#waste coal

[appalachianfuturism]

“Firepoint Energy Inc, a Wyoming C-Corp startup with principal offices opening in Pennsylvania and Texas, announces the discovery of more than $130 billion in rare earth minerals in waste coal samples collected from nine locations in Pennsylvania.

The test results confirmed by Conti Labs in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania prove that the waste coal samples contained dozens of critical rare earth elements (REEs), including neodymium, dysprosium, europium, lithium praseodymium, and terbium. All of these minerals have been declared to be critical to the U.S. economy and national security per the Energy Act of 2020…”

[edgylesbiangurl]

They're the IT girls of Nu metal to me

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

Man, what I wouldn't give for an Invincible-style Spidey series. We could have perfection if they would just hand it over. But alas. You wouldn't even have to change much either, Peter and Mark are basically the same dude. Some more redraws below cause I had fun with this one.

But for real this is like my last one. Maybe I'll do another Conner AU one when season 3 comes out but then idk. These are fun but I'd rather not trace-redraw with my poor mangled finger and instead focus on like developing my own art and whatnot. Anyways uh HEY LOOK SFPIBER-BAM

[succubuschic]

rayna foss and aimee echo for kerrang

[bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue]

Ah yes, I love The Killers’ Christmas singles:

hey what if we released a Christmas single? hohoho just kidding…unless? 👀

HOMICIDAL SANTA

reflections on what it must have been like to be the stepfather of the Son of God, struggling with the fame and having a crisis of identity and faith

WE HIRED A GODDAMN MARIACHI BAND AND YOU ARE GOING TO LIKE IT

haunting, but ultimately uplifting and life-affirming, piece referencing characters of Old Hollywood reckoning with death as the narrator struggles to get his life back

OH BILL ����I SHAN’T 💃🏼 FORGET YA! 🤠 AND I ✨OFTENTIMES 🎁 RECALL! 💭 THAT LIVELY 🕺 GAITED ‼️ SOIRÉE! 👯‍♀️ THE COWBOYS’ 🤠 CHRISTMAS 🎄 BALL!!! 🌟

HOMICIDAL SANTA 2: HE’S EVEN MORE HOMICIDAL THIS TIME

I’m alone on Christmas and also a struggling actor and sad

reflections on what it must have been like to be, uh…a lump of coal…at the North Pole…named Joel

HOMICIDAL SANTA 3: REPENTANT SANTA⁉️

oh shit we need a closer for our compilation album of Christmas songs, uh…here take this and be done with it

[meowmeowmessi]

the entire club and their fanbase are a joke LMAOOOO

[randgugotur-6]

July 3, 1998

On this day twenty six years ago Ozzfest ‘98 kicked off its North America leg of its tour with the first of two shows in Holmdel, NJ. The lineup included Megadeth, Tool, Limp Bizkit and of course Ozzy on the main stage. Motörhead, System Of A Down, the Melvins and others played the second stage. The North America tour covered only eighteen shows.

Did you go to any of these shows?

[mageofminge]

do you guys ever have nightmares about getting a fish tank only for the fish to die within the day you get it due to some really horrible and also easy to avoid errors?

[oograths-pizza-and-chill]

They made a SPACE SUIT FOR BIRDS!?

[lavendertarot]

Just finished Howl's moving castle (the book) and that one post wasn't lying. Howwell is really welsh and it is one of the funniest parts of it

[starfieldcanvas]

it could still be relevant information if there had been a large spike in consumption since the introduction of commercial generative AI, but santa clara county hasn't put out energy consumption numbers for 2023 or 2024 yet so i can't actually tell.

however, if you ask santa clara why its energy utility bills are going up, they will specifically tell you it is because they're upgrading the local energy grid for improved reliability and it has fuck-all to do with increased energy consumption:

long-term, yes, it does seem likely that AI will consume way more power than it's worth, both in a subjective sense and in a financial sense (as even the financially-motivated Goldman Sachs has noted) but right now? it will not be noticeably impacting anywhere that already had high energy draw and a lot of data centers, like silicon valley. california water has been getting more expensive every single year since the droughts started well over a decade ago; AI is only a fraction of the water misuse we're dealing with here, and it's almost certainly a mistake to focus your ire there instead of on far more impactful problems like agricultural overuse.

