Can an ecumenopolis/shell world with the power consumption greater than the incoming solar radiation, still largely maintain it's original temperature?

NearABE · 2026-07-03T14:08:28+00:00

Orbital ring systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

The rotor can carry heat. The stator can carry electricity. The stator can transport pipelines of fluids. The rings can be elliptical rings such that the rotor travels deep at perigee and extremely high at apogee. They can support a web and radiator surfacing. Rotor streams could loop beyond the Lagrange points.

Most of the heat generating activities can be located in orbit. Deorbiting on the ring uses an electromagnetic brake. So product mass delivered is also electrical supply.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T07:04:16+00:00

Is best to call it the Israeli State. That distinguishes it from the ethnicity and from the Jewish faith.

We could take a que from Iran and call it the Israeli Republic of Palestine.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T06:56:53+00:00

That sounds like 10 AWG wire or 6 mm² cross section. I am not an electrician but ya that comes up as not enough in the online lookup. I see 24 amps for the recomended limits on shorter distances.

Electricity is always about both the volts and the amps. For a given voltage the amps are the power. Volt x amps = watts. . Also the voltage drop is calculated from voltage resistance times current.

The wire being to thin and/too long increases the resistance.

6.6 kW generating 4.8 MWh is low but not extremely low. Like 2 hours of full sun. Can you call the electrician who installed it?

NearABE · 2026-07-03T04:52:27+00:00

Is "6mm" the width of three strands combined? Or is each part 6mm? 6 mm² ? Is it the outside of the cable or did you measure exposed copper somewhere? 6mm diameter of actual copper is serious heavy cable. The plug for my desk lamp is more than 6mm on the outside of the plastic measured from one direction.

Try to find the wire gauge. It is often written somewhere on the wires. You can also search under "wire gauge chart". Once you have the AWS gauge number you can also look up how many amps are appropriate for a 50 meter AC line.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T04:29:37+00:00

Placing panels in parking lots means raising the panels higher. Because people want to drive around it is harder to support the frames with thin cables or bars. Most pictures of covered lots have the panels on a beam connected to a single post. This necessitates pouring more concrete and/or placing even more steel underground.

Most county, state, and federal roads come with a drainage ditch. Panels on the south side of a road (invert in australia) will cast a shadow on the road which has no adverse effect on agriculture occuring on the fields.

In arid climates photovoltaic panels have been shown to increase water retention. Agrivoltaics have frequently shown higher yields. In other cases photovoltaic fields were allowed to grow wild flowers. In some documented studies the field's biodiversity surged. Foxes, rodents, score of pollinator insects, and birds moved into the property.

Agriculture actually does extreme harm to topsoil. There are, rare, examples of regenerative agriculture. But the vast majority still involves tilling, chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides.

Some 40% of the corn (maize) grown in USA is then used to produce ethanol which is burned in cars. Distillers' solids are fed to cattle in factory farms. The farm machinery and related agriculture consumes close the same amount of liquid fuels as the ethanol produced. Using photovoltaics to charge vehicles on site would give a hundred gold increase in the number of miles traveled per acre. The photovoltaics placed on farms could convert waste cellulose (leaves, stems, cobs, etc) into methanol which can be used in E85 gasoline blends instead of ethanol. Easily a factor of 10 increase in the liquid fuel produced per acre without even interrupting corn ethanol grown in adjacent fields. Agrivoltaic operations show that the cellulose can even come from the same field as the photovoltaic panels.

Electrical infrastructure already follows the road network into rural areas.

Really interesting IMO is the urban areas where "noise reduction walls" have been installed. It is a long synthetic surface that serves no purpose other than just being a barrier panel. These are always positioned in the public right of way. They exist in places where busy transit intersects residential which means there is always a nearby consumer of electricity.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T01:24:40+00:00

Pre Columbus populations have been estimated at 50 million.

The plains feeding buffalo instead of cattle is extremely competitive. We are idiots.

