How did china manage to get hit by power issues :sadness:

    • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The entire US is gonna be like Texas last winter, but constantly on and off all over the country, and not always weather related. Sometimes a bird will fry a transformer and shutdown power for a couple million people for 2 days, nbd.

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          There won't be anything to loot. We have a just in time supply chain, so it's 2 weeks of food and consumables max before we're just done.

          Same goes for power and shit, the hundreds/thousands of cities that still rely on coal power will just go dark suddenly if coal flow stops for a few days. When that happens, it reverberates through the entire grid.

          America is literally on the verge of complete collapse. Not even necessarily "politically" or whatever. Like physically, the infrastructure necessary for modern society just no longer exists. Everything we're using is running up against the 2x engineering tolerances they were built to, the lifespans are being stretched by a factor of 2 as well. The scariest thing is that a huge amount of our infrastructure was built at the same time, so all that new deal/pre Reagan shit is coming due for changes.

          Out where I'm at they've been furiously replacing bridges because they're all at their end of life. Only about half have been replaced so far. The highways that have become necessary for life in most of America are crumbling, there exists no housing or civilization by rail that could be salvaged except some major cities. Here they actually tore up a bunch of rail lately to make room for more kitch breweries and condos in the old industrial area.

          I'm legitimately worried about how bad it's going to get...like this is one of those things where it could just snap one day and the cascading failures will be totally uncontrollabe.

            • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I don't think you really are understanding what this means. The rich will be fine, they'll escape to another nation and leave the American workers to starve to death in the waste dump they created. Like the famine that will result from the American grid collapse will make all the fake ones they attributed to communists look like skipping lunch.

    • apparitionist [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      duct tape a 50 year old infrastructure for the foreseeable future

      nuclear advocates are idealist radlibs who don't know anything about our current engineering system and think "more power" will be simply helpful. The US can't even deal with extra power from solar panels lol

      • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        You can't have grid stability exclusively off of wind and solar. That's the dirty little secret, they always end up cheating with natural gas. It's not about "more power". It's about "power is made exactly when it's needed".

        • FidelCashflow [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          I we have the tech if we had the money. We ajmy aren't willing to put the money into it. Plenty of environmentally friendly battery systems, they just aren't as dense or efficent as lithium but if we thought of not drowning in a boiling sea as an investment we cluld manage it.

          • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            It's a lot more complicated than just building a bunch of safe, extremely reliable, zero-carbon nuclear plants. We have the tech to decarbonize the grid. France got it done ffs.

            Nuclear is heavily regulated and therefore extremely unprofitable, which is why Greens hate it (they're all neolibs). That's basically it. Wind and Solar require massive amounts of rare earth medals to build a battery system, but that means lots of easy money for Elon Musk level grifters to "disrupt". Can't do that with a EPR

              • medium_adult_son [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Or pump water uphill, then release that slowly to spin a turbine.

                Some other, more gimmicky, options that don't use batteries include giant flywheels or moving a weight up a tower (or down a mineshaft) and dropping it slowly to run a generator.

                • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I've heard the flywheels are pretty okay. It really seems we need some more low-tech solutions to round out how we do energy tbh.

                • CopsDyingIsGood [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Wait how would this work? I'm a dumbass but it seems to me like you'd need to expend the same amount of energy pumping the water uphill that you would get back from it flowing downhill. Pls explain

                  • medium_adult_son [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    Right, and there is probably even some loss from the water potential energy conversion to electricity via the generator.

                    But it is a great way to store huge amounts of energy, instead of a huge number of lithium batteries. That way it can be used when solar/wind aren't producing energy

              • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Yes, some more mad-scientist shit that tech grifters can get in on vs a mature, safe technology that just happens to be highly regulated and not open for the type of "innovation" America does!

            • FidelCashflow [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              I honesty feel like just brute forcing it with browns gass would end up being easier. You get clean water and enough explody bits to keep us happy.

              We would have a coup here in ameriva if they made a bunch of nuclear power plants that you couldn't secretly make bombs at. Just the vibes of doing something efficent would destroy us as a country