Articles about AI causing the US to backslide on coal and gas are behind a lot of different paywalls, but after digging through multiple Futurism articles on AI to Bloomberg to the Sierra Club, I found the Sierra Club's report from October 2022—an entire month before ChatGPT went live—and the Sierra Club is extremely clear that even then, many of the US energy companies who had promised to close gas and coal plants had in fact been talking out of their asses and had made no significant progress towards shutting down anything!

We assigned a score to each utility based on its plans to retire coal, build new clean energy, and not build new gas plants. The aggregate score for all companies studied this year was 21 out of 100 — or a D — up just 4 points from the previous study. For parent companies with a climate pledge, the aggregate score in our analysis was 23 out of 100, only 2 points higher than the overall aggregate score. This suggests that most utilities’ corporate pledges are not translating into action. The companies studied account for 69 percent of remaining coal generation in the US. They have committed to retire just 28 percent of their coal generation by 2030. About half of the operating companies included in this study, 37 companies, are planning to build new gas plants, totaling nearly 38 GW through 2030. These utilities have actually increased their plans for new gas plants since our last report. This accounts for over half of the total planned gas in the US through 2030.

If energy companies are claiming now in 2024 or 2025 that they have no choice but to keep those plants open due to AI-driven demand, take those claims with a huuuuuge grain of salt, because we already knew many of them were planning to keep those plants open before they knew genAI was a thing.

Don't forget that "data centers" does not actually mean "AI data centers". One of the most energy-fucked places in the country is "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia, where lax regulation and poorly-thought-out tax incentives have led to, no joke, FOURTEEN UNINTERRUPTED YEARS of data center construction. And I don't mean they built a new one every year, I mean for fourteen entire years not a DAY went by where Data Center Alley was not in the process of constructing a data center. GenAI has only been a thing for just over two of those fourteen years!

So. Yeah. A lot of environmentally-conscious sources are trying to draw attention to energy waste using AI as a buzzword, but the fact is that the situation was already pretty dire, and it's very easy to make it look like that's AI's "fault" when AI is just something that could hypothetically make it worse in the future.

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Table 8.6 lists equivalents in joules for a variety of frequently encountered units.

"Environmental Chemistry: A Global Perspective", 4e - Gary W. VanLoon & Stephen J. Duffy

[tenth-sentence]

The solid waste obtained after slurry injection is about double in mass of that that results from combustion of coal without emission control.

"Environmental Chemistry: A Global Perspective", 4e - Gary W. VanLoon & Stephen J. Duffy

[mckitterick]

also, Hollywood and The Simpsons lie to you about what used nuclear power-plant fuel looks like:

it's an easily contained solid, not a barrel of glowing green goo, and advanced reactors (like those used in France and those potentially coming to the USA if we stop fighting nuclear power) can re-use the solid-rod waste into more fuel to continue powering society

the real problem here isn't the threat of nuclear terrorism or (fake) leaking barrels, it's that we use so much power, and that power needs to come from somewhere. getting it from coal that pollutes infinitely worse than nuclear isn't the answer, and just turning off all electrical devices and industry to reduce demand isn't feasible

until we get real, sustainable fusion power (always a decade away! but coming soon this time, we promise...), we need to continue expanding solar, wind, wave, geothermal, and other renewable sources. and continue updating fission nuclear to re-use waste. making all of this stuff requires a lot of power, btw

in the mean time, unless we can get civilization to stop using electricity, nuclear power is a perfectly safe source... as long as we have safeguards against human error and awfulness, and don't build bad designs in areas prone to environmental catastrophe

I wish all environmentalists a very suck cocks in hell

[lenrosen]

A U.S. report explores creating a carbon industry to use captured CO2 and coal waste for products while sequestering pollutants