Hydrogen can be produced from the electrolysis of water (which can be powered by any electricity source, ideally renewables). It can also be thermochemically produced from water potentially with thermal energy from nuclear power plants but that is not currently done.

Neither method requires any natural gas or direct CO2 emissions.

That’s true, but its still a massive improvement compared to what we currently use (oil and gas). Heat pumps would be ideal.

Not sure which portions you think are “utter bullshit” but here is a link to the full text. If you have your own source you could provide it, but Nature is not known for publishing “utter bullshit”.

And carbon emissions was the metric I was using for the comparison, if I didn’t make that clear. In terms of carbon emissions heat pumps are lower emission than current sources of heating (mainly gas and oil) and that will only improve as electric grids gain higher proportions of clean energy.

They work just fine in cold environment and there was a recent paper in Nature that found heat pumps already outperform current methods of heating using existing electricity mix for 95% of the worlds demand. They are so efficient that they can outperform oil/gas when electric grids are still running on a majority oil/gas.

Most hydrogen made now comes from natural gas, but you can make it from water using clean energy sources. And when you burn it you get water not CO2.

So it is much cleaner than natural gas. The challenge is distribution. Hydrogen leaks out of everything and makes metal brittle/weak. It’s generally just a huge pain to work with. Also round trip efficiency is low at maybe 70%, so you need more energy to produce the hydrogen than you get out of it as heat. Which means it will likely cost more than natural gas, but if you factor in externalities (air pollution deaths/damages, climate change, etc) it is likely cheaper than natural gas.

Another option is heat pumps, which run on electricity (easy to distribute/can be clean) and achieve ~300% efficiency by moving rather than producing heat. Their main drawback is high fixed cost of installation.

>”Why does it seem like the rate I’m burning calories on the elliptical increases during my workout?”

Does the device giving calorie readout record your heart rate? Your heart rate will increase over the first few minutes of an activity and then gradually level off even if it is at a constant rate which would give a rising value for calories burned at the same pace if it calculates calories based on HR.

N2 nitrogen in the air is not useful to plants, it needs to first be “fixed” (converted to usable organic forms). Bacteria in the soil do this and so plants have evolved to just obtain their nitrogen from the soil. They could have probably evolved to do it themselves but there was no need as bacteria already did it.

This only becomes a problem when you want to pack more plants into a smaller section of soil and bacteria cant provide enough nitrogen. For the crop yields we get today we need fertilizers to make up for what the soil bacteria cant do.

The oxygen is converted to H2O not CO2 in aerobic respiration. The CO2 comes from the pyruvate/food.

Also telomeres are more relevant for the Hayflick limit, they are more of an effect and not a primary cause of aging on the level of whole organisms.

You mean that time a reactor failed safe as it was designed to do and no one was killed?

Green is also used because most digital cameras have more green pixels than blue or red pixels. Blue is also far away from skin color and blue screens were used back in the film days.

>”If even those backups dont work, you will be out of luck. You can now only be treated for the symptoms and hope that they wont kill you.”

There are experimental phage therapies that do work sometimes. There are many case reports of people who survived multi drug resistant infections after a match was found in a phage library and then actually worked.

As antibiotic resistance continues to worsen phage therapies will continue to get more attention and funding.

Eh, PCEVs and BEVs wont compete for some time. They are both superior to ICEs and have their own pros/cons. It’s likely we will see a mix of both going forward.

>”It’s safe to say we can scale the mix of renewables faster than nuclear.”

Not to 100%, we dont have the grid storage. Nuclear provides base load which wind/solar do not. They are not in competition with each other, they are both needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

>”they aren’t interested in making their groundwater radioactive.”

Thats fake news, Yucca had plenty of research showing groundwater would not be impacted. But it’s easy to just make sh*t up since everyone is already irrationally scared of nuclear.

>”Heck, out here in Washington state we can’t even clean up a contaminated site without constant political fights. Why would anyone want the same issue? And it’s going to be an issue anywhere. Not hypothetically… it’s pretty much guaranteed.”

