mosiacmango

You only need one.

That’s almost a selling point, albeit a painful one. You can build these for cheaper than a stick frame, if you have the physicality and time to do so. Otherwise its going to pricier.

It only prevents it when it’s there.

Thr cardboard/newspaper prevents germination of new weeds, and blocks off light from old weeds, generally killing them.

I used this to reclaim a wild patch into a garden bed with cardboard and pine needles as mulch. Took a few months, but it even killed some blackbeery brambles. They came the fuck back of course, but it was enough to get the patch going right.

Dont use colorful or waxed cardboard, and remove all tape. Its annoying, but better than picking it out of the garden later.

That’s a solid critique. We can math it out more.

So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.

For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.

So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.

The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.

So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.

The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.

For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.

So an equivalent in solar power generation/storage vs nuclear is about 7x faster and 1/8th the cost than nuclear.

HVDC cables don’t have the same losses as the more common AC cables.

Indeed, but a lot of earthship building is just rough manual labor useing cheap or free materials. It doesn’t take specialized tools, although they will save you time.

Effort is something the poor have to supply much more of than the rich to reach a steady state, but with the above design its possible instead of out of reach.

For anyone with a work ethic but more time than money, an earthship is a stunningly efficient passive home designed in the 70s that uses rammed earth tires covered with adobe as walls, thermal mass to maintain heat, and giant windows to bring in light. The roof is designed to drain into water cisterns, and grey water (kitchen, bathroom sink) is used to water crops grown inside a beautiful inner garden. Its fully ready to be integrated with PV.

Here’s an example if you want to see one of the many that people have built. Here is some more analysis of the viability.

The tooling is likely a lot better now, ironically because of oil and gas companies developing advanced drilling tools for fracking.

Some of those ex O&G employees are working on "geothermal anywhere" projects with that tooling, some of which are live now.

The drilling is limited to the making the channels for water flow. They are using maneuverable fracking drills and tools to get to the depths they need. They then inject water for use in the heating loop. This water should be used continuously, although it a unclear if it will need to be topped up.

Some of these geothermal startups are creating “natural” cracks via drilling to circulate water, while others are using the drilling to place fixed piping. The latter is hard, more expensive and likely more efficient. The company in the article is doing the former if Im not mistaken.

Cost, probably. If you only have 200 million, you can’t build 500 million worth of towers.

Could be transmission line limits too. Improving those can be its own project.

Roughly 250,000 houses of power.

Im only referring to raw human survivability.

Whether this amount of growing space could produce enough calories per year to keep 1 human at “barely alive or better” caloric input.

In my estimate, you would need to devote most of the land to potatoes, and rely on eggs, rabbit meat and likely some wild foraging for the rest. It probably is feasible if you do the above.

You might be able to survive if you grow just potatoes in those 8 beds and feed the 6 laying hens on weeds and scraps from the other plants.

You can also convert 3, the “tea herbs,” into more potato beds.

Direct archive link, as the above takes you to the save page.

My phone pushes over the air updates every couple of months. These have included android 13 and 14, and various patches.

Android updates aren’t something you have to go and get, they come to you. Having the long term support means your phone will always have the latest user features and security improvements, even for non technical users. People can and do install these all the time.

Its free, open source software folks. Its fine to not be happy about a projects direction, but these comments are really treading the “I payed them $0 and I demand my moneys worth!” line.

He spent 4 months working on another free, open source project bexause he wanted to. That’s perfectly fair on his part. Working for $0 on things you want to work on is a sane and basic right we all have. The work may even help lemmy in an as yet unknown way.

You are as equally free as the lemmy dev to work on moderation tools. The fact that you have put in the same amount of work as the dev should tamp down the criticism a ways.

Now if you donate to the lemmy devs directly, fire away. If you want to contribute directly, Rust is an excellent programming language that fits very well with the solarpunk ethos. It’s incredibly efficient, so code uses less power than alternates, it’s memory safe, so it by default eliminates 75% of the most common computer bugs, leading to safety, stability and reliability of the products it runs on, and its community is enthusiastic, which should ensure its longevity for decades to come. Learning it might be a good avenue if you want to help lemmy.