Looking at the installation, I would advise the experimenter to immediately remove the hub motor from its semi-submerged state (thermal variation of the environment will pull in water through seals and bearings) and use a shaft of reasonable length to extract power.
Besides that, nice project.
Were electric ferries not a viable option?
For short routes, they are.
Here in Estonia, two ferries that sail to the island Saaremaa (route Kuivastu-Virtsu, about 4 nautical miles so really short) …they typically charge in port and travel on battery power. They have a combustion engine of course, and can use it when ice is thick (which lately hasn’t been the case, and this year is ridiculous, it’s January soon and there even no snow, not to speak of sea ice).
The power grid connection at the port was redesigned of course. Charging a ship requires more amps than an ordinary port might have access to.
But how long is the Arran sea route? Sources give me different numbers and on the map, I can’t figure out which port they actually prefer to sail from. Either way, it looks manageable on battery power.
Here is the Mauna Loa data line from 1958, matching the top figure.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg
The rest has been matched and synchronized to it using other sources. I’m not climate scientist, but I would guess the best sources are ice samples from polar regions where it accumulates from top and melts from bottom. CO2 dissolves in water and when snow falls and turns into permanent ice in such places, it captures a snapshot of that period’s atmospheric gas content, among that the CO2 level.
Geothermal makese sense on high latitudes (see Iceland for example) where heat is desirable even if electricity can’t be extracted.
Where you cannot drill deep enough (a Finnish company tried a 5 kilometer borehole and didn’t hit good enough heat) - artificial geothermal (thermal storage in large underground caverns) still makes sense, but not for electricity production. Just storing heat extracted from the environment during summer.
If drilling should get cheaper (e.g. those MIT guys declaring that they have a practical and reliable maser drilling rig), accessing good enough heat may be possible in places where it’s not worthwhile currently.
In some locations, production of geothermal energy can be combined with extracting dissolved chemicals - e.g. some borehole may produce a lot of dissolved lithium salts. No point in letting lithium back underground, better to put it aside.
It looks neat and might help in emergencies or special conditions, but if one takes a look at the wattage, sadly… 50 kW is very limited power. Probably not good for widespread use.
The helium-filled S500 blimp ascended to 500 meters above ground in the city of Jingmen, generating power at a rate of over 50 kW, according to Beijing SAWES Energy Technology Co Ltd, one of the developers of the system.
Wow, I didn’t know that seagrass has pollen, seeds and all the stuff needed for plants to sexually reproduce on land.
It might be extremely handy for the conservation effort, because you don’t need genetic engineering to spread useful traits then.
I hope they succeed. :)
Also relevant: “Always shoot the messenger first.” :)
If news unsettles a person, and there’s a cognitive dissonance upon processing their world model (“everything OK with climate”) and sensory input (“another big freaking hurricane”) then if the person isn’t a model of rational thought and already has a fad for conspiracies…
…one might find it easier to add another conspiracy theory to one’s collection, as opposed to harder steps like refreshing one’s model of how the world functions. :o
The proliferation of a new technology typically doesn’t start from poor people.
It starts from fanatics first. I built my first EV. It was crap, I cut it apart and sold the metal (environmental footprint: awful). Then I built my second EV. It drove around 10 000 km, but had to be retired due to metal fatigue (enviromental footprint: neutral at best, lesson learned: big).
I bought my third EV on a crashed vehicle auction. New front axle, stretching the frame back to correct dimensions… I drive it every day, but it’s a crap car that I’d not recommend to my worst enemy. :) Environmental footprint: positive, I can produce fuel for myself from April to October. But if the same vehicle would be used by someone who doesn’t produce (or buy) renewable power, the footprint would be less positive.
Anticipating the demise of my factory-made electric microcar, I am however building another EV. Again the footprint is negative, but I need information about how to easily manufacture one, and obtaining information has a cost in resources. :(
Meanwhile, of course, truly rich folks buy fancy and electronics-laden self-driving EVs which some then proceed to crash or mishandle due to lack of clue. People are like that and it will stick out in statistics.
IMHO: if they hadn’t bought an EV, they’d have bought another kind of status symbol and would have used it even more wastefully. What matters more is what the average person can and will do. And how do we influence the auto makers to produce less resource-intensive vehicles?
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
About methane: dealing with it at the source (oil and gas drilling and mining, waste disposal, etc) is going to far less than dealing with it later in the atmosphere.
Knowledge of how to increase methane oxidation rates in air is good to have, however - in case some geochemical methane source (permafrost, hydrates) gets pushed over the edge and starts outputting more than tolerable.