World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject

> I doubt that "land use" is a big issue in one of the least densely populated countries on earth.

All evidence to the contrary, apparently.

One report I found cited "50 km" as sufficient separation. Applying this as a radius you get 7854 square kilometers of land.

> Using the existing infrastructure probably makes it slightly cheaper though.

"it", here, could mean either the "green energy" operation or the observatory site.

The omission of this information is partly why I'm suspicious of the article. A well written article would have included things such as the above information about what the project was and additionally why it was being proposed for the given site. Omitting any information on the other side of the equation, and talking only about the impacts it will have on the observatory sure sounds like activist propaganda to me.

> Surely one could find a place for an industrial site

Has anyone proposed one?

I thought space was the the world's prime telescope site.

> green hydrogen in a fossil fuel shill talking point

I'll stipulate that. None if this is my sacred cow.

Apparently, however, your view isn't operative among establishment Powers That Be. Otherwise "they" wouldn't hesitate to name it, and instead employ euphemisms like "huge industrial complex" and "industrial megaproject." If this were some evil, no good, very bad mining operation or gas and oil field, it would be featured prominently in all of the reporting. And you know it.

Instead, we get euphemisms. One report I read about this specific matter used the term "electrical generation units." A coal plant? Nat gas? Nuclear? No. If it were any of those things "they" would say so, in clear, bright terms everyone would be eager to hate on. But it's wind and solar, so "they" carefully demur, and straightforward terms like "solar panels" an "wind turbines" are deliberately avoided.

It's not any sort of conspiracy, mind you. Everyone just somehow knows that wind, solar, hydrogen, whatever, is sacred and must be spoken of with only the greatest deference, adopting however much linguistic gymnastics seems necessary.

They may feel that way, but that seems emotional rather than rational. The choices for small-scale energy sources are: batteries with all their dirty mining, biofuels taking away lots of arable land from food/textile/etc production, or fuel cells which can still involve petrochemicals (but don't have to). There are no perfect options, and strapping enough solar panels or wind turbines to a vehicle (car, bus, train, airplane, etc) to make it drivable is just not even remotely feasible.

No doubt the petrochemical companies want to continue existing, but shifting the transportation infrastructure away from directly burning gasoline and natural gas is a net win even if in the short term there are still hydrocarbons involved. Going all in on electric vehicles only is not diversifying the solution space enough.

I understand it if you look at the receiving end. Say in Germany they built natural gas plants shortly before the war under the premise that they must be Hydrogen ready, aka right now we use natural gas but promise in a few years when Hydrogen production is there, we'll switch to Hydrogen. That can be very easily criticized as green washing of the gas plants (although a gas plant is much better than what it would have replaced, brown coal). Now with the war and the pipelines destroyed, Germany went a different route and instead runs the coal plants for a longer time.

But if you look at the production side, they are building a solar power plant. How is that green washing? There is no way to use a solar power plant other than to collect renewable energy. Either it is operational and collects renewable energy, to send it to various places, or it is not operational, but then it's been a bad investment for the investors. Now, maybe it could be part of some greater scheme where one uses this plant as the "source" of a multiple of the ammonium it can actually produce, and sells ammonium from fossil sources as made by Chilean sun. But that should then be addressed on its own, and not hamper the project itself (although of course a different location would be better that doesn't risk the operations of scientific instruments worth billions).

There's two types of hydrogen: 1) ammonia for fertilizer production and perhaps other industrial decarbonization, and 2) fantasies of energy storage, fuel, etc.

Environmentalists know of the necessity of ammonia, but push back hard on the second.

Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is fairly good at summarizing an honest assessment of where hydrogen will be useful:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-ladder-version-50-mi...

And you'll see that it gets pushed in lots of very inappropriate places.

It's funny how much benefit of the doubt is given to really bad tech, like hydrogen and large nuclear reactors, despite decades of data showing that they always underperform expectations and that people who implement them always overpromise and underdeliver. It's a stark contrast to solar and wind and storage, which always seem to underpromise and overdeliver, and these technologies face huge amounts of undue skepticism not only from decision makers but also the press and the public. There's a lot of decision making in energy that is extremely disconnected from data and reality, and most of hydrogen decision making these days is disconnected from reality.

Environmental activists have their own biases and blind spots.

In Switzerland, there are two restaurants called "Blinde Kuh" (blind cow), where it's completely dark and you'll get served by blind/visually impaired people. There even work visually impaired people in the kitchen (besides "regular" seing people). It's a fascinating wxperience.

There's a similar experience at Tochoji Temple in Fukuoka city.

I looked up bortle and Portugal, and Google gave my a light pollution map. I still don’t know what bortle means…

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info

The plan of "don't build a major industrial centre 5km from the best site for optical astronomy in the world, build it somewhere else" seems like a perfect viable one to me.

> That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.

Given the size of the site (over 3000 hectares), even lights purely pointed at the ground will still create large amounts of bounce lighting. The ground reflects light up in the sky.

Yeah the guards go home for the evening and then you can probably walk in after dark. You'd have to walk a really long distance in some of them though, because the vehicle gates are usually a very long walk from the scenery, and that's at high altitude.

The telescopes are 8,000 miles south of America. Why does American policy matter?

I don't know of any Americans that advocate for shooting of school children.

Pretty fucked up to say that people that don't have dark skies even on their radar with everything going on right now are heartless and lacking empathy. It shows a gross misunderstanding of the average person today and really shows your lack of empathy.

I shoot astro, I love it. I wish skies were darker. But I certainly don't blame my comrades for not giving two fucks about how the sky looks when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent.

> so many people

How many people get "things that make life worth living" from the Paranal Observatory every year?