Gigafactory

Quote: kenarman

One of the most insightful things I have read for a while Paco.

Thank you.

You know, Dublin county has a population of 1,345,402 out of a total population of 4,761,865 for the Republic of Ireland.

Ireland outside of Dublin, unlike the rest of western civilization, has probably the same or less population than it did in 1840-1850 during the potato famine. I asked someone if they stopped building houses a hundred years ago since there were no more people. Did they just keep renovating the old houses?

The answer is of course that they build new houses and simply abandon some of the old ones. But they have the opportunity to be one of the greenest societies in the Western world even if the insulation is not that good.

18th century Irish mansion


New Irish mansion

Quote: Pacomartin

Thank you.

You know, Dublin county has a population of 1,345,402 out of a total population of 4,761,865 for the Republic of Ireland.

Ireland outside of Dublin, unlike the rest of western civilization, has probably the same or less population than it did in 1840-1850 during the potato famine. I asked someone if they stopped building houses a hundred years ago since there were no more people. Did they just keep renovating the old houses?

The answer is of course that they build new houses and simply abandon some of the old ones.

Not near as long a time line but you have the same thing happening in the rust belt and New Orleans. The rural areas of much of Canada, particularly the prairies have/are experiencing the same thing with the death of the small family farm and newer ways of transporting grain. Many of the small prairie towns are essentially ghost towns.

County cork in the southern part of Ireland had a population of 854,118 in 1841, which dropped to 330,443 in 1961, and has rebounded to 542,196 in 2016.

The lack of industrialization made Cork the end of the world after WWII, but now is one of the most attractive features in the post industrial age.



Cork Airport even has one of those trans-Atlantic narrow body flights operated by Norwegian Air Shuttle to Providence Rhode Island.

County Clare had a population of 286,394 in 1841 and bottomed at 73,597 in 1966 and has returned to 118,627 in 2016. County Clare is the location of Shannon Airport.

Quote: Face

I could be wrong (I'm not a learned fellow) but I'm still convinced the guy in Utah that's still driving his '64 Belvedere is the pinnacle of green living, precisely because of the unseen price of manufacturing. Just that alone, the resources used to create a new model, has got to skew things quite out of favor with the new stuff. ANY new stuff.

Quote: Christian Science Monitor

The study reveals that fully 75 percent of a car's lifetime carbon emissions stem from the fuel it burns, not its production. A further 19 percent of that is production and transportation of the fuel, leaving just 6 percent for the car's manufacture.

These figures vary – a more recent Volkswagen study suggests that with vehicle efficiency rising steadily, 68 percent of the car's lifetime emissions came from driving it, while the manufacturing process accounts for a higher 22 percent.

Apparently the manufacturing of a new Ford Fusion creates about 17 tons of CO2. A car which gets 30 mpg pollutes about 4.35 tons of CO2 annually, (whereas a car which gets 40 mpg only burns 3.25 tons annually.) So over the course of say, 12 years, the 30 mpg car pollutes 52.2 tons of CO2.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Face, but a '64 Belvedere probably gets about 15 mpg?

Quote: reno

Apparently the manufacturing of a new Ford Fusion creates about 17 tons of CO2. A car which gets 30 mpg pollutes about 4.35 tons of CO2 annually, (whereas a car which gets 40 mpg only burns 3.25 tons annually.) So over the course of say, 12 years, the 30 mpg car pollutes 52.2 tons of CO2.

So the new car saves 4.35-3.25=1.1 tons of CO2 per year, so to make up the 17 tons for the manufacture of the new car would take 15.5 years.

Quote: reno

Correct me if I'm wrong, Face, but a '64 Belvedere probably gets about 15 mpg?

I think citing a 63 year old car is a little bit of hyperbole to make the point. I wouldn't take it literally.

Let's not underestimate the right wing's fetish for oil and coal.

Don't get me wrong. Oil and coal have been a boon for humanity. Without them, there's no large scale industry or transportation. But they're dirty fuels, and their supply is limited (though coal is so abundant, we may never run out).

There are better, cleaner options. The problem is more economical and political than functional. For instance, nuclear fission is rather clean. Yes, fission byproducts are deadly dangerous, but these are contained in the reactor, not spewed all over the atmosphere. And there are several ways to deal with them. reprocessing would help, though there are problems in how this might lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The problem is we can't power cars, trucks and airplanes with nuclear fission. Large ships can carry a reactor (all of the US carriers and submarines do, as well as some large cruisers, but getting the qualified personnel to man a reactor in every large container ship, oil tanker, etc. would be very expensive.

That's the functional problem. the political is the exaggerated fear of nuclear power among the general population, as though nuclear plants in France's interior are at high risk of a tsunami-induced meltdown.

We're getting to the point where electric vehicles on land are a feasible, economical possibility, but we're not there yet. Of course, if the electricity comes from oil-burning or coal-burning plants, then you're just displacing emissions rather than reducing them. If nuclear fission were more prevalent, that wouldn't be a problem at all.

Solar is a good alternative in some areas, particularly desert terrain like parts of California, Nevada and Arizona. that's limited, but so what? Hydroelectric power is limited to places where dams can be built and maintained. Much the same goes for wind power.

