And their vote counts more than yours because they live in rural districts with lower populations. Smh at “democracy.”
The top image makes me want to cry. Every new solar farm I’ve seen IRL or in the media has been built directly on the ground, just wasting that space.
Why is what is in this image, or other such systems, not being done everywhere?
Like at our local IKEA parking area. Why did they empty a bunch of land next to the parking lot and build them there, instead of ontop of the carpark? Thus protecting the cars from the elements at the same time as taking literally 0 space.
Top image is called Agrivoltaics and certain crops do better in a little shade. Strawberries, lettuces, and brassicaceaes for example. Pawpaw would probably do well as well.
But I’m not ready to put Pawpaw in the ground!
Seriously though, TIL! It’s not native to my area, but apparently its range isn’t very far from me. My gf and I are getting into foraging lately (we picked a bunch of invasive garlic mustard last time we went out) and might take a few classes in it. So maybe if we find ourselves in those areas, we can look for Pawpaws next!
If you’re into food stuff, you may be interested to know that there is an artisan near you who makes Pawpaw vinegar. Cant recall the name of the maker but Bryan Voltaggio plugged it on Triple Threat a while back.
Sounds cool, come and share with us some of your !foraging@slrpnk.net
nuclear is pretty cool.
Coal and natural gas plants can also use the same cooling tower design.
It looks like maybe a coal plant is depicted, on account of the tall smoke stacks and what look like drop chutes for handling solid coal. But the layout doesn’t make sense. What are the smoke stacks coming out of?
It looks either AI, or a combination of pictures via Photoshop. I’m guessing AI, but hard to know for sure.
I mean, it depicts people planting crops UNDER the solar panels. Out of the sun.
Yeah, this is 100% AI.
It depends on the crop and how they do the layout, but you can absolutely grow some plants under partial shade from panels.
The sun moves.
Yeah, and? Most crops need more than just a few hours per day of sunlight. Those panels are HUGE. Way bigger than the shadow we’re seeing.
But more to the point, what are they even growing there? It looks like ivy that turns into some indistinct shrub, and then there are flower bushes behind that? Also those panels look like they’re about 20-30cm thick when you compare them to the people vaguely “harvesting” the crops. And I’m pretty sure those posts holding them up are basically railroad rails with no support on the back of the panels.
Agrivoltaics is the term for combining crops and solar
Reverse image search leads to: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/agrivoltaics-of-solar-power-and-farming-are-a-big-success-on-this-boulder-farm/
Attribution is: “Jack’s Solar Farm – Photo by Werner Slocum: NREL”
Searching that name returns this person, listed as a photographer with National Renewable Energy Laboratory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werner-slocum-7976503
That’s pretty interesting. Makes more sense when posited as a way to grow northern crops in more mid-latitude areas.
I like those cooling towers now that I know what they do. It’s kind of dope inside there
One could say… they’re pretty cool
Smoke stacks aren’t specific to nuclear - it’s specific to large boiler plants I think.
Memes like these make progressives look like dumbasses.
Look at all that water vapor polluting the air! Omg
- Sincerely, a progressive
Would like to live next to a plant like that?
It’s not about the vapor but about the land it’s occupying. It also looks ugly like shit. People will complain bout wind farms destroying the landscape but huge chimneys don’t bother them for some reason.
Honestly? Yeah. Well if I didn’t already have my house fully off grid.
Being in proximity to a nuclear power source would help ensure minimal power outages compared to fossil fuels.
So if I had to choose? Yes. However, I took things into my own hands and have a 36kW solar system with 100kWh battery bank powering my property.
YMMV
I used to live within a certain radius of one, our local school used to stock iodine pills in case of an emergency. Luckily I’m Canadian and we have one of the best nuclear track records full stop so it was never a worry.
Am example of what you’re saying is Michigan City, Indiana. It’s actually a pretty nice little tourist town. I go every year for the Great Lakes Grand Prix. It’s just an excuse to go to the beach and drink some beverages. It has a decent beach (very nice by Great Lakes standards), dunes, a zoo, and a coal and natural gas plant right on the water front… It’s such a cool place as long as you don’t look in the one direction and see that huge eye sore right next to the beach.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be admiring it, thinking of how incredible the amount of clean energy coming from it relative to its tiny waste output is. I wish we had way more nuclear power.
The plant is coal and natural gas, not nuclear.
Oops, I misunderstood. Well, down to the ground it goes!
We had a coal plant near where I live that’s along the riverfront. Thankfully the government here saw sense and tore the whole thing down and replaced it with the largest solar farm in Canada.
i don’t like nuclear, mostly because of how it creates this highly dangerous waste, that our ancestors will still have trouble with (and thinking about it, is probably mined in a similarly destructive way to coal?), but i got to say that nuclear power plants actually lool fine to me and their vapour is actually quite pretty and scenic imo. ofc i would not want it everywhere, but its fine. i would not base my opinion of nuclear on that.
You mean
ancestors*descendants. Also, rest assured! That’s not a fear to have: https://www.anl.gov/article/10-myths-about-nuclear-energyMyth # 5: There is no solution for huge amounts of nuclear waste being generated.