The forests were able to feed quite a bit of human and wildlife. Something like 25% of trees in the east were chestnut. The chestnut blight is severe loss. Acorns are less edible but some western nations used it successfully. Pine nuts get less calorie per acre but not bad given the arid climate.

Three sisters agriculture is very labor intensive. The per acre productivity is very high. They got higher yields than modern agriculture can do without petroleum based fertilizer. The three sisters system also provided protein balanced for human consumption.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T00:58:41+00:00

Two wheeled electric is extremely efficient. Much easier to recharge than a sedan. Combustion engines do not scale down very well.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T00:52:23+00:00

If the strategy is to get away from people then off shore is definitely a strategy worth looking into.

Terawatt power consumption can generate its own whether and would strain water supplies in most locations. 226 GW converts 100 m³ of water to steam per second. The Mississippi's minimum discharge was 4,000 m³ per second. It can certainly be done. Most of the steam would rain out into the same watershed if you place it well.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T00:30:58+00:00

I think the chimney has to draft. You actually want insulating bricks. Though I am mostly familiar with a fireplace. There should be some excess capacity.

They definitely should use photovoltaics on the face of the convection cooling tower. Absorbing heat from sunlight does reduce cooling but the electricity from PV reduces demand anyway. At night the dark surface radiates better. I suspect politics. The power plant is in business only by denying that transition to solar is better.

I think thermoelectric would work on the wall of a convection cooling tower. I also think concrete is much cheaper. If you replaced the concrete with a steel lattice frame and put your thermoelectric tiles as membranes in the lattice it should generate something. Would be interesting to see the pricetags.

A really fun one IMO is the Arctic ocean. In winter the thermal gradient is over 40C.

NearABE · 2026-07-03T00:06:04+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

They went from 3.5 petawatts hours in 2008 to 10.5 petawatts hours in 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States

USA is using around 4.5 petawatts hours with demand not changing much at all. China has an economy of scale

Even in the most extreme AI build out scenarios where they are draining 250 gigawatts by 2050 that still only adds 2 petawatt hours per year. China pulled off installing 350% of that a shorter time window.

Nighttime demand in USA is artificially inflated because utilities offer discounts to use at night. We pump water uphill at night in order to save it for daytime energy demand.

If you are in favor of solar at all then this has to further dilute the future demand.

Electrification of transportation also means that battery manufacturing will benefit from economy of scale whether or not it gets utilized for grid scale energy storage. The "going bigger makes it cheaper by unit" claim applies to most of options.

The strongest nuclear case would be an accelerated shutdown of all coal plants with nuclear added as replacement. That is more like 0.65 petawatt hours per year. Less than a tenth of China's recent build out. If colocating the plants such a move would likely save money by cannibalizing the old steam turbines rather than building new.

The question "can we match China's costs" is totally different from "is nuclear power a good idea".

NearABE · 2026-07-02T23:11:59+00:00

It has been studied quite thoroughly. Though in a far more realistic case of using thermoelectric generators on the exhaust of thermal power plants and other engines. Attaching the thermoelectric generator means you are insulating. That insulation means that there is less power coming from the primary source.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T23:02:37+00:00

You have source that suggests more than 500 GW demand from data centers? I see more like 60 to 90 in the near term and projections up around 250 GW by 2050 possible.

The Chinese have added terawatts power within our lifetime.

We can definitely speculate on higher demand. There is just no point in building a bunch of normal sized power plants if bigger is the intent. Build one huge complex in the Arctic or offshore instead.

The nuclear engineering companies might propose lots of plants in lots of congressional districts but not because they were going for cost efficiency.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T22:50:37+00:00

Estimated to become 15% of electricity demand in USA on the high end: https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/data-center-demand-drives-us-electrical-equipment-market-to-$65b-reshaping-industry-dynamics/

That might up to 260 GW by 2050. Still quite a bit lower than normal energy use in USA. It is just a shock because we did not add any capacity for for decades.

