Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

[maximara]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

I dont know why people think that, hotter means wetter, in the glacial period the amazon rainforest was a savanna. The hotter Earth is, the more clouds, it's just common sense, glacial periods are actually dryer periods overall. The hotter it gets the more jungles there would be.

From the linked article: "Places as far afield as East Coast USA, the Pacific Northwest, Western China, Patagonia, Central Asia, and the Atacama in South America, all became much wetter, causing a global uptick in erosion. The result was a general expansion and densification of forests. Remarkably, there’s no sign of deserts either in North Africa or Asia, where today we have the Sahara and Gobi deserts."

More over Tropical rain forest thrived throughout last Ice Age states "These data will come as quite a shock to many paleoclimatologists,” said Paul A. Colinvaux, a research scientist at the University of Michigan Center for Great Lakes and Aquatic Sciences and senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “They contradict the widespread belief that a drier climate during the last Ice Age turned the Amazon lowlands into a savanna with isolated pockets of rain forest.”

It is like how we view fossilized animals. The "Shrink-wrapping" fossilization produces results in reconstructions whose resemblance to what the thing looked like in life next to nil.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Capital letters do not turn a falsehood true. While some portion of radioactive wastes can be productively recycled, you're inevitably going to have a fair amount of fission byproducts and neutron-activated materials that are hazardous but not useful. The quantity is not super large, but claiming that there's none is straight up false.

Never mind the problem is right now Nuclear requires a bucket load of fossil fuel to even function. Building the plant takes fossil fuels, enriching the fuel takes fossil fuels, transporting the enriched fuel takes fossil fuels, and putting the waste product in a place so you don't have something like the Goiânia accident happen again takes fossil fuels.

Until Nuclear (or any other renewable) can self support itself they are not a replacement for fossil fuels.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by maximara

Never mind the problem is right now Nuclear requires a bucket load of fossil fuel to even function. Building the plant takes fossil fuels, enriching the fuel takes fossil fuels, transporting the enriched fuel takes fossil fuels, and putting the waste product in a place so you don't have something like the Goiânia accident happen again takes fossil fuels.

Until Nuclear (or any other renewable) can self support itself they are not a replacement for fossil fuels.

That seems an oversimplified analysis, in that it's qualitative rather than quantitative. If we are currently using N fossil fuels, and we could instead get M energy from nuclear (where M > N) and use n fossil fuels to keep the nuclear reactors going (where n << N), surely that would be a win. This isn't test of religious purity, like kosher, where one drop of milk makes a meat dish treyf; it's a question of economizing on fossil fuel use to reduce its costs. And I would think that the energy you would get out of a nuclear plant would be much greater than the energy you spent in fossil fuels to build and operate it; otherwise what's the point?

[maximara]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That seems an oversimplified analysis, in that it's qualitative rather than quantitative. If we are currently using N fossil fuels, and we could instead get M energy from nuclear (where M > N) and use n fossil fuels to keep the nuclear reactors going (where n << N), surely that would be a win. This isn't test of religious purity, like kosher, where one drop of milk makes a meat dish treyf; it's a question of economizing on fossil fuel use to reduce its costs. And I would think that the energy you would get out of a nuclear plant would be much greater than the energy you spent in fossil fuels to build and operate it; otherwise what's the point?

True but in the context of the OP' "Recoverable fissile and fossil fuels are depleted to insignificance (but other metals can be scavenged from the infrastructure)." Nuclear (fusion as fission is off the table) being self sufficient is a must and right now fusion is a power sink ie it takes more energy to do than it produces.

[Tom Mazanec]

And if national governments acted as intelligently as an individual human

Inky, that alone makes a Weird Parallel :-)

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by maximara

Never mind the problem is right now Nuclear requires a bucket load of fossil fuel to even function. Building the plant takes fossil fuels, enriching the fuel takes fossil fuels, transporting the enriched fuel takes fossil fuels, and putting the waste product in a place so you don't have something like the Goiânia accident happen again takes fossil fuels.

Until Nuclear (or any other renewable) can self support itself they are not a replacement for fossil fuels.

Err... That's because building Nuclear requires energy, and the most abundant and cheapest sorce we have is fossil. But once you have Nuclear (even supplemented by other renewables, hidro is still a good value, in fact of all sorces it has the best cost benefit, even more so than coal, but sources of hidro are too limited) covering 100% of the grid, you dont need fossils to enrich or ignite additional nuclear. And having all transport with EV you also dont need anymore fossils.

That's like saying that when the industry was shifting from steam to oil that "oh but oil still needs steam, you need steam to pump the oil up, you need steam to transport the oil in the trains... oil cannot live without steam!" which isnt true except for the initial transition.

It is possible to replace fossils for electricity generation - with alternatives that are invariably more expensive, which means all societies will produce a little less of everything else - money is not just an arcane measurement, it actually represents the allocation of finite resources. Or, as Bismarck would say "you can either plant potatoes or make grenades". So it isnt just simply "spend more on nuclear". That actually means producing less food, producing less manufactures. It actually means lower standards of living. But, considering the steady increase of production of the last 2 centuries and the technogical progress, I'd say that this extra allocation of resources could be easily "soaked" up by the overall increase of productivity.

The major problem for a post-oil world is in materials - and not only just plastic. And we are still going to have to deal with a real pollution problem which I consider to be far worse (and more realistic) than CO2, which is something governments dont mention because it's not of their interests, which is the accumulation of plastic in the oceans and in the soil, particularly of micro plastic. So, after-oil we'll still need plastic and other materials derived from petroleum (I dont know the name in english of the thing used to build roads, but that's one example), and those are highly polluent for the soil and waters, which is something we'll have to deal with even if we synthesize those using nuclear for the electricity.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by maximara

True but in the context of the OP' "Recoverable fissile and fossil fuels are depleted to insignificance (but other metals can be scavenged from the infrastructure)." Nuclear (fusion as fission is off the table) being self sufficient is a must and right now fusion is a power sink ie it takes more energy to do than it produces.

Why fission is off the table?

Fusion, right now, is still SF. There is no fusion at the moment. The only alternative is fission.

If oil were to end tomorrow, modern civilization would collapse instantly. There's no alternative as of right now; what we are discussing is about viable alternatives that COULD be implememted - as in, it would require quite some time to adapt. A few decades, but doable.

If it happens right now, there's nothing to be done, we would be doomed without any possible salvation.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

Why fission is off the table?

Read the portion of the post you quoted again:

True but in the context of the OP' "Recoverable fissile and fossil fuels are depleted to insignificance (but other metals can be scavenged from the infrastructure)."

[whswhs]

The substance used for roads is asphalt.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Read the portion of the post you quoted again:

Oh, ok, I missed that entirely because at first glance I didnt seriously considered it.

Fissile materials arent on the verge of ending, they are not scarce in the sense of having very little off, they're scarce in the sense that they are hard to extract and enrich, harder than oil. But they are far far away from insignificance.

If both fossils and fissiles are over, so is this discussion. We are doomed, civiluzation collapses and we'll face a 1.000 years dark age of barbarism before we go back to a happy TL 3/4 life.