• 18 Posts
  • 4.08K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle

  • TNT has 1162 Wh/kg ratio.

    How do you recharge TNT?

    We are hitting the limit what is doable with energy density.

    I mean, we’re definitely running into a problem of how you build a battery without also building a bomb. But the entire point of TNT is rapid thermal expansion. The point of a battery is very low voltage steady release of electrical charge.

    I might also note that C4 has around 6 Mwh/kg. A bit of applied chemistry can go a long way to improving energy efficiency. And that’s before you take advantage of geometry to focus pressure, via a shaped charge.

    Point being, there’s a lot of clever ways to juice a lemon. We’re a long way from the end of the road on battery improvement.














  • You know, I was skeptical that birds even got up that high.

    Turns out this thing is actually far too low.

    Incidentally, also why the other wind turbine bird death stories are largely horseshit.

    Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.

    Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.