LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

Max

I am still a Rossi believer.

At least until the hopefully

Positive legitimate test of

the ECat-SKL.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4543

A bit of interesting info, not necessarily about renewables, but certainly emissions. (I have not confirmed these numbers, just interesting reading)

Autos / trucks contribute about 20% to "global warming" emissions.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resourc…st%20any%20other%20sector.

So much is said about reducing this source of pollution and rightly so. However....

"...the Internet emits more greenhouse gas than the entire aviation industry."

This article states, "According to some estimates, “the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7 percent of global greenhouse emissions”.

Interesting that I hear about cows farting, that we should eliminate meat and making a big deal of that, but I have not heard one person say we should give up our internet! (Or at least greatly reduce usage. Remember, a vast amount of internet usage is absolute meaningless Twitter, Facebook, porn, JONP and the how many full reads of Rossi's paper! )

Just goes to show, people only push things that effect them or are their "interest"! No thread on world hunger or abolishing the internet here... or farting cows either for that matter!

Quote from sam12

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4543

This is a proposal to use fission reactors to produce hydrogen gas. This idea has been around for decades. A similar idea is nuclear power desalination plants in the Middle East.

This might make sense with existing nukes, but I doubt it would be cost effective to build a new nuke and use it for this purpose. The cost overruns of the nuke under construction in Georgia make me think corporations will never again be able to build a cost-effective nuke. I am not saying that is impossible; I am saying the clock has run out on this technology. Competing technologies all continue to get cheaper and more reliable. Things like wind and solar are cheaper and more reliable than nukes. Even if nukes get better, so will wind and solar.

For a project to produce massive amounts of hydrogen gas, I expect wind turbines someplace like North Dakota would be cheaper than a nuke. Or solar in Nevada. You can produce the gas anywhere and ship it by pipeline. There are already pipelines from the Dakotas for natural gas. I don't know where they go, but here they are:

https://ndpipelines.files.word…ural-gas-map-feb-2019.pdf

I have read you can repurpose nat. gas pipelines for hydrogen with a new lining inside the pipe, installed by robots. Either that or produce synthetic hydrocarbons. The latter would have a larger market, for things like buses.

Quote from Bob#2

"...the Internet emits more greenhouse gas than the entire aviation industry."

This article states, "According to some estimates, “the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7 percent of global greenhouse emissions”.

That claim has been made before, for many years. It might be true -- I don't know the present day numbers. But it needs clarification. The internet does cause carbon emissions, but it also prevents them. For example, it reduces the need for commuting and travel. It greatly improves recycling, especially for things like industrial waste and garbage, which is now sold and traded instead of being dumped. Internet and big data technology have dramatically reduced waste in the grocery industry, to the point where grocery stores no longer have large amounts of expired food to give to food kitchens. (This happened long before COVID-19.) A shipment from Amazon.com to your house uses less materials and less energy than sending the same good through retail stores. That is one of the reasons Amazon is clobbering retail. Everyone sees it has reduced the need for paper records, mail, newspapers, and the amount of clerical work. There are also unexpected savings from computers. People include the energy the computer screen in the total energy. That makes sense, because a large screen uses a lot of energy. I have 3 screens. One of them consumes 32 W according to my battery backup display. That's a lotta electricity. BUT they are so bright, I do not need much overhead lighting. They displace other lighting, and they are an efficient method of illumination. Maybe not as good as LED lights, but pretty good.

Internet server farms were not energy efficient years ago. Google and other industry leaders got together and set new industry standards and best practices, greatly improving overall efficiency. They used a combination of sophisticated and simple methods. For example, they found you can run modern servers at high temperatures, 80 deg F. So they told their people to wear short shirts and pants, and they ran at high temperatures. Overall they have cut energy use by 87%, and carbon emissions by 65 - 90%. Which makes me think the estimates quoted above may be out of date.

See:

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

Quote from JedRothwell

I have 3 screens. One of them consumes 32 W according to my battery backup display.