Truth: All of the used nuclear fuel generated in every nuclear plant in the past 50 years would fill a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards, and 96 % of this “waste” can be recycled [5]. Used fuel is currently being safely stored. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the equivalent scientific advisory panels in every major country support geological disposal of such wastes as the preferred safe method for their ultimate disposal[6].
Nah.
You just need to find a long term storage solution that is safe (and cheap) for the next 100.000+ years. That‘s longer than the modern history of humans. At our current trajectory this period will contain hundreds of world wars, none of the current nations will exist and we will have technology far beyond our comprehension. I am also totally neglecting all the companies making the profits today will be gone. Funnily enough many nuclear disposal site are built close to borders, which shows the short sightedness of the designer. Also also the resources for nuclear energy are finite, same as with coal. So we can may be use the technology for couple hundred years at best, but have to deal with the waste way longer.
I am not against new nuclear power plant projects, but please think about disposal first, let companies pay for it today and then think about building the actual plant.
I hate the nuclear hate. Maybe today we have better options, although micro-reactors have a lot of promise, but if we invested in nuclear energy 50 years ago our planet would not even be close to fucked up.
People are always fearful of the nuclear accidents but they don’t even come close to those killed in the extraction of fossil fuels, but poor lives don’t matter. God help anyone has to bear even a miniscule risk for their own energy production.
Thanks for listening to my rant
Thank you for your rant. It is exasperating how people completely dismiss nuclear and politicians go right along with them.
I thought the primary problem with nuclear is that it is incredibly expensive?
Private insurance for the project is incredibly expensive. But there are ways to go about it differently, if the will is there.
Looking it up to refresh my memory, it looks like there’s also the comparably very high construction cost and the cost of disposal and/or maintenance of the waste. Those feel like fairly fixed costs. Unless we can make those cheaper without sacrificing safety and worker pay, it seems like nuclear just isn’t economically practical.
And the big roadblock is it takes way longer than an election cycle to get online, so there’s little to no incentives to start a project of one. Renewables have the advantage of going online within that window.
People on average have a higher risk of exposure to radiation by going to their grandma’s for dinner than by living directly next to a nuclear power plant
I have one problem with nuclear: It HAS to be done responsibly or you FUCK UP EVERYTHING FOREVER. And…find me a government on this earth that can “responsibly” anything.
Well, so far the only true failure has been soviet union. But I do share the concern.
Also wars are capable of bypassing responsibility.
No this is coal:
I wonder what our descendants will think of those greed craters.
It depends, but in a lot of cases, they probably will be flooded and then become rather nice lakes. Coal is usually not very toxic, so this will be fine. Then plants grow around them and it can turn into a rather nice place. If this was not a desert before, nature will transform it into something pretty decent surprisingly quickly.
I live in an area where there’s tons of flooded mines. They’re toxic. They’ll kill larger waterways and everything in them if they breach containment. The creeks here run different colors depending on what mine is leaking into them and most of the coal industry stopped mining a hundred years ago.
Ahh thanks for the picture! I used to live near where they had several of these growing up. We were fed the “clean coal” angle. So many grow up believing that it’s better than other coal and better burning. (clean coal isn’t a thing lmao) The peopel felt better with this angle about it.
It was the northern plains, though. So it was all boring open landscape already. (I referred to it as the moon growing up.) There’s not a lot of people living out there, anyway. Wyoming specifically, though, has environmental regulations on oil, gas, and coal from a beautification standpoint. So yes, they can have these large pits, but once done, they have to turn them into things like ponds/lakes/etc. They can drill for oil/gas as well in the state, but they can only be so many feet/miles between pumpjacks to not ruin the landscape. That type of thing.
It’s been slowing down as an industry, coal that is. One of the major exporting countries that was buying and using coal (had even completely purchased many of the processing plants there in WY) was China. In the last few years, China has largely moved away from using coal as much, so that industry is in decline. They’ve been doing a lot more Solar, Wind, and Hydro. So as long as we keep moving toward that, these big pits will slow. You just need to get other big coal consuming countries onboard.
EDIT: OH another fun thing about Wyoming as a state, but specifically counties that have these coal mines, they require x amount of the profit made from these resources must be put back into the towns themselves. A beautification type fund or something (I have since moved away but recall this) So you actually will have some surprisingly well tended and well funded towns randomly in wyoming because of this.
(I do recall as a kid, the mines would have their explosion technicians be the ones to do the fireworks events for the fourth of july celebrations. Seeing as they were already well versed in exploding things, those were some of the most magnificent fireworks displays.)
Compare that to other states that have natural resources that are being mined and drilled, they don’t require as much to be put into the places they’re getting things from, and things get run down and driven out. The resource itself isn’t going anywhere, but you get these people who bend over backwards allowing these industries to take advantage and suppress other industries so their worker pool isn’t competitive because it will “bring jobs and industry in”. They end up giving far too many concessions to the fossil fuel industry, not holding them accountable for their actions in the area. The resources get used and then they move out and leave a huge vacuum, killing smaller communities entirely.
So Wyoming is actually pretty well situated on handling the fossilfuels in there.
