Comments by "" (@ronjon7942) on "Google’s Billion Dollar Gamble: You Won't Believe What it is!" video.

I’m sure Google’s attorneys and accountants are also keeping a lookout for any favorable subsidies…especially from this administration. I’d wager they have some ‘campaign contributions’ to pay back.
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@worldadventureman Ha. Good1.
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Hey, quit making sense.
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Mmmm, well, we Arizonans better pick that up a bit, seeing how farmers and rural locations need to drill up to 1000 feet to reach the fossil water aquifers. At least one basin is down 2000 feet. In almost all cases, ground water is being removed at a greater rate than it’s being replenished. Statewide, we’re in a negative balance situation with all aquifers continuing to shrink as we need to drill deeper to pump out what is needed…or, tragically, what is desired. At least we have policies in place such that we make an effort to replenish groundwater reservoirs, but the aquifers are losing. No aquifers have a net positive recharge.
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Sure. On a Star Trek episode. I personally don’t have enough property to satisfy all my energy requirements, plus I still need a patch to let my dogs out. Not sure I want to purchase, install, maintain, and upgrade my ‘strategically durable’ solar contraption when I can just flip a switch and use power from a grid that has been 99.999999% reliable and available. Sorry for being cynical, but these pie in the sky ideas spewed with little awareness of regional, state, and national scope realities, along with financial ramifications, actual economic benefits, what additional bureaucracies will the DOE create to manage this distributed nightmare, and of who or what is going to pay for ANOTHER redundant power grid? I’m not certain how it makes sense to fund and build a brand new supplement to something that mainly works well? Why not invest in buttressing the grid we have? Why not look at instead investing the $tens of billions into something practical, proven, better, and ultimately required when the anti nuke activists die off, hostile bureaucrats from regulatory agencies retire (and/or die off), and a pro nuclear political and social will take over because eventually fossil fuels will become too expensive and solar and wind still won’t make economic or technical sense as a primary energy source? Whatever, sorry - now I’m just rambling.
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@arivaldarivald3212 Except that rain falls elsewhere from whence it evaporated, so CA almost loses twice…or maybe once and a half.
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⁠Unseen cost? We’ve been using nuclear since the ‘50s! The Phoenix area runs on nuclear from the plant at Palo Verde! France runs its entire national power grid off nuclear! There are no ‘unseen’ costs; there is only social and political ignorance over it, along with stupidly suffocating regulations forcing companies to take 4x and 5x as long to build a nuclear power plant and bring it online, along with driving up the cost 10-fold. And comparing nuclear with solar based on land area is…is…is ludicrous. Really. The solar farm will likely have a millionth the power output of a nuclear power station, is absolutely not maintenance free, unsuitable for continuous use by a huge metropolitan region, requires inefficient and absurdly expensive supporting infrastructure, and is economically unviable at large scale. And the manufacture of the complete solar infrastructure is about as far removed from being so-called green as a coal mining and burning operation. Geez, what pretty-picture, John Kerry brochure have you stumbled across?
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Ya, that’s a generous use of the word ‘hugely.’ It’s not like Yellowstone’s gonna crack open and cause the world-ending super volcano.
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Mmmm, well, we Arizonans better pick that up a bit, seeing how farmers and rural locations need to drill up to 1000 feet to reach the fossil water aquifers. At least one basin is down 2000 feet. In almost all cases, ground water is being removed at a greater rate than it’s being replenished. Statewide, we’re in a negative balance situation with all aquifers continuing to shrink as we need to drill deeper to pump out what is needed…or, tragically, what is desired. At least we have policies in place such that we make an effort to replenish groundwater reservoirs, but the aquifers are losing. No aquifers have a net positive recharge.
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What?? The core?? Earth’s core??
