In the late 1980’s, perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Chinese desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn’t appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization that existed at the crossroads between China and Europe.
The Tarim Basin mummies do not resemble modern inhabitants of the region, leading different groups of researchers to posit that they may have hailed from near the Black Sea, or been related to a group hailing from the Iranian Plateau. Recently, researchers analyzed the genomes of some of the earliest mummies from the Tarim Basin. They found that the people buried there did not migrate from the Black Sea steppes, Iran, or anywhere else—rather, the analysis suggests that they were direct descents of the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), a human population widespread during the Pleistocene that is now mostly represented in genetic fragments in some populations’ genomes.
Cheap Electronics Dissection Project how much electronics can you get for $10 in ecuador? turns out these devices were created for the US market. smells like an opportunity to me
Tiles to reduce air pollution in a city, respiratory oases. I love it when architecture solves problems instead of creating them (ie suburbia):
The tiles are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), a pollution-fighting technology that is activated by ambient daylight. TiO2 is a photo-catalyst already known for its self-cleaning and germicidal qualities; it requires only small amounts of naturally occurring UV light and humidity to effectively reduce air pollutants into harmless amounts of carbon dioxide and water. When positioned near pollution sources, the tiles neutralize NOx and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) directly where they are generated. They transform previously inert urban surfaces into active surfaces, re-appropriate polluted spaces for safer pedestrian use, and invert problem spaces – dark, polluted, uninhabitable – to benevolent spaces that benefit communities.
PigeonBlog enlists homing pigeons to participate in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons are equipped with custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an online server without delay. Pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time over Google’s mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.
Air pollution has decreased even though population and the number of cars on the roads have increased. The shift is the result of regulations, technology improvements and economic change. New York City has seen a 32% decrease in nitrogen dioxide between the 2005-2007 and 2009-2011 periods.
2014-11-26: Pollution can be cleaned up quickly. This should make China’s pledge to improve air quality / reduce greenhouse gases quite feasible.
In 2002, South Korea was ranked 120th for air quality, and 43rd in 2014
2015-09-23: VW 1M tons of pollution. It is time to get tough, and destroy VW.
Volkswagen’s intentional fraud resulted in an extra 1M metric tons of air pollution being spewed into the skies over America; if they’d extended the con to Europe (where there are far more diesels), it would have been orders of magnitude worse.
In regions that lean heavily on coal-fired power plants, plug-in cars can end up polluting more heavily at the smokestack than gasoline cars at their tailpipes. But as grids get greener, that’s becoming less true nationwide.
2017-06-17: Schlieren Imaging. This is what the world would look like if you could see invisible air currents, temperature gradients, and differences in pressure or composition of the air
2018-01-22: Far UVC disinfection. There’s part of the uv spectrum that kills viruses & bacteria, but does not damage skin.
If CO2 can affect sleep quality, that would explain how it could produce a whole-day effect. Strøm-Tejsen tests this on 16 subjects and finds that “objectively measured sleep quality and the perceived freshness of bedroom air improved significantly when the CO2 level was lower, as did next-day reported sleepiness and ability to concentrate and the subjects’ performance of a test of logical thinking.” Good things about this study: subjects were blinded to condition, the paper contains a pilot experiment and a main experiment which mostly replicate each other’s results. Bad things about this study: the experiments were about n = 15 each, the researchers didn’t correct for multiple comparisons, and they admit to manipulating the statistics surrounding their logical reasoning tests to get better results.
Ditching fossil fuels would pay for itself through clean air alone. Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent 4.5m premature deaths, 3.5m hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and 300m lost workdays in the US.
air filtration and UV disinfection can greatly reduce SARS-COV-II in hospital wards. The authors installed portable air filters with UV disinfection on 2 COVID hospital wards in the UK. The air was tested for viruses, bacteria and fungi before the filters were turned on, during the time the filters were on and then again after the filters were turned off. Airborne SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the ward on all 5 days before activation of air/UV filtration, but on 0 of the 5 days when the air/UV filter was operational; SARS-CoV-2 was again detected on 4 out of 5 days when the filter was off.