In case you are wondering . . . this is how 3 screens on one Windows computer look:

You can instantly move any window from one screen to the other. (Windows-key, shift, arrow) So, for a translation, I have the Japanese text on the right, the English in the middle, and things like e-mail, Windows explorer and on-line dictionaries on the left.

In my opinion this is by FAR the best upgrade you can make to a computer. It gives you plenty of space to work. If you have a choice between buying a faster computer, or three large screens, get the screens. Many people flounder around with single laptop with a tiny screen. They are constantly flipping between windows, going from e-mail to document, to this, to that. I have everything visible. When I am copy-editing a paper, I grab a line of text and move it right into an e-mail to the author on the next screen. Such as: "p. 34, 'No meaningful counting increase . . .' SHOULD BE 'no significant counting increase . . .'"

(The hard part may be connecting the screens. Screen data and power cables are too short. That is why the back of the computer is visible in this photo. There is only one place you can put it.)

Quote from JedRothwell

That claim has been made before, for many years. It might be true -- I don't know the present day numbers. But it needs clarification.

You miss the point.

WIth your above reasoning, I can say automobiles are much, much more efficient than they were in the past. That planes are much more efficient as well. That electric trains replace smoky old coal burners etc. etc. So we should not do anything about them since they are so much more efficient!

Just because something is more efficient, does not make it good.

As I stated, the majority of internet usage is useless babble. Porn videos, twitter trash, Face book "I am eating a Joes", Rossi blogs (and the thousands like it), scammers stealing millions via the internet, and I could go on and on.

No, just like most are not calling to completely abolish automobiles, just get rid of the internal combustion engine.

No, just like no one is complaining about chicken farts, just the evil old bovines (And the steaks, hamburgers, etc. etc.)

No, just like no thread here on world hunger, only Covid, which might effect us personally.

So logic should dictate that we do not give up the internet, but get rid of all the "cow fart" porn, Rossi blogs, twitter and 90% of the other crap that probably is causing (3% * .9) = 2.7% of Global Warming. But no, I doubt we will here any calls for that! That is too inconvenient to us personally!

P.S. If everyone had 3 computer screens at 32W per screen, there are supposedly 2 billion computers in the world.

https://www.scmo.net/faq/2019/…ers-is-there-in-the-world

(I have not verified this sites trustworthiness, but the number does not sound too far off)

So 2 extra monitors * 2,000,000,000 computers * 32 watts each is an additional 128 billion watts of consumed electricity! And for what? Viewing pleasure or ease?

And we worry about cows farting!

As with a huge number of things in life, vastly different pictures can be painted of a subject, depending on how one wants it to look like!

Quote from Bob#2

WIth your above reasoning, I can say automobiles are much, much more efficient than they were in the past. That planes are much more efficient as well.

Automobiles are indeed much more efficient. So is the internet. It has improved dramatically, reducing carbon emissions by as much as 90%. It may soon be carbon neutral, relying entirely on renewable energy such as wind and solar. That will solve the problem for good.

Quote from Bob#2

Just because something is more efficient, does not make it good.

It is better to be more efficient than less efficient.

Quote from Bob#2

As I stated, the majority of internet usage is useless babble. Porn videos, twitter trash, Face book "I am eating a Joes"

Do you have evidence for that claim? Is there a study showing how much internet traffic is devoted to what category? Some time ago, I read that Netflix takes a significant fraction of all bandwidth. That probably takes less energy than people driving to movie theaters or movie rental stores. It takes less energy than mailing DVDs. So it is a net savings.

Netflix bandwidth is described here:

https://variety.com/2019/digit…h-application-1203330313/

In any case, it is a free country, and if people want to engage in what you consider useless babble or porn videos, that's their business. They will do it whether you like it or not. I do not think the energy consumption of these activities is much higher than it was for similar activities before the internet was invented. Printed books and Playboy magazines take far more energy than distributing that content by the internet. Thousands of times more. Last year, I distributed 253,000 documents from LENR-CANR.org for $100. Printing and mailing that many documents would have cost ~$500,000, and a lot of human labor.

