reduces overall entropy and allows nature to restore resources.

Artificial demand has resulted in misconceptions of need. You don't need to wear short sleeves in the winter or long pants and ties when it's hot.

People just need to adapt to natural conditions better as they did before the industrial revolution.

I disagree. I prefer the higher standard of living that comes with greater energy use.

So then we artificially cool the earth.

Efficiency is good too. But it's no reason to not produce more energy as well.

Why?

Nature has its place, but we are not going to abandon most of the planet to it.

What is it about having more energy that appeals to you?

Do you understand entropy?

I disagree. I think we could find ways to radiate heat away from the planet.

There might be other ways to cool the planet besides giant air conditioners.

Although, if giant air conditioners were able to radiate their heat into space, that might work.

I've nothing against a few more trees, but abandoning the surface of the planet to massive forests is a nonstarter.

I've nothing against paying attention. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't advance ourselves.

livinglava wrote:

It's not, but the solution is to understand and harness natural living 'machines' that have already proved sustainable throughout the history of the planet. Why would you want to try to do everything with industrial machines and systems that have been evolving for the last couple centuries while ignoring all the incredibly effective machines that have been evolving for billions of years?

Because technology can do so much more.

livinglava wrote:

You do that by restoring forests and reversing deforestation; and by reversing fossil fuel dissipation by using up fuels at a rate slower than they form and sediment.

How would that help with the water vapor that you were worried about?