Won’t be any economy left if the planet is made uninhabitable. It’s like the most sacred thing is profit, not anything about the people that create it. Very odd train of thought.
There might be 50% accounting drop in some reports thanks to all the biomas co-firing making coal plants ECO on paper, at the cost of freshly chopped European forests.
Eh, nobody gets to make rational evidence based policy with nuclear, that ship has sailed. I think once fusion is cracked the 50-years away joke will just shift into the planning permission department.
Fusion may be difficult but math and physics say we should be able to do it. Just because it's difficult and with a long time horizon doesn't mean you should throw it in the bin with "perpetual motion". (Cold Fusion however, you may throw in the bin)
Just saw a talk [0] where they talk about using lasers to create fusion. The current puck used to kick start the process costs $1M, (paraphrased) "it needs to cost 20 cents before Fusion is viable. But hey, we're in the research phase!"
From the point of view of an end user, it doesn't matter if a technology is not possible because it's physically impossible, or if it's so uncompetitive it's economically impossible. The net effect is the same: the technology is dead to them.
Wouldn’t go so far as never. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Fusion power on a space ship will be viable one day if humanity survives long enough.
Fusion is already working. Not well enough to be commercially viable, but it's already working. ITER will produce more energy than it will be using - albeit only enough usable energy to break even. It's not a matter of making it work anymore, it's only a matter of getting it to work well enough.
But maybe all we will ever need are solar panels, after all the sun is providing way enough energy as is... for now.
Let me be more precise (for you and for the people who downvoted me): fusion will never be cost effective. Ever. There is no conceivable material for the walls of a reactor that could withstand the neutron bombardment from the reaction. Maybe there’s some super-inexpensive way to replace the entire reactor core every 18 months... but I seriously doubt it.
I know but to replace it with coal??? Couldn't they have gone for e.g. LNG or more renewables phased in over time? The speed of the shift seemed mighty fishy.
Part of the reason of coal increase is that there were more than enough hold-outs that expected there to be another exit from the exit (2011) of the exit (2010) of the exit (2000) from nuclear, so that they saw no need to actually do something because surely the nuclear shutdown won't _actually_ happen.
Well, it does and that assumption cost expensive time.
I mean for power generation, I guess sure. But coal is an essential part of steel production. And steel is the thing that literally all modern buildings and vehicles are made out of. So the whole "Green industry doesn't need coal infrastructure" thing is just BS.
"Once fusion is cracked" is almost on par with "once perpetual motion machines are cracked." It presupposes that fusion being "cracked" is a reasonable thing to expect.
> "Once fusion is cracked" is almost on par with "once perpetual motion machines are cracked." It presupposes that fusion being "cracked" is a reasonable thing to expect.
Oof. One need only to peruse your comment history to see where this sentiment is coming from, but even that is no excuse for that obtuse argument.
"Perpetual motion," on the one hand, is quackery outlawed by straightforward thermodynamics, breaking the rules of which allows assertions like "chair seats and door handles should be spontaneously heating up to incandescence essentially at random." Fusion, on the other hand, is a technical problem.
Fusion researchers at MIT, ITER, and other institutions at the top tiers of academia across the globe are not a cabal of greedy grant-dependent charlatans bamboozling their way through careers in bad faith, deliberately ignoring the lone rational voice of Lidsky and his Johnny-Come-Lately-The-Baptist on HN, u/pfdietz. It's perfectly rational (Sane, even!) to cast aside internet naysayers (no matter how zealous) in favor of deferring to, you know, actual experts.
Fusion researchers are people who have irreversibly (or nearly so) committed their careers to something. They have a very strong incentive to not admit they have wasted their lives. It's touching you think that asking such a person if fusion deserves more funding that you'd get anything but a "yes" answer.
In general, you don't want to ask a person in field X if X needs funding. You might ask them what's the best way of spending money in X, but even then you better phrase the question carefully to avoid conflict of interest.
This is either a bad joke, an incredible misunderstanding of physics. "perpetual motion machine" is not compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. There's many working fusion reactors, we don't know which, if any, designs will be economical.
A cup of water is enough to power a small city, if the atoms in it were perfectly fused. So for all practical purposes, clean fusion IS pretty close to what we imagine when we think of perpetual motion. The sun would burn out long before we ran out of usable fuel in our solar system.