“Far-UVC rapidly reduces the amount of active microbes in the indoor air to almost 0, making indoor air essentially as safe as outdoor air” The lamps inactivated more than 98% of the airborne microbes in 5 minutes. The low level of viable microbes was maintained over time, even though microbes continued to be sprayed into the room. The efficacy of different approaches to reducing indoor virus levels is usually measured in terms of equivalent air changes per hour. In this study, far-UVC lamps produced the equivalent of 184 equivalent air exchanges per hour. This surpasses any other approach to disinfecting occupied indoor spaces, where 5-20 equivalent air changes per hour is the best that can be achieved practically.
2022-08-19: Startups are entering this space to bring the cost down.
Beam ($5000) is an LED-based, upper room disinfection device that uses 265-nanometer ultraviolet light to create a disinfection zone located above people in a room. Vive ($3000), meanwhile, uses a wavelength known as far-UVC at 222-nanometers to inactivate harmful microorganisms in the air and on surfaces, even while people are present. While the Beam works in large open spaces, like classrooms and office lobbies, the Vive can be installed in smaller spaces, such as conference rooms and bathrooms. “What we have come to realize is that there is not one-size, fits-all for infection protection. What Arc competes with is some form of chemical intervention. For Beam and Vive, it’s HVAC upgrades.”
2022-10-28: Without massive improvements to LEDs, far UVC is not practical due to cost. Unclear what the deal with these startups is but I suspect they don’t output enough power to be effective.
$2000 is a ballpark retail price for a lamp installed by specialists, and the lamps have an expected lifetime of 15 months if they run continuously. There’s hope that far-UV lamps based on LEDs will eventually provide cheaper and longer-lived alternatives to the gas lamps currently being used, but prototype LED far-UV lamps are currently restricted to impractically low levels of power.
China’s pollution levels in 2021 had fallen 42% from 2013. The improvement means the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan is now 2.2 years longer. Chinese cities used to dominate global rankings of the world’s worst air quality; while some are still on those lists, in many cases they have been overtaken by cities in South Asia and the Middle East. In 2021, Beijing recorded its best monthly air quality since records began in 2013. There is still work to do as China remains the world’s 13th most polluted country. And Beijing’s particulate pollution – the tiny but highly dangerous pollutants that can evade the human body’s usual defenses – is still 40% higher than in the most polluted county in the United States.
Light in the 200-235 nm range, or far-UVC, is one of the most promising tools for dramatically reducing airborne transmission from day one of almost any pandemic caused by airborne pathogens. If adopted widely, it could also have a dramatic impact on seasonal flu, colds, and endemic COVID-19.
Unfortunately, progress on development and adoption has been much slower than one would have hoped. One bottleneck is the high cost and low efficiency of the only commercially available source at this wavelength range, 222 nm krypton chloride excimer lamps. For example, by our calculations, equipping a classroom with far-UVC would cost >$10k/classroom/year in lamps alone.
While directly supporting solid-state far-UVC R&D to accelerate availability is important, growing the far-UVC market in general and enabling greater private investment is even more critical.
john robb has an interesting idea: export legal hassle. while his post has a tongue in cheek tone, there is a sound underlying idea: greasing the wheels of commerce by expanding the rule of law. under the assumption that laws are fair and are not merely devices to delay the demise of obsolete industries (hello DMCA, hello RIAA), this levels the playing field and reduces uncertainty. always good things for trade. works best in conjunction with pacification by trade the interesting question is of course whether this brings countries in closer compliance with the rules or is just another stage for an arms race.
US files a complaint against China for WTO violations. Now this is something that we can export: legal hassles. Unleash the lawyers! We should have 100s of WTO filings against China in the works. 1 way to make this happen: create a method by which private law firms can create a WTO case and share in the fines levied (or a lump sum payment based on a portion of the savings for US companies for successful efforts where no fines are extracted). There are probably lots of methods that can make legalism a top US export.
Germish, also referred to as Denglisch, Engleutsch, Genglish or Ginglish is a jumble of English terms embedded within a grammatically German sentence (or vice versa). It is spoken in all German-speaking countries and owes its existence in part to the cultural predominance of English language pop music and international computer slang.