The energy cost of transmitting data has improved by orders of magnitude over the last 30 years, and it continues to improve rapidly. See:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12630

QUOTE:

". . . This article derives criteria to identify accurate estimates over time and provides a new estimate of 0.06 kWh/GB for 2015. By retroactively applying our criteria to existing studies, we were able to determine that the electricity intensity of data transmission (core and fixed‐line access networks) has decreased by half approximately every 2 years since 2000 (for developed countries), a rate of change comparable to that found in the efficiency of computing more generally."

We have very stable and green electricity in Sweden. Here an electrical vehicle is a really green alternative and also more and more servers are located here (Facebook, Microsoft and Amazone). My point is that by placing the servers in countries/states with green electricity you can also cut down on the CO2 impact of internet. This assumes that the main electricity goes on supporting the servers. Not sure how much the network actually tolls.

Quote from Bob#2

So 2 extra monitors * 2,000,000,000 computers * 32 watts each is an additional 128 billion watts of consumed electricity! And for what? Viewing pleasure or ease?

You wrote 2 trillion. You mean 2 billion.

You missed the point. the monitors consume LESS energy than the overhead lighting they replace. Because they are efficient and they are positioned right where you need the light, there on your desk. So, even if every computer had two extra monitors, and even if they were not used to display data, they would still reduce energy consumption overall. Bright overhead illumination makes them harder to read, so people turn down the lights. Also, most people use screen savers, and turn monitors off at night, so the duty cycle is around 50%.

If all you want to do with a computer is view Netflix or porn, or read the New York Times, one screen is fine. Even a laptop is fine. You only need 3 screens to do word processing, translation, programming and other data-intensive work. So, there is no prospect of 4 billion more monitors being needed.

You also missed the point that the overall energy consumption of using screens and computers is far lower than it was for manual methods. Also, far more efficient, faster, and it saves manpower. Per unit of work (such as inventory management), manpower consumes far more energy than computer equipment does. You are comparing the use of a computer to doing nothing, with no data processing or work. No inventory management, no movies, no newspapers. That is not a reasonable comparison. Granted, the hours of movies people consume per month with Netflix is probably higher than what they consumed by going to movie theaters, and probably somewhat more energy than they would consume with a modern television and over-the-air broadcasting. It is not more than cable TV. It is either exactly the same (with CATV) or much less with fiber. Netflix takes far less energy than watching over-the-air TV with a cathode ray television in 1990.

Quote from stefan

Not sure how much the network actually tolls.

The fiber optic cable network itself takes little power. There are 420 undersea cables in the world. The longest ones consume about 16 kW. So that's 7 MW.

There are lots more cables on land of course, but maybe not as many as you would think, because data rates these days are prodigious. When I last read about this years ago, most of the electricity was consumed by the servers, not the connections between them. The switches that direct packets also consume more power than the cables. Optical packet switching reduces energy consumption and speed up data rates. (That is, redirecting light directly instead of converting it into digital electronic form. How they do that I cannot imagine. It has been around since the early 2000s.)

Solid state disk in place of rotating disks for high volume traffic in server farms greatly reduce power consumption.

Quote from Bob#2

You miss the point.

WIth your above reasoning, I can say automobiles are much, much more efficient than they were in the past. That planes are much more efficient as well. That electric trains replace smoky old coal burners etc. etc. So we should not do anything about them since they are so much more efficient!

Just because something is more efficient, does not make it good.

As I stated, the majority of internet usage is useless babble. Porn videos, twitter trash, Face book "I am eating a Joes", Rossi blogs (and the thousands like it), scammers stealing millions via the internet, and I could go on and on.

No, just like most are not calling to completely abolish automobiles, just get rid of the internal combustion engine.