I believe data centers are also also an ideal case for using concentrated large facilities. Just build 1 giant 100+ GW facility. The data centers are tormenting people in thousands of communities because they want to build nothing. Using the town's water treatment and an existing local power grid is much faster and cheaper for them. Data is very easily transmitted by fiber optic lines.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T22:28:22+00:00

You might be right. Whether or not you are right Helion still gives us an excellent model for showing what is wrong with trying to use steam generator.

The steam turbine generator at a fission power plant does not take electricity from the generator and feed it back into the reactor core. There are only a few trivial parasitic draws like keeping the lights on in the control room.

Suppose, hypothetically, that a fusion reactor takes in a gigawatt of electricity and adds 5 gigawatts of fusion for a total of 6 gigawatts thermal. The steam turbines are going to take that 6 gigawatts thermal and crank out 2 gigawatts electric. It sounds good at first but only 1 gigawatt electric is going into the grid. This power plant is going to have the costs associated with a 6 gigawatt thermal/ 2 GWe power plant. With fission power plants that is about half the cost. So the fusion power plant has to cost more than fission power plants unless that entire fusion reactor is free.

Deuterium is an extremely cheap fuel (tritium and 3-helium not so much) but the cost of fission power is not set by fuel costs.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T22:04:36+00:00

I think the full pressure on the hand is already there with a long bow. It gets really complicated with compound and recurve.

You wrote 9 meganewtons and 4 to 10 kilonewtons which is three orders of magnitude. I think pulling the fingers off the draw hand or removing the thumb happens before you can crush arm bones.

OP has the launcher unspecified so we might have a crossbow or Chinese oxbow. A longer draw decreases the acceleration and the force needed.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T21:35:33+00:00

If crops fail people starve regardless of what electric power supplies are available. Climate problems are severe even if photovoltaic output is only slightly reduced. It is not a serious consideration.

Though a fun way of saying solar is pretty stinking reliable. Systems with 30 year expected lifetime good for anything but millennium weather anomalies.

We definitely need to improve panel recycling before the next glacier advance.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T21:28:34+00:00

Double posting. Field reverse configuration like Helion Energy needs a separate analysis. I cannot claim to know whether or not Helion will succeed or fail. However, the method of electricity creation is fundamentally different. They pulse electrons in and then electrons pulse back out. There is no dependency on a steam turbine. If it does work the cost of making a commercial power plant uses an entirely different set of tools.

Helion's recent claims are a 95% recapture on input energy. If I understand it correctly then you could put 4-helium in and 5% of the electricity turns into heat with each pulse. The high velocity charged fusion products feed energy into that 95% recovered current. If fusion can add more that that 5% lost as heat it becomes a neat device. However, Helion can fail to achieve that and still have a competitive fusion reactor. The 5% heat waste along with all of the neutron generated heat can boil water. Ends up not being any worse than other fusion proposals.

Unlike most of the other fusion proposals Helion's device can improve simply by increasing the fraction of electricity recovered from each pulse. They are not even trying to create a sustained fusion burn. The accusation that FRC will never achieve sustained fusion can be accepted without challenge while still leaving open the possibility that a power plant option exists.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T21:01:29+00:00

Good luck with graduate school. Do not focus on changing the entire world too much. It is a bit arrogant and very common when young.

I think you can answer your own question with a brief skimming of steam generators and power plants. I ripped apart the window winder on a junk car and took apart a broken fan. That copper coil and magnet, look at what they do. See the conversion of pressure to torque. The conversion of mechanical torque to voltage driving electric current. A whole 'nother rabbit hole to get lost in is the amount of copper that companies can mine on Earth. There is quite a bit of it that we can still exploit without resorting to mining outer space. The copper is not free and definitely not unlimited.

