It sounds like you may be comparing the population density of a large, diluted area and not the downtown areas alone.
It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings.
Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.
I got a trash can with a lid for all my small parts and a shop vac nearby to clean out the catch tray of the laser after I cut something smelly.
I also upgraded my exhaust fan to make sure nothing got into the room. I got a variable speed DC fan so that I can leave it on a low speed after cutting something smelly to help the smell go outside until it dissipates.
I had the most issues with smell when I was using cheap wood from home Depot. When I switched to real Baltic birch the smell wasn't as bad so I think the other stuff had chemicals in it.
Acrylic still smells bad but it dissipates quickly.
Besides the countless examples of the US directly destroying the environment and wiping out entire species, the modern issue is that the US and much of Europe overconsume and import all of these goods and energy which means that they export the pollution and environmental damage to other countries, hiding the problem out of sight.
China is only such a large polluter because it is manufacturing everything for the entire world. All of our nice living conditions in the US and Europe come at the expense of developing nations. Poor factory conditions, rampant air, water, and ground pollution, deforestation, poverty. These are pushed onto every nation below it in the supply chain.
I disagree with this sentiment. China is large polluter because it chooses to ignore environmental damaged because it does allow it to have large profit and compete in the international market where competing producers from other countries are bound by more strict environmental laws and are unable to compete on the fair ground.
Is fighting climate change a waste of money? Even if it turns out to be more expensive than burning coal, isn't this still a better outcome when they need to increase electricity supply anyways? This is a good example of putting green energy above corporate profits which capitalist nations struggle with.
Why cherry pick a single bad thing from over 60 years ago? Is that supposed to discredit all actions by the country? One could find just as many examples, if not more, of the US destroying the ecosystem in that same time period.
The US is held back by corporations that demand ever increasing profits and by political parties that roadblock each other such that it cannot focus any substantial effort on meaningful initiatives for change.
I imagine the reason to cherry pick a single bad thing is because the list of all of them would be too long to be of practical use.
On the other hand, I agree that the person you're responding to didn't make a strong argument by posting something unrelated to solar energy manufacturing and deployment. No more than you did by responding with "but what about the USA...". Neither are helpful, salient, or convincing.
I thought this headline would be cause for celebration and I'm just disappointed to see so many negative comments that reduce the accomplishment down to red scare style jabs.
I only pointed back at the US to help reframe the situation in readers' minds who are mostly US based. The list of environmental damage by the US would also be too long to list so it seems unfair to have comments presenting 1 side without mentioning the other.
As for parties, well that's not a problem. This is by design. U.S. political system is the way it is to prevent tyranny - not to provide the most efficient or even effective government. The Founding Fathers understood it and it was an acceptable tradeoff. Nothing in America assumes or expects a functioning government able to get things done, society and business exists pretty much on it's own. It's the best thing government can do - do nothing, and provide a good shitshow for the people to watch. A healthy society doesn't need government to babysit it.
Corporations can't "demand" profits, profits are what the market conditions form.
Renewable energy will work in America once it makes more money than fossil fuels for the same input. Business in the U.S. is almost not susceptible to political shit.
I get that the US system was supposed to do all that in theory, but in practice it has been structured to prevent citizens from having any control over anything. It's a form of tyranny masquerading as democracy. Without major reform, we are stuck with whatever politicians these 2 parties put before us and our only choice is the lesser of 2 evils. These parties have similar interests to continue the current, flawed, system and so we are powerless to enact any change.
"Business in the U.S. is almost not susceptible to political shit. "
That's because capitalists control politics. Their profits are more important than social wellbeing.
> Why cherry pick a single bad thing from over 60 years ago?
It was the one I remembered first. Solar panels can be one good thing and the dead sparrows and famine can be one bad ting, and they can balance each out perhaps?
> Is that supposed to discredit all actions by the country?
I didn't say or think of it that way, but you seem to. So, what do you think that action and the following famine exemplifies or points to?
My response was mainly tongue in cheek to the GP's point that communists are somehow the paragon or efficiency and no bullshit attitude.
> The US is held back by corporations that demand ever increasing profits and by political parties that roadblock each other such that it cannot focus any substantial effort on meaningful initiatives for change.
Yeah no doubt. I wonder what a good way forward is there?
Sorry to be combative, maybe I missed the tongue-in-cheek. My response was mostly because your comment took a headline which should be good news for the world and appeared to frame it negatively just because of their political system.
Yes, that happened and it was clearly bad science but scientists know better now. During the same time period, the US was spraying DDT across the country killing off many species including its own bald eagles. I'm still unclear what this has to do with modern China and solar initiatives.
I imagined it to be similar to how some "blue collar" professions attract mostly men who openly discuss women in sexual ways with each other while at work and will cat-call a pretty woman walking by.
Likewise, a group of business men in suites are less likely to engage in this behavior. It's impossible for the unicyclist to measure people's class standing but you can get a lot of context clues by their appearance and behavior. Maybe it includes some bias, but for the purpose of logging all interesting responses I thought it was approximate enough.
