• 12 Posts
  • 399 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • Things appear white because they are reflecting a lot of light in the visible wavelengths you can see, to which the atmosphere is unsurprisingly transparent. Things that are black on the other hand absorb the light, heat up and re-emit at their thermal temperature which in the terrestrial range of 0-100 degrees peaks in the far infrared which the atmosphere is not (as) transparent to.

    The linked study is talking about a boundary effect between the cooler area of high albedo (because painting things white does reduce the energy absorbed and reflects a good chunk of that back into space) and the warmer area of normal albedo. Its modelling how that change between different temperature areas affects air circulation and cloud cover, not that the reflected light is warming up other areas.










  • Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.

    It’s just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.







  • Its possible that it was built to a lower standard than would be expected in the west, both in terms of quality and worker safety. Though unless you have specific reports of that I dont see any reason just to assume it because Arabs bad.

    In addition this was largely built by Korean companies who have a successful record of building NPPs at home without incident, I imagine Korea wouldnt be particularly happy if their citizens (especially highly trained and economically productive ones) were being abused to build foreign infrastructure.

    The main point is that NPPs dont have to be stuck in a quagmire, and using Hinkley Point as a stand in for all NPP construction is disingenuous, just as using the UAE as a sole example would be.