The U.S. and China are in a high-tech race to achieve and commercialize an elusive clean energy source: nuclear fusion. Fusion has the potential to create ne...
calling it the “holy grail” like it’s some mythical unreachable thing. The sun’s been doing it for the earth since before there were life to use its energy.
The Holy Grail of energy needs to be so many things. A non exhaustive list:
Clean/low environmental impact
Cheap
Fast to build
Reliable output and able to load-follow
Universally applicable (geography)
Safe
Large scale
Solar and wind don’t tick all of these boxes, but neither do fission, fusion, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any other source. That’s why we’re in this predicament.
The thing about fusion is it doesn’t actually bring anything new to the table. It’s supposed to be fission but without any radioactive waste, but this isn’t actually true. The beryllium cladding in the core of the tokamak (Chinese reactors use this design iirc) becomes irradiated, and when replaced produces a volume of low-level waste far higher than a fission reactor does through its normal operation. And it’s going to be way more expensive simply by virtue of being novel to boot.
I think we could do better than the sun if we really tried. Compost emits more energy per volume than the sun’s core, there’s just way more core to emit energy
calling it the “holy grail” like it’s some mythical unreachable thing. The sun’s been doing it for the earth since before there were life to use its energy.
Also, calling it a race implies that both parties are actually trying.
One party is in a solo race is produce as much dirty energy as possible so treat printers and surveillance algorithms can get that much bigger.
The Holy Grail of energy needs to be so many things. A non exhaustive list:
Solar and wind don’t tick all of these boxes, but neither do fission, fusion, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any other source. That’s why we’re in this predicament.
The thing about fusion is it doesn’t actually bring anything new to the table. It’s supposed to be fission but without any radioactive waste, but this isn’t actually true. The beryllium cladding in the core of the tokamak (Chinese reactors use this design iirc) becomes irradiated, and when replaced produces a volume of low-level waste far higher than a fission reactor does through its normal operation. And it’s going to be way more expensive simply by virtue of being novel to boot.
I think we could do better than the sun if we really tried. Compost emits more energy per volume than the sun’s core, there’s just way more core to emit energy
so what I’m hearing is that we just need to compost the sun