Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nwiswell 1615 days ago
> Let us say it is not being discussed because it is not feasible. Unless of course we build massive nuclear power plants in Antarctica with all what that entails.

Maybe it really is because it's not feasible, I concede that's not something I can really know. But nuclear power plants are not necessary. As the paper sets out, there is abundant wind energy in Antarctica. Setting up a medium-size (1200 MW) wind farm on the Antarctic coast is actually not a crazy proposal, since the construction can be undertaken by ship alone.

Moreover it's very clear that the energy required to freeze one ton of CO2 is substantially less than the useful energy obtained by its combustion (this is intuitive from the magnitude difference between heat of combustion and enthalpy of sublimation: combusting one mol of pure coal to CO2 liberates 393 kJ, freezing one mol of CO2 out of the air consumes 26 kJ). In no way does that violate thermodynamics; the CO2 still exists, it just isn't doing any harm.

This project would not just ameliorate global warming, it could allow useful exploitation of all the remaining global fossil fuels.