No, I understand that. What I'm pointing out is that if something has no realistic chance of being economically viable, then from the end user's point of view that's just as bad as if it were physically impossible. The only difference is society is spending billions while pretending an economic miracle will happen, even if that miracle is as implausible as discovery of a violation of the law of conservation of energy.
Fusion indeed has a realistic chance of being economically viable. Your comment assumes that current technologies remain entirely static which is the unrealistic position. Enabling technologies like high temperature superconductors, advanced computation/simulation capabilities, new high current/high voltage electronics, as well as recent advances in alternate (non tokamak) concepts bode well for the field.
Perpetual motion machines are fundamentally impossible by current understandings of physics. Fusion, from my reading, is more like a tremendously difficult modeling problem. Like protein folding. We can't sustain a productive reaction because we can't contain it properly, and we can't contain it properly because we can't yet predict the behavior of the plasma.
Perpetual motion is not hard at all. Satellites are in perpetual motion around globe for decades. It doesn't violate anything. Universe is infinitely old and still moving.
Perpetual motion _engines_ violate law of energy conservation, because perpetual source of energy can create infinite amount of energy, thus they are impossible, like perpetual source of water, or perpetual source of anything.
We're pulling the coal plants down, and pushing to do it faster. (It may still not be fast enough, ok.) I'm more worried about the countries with no such plans.
There is pretty much zero chance of the planet becoming uninhabitable in the next few million years, so I'll save you a lot of anxiety. We're gonna be fine.
Source? We are destroying a lot of the negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. clearing rain forests, destroying the tundra, etc) what makes you sure we will be okay? A 4-5 degree Celsius increase in temperature is looking likely by 2100. If that is extrapolated out a few million years doesn’t seem plausible.
We do need to phase out fossil fuels, but we must do so in a way that is not only physically and economically but also politically sustainable.
As we have seen, big changes of any kind that displace or destroy the livelihoods of vast numbers of people always lead to some form of populist or revolutionary revolt. Whether it takes a "left" (populist-socialist/communist) or "right" (national socialist) form depends mostly on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue that can best harness the anger of the masses.
Abandoning fossil fuels must be done in a way that cushions the public and the economy somewhat or we will have a full scale populist revolt with slogans like "roll coal!"
In this case what "we must" do isn't really in control of a single country. It turns out battery electric vehicles are viable now. Most of Germany's car sales aren't internal to Germany. If they don't produce competitive electric vehicles, Tesla will, or Rivian, or a dozen companies in China and all over the world.
Germany's choice isn't to start producing electric cars or to keep producing the same number of ICE cars they always did. It's to start producing electric cars or lose most of the market to new competitors.
And that means there are going to be fewer jobs making cars, because it's less labor to make an electric car. But you don't bail out the buggy whip makers, they just start making drive belts, or they go away.
I'm not sure the buggy whip makers thing is applicable. Industrialization put a ton of people out of work, but growth created new jobs for them. We are now in a near-zero growth environment, so I'm not sure growth will supply a magic bailout this time. Jobs are going to be lost and they may not be replaced by anything.
The thing about jobs is that they mostly balance out. Some people lose their jobs, but that means cars cost less. It means you get the same standard of living with less income. So you take a lower paying job and still have the same life.
There are effectively unlimited jobs at low enough pay, so as long as the pay meets the cost of living it's fine, so anything that lowers the cost of living is good.
That balance doesn't operate at the individual level. It mostly benefits the people who buy cars and mostly hurts the people who used to make cars. But on net it helps more than it hurts -- it's better to make transportation less expensive than have some more jobs that cause transportation to be more expensive.
The biggest problem with this is that it works best when everything gets cheaper at once. Otherwise that individual-level asymmetry starts to become trouble. And what we have right now is a regulatory environment that makes it hard to get cost reductions in certain industries (housing from zoning rules, education from government subsidies, healthcare from a hundred separate causes), so those keep growing as a percentage of income. And that's going to be a problem if we don't do something about it.
The article is all about how there's much more at stake than just profits, including thousands of people's jobs. I don't disagree that there's plenty of greed clouding people's judgment, but this cartoonish portrayal is unfair. "Let him who is without an ecological footprint cast the first stone".