What limits widespread use of electric cars are two factors: batteries and recharge times. The latter can be reduced with specialized equipment, though it would cost more. The former awaits a breakthrough in battery technology. This breakthrough is also sought by users of portable computers (laptops, tablets and cell phones).

In the long run we can do away with coal and oil for generating electricity, but that absolutely requires acceptance of nuclear power. Those who think fusion will solve all problems, though, couldn't be more wrong. While it's true the main fusion byproduct is non-radioactive helium-4, perforce there will be some unstable helium-3 and tritium (hydrogen-3) in the mix. That's not a big deal. However, the whole reactor core, and possibly other parts of the reactor, will be irradiated int he meantime. it's possible after years of use you'll have a highly radioactive reactor on your hands. This is a known issue that is given little attention in the media.

The big advantage of fusion is that it uses hydrogen as fuel. And that's so abundant an element we'll never run out of it.

We may also use fusion power for nucleosynthesis, building larger elements from smaller ones. This requires additional energy at some point as you get to higher atomic masses in the periodic table, but it might be worth it for rare or crucial elements, like for example rare earths. assuming we can keep fusion reactions going for heavier elements. Fusing hydrogen is one thing. Fusing lithium is quite different.

Oil and coal are not at the level that whale oil got to int he XIX century, but they're getting there.

Quote: Pacomartin

So the new car saves 4.35-3.25=1.1 tons of CO2 per year, so to make up the 17 tons for the manufacture of the new car would take 15.5 years.

Right, if you're going from 30 mpg to 40 mpg.

But if you get a Prius with 54mpg, it's a big difference. Yes, the Prius' battery adds to the carbon footprint, but considering how much smaller it is than the Ford Fusion (600 lbs. lighter) I'm not convinced the carbon footprint of manufacturing is significantly higher than the Fusion's 17 tons.

Quote: Nareed

That's the functional problem. the political is the exaggerated fear of nuclear power among the general population, as though nuclear plants in France's interior are at high risk of a tsunami-induced meltdown.
.

Of course, if you had a country heavily dependent on nuclear plants, those would likely be a great target in war.

Hard to clean up, extremely centralized, expensive, and cover a lot of power needs so not easily replaceable even in good times.

I guess this is arguing the 500 year tidal wave argument, but still should be considered in cost.

Quote: Pacomartin

People just need to feel important, like they are meeting carbon footprints. Nobody can stand the idea that doing nothing might be better than doing something.

Its just the constant hype.. global warming in the headlines and suddenly people start with reusable grocery bags and lugging by hand an item that has a handle on it.

A purpose in life. A good deed. Heck, buy a pink ribbon for breast cancer and you probably do zilch but it feels good. Concern for the handicapped, concern for global warming, concern for this and for that.... well, its probably better than trying to find purpose in drugs.

Quote: U.S. Department of Commerce National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration NOAA Research

Refrigerators in the late 1800s and early 1900s used the toxic gases, ammonia (NH3), methyl chloride (CH3Cl), and sulfur dioxide (SO2), as refrigerants. After a series of fatal accidents in the 1920s when methyl chloride leaked out of refrigerators, a search for a less toxic replacement begun as a collaborative effort of three American corporations- Frigidaire, General Motors, and Du Pont.

CFCs were first synthesized in 1928 by Thomas Midgley, Jr. of General Motors, as safer chemicals for refrigerators used in large commercial appilications1. Frigidaire was issued the first patent, number 1,886,339, for the formula for CFCs on December 31, 1928. In 1930, General Motors and Du Pont formed the Kinetic Chemical Company to produce Freon (a Du Pont tradename for CFCs) in large quantities.

By 1935 Frigidaire and its competitors had sold 8 million new refrigerators in the United States using Freon-12 (CFC-12) made by the Kinetic Chemical Company and those companies that were licensed to manufacture this compound.

In 1932 the Carrier Engineering Corporation used Freon-11 (CFC-11) in the worldís first self-contained home air-conditioning unit, called the "Atmospheric Cabinet".; Because of the CFC safety record for nontoxicity, Freon became the preferred coolant in large air-conditioning systems.

(published in The Chapman & Hall Encyclopedia of Environmental Science, edited by David E. Alexander and Rhodes W. Fairbridge, pp pp.78-80, Kluwer Academic, Boston, MA, 1999.)
James W. Elkins
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL), 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80303 U.S.A.
E-mail: James.W.Elkins@noaa.gov, Phone: (303) 497-6224, Fax: (303) 497-6290

We have a refrigerator from 1928 that uses one of the pre Freon refrigerants (probably ammonia :NH3) since I don't think methyl chloride (CH3Cl) or sulfur dioxide (SO2) was common at the time. The refrigerator was manufactured two years before the company to manufacture Freon was formed.

As the refrigerator is now 90 years old and has not broken we find no particular reason to replace it.

The 1928 refrigerator has no freezer, as they didn't exist at the time. A second refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen was manufactured in May 1994 and contains both Freon-12 (CFC-12) and Freon-11 (CFC-11). The manufacture of these chemicals ended for the most part on January 1, 1996. We are still using this refrigerator as well.