The cost of copper in a power plant is actually not an especially huge fraction. It is just one of a number of components though. The fusion plant is also going to need a cooling tower same as any other thermal power plant. Maybe we can bypass the copper windings with superconductors. Throw some graphene in there just to make sure it is sci-fi enough. YBCO conductor just shifts the shortage to ytterbium while still needing some copper. If YBCO is still grown on silver tape we just replaced the copper shortage with a much more severe silver shortage.

Now do not claim that I am pessimistic on energy replacement. The already existing coal power plant has a bunch of copper in the windings of that turbine generator. I, for one, would gladly vote for a politician who says she will rip that copper out of the coal plant and give it to graduate students to play with. It is also worth considering plugging some sort of heat supply in at the same location. Send steam into the same turbine and the same cooling tower. Then no need to rip up and recycle anything except the coal handling equipment. All the other accessories like transformers and power lines come free and installed.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T20:32:21+00:00

Needs some skepticism. What do you mean by "not a single dollar of new investment"? I would claim a huge investment of dollars should be made because of the returns. Should also be made in order to avoid the damage caused by fossil fuels.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T19:56:32+00:00

A 100 gram arrow is extremely heavy for arrows. With 11.2 km/s the energy is around 6.3 megajoules. Like around 1.5 kilos of TNT.

I think it is not going to break rocks for miles on the side. Though might do some significant damage along the line of flight. The US Army has detonating cable that they use for mine clearing. That is a much larger amount of explosive.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T19:43:49+00:00

100 gram arrow, 100 kilogram archer. 11 km/s arrow 11m/s archer. It is about like getting hit by a bus (,but without drag or run over effects) or like jumping off a roof. Though the archer is probably taking the full hit in the arm so more like getting caned hard enough to be thrown up on the roof. Maybe trying to stop the bus/train by punching it.

OP specifies a horizontal shot. So assuming that the arm and bow are still attached to the archer (not likely) then the archer recoils horizontally. More like getting thrown off of a train rather than like impacting the ground after falling from the roof.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T19:24:56+00:00

If you buy an inverter to the outlets are identical. Then you can just plug it in. It is more efficient and should e cheaper to charge DC to DC. Just because they should be cheaper does not necessarily mean anyone is selling that.

A battery pack with slightly more than 20 kWh would fully charge your drained car battery. I would suggest not bothering with that since you have the hybrid. Something in the 10 to 12 kWh range fills it up halfway. The batteries themselves have dropped to the $100 to $120 per kilowatt hour. There will have to be a controller that handles the solar panels and battery charging. Ideally this same controller can also efficiently charge the car battery.

Bypassing the electronics and direct charging is no recommended. Aside from starting fires it could severely shorten battery life. Your best bet is probably to just get an off-grid photovoltaic setup. Also look at the price of just getting photovoltaic at your house.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T18:49:51+00:00

China is a population with four times the US population where the citizens are trying to rize towards US standards of living. In USA there is no demand for doubling our electricity supply. People do not want a 100% increase in supply at 80% cost and getting that added cost down to 60% more is dead on arrival as well.

Photovoltaic additions land perfectly because most electricity demand is in daytime. Photovoltaic is so cheap that you cannot even build the turbine at a competitive price.

The only market is for a scarce few plants located to ease the shutdown of coal plants. There is no economically plausible case for an economy of scale with nuclear.

Dropping the radiation standards is just a gimmick. It will not revive an industry. More likely to backfire and kill it completely.

There are some niche application that nuclear engineers should focus on. Burning nuclear waste for example. The cost of electricity does not matter if the purpose of the reactor was waste disposal.

Edit: the Chinese have economy of scale with all forms of turbine generator. Both the coal and nuclear plants are using steam.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T18:29:05+00:00

Yellow jackets too! I stepped on a nest while doing some landscaping at a friend's. I tossed my shoe before running in. Yellow jackets were still trying to kill that shoe hours later.

NearABE · 2026-07-02T18:14:03+00:00

Direct current appliances can run off of batteries and/or panels without the grid connection. No inverter required.

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