You realize nuclear weapons production done in the 1940s is completely unrated to nuclear energy today right?

Right now it isnt nuclear vs fossil fuels. Renewables are not yet ready to replace 100% of fossil fuels so nuclear is needed as well.

This is the worlds current energy mix.

This was published in 2019, unfortunately it went largely unnoticed: >”these two countries could have prevented 28,000 air pollution-induced deaths and 2400 MtCO2 emissions between 2011 and 2017. Germany can still prevent 16,000 deaths and 1100 MtCO2 emissions by 2035 by reducing coal instead of eliminating nuclear as planned. If the US and the rest of Europe follow Germany's example they could lose the chance to prevent over 200,000 deaths and 14,000 MtCO2 emissions by 2035.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519303611

And by your logic we should also get rid of hydro, which makes up the majority of renewable energy. Because [insert conspiracy here] could do something bad like that one time.

It is actually built lol. Finland is finishing one right now. The US partially built one but uninformed people like yourself made sure it was canceled. We burn plenty of “clean coal” instead, great job.

The “hole” doesn’t need to be guarded. It would be really obvious if someone was trying to dig through a kilometer of bedrock.

I’d be more worried about the cancer you will get from the fossil fuel particulates you are breathing right now. Billions of dollars have been spent researching deep geologic repositories, but no amount of research is enough to overcome ignorance.

>”just magically disappears into a hole somewhere with zero management or oversight”

It’s not magic, but that is pretty much how deep geological repositories work.

Long term storage for nuclear waste is deep geological repositories.

No that is considered in the IPCC report on lifetime emissions. It’s not enormous. Don’t make up nonsense.

Nothing is carbon free. But nuclear is tied with wind as the cleanest source of energy. (source: IPCC table on page 7)

Not sure which country you are referring to but they can and do have private insurance in the US.

Do you have any sources on them being unsafe? Specifically less safe than fossil fuels?

This theory about an all powerful nuclear industry falls apart when you consider Japan shut down its nuclear plants in 2011 and hasn’t turned many them back on. There were a lot of problems with Japans communication about Fukushima and risks, however there is also a lot of misinformation, particularly when it comes to radiation levels outside of japan.

>”I haven't forgotten the iodine-131 readings in the rain here in Portland, in March 2011.“

Here is the EPA report on iodine-131 levels: >”Boise, Idaho and Richland, Washington, showed trace amounts of Iodine-131 – about 0.2 picocuries per liter in each case. An infant would have to drink almost 7,000 liters of this water to receive a radiation dose equivalent to a day’s worth of the natural background radiation exposure we experience continuously from natural sources of radioactivity in our environment.”

>”My guess would be that an honest assessment of excess deaths would run in the tens of thousands from Fukushima and Chernobyl.”

The UN did an assessment of Chernobyl and estimated 4000 current and future deaths. I belive the estimates for Fukushima range between 500 and 2000, many of which come from the evacuation (exacerbated by the largest tsunami in Japanese history).

The reactor itself had design flaws but was still safe if run as designed. The problem is the staff ignored nearly every safety protocol developed which then exposed the flaws in its design. The changes made were adding new materials to the control rods that absorbed neutrons as well as using more enriched fuel with a higher amount of U235. These changes make it easier to control the reactor. They also automated some of the controls so that the mistakes made by the staff could not be repeated. (source)

The reactors still lack containment vessels found in western and modern reactors. These reinforced concrete vessels are the ultimate failsafe to contain the majority of the waste in the event of a meltdown. They are part of the reason why Fukushima and 3 mile island had virtually no direct casualties (Fukushima had 1, three mile island had 0).

Just to clarify Herpesviruses are not retroviruses and most herpes viruses don’t integrate with the host genome (the few that do use a completely different mechanism than HIV). Herpes tends to hide out in cells that are left alone by the immune system allowing for chronic infection.