chris_va

oo, fermi estimate time!

Typical 50% RH at ground level is ~7g/kg air, air is roughly 1kg/m^3, so between the surface and the planetary boundary layer (let's say 1km) is about 7L of water per m^2 of surface. Moving along at ~3m/s means 21L/s passes by each meter of fence line.

PBL probably mixes after about 50km, so it takes ~5 hours to normalize after you pull out water at ~5 knot wind speed. If you want to not make a dent, means you can pull less than 1L per m^2 per hour, or about 8m^3 pear, which is about 8x the yearly requirement for farmland.

So, you can irrigate a farm and your neighbors would mostly be fine.

(math not checked)

Landlords are competing with each other, and renters can take their next best alternative. If everything gets strictly more expensive, the next best alternative is not necessarily any cheaper...

I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.

And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).

Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.

My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.

never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere

Don't forget the not-actually-Open-no-longer-a-non-profit history

well let's hope we don't cover him

I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN.

Learning to hack something together in high school using the latest technology (vacuum tubes, radios, microprocessors, web/javascript) has been a common theme in the tech world for generations. With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?

I know extensive thought goes into filters in front of the camera and the lighting, but one can probably change the bayer filter transmission function to get them to match better (and maybe add one or two channels at the cost of shot noise).

I see this in industrial cameras, do you know if any filmmakers use non standard Bayer filters?

GAO's task is a bit broader, no?

Yeah. I don't think the conclusion is necessarily wrong or that they shouldn't have investigated, but I also think the cost to the taxpayers might increase due to the underlying nuance. The report implies that the guidelines are correct, but doesn't really quantify the counterfactual.

Again, devil's advocate

To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion.

The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.

Only if there is a local glass processing facility + consumer (e.g. large brewery, etc) is it worthwhile.

It's really the alkalinity (e.g. the Mg++ or Ca++), which silicate rocks often have (but technically not limited to silicates).

As an aside, we need to dissolve roughly one large mountain into the mix layer (top ~50m) of the ocean to have it fully take up atmospheric CO2. Without dissolving, the reaction is very slow (co2 in atmosphere => slightly lower pH rain => reaction with mostly passivated rock + erosion).