Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "Storing Freshwater In The Salty Sea" video.

  1.  @megalonoobiacinc4863  Pollution? No. I would say pollution is something that you release into the environment uncontained, and i don't anticipate substantial release like that in the future, and to a small extent, radioactive material is just naturally present in the environment, so as long as you stay well under this order of magnitude, it's fine - and also to be considered that burning coal releases radioactive pollution as well. Contained waste products that need long term management is what you might be thinking of. Ultimately the consensus has emerged that you can just dig a deep enough hole in some vaguely stable rock and bury the previously stabilised stuff in there, and then forget about it and it's absolutely fine long term without reservations, at least at foreseeable future scale of waste production (you possibly can't just scale it up endlessly); but then there's NIMBYs. Other solutions include further use of what is currently waste but there are political roadblocks as well. Ultimately current form of nuclear power is a temporary measure, to hold us over for the maybe next sub 50 years until we figure something out. As far as temporary measures go, i'd say it's pretty decent as long as it isn't the only hydrocarbon independence measure taken but part of a broader strategy. It's also a temporary measure because we're going to run out of uranium, so our potentially limited ability to safely entomb waste is well balanced by the raw resource being limited in the first place. So waste isn't really a problem.
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  2. Oof that topic. Unfortunately the research is reeeeally shaky, and the public understanding of it is even worse. Odds are, if you've heard of microplastics, the only thing you've heard is that you eat 5g worth of plastic every week in form of microplastics. It seemed like it required a little explanation to me, so i followed where it came from. The figure actually comes from a private report done to the WWF Singapore by scientists of University of Newcastle AU. Then, WWF produced pamphlets with the wording that people "could be ingesting approximately 5 grams of plastic every week on average". Subsequently the scientists, Kala Senathirajah et al produced their own paper with the underlying methods and conclusions. The paper has two halves basically, first they estimate the number of particles an average human ingests, and the sources and pathways of it, it's meta-study or a survey of existing research and it's actually pretty good, it comes up with a figure of 2000 particles a week with a confidence window of an order of magnitude. Continued in the next comment because i'm running out of comment length.
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  3. Continued... The second half of the paper estimates the weight then, by fitting different solid shapes of up to 1mm in size (wat) to the number of particles, and... well it's really a load of handwaving at that point. The study authors themselves give their confidence range of between approximately 0.1g/week and 5.6g/week, with their best-effort estimate being 0.7g/week. And given their methods, i think they are undercounting their confidence interval, i think it's much worse than that, with several orders of magnitude of actual confidence. Really with existing data, no good statement could be made on how much plastic in terms of weight one ingests. That WWF chose to run with a 5g figure should tell you something. They presumably requested this estimate and then they took something near to the upper bound and ran with it, it's purely a scare tactic to drum up more funding. Which i'm a little ambivalent on, given yeah more funding is needed; but i wouldn't entrust WWF with it. It erodes the public trust into science and eco activism both, since it's fundamentally a dishonest tactic; someone at WWF will pat themselves on the back for a successful campaign, for winning a battle, while edging closer to lose the war. I also think lack of good weight data is not entirely a coincidence, due to limited relevance of bulk weight of small particulate, as environmental erosion and chemical interaction are surface based. For weight, what you want to know is how much (macro)plastic you put into the ocean, and that's hardly a secret. Microscopic surface estimates are difficult, but particle count might just be a good enough proxy. Just not for weight. Like you request useless data, you get useless conclusions.
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