I’ve had enough of hearing that the French do not learn English. It’s a big disadvantage for international competition. Yet in the globalized, internet age, the French seem to realize that the losers from a refusal to learn English are themselves—and that speaking it need not make them less French.
2009-05-30: Wow. 1000s of Chinese school kids shouting english in a stadium, to learn.
The Coca-Cola Company ignited a firestorm of controversy on Sunday with a Super Bowl ad that appeared to make the inflammatory claim that other languages besides English exist. “Last night, Coke assaulted millions of Americans with its misguided and inappropriate view that other languages exist. In the future, we strongly hope that Coke will keep its crazy theories to itself.”
2015-07-19: Everything is becoming english. Many languages borrow not just words but grammar from english.
GERMANS joke about their bad English. In Berlin, you can buy fridge magnets with German expressions over-literally translated into English, like “It is me sausage”—a word-for-word rendering of Es ist mir Wurst, or “it’s all the same to me”. “German Quatsch” on Twitter has many more. But educated Germans usually speak English quite well. The reality is that, to a deeper extent than commonly realized, German is changing under constant influence from English.
2017-01-07: Many countries would benefit from this. I’m always embarrassed for companies that can’t communicate.
Japan continues to work inside a linguistic bubble – not least because many firms in Japan are oriented towards the domestic market and pay little heed to global trends. But this approach is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Switching to English makes Japanese firms more competitive, while opening employees’ eyes to the outside world. There is another benefit to using English in business: The language has few power markers. Its use can therefore help to break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society and reflected in Japanese conversation, which could boost efficiency.
Also, Education Ministry to begin using English. Reminds me of the lonely guy in the us government who has been responsible for metrication since 1970.
the Japanese Ministry of Education will soon begin conducting their meetings in the language. As using English in meetings is highly unusual in the country, the ministry will start implementing it slowly, beginning with high-level officials in their department.
2023-05-04: LLMs will accelerate the winner takes all dynamics. The proposed countermeasures are ineffective and weak.
A tool like ChatGPT has yet to be trained on a massive amount of high-quality, diverse and representative Arabic written data. Its lack of data makes the tool’s results in Arabic unable to distinguish the nuances, accuracy and depth needed to generate quality content. Arabic-speaking users of AI tools face profound consequences of the language divide. At the top of the list is the limited access to information, as the vast majority of references and big data these tools scan to generate their results are mainly available in English.
This discrepancy hinders the ability of Arabic-speaking users to leverage AI for professional and personal growth and perpetuates a digital divide with long-lasting repercussions.
Watching the mummy returns reminded me of an article i had read some time ago, arguably one of the scariest i ever read. it talks about the problem of marking a site as dangerous for 10 ka into the future.
These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is … by … kilometers and the buried waste is … kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.
Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area.
Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10 ka. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. The site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site when it was closed in …
2006-10-16: Well-researched Thorium piece, but Michael needs to become more concise: he repeats himself too much in this piece.
Sometime between 2020 and 2030, we will invent a practically unlimited energy source that will solve the global energy crisis. This unlimited source of energy will come from thorium. A summary of the benefits, from a recent announcement of the start of construction for a new prototype reactor:
There is no danger of a melt-down like the Chernobyl reactor.
It produces minimal radioactive waste.
It can burn plutonium waste from traditional nuclear reactors.
It is not suitable for the production of weapon grade materials.
Global thorium reserves could cover our energy needs for 1000s of years.
The new reactor, which is only 7m x 2m, could change everything for a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
2008-05-22: Why bother with oil-based stuff when you can have distributed nuclear energy with Uranium hydride batteries? 2008-07-24: Uranium Deep Burn
It is projected that volumes of high-level waste could be reduced by a factor of 50, while extra electricity is generated.
Besides the low amount of waste and almost complete burning of all Uranium and Plutonium, another big advantage of liquid fluoride reactors is fast and safe shutoff and restart capability. This fast stop and restart allows for load following electricity generation. This means a different electric utility niche can be addressed other than just baseload power for nuclear power. Currently natural gas is the primary load following power source. Wind and solar are intermittent in that they generate power at unreliable times. LFTR would be reliable on demand power.
