SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
2016 was the third year in a row that global carbon emissions remained stable, even as the overall economy grew. Although 32.1 Gigatonnes of emissions is certainly not good news for future climates, there is some cause for optimism within the numbers, as some major economies saw their emissions drop. And controlling emissions didn't come at the expense of the world's finances, as preliminary estimates show that the global economy grew by over three percent.
[...] China was one of those countries, starting up five new reactors to increase its nuclear capacity by 25 percent. Nuclear combined with renewables to handle two-thirds of the country's rising demand. China also shifted some of its fossil fuel use from coal to natural gas. The net result was a drop in emissions of about one percent, even as demand grew by over five percent (and the economy grew by nearly seven percent). Gas still represents a small fraction of China's energy economy, so there's the potential for further displacement of coal.
In the US, the process of shifting from coal to natural gas is already well advanced. Coal use was down by 11 percent last year, the IEA estimates, allowing natural gas to displace it as the US' largest single source of energy. This, along with booming renewables, allowed the US to drop its carbon emissions by three percent in 2016. That takes emissions to levels not seen since 1992, even though the economy is now 80 percent larger than it was then.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/global-carbon-emissions-continue-to-stabilize-us-has-3-drop/
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:38PM (2 children)
When solar reaches Grid parity [wikipedia.org], the price of nuclear power drops to zero.
Molten salt reactors have the potential to do high-temperature chemistry, possibly producing electricity as by-product.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)
Molten salt reactors have the potential to do high-temperature chemistry
When I was a little kid, before the EPA, or before the EPA cared, we had a garbage incinerator.
I've often considered that some day instead of a landfill and a sewage treatment plant, we'll have a community MSR and thermal depolymerization plant. MSRs run hot enough to make a pipeline theoretically workable, its not like you'd need clearance to tip each garbage truck directly into a reactor, you can secure the reactor on one side of a road and run the TDP plant on the other side of the road or something like that.
Anyway I just think it interesting that for most of my life garbage got stockpiled but both before and after it'll get vaporized. Who knows that the archeologists will think of that.
Another weird thought is around here landfills get turned into ski hills once filled up. So.... dig up the ski hill, vaporize it, and turn it into valuable industrial materials again? I would imagine for some obscure rare earths the best ores on the planet are, or in the future, will be landfills. Someday something like indium or nickel might be so valuable people dig up landfills just for those two.
If you don't want to use a nuke, assuming you have really big tanks and warehouses, you can Solar TDP garbage when the sun's up. Just make sure you can process like twice as much as bare necessity to ease catching up and maintenance windows. This becomes a problem for MSR technology because you can build an unimaginably immense solar array for the cost of a MSR.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:22PM
The solar version takes a lot more land area. You can just about fit the thorium version on an Aircarft [wikipedia.org].
But I agree, landfills are potential targets for mining in the future.