No, just like no one is complaining about chicken farts, just the evil old bovines (And the steaks, hamburgers, etc. etc.)

No, just like no thread here on world hunger, only Covid, which might effect us personally.

So logic should dictate that we do not give up the internet, but get rid of all the "cow fart" porn, Rossi blogs, twitter and 90% of the other crap that probably is causing (3% * .9) = 2.7% of Global Warming. But no, I doubt we will here any calls for that! That is too inconvenient to us personally!

P.S. If everyone had 3 computer screens at 32W per screen, there are supposedly 2 billion computers in the world.

https://www.scmo.net/faq/2019/…ers-is-there-in-the-world

(I have not verified this sites trustworthiness, but the number does not sound too far off)

So 2 extra monitors * 2,000,000,000 computers * 32 watts each is an additional 128 billion watts of consumed electricity! And for what? Viewing pleasure or ease?

And we worry about cows farting!

As with a huge number of things in life, vastly different pictures can be painted of a subject, depending on how one wants it to look like!

Display More

Internet has downsides and also upsides as well, such as (MATH|Physics|...) Stack Exchange, wikipedia, I can feel connected to friends and family far away (facebook), internet banking, swish (payments to friends and family), creativity (my daughter loves to paint ), there is a tremendous amount of resources for her in the internet and she also follow other artists. Open source communities (My main hobby is open source development and I have friends all over the world in our community). This site and all LENR resources. Netflix, HBO, Spotify, Internet radio. Probably the biggest sources of energy goes to streaming of film and music. I can choose what I see and hear and play it instantly, no commercials, no need to go to the city enabling a good life on the countryside if you have broadband (which is very common even in rural areas here), also there is plenty of humor and interesting information about movies that makes the movie experience much deeper. A third maybe large contender for bandwidth and electricity is games. You may say that that is not needed, I thoughts so as well. But then I read a very touching story about a crippled Norwegian guy who his parents was very concerned by him spending a lot of time with his computer. Then he died and people from all over the world would come to the funeral. As it happend he was a very liked figure in clan in a internet game where people mostly interacted socially see touching story. One of the new games this year is last of us II, I do not game but I discussed this game with my daughter and that game is deep, and although violent it also is very emotional experience that combine state of the art gaming with story telling on a amazing level and also teaches about a more colorful way of viewing enemy people than just an enemy to kill. The only downside is that we spend less time physically interacting and physical activity. But this is not something that cost electricity. Anyway my point is that internet has probably more updside than downside.

From what little I know, bitcoin mining is one of the most egregious IT consumers of electricity: enormous server farms motivated by nothing more than greed.

Quote from JedRothwell

. . . corporations will never again be able to build a cost-effective nuke. I am not saying that is impossible; I am saying the clock has run out on this technology. Competing technologies all continue to get cheaper and more reliable.

The clock often runs out on a technology. For example, advanced uniflow piston steam engines were developed in the late 19th century. They were remarkably efficient, and (as I recall) fully automatic. You could use them for things like stand-alone factory equipment or elevators (as I recall). The Skinner Engine Company in Pennsylvania made them. It lasted until 1960. However, they were too late for the market. Electric motors were better for stand-alone use. Gasoline motors were better for automobiles, and steam turbines for generators.

From 1945 to around 1990, there was a window of opportunity to develop a cost-effective, safe and reliable nuclear power plant. Companies sincerely thought the reactors of the 1970s were safe. They would never have deliberately sold something that could self destruct in an accident like the Three Miles Island and the Fukushima reactors. But, it turned out they were not safe. Re-engineering them now would cost gigantic sums of money. Totally new designs such as the pebble bed reactor might work, but it would cost a lot to find out.

Companies would not deliberately design a reactor so difficult to construct, it bankrupts the company the way Toshiba Westinghouse has been bankrupted in Georgia. (https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/…ia-southern-co/index.html) These companies are not run by fools, but it turns out the technology is too difficult and too problematic. With the best will in the world, they cannot make it work, and they cannot compete with gas, or wind and solar. They are on the wrong side of history.

