dgmib

I feel genuinely bad for any democrat supporter with an ear injury right now.

You’re not wrong.

Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.

There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.

You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.

Yes somewhat.. the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.

Money isn't the limiting factor though.

There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.

Not sure where you’re getting 250kwh/m2/year from. If it was one contiguous solid panel maybe you could achieve that and then you’d be correct it would be about 560,000 km2. Or roughly the size of France.

But you need to leave space between the panels in a solar farm for them to be at the optimal angle without casting shadows on each other. Real world solar farms have much lower density than that.

The density can vary significantly, our hypothetical solar island could be anywhere from the 6th to the 50th largest country but regardless we’re still talking about something in the area of a trillion individual solar panels.

Assuming money isn’t the limiting factor (which it isn’t in most countries) we don’t have anywhere close to the ability to manufacture and deploy that many panels by 2030 or 2035.

Assuming we maintain exponential growth of both wind and solar (doubtful) we’re still a least two decades away from eliminating fossil fuel electricity generation never mind meeting the 2-3x generation capacity needed to transition transportation and other consumers of fossil fuels over to electricity.

Renewables growth has shattered estimates before, you never know, but the transition is not happening any where near as fast as people seem to think.

You might want to do some basic math on the current rates at which renewable energy and global energy demand is growing.

The world burned 140,000 TWh worth of fossil fuels last year, a new record because global energy demand is still growing faster than total new renewable generation.

Let’s say we built an island of floating PV panels in the ocean large enough to generate that much energy.

It would be the 8th largest country in the world.

No we’re not going to hit 70% by 2035 even assuming it maintains exponential growth, not even close.

The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.

Yea basically the main contamination issue is that radioactive substances were spread around. Contamination of the surrounding area isn’t the only issue we have to deal with, nor is it the most serious, but it is generally is the most costly remediate.

The contamination problem is caused by radioactive matter spewed into the air and settling on the trees, buildings, ground etc… in the surrounding area.

The main remediation strategy is to remove everything in the surrounding area including the top ~3 ft or so of soil of the and haul it off to an underground landfill to slowly decay for at least a few hundred years safely separated from humans.

Lots of great answers here.

I think one under mentioned cause is the effect of social media algorithms.

All major social media platforms use machine learning algorithms decide what to show in your feed. The algorithms are programmed to show you the things that have historically kept you on the site longer.

It’s human nature to upvote/read/support/engage with the things that agree with our world views, and downvote/dismiss/disengage/discredit the things that disagree with our worldview.

These two facts combined result in you seeing more of the content that aligns with your worldview, and more of the content from people who share your worldview. We’re all funnelled into communities of like minded individuals that repeat what we already believe, reinforcing whatever that is regardless of how factually correct it might be.

Dissenting information that might cause you to reconsider your position or become more politically aware is automatically filtered out.

And it’s not just social media either, even the algorithms behind search engines display this behaviour.

Long before social media existed, Google was tailoring search results to match the things you tend to click on. If you searched for news and typically clicked on the headlines biased towards one side or the other Google would start ranking site with that bias higher.

This wasn’t intentional (at least not originally) it was just a side effect of the algorithm, trying to figure out what you were most likely looking for.

For someone who, for example, believes the Earth is flat. If they were to type “is the Earth flat?” Into a search engine. They are much more likely to get results that “prove” the Earth is flat, then a person who believes the Earth is round, because the algorithm knows that they tend to click on articles that “confirm” the earth is flat.

Algorithms used by social media and search engines today, make it genuinely difficult to maintain a balanced worldview and find unbiased answers to any question. They are all designed to keep you engaged, And it is human nature to engage more with the things we agree with, regardless of truth.

The old 8” floppy disks were more expensive but known for being incredibly reliable.

The newer 5.25” and 3.5” floppies used cheaper and mass produced coatings on the magnetic surface, plus the smaller and higher density tracks had less surface area per byte and less material to hold the signal.

The net result was the newer floppies often couldn’t be reliably read after a few years of use.

It’s not at all surprising they stuck with the more reliable system for so long.

My mom used to describe a solution to a problem that worked well as “slicker than snot”

Used that phrase in a work meeting once when I was younger and got the most eclectic mix of reactions ranging from, “ think I’m going to vomit” to full on LOLs.

No.

MW is the maximum capacity not the average.

A nuclear reactor runs at close to its maximum output pretty much 24/7/365.

A solar farm only operates during the day, and even then it only operates at maximum output in the middle of a clear sunny day.

The overall average output of a nuclear plant is typically around 90% of its capacity.

The overall average output of solar farm is 20-25%.

This massive farm will still only output a bit more electricity than what a single nuclear reactor outputs.

A nuclear power station typically has more than one reactor, so compared to a typical nuclear power station this isn’t even close to the average nuclear plant.

Though it does beat a few of the smallest nuclear plants that only have a single reactor.

Nuclear outputs a fuck-ton of electricity for its size.