This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That's about 650 kcal.
An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.
Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn't have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.
There's not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.
Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn't poison oneself from within.
One is something you choose to pay, the other you get shot if you don't pay.
Contract claims and property claims are ultimately enforceable by government force, as well. A "no trespassing" or "no loitering" sign, or a "Copyrighted work, all rights reserved" notice is enforceable by men with guns, too.
If taxation is theft, the same reasoning would extend to property being theft, too.
40x the kinetic energy. Now consider the chemical energy stored in sufficient fuel for a coast to coast flight of that weight and speed.
Same vibes as Kim Jong Un touring a factory.
So even with those ultra unrealistic assumptions (100kg people, 1 step per second, 100% efficient energy capture), 9.8 watts just isn't enough.
Lighting needs about 0.6 watts per square foot (6.46 watts per square meter) in an office. That means you need someone like that generating 9.8 watts every 16.3 square feet or 1.5 square meters.
There's an inherent tension there, where sufficient density to make that work would require people to take fewer, shorter steps.
A basketball court is 4700 sq feet (436.6 sq meters). That means you'd need 288 big people stepping that fast, jammed into a single basketball court sized space, just to keep the lights on in that space. If any of the people stop moving even for a second, the system fails to keep up.
The numbers don't make any sense.
A 100kg (220 lb) person whose steps compress the tiles by 1cm (0.01m) per step would be transferring 100 kg x 9.8 m/s^2 x 0.01m = 9.8 joules, or 0.00272 watt hours. That assumes 100% perfect efficiency in capturing that energy.
A watt is a joule per second, so someone who steps 1 step per second is generating 9.8 watts. That's not enough to light the station, much less run the computers and signs and the fare gates and escalators and elevators.
And of course it wouldn't come anywhere close to running the trains. After all, if it were easy to take people's biomechanical power to run trains, that would mean that humans could push the trains effectively.
So they're trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they've done on site, that's about 5 and a half years.
They're also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that's $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.
In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That's $17.50 per watt.
Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn't dispatchable.
Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.
So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.
Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.
So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn't going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia's ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that's all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.
NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.
Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn't been great.
And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there's less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.
If he's running again in 52 years, then I'll have serious questions about what I know about the fundamental rules of life on this planet, so maybe he should be president again at that point.
That was true in the 70's, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.
The big changes since the 70's has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.
There's less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.
The "Stan Kelly" persona itself is a fictional satire. The work is actually done by cartoonist Ward Sutton, whose standard political cartoons under his own name criticize the right wing directly.