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Not a fair copper, gov(t)

Environment
#1

Huge copper requirement - up to 4.7 tonnes for a 3 megawatts (MW) (which the post says must be ‘virgin’) wind turbine.

Hat tip The Lifeboat News: Copper..., where it looked like the thread had been removed. Post was moved on Twitter, but is on Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220926060627/https://twitter.com/brandall9481/status/1574153946628661249

Post shows grim pictures of the lovely copper mines.

Author B.F. Randall is a nuclear advocate. (Looks like he moved the twitter thread himself).
From his personal caption:
" Nuclear Power is the best solution to humanity’s existensional and inter-related geo-political, economic, and environmental problems."
New thread is on https://twitter.com/brandall9481/status/1574221167082164225 but the old one has the real content.

So…I wonder if he’s posting any pictures from Fukushima.

Can we have long threads showing idyllic pictures of how to live on less energy, cycle lanes, street culture, sustainable food and community events other than mass portable device gaze-ins.

But if Nuclear Guy is right about the copper it might be a warning shot about the renewables revolution. As @RhisiartGwilym has, of course, reminded us. At least the final community event will be fun, a great slide - we have these massive copper sink holes to descend into - crash helmets superfluous.

#2

Reminded repeatedly, E, like a cracked record, I know. One of the pleasures of dotty old age…

I doubt BRandall is right about nuclear; even with Dmitry Orlov’s assertions about a new ‘clean and waste-eating’ nuclear technology. The nuclear enthusiasts never seem to address the constant economic experience, which is that it’s always too costly ever to pay for itself in electricity sales; always therefore subsidised.

But subsidised with what, once the current monetary dream-world has evaporated, and money once again acts simply as an - actually-credible - claim on actually-available resources, goods and services? In other words, the reckoning about the realworld nature of value, which will come on the other end of the Modern Monetary Tripe fad…

The copper story simply underlines yet another layer of the iron logic of the Long Descent: the fact that resources which are simply essential to modern hitech-industrial social organisation are all screwing down together! And it’s the synergy between these various depletions which makes anything like modern copper ore mining simply impossible to continue.

We - in hugely-smaller numbers, if you see what I mean - had high-grade copper ores in actual outcrops several thousand years ago, easily enough worked with stone-age tools and abundant fire-wood for charcoal. The island of Cyprus was renowned for it: Cyprus - Kupros; geddit? But always in quite small quantities by our standards even then. And since then, availability of copper has been on a downward exponential; hence the horrendous story which BR unfolds. All strictly unsustainable, natch; evanescent even, in the longer-scale view of things.

What comes next is the Salvage Age, as described by JMGreer in his futurist fiction: the time of the Guilds of Ruinmen, who take apart the ruins of the old civilisation, with the usual mediaeval, fall-of-civilisations gear of hand tools and muscle, and not much else, and who recycle what they can - for as long as that lasts. And then…?

And remember, as if echoing the Laws of Thermodynamics, you never get quite as much goods back from the recycling processes as you put in originally. There’s always a net loss, until finally…

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