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@emmanuelgutierrez8616 Unseen cost? We’ve been using nuclear since the ‘50s! The Phoenix area runs on nuclear from the plant at Palo Verde! France runs its entire national power grid off nuclear! There are no ‘unseen’ costs; there is only social and political ignorance over it, along with stupidly suffocating regulations forcing companies to take 4x and 5x as long to build a nuclear power plant and bring it online, along with driving up the cost 10-fold. And comparing nuclear with solar based on land area is…is…is ludicrous. Really. The solar farm will likely have a millionth the power output of a nuclear power station, is absolutely not maintenance free, unsuitable for continuous use by a huge metropolitan region, requires inefficient and absurdly expensive supporting infrastructure, and is economically unviable at large scale. And the manufacture of the complete solar infrastructure is about as far removed from being so-called green as a coal mining and burning operation. Geez, what pretty-picture, John Kerry brochure have you stumbled across?
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@djr2078 Run out of room? What? ALL of the high level radioactive waste in the WORLD can be contained in an area smaller than a football field. No one cares about storing the low level stuff, bc it half-lifes fairly quickly…within a lifetime. This includes garbage like protective clothing, etc. Not that it matters with respect to the amount stored, but only a fraction of the nuclear fuel is used…like under 10%, so it could be reprocessed and reused when it becomes cost effective to do so. To say storing high level nuclear waste is unsustainable because of all the space it consumes means only that you need to take a drive across America. Space and room is not anything we are lacking. Besides, the space used to store dangerous petrochemicals, end of life solar panels, and old wind turbine blades is factors of millions greater than all the space needed for all the nuclear materials we’ll need to store, probably forever. I hope you were just being sarcastic.
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@gordybishop2375 When you learn about the ACTUAL harm, lives lost, the lack of follow on cancer, and environmental impact of ALL accidents related to nuclear, it’s negligible, even accounting for Chernobyl. The Soviet Union and Russia have destroyed their country’s environment in so many ways, at so many locations, Chernobyl should have been a catastrophe - this is a country that couldn’t even decommission their nuclear submarine fleet and their nuclear weapons…America had to do it. Russia actually decommissioned and disposed of some ship reactors by literally pushing them overboard into surrounding seas in the North - and right off their coastlines. Those thugs had and have no business playing with atoms. When Japan had their issue with the earthquake/tsunami, not one person was injured or killed by, or exposed to, fissile material or radiation. 100s were killed, some due to the earthquake, but mostly by panic, and relocating sick and elderly people from the area to ‘someplace safer.’ Ignorance, and misinformation and outright lies by activists, along with irrational social fears, and competing interests and hostile political agendas are the true problems nuclear must overcome. There are no unknown engineering problems…challenges, sure, but nothing insurmountable and nothing that hasn’t already been done or demonstrated before.
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I bet Google’s gazillion servers and bajillion data centers weren’t and aren’t manufactured using so-called renewables. Also, the conductor cables from the redundant grids to each data center are large, like two or more inches in diameter large; and HVAC chillers and those gazillion servers use a ton of always-on, 7x24x365 electricity. I bet Google’d need a solar farm the size of the Sahara Desert to keep that equipment running in every one of their data centers on the planet. For some context, I installed some point of sale computers at a small McDonald’s inside a mall. The incoming power conductors to run the electric grills and deep fryers in this SINGLE location were over FOUR inches in diameter. That’s a boatload of continuous electricity for a 2000 square foot franchise. Solar power that, Google! Now interpolate that with a single 200,000 to 1,000,000 square foot data centers with over 125,000 servers EACH, with each building having anywhere from 20 to 150 HVAC chillers. Data centers each consume between 50 and 100 MegaWatts. In 2015, Google reported the entire organization used around 6 TeraWatt hours of power. I’m thinking there’s some fine print in this lofty claim…something similar to the usual 20-page EULA tech companies are so famous for. Not to be cynical, but this is the company that pretends to respect my privacy, yet somehow manages to deliver me mental health advertisements whenever my crazy ex-girlfriend sends me an email.
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