| ??? 03/26/10 20:01 Read: times |
#174538 - Still not a magic bullet Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Christoph Franck said:
It is a technical problem that every heat-based power plant faces. It has little (nothing) to do with global warming. Not at all. All local warming is added on top of the base temperature. If we assume that the sun shines 1kW heat/m2, then 1GW of waste heat is enough to double the amount of energy for a square kilometer or increasing the amount of heat with 10% for ten square kilometers. And it doesn't take too much temperature changes to drastically change the situation for animals and plants. If you have 2 degrees global warming, then you have a 2 degree smaller window allowed for local warming. And, well, basically any large heat-based power plant dumps several gigawatts of heat into the environment, somehow. Exactly. Which is a reason why you have to care about the problem. Compare with hydropower - without the power plant, the energy in the water would still be converted to heat. In that case, we are "harvesting" the energy that the nature is already busy converting to heat. If you use fusion power plants to _replace_ coal-, oil- and gas-burning power plants, you'll slow down or even eliminate AGW. We are a long way from being able to build efficient battery-powered vehicles - especially airplanes. Electricity production isn't the only source of NOx and particle pollution. |