Sometimes, a technology comes back from the dead. Electric cars lost out to gasoline models around 1910 because they were slow and had a limited range. Now they are coming back.

Quote from JedRothwell

Do you have evidence for that claim?

How about 30% of internet traffic is porn?

"In fact, 30 percent of all data transferred across the Internet is porn. YouPorn, one of the larger video porn sites, streams six times the bandwidth as Hulu."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry…he%20Internet%20is%20porn.

(I do not claim what accuracy this site has)

30% is simply porn!

Quote from JedRothwell

In any case, it is a free country, and if people want to engage in what you consider useless babble or porn videos, that's their business. They will do it whether you like it or not.

True indeed. But so is wearing a mask! One might say that "no, not wearing a mask will effect me as I could get sick". Well, polluting the planet and helping cause global warming by watching porn is effecting me as well!

The main point, in which is not seem to be getting across here, is that I am NOT really calling for the internet to be shut down. No more than I cam calling for cows to stop farting!

It is that people WILL paint a picture AND can give supportive evidence to any cause they have become attached to. And those causes are simply a world view perspective.

Internal combustion cars are bad... they pollute!

Internet is "more good than bad" thus the 3% of global warming contribution is OK!

Cows are bad! They pollute and meat is bad for you!

Internet is "good because I use it" and thus global warming effect is nullified!

So I am not arguing about the internet here... I am pointing out that almost everything people DO argue about here is simply cherry picked to support their world view. Masks, vaccinations, HCQ, RCT's, all of it. Both sides pick the data to support their view. Many will out and out state they are simply more "enlightened' and their view is "more scientific" than others. Others will counter stating BS.

So in one instance, "main stream" is full of crap because they do not support my view of LENR, but then one will accept everything main stream says about something else IF it supports my view! We have a plethora of highly educated and smart people on this forum, yet look at the VAST disagreements! RB and THH. Wyttenbach(?) and you, me and Alan Smith (concerning Rossi )

The human mind is a very weird but amazing entity. It is a wonder society functions at all. (It is starting to look like it is not!)

No matter the subject, there are opposing views.... and yet some will be adamant that "Their" view is the correct and "educated" one period. Whether it be masks, green energy or LENR. The internet meme in this thread about alternate energy was simply just an example...... one has a view and will find evidence to support or justify that view!

Quote from Bob#2

(I do not claim what accuracy this site has)

30% is simply porn!

I doubt it. 30% is a suspiciously round number. I doubt anyone outside a phone company has access to the information you would need to establish this.

Quote from Bob#2

No more than I cam calling for cows to stop farting!

I am calling for that, by switching to in vitro meat production. That is a problem with a clear solution. A solution that would have many other advantages, such as lower cost, less energy and water consumption, and so on.

Quote from Bob#2

It is that people WILL paint a picture AND can give supportive evidence to any cause they have become attached to. And those causes are simply a world view perspective.

I do not think I am guilty of this. Even if 30% of internet traffic is devoted to porn, 70% is not, and that fraction has greatly reduced overall energy consumption and waste in many ways. Overall, I am confident the internet saves far more energy than it costs. Other modern technology has clearly saved more energy than it costs, because overall energy consumption per capita for the last several decades is down, and energy intensity per dollar of GDP is way down. It is down by 28 to 40% since 1990, depending on the type of economy.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032

Per capita energy consumption in the U.S. peaked in 2000 at 350 million BTU, and has fallen to 305 million BTU. Per chained dollar (2012 value) it fell from 15.11 BTU/dollar in 1950 to 5.25 today. As a share of the GDP it has fallen from 13% to 6%. No matter how you look at it, energy use is declining. There is no reason to think it will not continue to decline. We are still far from the limits.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_19.pdf