Fuck ethanol. Lets have some 21st century nuclear power
Thorium is one of the victims of the brainless scare campaign against nuclear that has infected most western nations over the last 30 years. Instead of doing silly stunts like the germans, whose “exit” from nuclear energy will mean more coal plants being built, an enlightened nation would chose thorium.
Instead, we are stuck with aging reactors (how does that make anyone safer?) and scientific illiteracy both in the general population and elected representatives.
I’m generally dismayed how little discussion about thorium there is in energy circles.
Kirk Sorensen provides an update on the current state of thorium power. The bad news is that it still remains mostly theoretical concept; no operational reactor has been deployed yet — even as a prototype. However, new thorium nuclear molten salt experiments were just started in Europe. We have good “line of sight” on the science to build one — so, at this point, the limiting factor is mostly funding. In a world of privately-funded space travel, such a gating obstacle shouldn’t remain for long. 4 specific difficulties have been mentioned:
Salts can be corrosive to materials.
Designing for high-temperature operation is more difficult
There has been little innovation in the field for several decades
The differences between LFTRs and the light water reactors in majority use today are vast; the former “is not yet fully understood by regulatory agencies and officials.”
Andrew Yang has proposed a nuclear subsidy—$50B over 5 years
he is pro-nuclear and has a deep understanding of all the technical issues around energy. Real change from the Bush administration in selecting extreme competence. It is not in any way a guarantee of correct energy choices because there is still political reality.
At stake is the 100s of billions spent on meaningless levels of “safety” around nuclear power plants and waste storage, the projected costs of next-generation nuclear plant designs to reduce greenhouse gases worldwide, and the extremely harmful episodes of public panic that accompany rare radiation-release events like Fukushima and Chernobyl. (No birth defects whatever were caused by Chernobyl, but fear of them led to 100K panic abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe. What people remember about Fukushima is that nuclear opponents predicted that 100s or 1000s would die or become ill from the radiation. In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to.) 2014-02-14: You can power the world for 72 years with the nuclear waste that exists today, at a price cheaper than coal. Of course it will likely not happen due to collusion between the coal industry and the fear industrial complex.
China approved 2 reactors this month as it vowed to cut coal use to meet terms of a CO2-emissions agreement reached in November between President Xi Jinping and US counterpart Barack Obama. About $370b will be spent on atomic power. Plans to 3x nuclear capacity by 2020 to as much as 58 gigawatts.
Assuming a 25% conversion efficiency, a Radioisotope Power Source (RPS) would have 400K MJ / kg (electric) compared to 0.72 MJ / kg for Li-ion batteries. The goal is make a 5 watt “D cell” but with nuclear power that lasts decades
Bill Gates is funding Nathan Myhrvold’s Terrapower, a fast breeder reactor that burns a U238 duraflame log for 60 years, with 99% efficiency vs 1% for today’s U235 reactors. No fuel to reload or waste to ship around. Existing nuclear waste could be used as fuel.
“It is the first time a comprehensive IAEA international meeting on molten salt reactors has ever taken place. Given the interest of Member States, the IAEA could provide a platform for international cooperation and information exchange on the development of these advanced nuclear systems.” Molten salt reactors operate at higher temperatures, making them more efficient in generating electricity. In addition, their low operating pressure can reduce the risk of coolant loss, which could otherwise result in an accident. Molten salt reactors can run on various types of nuclear fuel and use different fuel cycles. This conserves fuel resources and reduces the volume, radiotoxicity and lifetime of high-level radioactive waste.
2016-11-28: Making nuclear energy radically less expensive
“The big thing is that the government is making national lab resources available to private companies in a way that it wasn’t before. If you are a nuclear startup, you can only go so far before you need to do testing, and you are not going to build a nuclear test facility, because that is hard and expensive. But now you could partner with a national lab to use their experimental resources. I’ve been talking about how to set up a pathway from universities for this kind of research.”