> I imagined it to be similar to how some "blue collar" professions attract mostly men who openly discuss women in sexual ways with each other while at work and will cat-call a pretty woman walking by.
Bro if you're trying to count those responses by class you can't use those same responses to put them into the bins in the first place, and reproducing a classist stereotype for no reason doesn't make the point any more valid.
Rumor is that the Google Pixel 9 series releasing this fall will include a "regular" size version of the Pro model with all the features of the larger model.
It will supposedly be about the size of the regular Pixel 7 which is reasonable size but not as compact as something like the Pixel 2.
I hope that if it sells well it'll encourage them to make more premium small phones.
The issue is mostly with our refining capabilities. Helium is mixed with natural gas as it travels from wells to compressor stations which push it down the pipeline to the refinery for separation. There are only 14 refineries in the world set up to capture helium, half of which are in the United States.
Building new refineries can take decades and is extremely expensive. The refinery and wells also must be located near radioactive reserves which decay and produce the helium.
You're absolutely right about party balloons not being an existential threat. There are two types of Helium for commercial sale: balloon-grade and Ultra High Purity Grade. Balloon grade Helium is used strictly for balloons and is not adequate to be used as a shielding gas or in any medical capacity. Ultra High Purity Grade has undergone the scrubbing process after extraction, and is safe for welding, industrial and medical applications.
The idea of "balloon-grade" led me down a rabbit hole. It seems that there are many defined grades of He with the majority being grade 5 (99.999% purity, 2 steps down from the purest) and the majority of He used, including in balloons is grade 5 due to ease of transporting just one grade. That made it cheaper to use grade 5 for party balloons than artificially reducing the quality.
In the last few years there has been more low quality balloon grade (97.5%
purity) produced by refineries in the US, increasing the availability and reducing the cost.
you're not going to save much cost by doing that 99 -> 97% isnt much difference in helium. the difficulty is not in the quantity of helium but the purity. if you dont care much about the purity it will be cheaper to produce.
Isn't the resource being consumed the same though? I imagine ultra high grade is just more refined? Or is the balloon grade gas not economically refinable to the pure gas?
Not just non-economical, but like almost all purification processes you will be producing balloon grade from the production of the ultra pure gas. Intrinsicly there will be helium that you can't separate from the other gasses that you removed from the helium.
Some non-zero remainder is all but inevitable, but even if your refining process yields 1 part pure to 99 parts mixed, after N steps you have 1 - (0.99) ^ N percent pure gas out of the whole, right?
So the ratio is somewhat arbitrarily (up to whatever the limit of your refining process is).
Unfortunately that doesn't usually hold out because as things get closer but not quite to the purity you need, you tend to need longer times, larger surfaces areas, higher temps, etc. in order to continue the process. You tend to hit spots during purification where you end up with an Azetrope (or similar for gasses) where you can't do a lot of the same techniques anymore because the impurities and the gas you want end up behaving the same at that concentration. At that point you have to start looking at adding catalysts or other chemical reactions to destroy or transform the impurities so that you can remove the end products from those reactions. But as you have less and less of the impurities it then ends up harder to target them to purify further. It's a nasty cycle that can drive costs up exponentially in terms of reagents, dollars, time and energy needed to do the purification. Ethyl Alcohol is a fun little rabbit hole to look at, at ~95% purity it forms an azetrope with water and you can no longer distill off the water or alcohol separately and have to resort to chemical or other means to get further purity. That's why you usually end up with other alcohols as a byproduct when purifying further (methanol in particular, since it disrupts the azetrope and lets you boil things off) or have to take rather expensive methods that remove the water.
This assumes that the refining process works the same no matter what the initial concentration is. (Don't know if it's true or not, but it's an unstated assumption.)
Balloon gas is already 99% helium. There’s not that much of it (one source is apparently as a byproduct of filling pure helium containers) and reprocessing it is not economical.
This take may be way off base but instead of trying to avoid 100% of nuclear incidents, shouldn't we be comparing the relative risk of nuclear environmental damage to the guaranteed and ongoing environmental and climate damage done by burning 200 million tonnes of heavy oil every year?
Maybe a few sunken nuclear reactors is already a better alternative? Again, I may be completely wrong, just seems like something that isn't being discussed.
In an ideal world, maybe so. But we haven't managed to clear the hurdle for ground-based power production so upping the ante to something that can sink would be even more challenging.
The "smeared along a beach or headland" ones are more worrying. What if the storm gets the reactor above the water line? What if a houthi anti ship missile wrecks/ignites the reactor compartment? What if armed men burst out of some of the 20000+ containers and deliberately try to engineer a disaster?
The golden ray (a car transporter) capsized in calm waters in a sheltered bay and the cleanup cost $850m. Fukishima is a twelve figure number.
It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings.
Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.