[Jistern]

>> I appreciate your style of acknowledging the points you agree on even as you dispute other statements.

Thanks. Hacker News is full of arrogant, ignorant engineers whom I despise. I’m brash, harsh, and opinionated. I have a take-no-prisoners style of arguing . Nonetheless, I’m neither arrogant nor ignorant. Really. I’m not.

I carefully consider my interlocutor’s arguments, and I readily admit when I have made a mistake or, gasp, actually been w-r-o-n-g. I don’t argue to win; I argue to learn. My goal isn’t to persuade my interlocutor; rather, my goal is to ascertain the truth.

Sure, these seem “simple and obvious”, yet, in reality, relatively few people on Hacker News actually engage their interlocutors in such a fashion.

Ironically, despite being a “non-engineer” I’m generally far more rigorous in applying the scientific method than most of the Hacker News hoi polloi. Furthermore, although I know it seems incredible (by which I mean “lacking credibility”, not “wow, man, that’s incredible”), yet as a non-engineer I’m better at engineering than most engineers I’ve worked with. Nope. That’s not arrogance; that’s an accurate assessment.

Frankly, that was a very depressing observation to me when I first realized it because I don’t enjoy engineering, and because I don’t consider myself to be good at engineering.

Furthermore, I am tired of embarrassing engineers whom I work with. It’s not fun for me; it’s a hassle. And, of course, they hate it. Engineers typically want to be right to satisfy their egos; whereas, I almost invariably want the products they create to work properly for my customers. In other words, they typically engage in self-righteousness; whereas, I’m focused on truth-seeking. Self-righteousness and truth-seeking are generally, although not always, mutually exclusive.

By the way, I’m not claiming to be selfless. I’m not. I like to learn.

I often need to expose many of the “theories” engineers proffer to me as little more than wishful thinking (a house of cards). It’s annoying and time-consuming. They become myopically focused on some bad technological solution; I want a good solution. I am barely interested in technology per se. To me technology (such as software applications) are like a bunch of hammers, screwdrivers, and chisels.

But if I don’t disabuse them of the falsehoods they are clinging to, they will almost invariably provide code to me that proves Weinberg’s Second Law: “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”

>> In this spirit:

>> Solar panel lifetime is approx ~20 years.

I've read figures like that too. Therefore, I'll grant you that point.

>> Is the e-waste from solar panels a pollutant?

Sheesh. Please stop nitpicking. From what I’ve read, solar panels can easily be produced to be over 90% "recyclable." Why are their quotes around the word recyclable?

Because recycle means this, "return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclic process." In reality, everything can be recycled. But what is commonly meant by the term is "easily recycled."

No. I'm not nitpicking. I remember complaining to one of the two excellent engineers I've ever had the privilege to work with about plastic going into landfills where it would sit for thousands of years before decomposing. He calmly looked at me… like I was a complete and total idiot. That look is hard for me to forget, although it’s probably been 15 years.

He simply said something like, "You know, one day robots will go down into landfills and retrieve everything that is useful. It's just a matter of time." That hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized instantly he was right, and that I was wrong. It was then that I began to look at landfills like, say, iron mines instead of terrible places which should be minimized and avoided.

In other words, when we toss stuff into a landfill, we are merely creating a new type of mine. Obviously, cases where, say , groundwater is being polluted, would be problematic (and should be avoided). Nonetheless, normally a landfill is just a man-made mine in my mind. (alliteration unintentional).

Soon after that conversation I lost almost all interest in the entire concept of “worrying about recycling everything” because I realized that most of the stuff that is valuable in the landfills will probably be recycled in 100 or 200 or 500 years. As for the stuff that isn’t valuable in landfills, it will simply remain in the ground, like over 99% of the stuff that is sitting in the ground around the world.

>> If not, is the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor a pollutant? If so, how do you reconcile the apparently inconsistent position that solar is non-polluting but nuclear is not?

I don’t intend to answer those questions directly, but I hope I will indirectly. My problem with nuclear power plants used to, say, produce electricity for cities (as opposed to say, “nuclear power plants” to power US navy submarines) has nothing whatsoever to do with pollution per se.