2016-12-01: Coal to nuclear can rapidly address 30% of CO2
The high temperature reactors can replace the coal burners at 100s supercritical coal plants in China. The lead of the pebble bed project indicates that China plans to replace coal burners with high temperature nuclear pebble bed reactors.
The amount of used nuclear fuel will continue to increase, reaching around 1M tons by 2050. The uranium and plutonium that could be extracted from that used fuel would be sufficient to provide fuel for at least 140 light water reactors of 1 GW capacity for 60 years. “It makes sense to consider how to turn today’s burden into a valuable resource.”
The overall cost of this first of a kind nuclear plant will be in the neighborhood of $5K/kw of capacity. That number is based on signed and mostly executed contracts, not early estimates. It is 2x the initially expected cost. 35% of the increased cost could be attributed to higher material and component costs that initially budgeted, 31% of the increase was due to increases in labor costs and the remainder due to the increased costs associated with the project delays.
Zhang Zuoyi described the techniques that will be applied to lower the costs; he expects them to soon approach the $2k / kw capacity range. If this can be achieved then the 210 MW reactor would be $525m. A 630 MW reactor would be $1.5b. It could be less if the 600 MW reactor only had to have the thermal unit and could use the turbine and other parts of an existing coal plant.
Terrestrial Energy is leading the way to getting regulatory approvals for its molten salt
fission reactor design. Terrestrial Energy aims to build the first walkaway safe molten salt modular reactor design in the late 2020s. IMSR generates 190 MW electric energy with a thermal-spectrum, graphite-moderated, molten-fluoride-salt reactor system. It uses standard-assay low-enriched uranium (less than 5% 235U) fuel.
Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it. It is intended to maintain its integrity without future maintenance for 100 ka, able to endure a future ice age. 100 ka ago 3 major river systems flowed across the Sahara. 100 ka ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4.6 ka old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2 ka old.
This Finnish tomb has some of the most secure containment protocols ever devised: more secure than the crypts of the Pharaohs, more secure than any supermax prison. It is hoped that what is placed within this tomb will never leave it by means of any agency other than the geological.
The tomb is an experiment in post-human architecture, and its name is Onkalo, which in Finnish means “cave” or “hiding place.” What is to be hidden in Onkalo is high-level nuclear waste, perhaps the darkest matter humans have ever made.
The reams of data generated by 3D-printing parts can speed up the certification process and lower the cost of getting a nuclear reactor online.
2021-04-20: Nuclear power failed. We need to deeply understand these reasons, because there won’t be a energy transition without new nuclear.
To avoid global warming, the world needs to massively reduce CO2 emissions. But to end poverty, the world needs massive amounts of energy. In developing economies, every kWh of energy consumed is worth $5 of GDP.
How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production, increasing our current 2.3 TW by over 5 additional TW:
If we account for population growth, and for the decarbonization of the entire economy (building heating, industrial processes, electric vehicles, synthetic fuels, etc.), we need more like 25 TW. The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can’t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cents/kWh; coal at 5 c/kWh.Why is nuclear expensive? I’m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that. (Or they were—costs are so high now that we don’t even build plants anymore.)
2022-09-14: Simple reactor designs that can be iterated quickly may be the future
Much of the future lies with KRUSTY-like kilowatt-scale systems. Nuclear has a power density problem that keeps it from powering our cars and planes. The shielding and heat engines are too heavy. The radiation and particles are harmful because they contain a lot of energy. The answer is to make solid-state technologies that convert heat and radiation into electricity. It is theoretically possible to turn gamma rays into electricity with something similar to a solar cell. Shielding gets lighter and generates electricity! It also brings new life to many isotopes that require too much shielding to be practical in radioisotope generators. In the meantime, kilowatt-scale systems can compete in smaller remote power applications and supplement solar microgrids. Further cost decreases could enable electricity customers to defect from the grid where solar is not feasible. Competing manufacturers promise a much more competitive industry than exists today, where incentives rarely encourage falling prices.
