I like the backgrounder about Sudbury.
Others like Japan found another way to achieve the necessary temp/pressure, but it hardly scaled as it needed to during the industrial revolution.
TBH the "let's avoid smoke" aspect sounds like a retcon, the mythical London smog is a testament of that.
Yes, that’s what the article says:
“ When you look at all the pictures of the factories in the 19th century, those stacks weren’t there to improve air quality, if you can believe it. The increased airflow generated by a stack just created more efficient combustion for the boilers and furnaces. Any benefits to air quality in the cities were secondary. With the advent of diesel and electric motors, we could use forced drafts, reducing the need for a tall stack to increase airflow. That was kind of the decline of the forests of industrial chimneys that marked the landscape in the 19th century. But they’re obviously not all gone, because that secondary benefit of air quality turned into the primary benefit as environmental rules about air pollution became stricter.”
Beyond the minimum the effect tapers off and what TFA is talking about starts mattering.
If you want video of a drone flying over a power plant or hot air balloons taking off, you can license them from stock providers, just like with stock photos.
Of course, it does share some of the cues of AI-generated content - but I suspect a lot of these AI companies buy a lot of stock content for their training datasets.
Am I wrong?
This was proposed to be used, again in Los Angeles, as a way to not only generate power (via turbines at the bottom of large hyperboloidal towers) but also clean pollutants from the air. I don't think it ever went anywhere (probably too expensive) but it would work at least in principle.
ErrorNoBrain•6h ago