I don't care much about nuclear waste one way or another. It's simply something that needs to be dealt with. In other words, I view nuclear waste as a cost, not a boogeyman. Nuclear waste is no big deal in my eyes. I don’t mind burying nuclear waste in some mountain somewhere until, say, we find some bacteria that will gobble it all up and render it harmless.

My problem with nuclear power plants has to do with cost: they are too expensive compared to solar and wind today. Furthermore, solar and wind look like they will keep dropping in price.

If nuclear were significantly cheaper than solar and wind, I'd very probably be advocating for nuclear. The dangers associated with nuclear are overblown by the general public, but they are real nonetheless. Therefore, at the same price point, I’d pick solar and wind over nuclear.

But these days, solar and wind are much cheaper than nuclear power plants. Therefore, building new nuclear power plants isn’t a feasible option for, say, providing electricity to a city.

These days any working engineer who generally advocates, say, constructing nuclear power plants to generate electricity for cities, is almost certainly a bad engineer. There might be some exceptions, but I don’t know of any.

Sure, in 10, or 20, or 30 years from now a new form of nuclear energy might produce electricity cheaper than wind and solar. I realize that. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Nuclear power has a lot of promise.

The main point you should focus regarding energy production in this: we are on the cusp of cheap, readily available electricity. That matters; that matters, a lot. As you might know, in 1850 steel was expensive; yet by 1870 it had become cheap. As a result skyscrapers started appearing in cities such as Chicago, New York, Rotterdam, and Turin. The Romans and the Japanese had steel. But it was super, super, super expensive compared to wood and bricks. (Oh, wait, what’s that you say? The Romans had famous concrete too? Huh. Well, I guess you learn something every day).

Cheap electricity is poised to change the world, much like cheap steel did about 150 or so years ago. How that electricity is produced doesn’t actually matter much for engineering projects. For example, when the Bessemer process was replaced by the Basic oxygen steelmaking process, I doubt many structural engineers at the time cared much about the technology. What they probably cared much about was obtaining cheap steel that met their requirements.

Finally, here is the most important point of all for you. (Yes, I saved the best for last). Engineers often become sooooo infatuated with “their toys” (their preferred technology) that they often become extremely biased and unscientific. I have excoriated many engineers for lying to me about their preferred technology.

No, I am not exaggerating. They lied to me; and I did indeed excoriate them. My tongue lashings were necessary because engineers often act like helpless drug addicts when they are enthralled with a piece of technology. They will “lie, cheat, and steal” to use what, to me, is a mere widget (tool).

Again, I am not exaggerating; I’ve lost a lot of time and money when working with engineers who have flat out lied to me in order to use their favorite technology, although it was obviously the wrong technology for the job.

Bring on the downvotes… cowards!

[ncmncm]

Funny, I once made almost the same remark as your "excellent engineer" to a real mining engineer, and he looked at me the same way as yours did you. Mining, he explained, is about getting out ore as nearly uniform in composition as possible, and designing a simple process to separate the tailings from the valuable part, and then applying a maximally simple chemical treatment to the latter, yielding product. A landfill is worst case for mining: everything is maximally diluted, and totally non-uniform.

That said, plastic in a landfill is anyway well sequestered. So, I thought there was no point in trying to recycle plastic. But I have been disabused, again: making plastic from petroleum tar releases many times as much carbon into the air as is contained in the plastic, and much more than recycling would. So, if we must have plastic, it is better if it comes from a recycle bin, even if the tar it would otherwise be made from will just end up cracked and burned for bunker fuel.

That said, plastic we put in the recycling bin generally just goes straight into the landfill anyway, but costs manual handling by the recycling service in between.

So it is hard to draw any sort of lesson about what to do with plastic trash. But anyway glass of all colors can be very efficiently turned into wall insulation and other stuff.

The Roman concrete we find in still-intact structures has certain desirable qualities, such as self-healing fractures, and getting stronger with exposure to seawater, but is 1/10 as strong as modern concrete. Their early concrete lacked the better qualities of later formulations.