The endgame is a chunk of nuclear material that can regulate itself based on user demand, surrounded by energy-capturing devices that soak up every bit of emitted energy. Power density could exceed today’s liquid fuels and batteries while having extreme energy density. We’d finally get our flying cars! Reactors that look like KRUSTY are on the path to that endgame.
2023-03-25: Nuclear has some near-fatal problems that make it a non-starter on earth. Beyond the well-known overregulation, the biggest problem is that nuclear produces relatively low temperature heat that then has to be converted to electricity, which is very inefficient. A process would have to be found to turn radiation and heat directly into electricity, without the steam turbines. 2023-07-13: How we got the current regulatory regime
In a world where industry and activists fought to a standstill, Probabilistic Risk Assessment provided the only credible guiding light. Rasmussen and team first began to compile and model relevant data in the early 1970s. Over the decades the industry’s database grew, and the NRC developed an opinion on every valve, every pipe, the position of every flashing light in a plant. This angered the utilities, who could not move a button on a control panel without reams of test data and its associated paperwork. This angered activists when the refinement of models predicted safety margins could be relaxed.
But Probabilistic Risk Assessment has no emotions. Probabilistic Risk Assessment estimated, validated, learned. Probabilistic Risk Assessment would form the barrier protecting us from catastrophe.
Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 80 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals, as well as 56 kg of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil”.
Just as we are hitting the hubbert peak, we get a technology that may make oil rigs obsolete:
Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4B barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2B barrels of oil. “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”
With their main (only?) source of income in danger, what will the middle east kleptocracies do?
because
The only thing this process can’t handle is nuclear waste. If it contains carbon, we can do it.” and Thermal depolymerization has proved to be 85% energy efficient for complex feedstocks, and even higher for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics
Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water 2x the size of Texas.
Declaring war on the “white pollution” choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to the cloth bags of old
2013-12-05: Depolymerization was hailed as the solution ~10 years ago: turning plastic back into more versatile compounds. I weirdly haven’t heard much about it since. Probably because no one cares about trash?
almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. More than 2K municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.
Anything that requires constant vigilance (sorting) combined with subsidies isn’t going to work even medium-term. looks like recycling needs a big reboot. 2017-04-26: Plastic-eating worms. This sounds like one of those “obvious solutions”, like releasing rabbits in Australia to deal with a forgotten problem. Fear our future where the wax worm is up there with rust as a mortal enemy of civilization.
While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten 4% of the bag. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after 6 months.
Hydrothermal liquefaction could change the world’s polyolefin waste, a form of plastic, into useful products, such as clean fuels and other items. Once the plastic is converted into naphtha, it can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals or further separated into specialty solvents or other products. There is 1B tons of polyolefin waste in landfills.
2019-03-13: Plastic recycling never worked, and was a greenwashing effort by the industry, and dum-dums fell for it.
Even before China’s ban, only 9% of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12% was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8B tons have been produced worldwide over the past 60 years—continues to grow.
Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels. Petrochemicals now account for 14% of oil use, and are expected to drive 50% of oil demand growth between now and 2050. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.
Every human on Earth is ingesting 2000 particles of plastic a week
2020-04-11: 90% breakdown of PET in under 10 hours. Process is still expensive and needs to scale further. 2020-07-08: Apples are the most contaminated fruit while carrots are the vegetables most affected. This is a much bigger problem than the performative efforts to clean up the great pacific garbage patch.
THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21B of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.
The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor 20x larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025. Manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET.
Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video. I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 4000 kg of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100m on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”
China has 300k in prison and a population of 1.2b, while America has 3m people in prison and a population of 300m.
on tibet:
Even more disturbing is the way that this short document The declaration of the “Tibetan Government in Exile” spends so much time dwelling on the subject of “ethnic purity”. They bemoan the fact that people of other ethnic groups are moving into Tibet and diluting the purity of their race. Freedom of movement seems to be a hallmark of any democracy, so one wonders what kind of democracy these people are hoping to install? Maybe a democracy that doesn’t allow people of various “undesirable” ethnic groups to live there? Maybe an “apartheid” system where only people who were members of the Lama’s religion get to vote?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 