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Because we care about rigor and accuracy in this forum, and would prefer to be aware if and how the article title and content don't reflect reality. If these comments bore you, skip them.
There is nothing rigorous about the ongoing fantasy that random HN commenters know things that no one else does.
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Because we care about rigor and accuracy in this forum, and would prefer to be aware if and how the article title and content don't reflect reality. If these comments bore you, skip them.
There is nothing rigorous about the ongoing fantasy that random HN commenters know things that no one else does.
From the title I thought the article was going to be a sarcastic description of plants.
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>> "don't manufacture and maintain themselves" Well, for any kind of industrial operation you'll want to plant the trees.. then there is the 10-20 year growth period that's kind of a problem for planning flexibility.. and then you need to chop them down and move them to the power plant which is a non-trivial and costly logistical constraint. All the while the solar cell sits there and produces energy without any inte…
Solar cells don't just sit there without intervention, and have larger up-front capital and labour costs than planting an orchard, or more appropriately, fuelwood or timber forests. And have a lifespan of 20-25 years. Plants are a pretty neat technology, all told.
"Nanotechnology" again. It's just surface chemistry, people. It's nice that they can do this in the lab, but as usual, the PR is excessive. "The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete." At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that. Especially since UC Berkeley announced a similar breakthrough last year.[1] Wikipedia points…
I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
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Yeah, this sentence in the middle of the article: > The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete. Doesn't actually say that this is at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline :) Sly words.
It would be pretty shocking if it was already cost comparable, of course :-).
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Sorry, no. 100W/m2 is highly unusual for any place on Earth. Take the most overcast midday conditions you can imagine and they'll exceed 100W/m2 by a comfortable margin. That can be in Germany, Canada, Colombia, or Antarctica. If it's sunny, it's very close to 1000, no matter where you are. Partly cloudy can even exceed 1000, since clouds can reflect additional sunlight onto the ground. Then there's of course nightti…
Sorry, yes. You're only counting the peak hour of the day. And yes, there's also nighttime, morning, afternoon, and evening. And guess what, nighttime is not zero. The moon gives off some light too.
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>"The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete." At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that. They don't really say that they are cost comparable to gasoline, they just make the obvious statement that if something were as cheap as gasoline that would be a big deal. I guess hyping these advances is supposed to make it easier…
To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'. The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe.
We've finally gotten a little smarter about the hype.
There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. Here's a shady group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Energy_Foundation that used the hype to raise money: In 1977, Executive Director Morris Levitt asserted that nuclear fusion power plants could be built by 1990 if the U.S. spent $50 to $100 billion on research.
"Nanotechnology" again. It's just surface chemistry, people. It's nice that they can do this in the lab, but as usual, the PR is excessive. "The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete." At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that. Especially since UC Berkeley announced a similar breakthrough last year.[1] Wikipedia points…
Serious question: Is there a sassy phrase in the hardcore research world for over-hyping discoveries? Like how we can identify "vaporware" as a concept since we have a word for it. If not there really should be
One way to make a system like this one more efficient/cost effective would be to draw the CO2 from ocean surface water which has a much higher concentration than the atmosphere, depending where you are in the world.
Flue gases with a high CO2 content are better than cheap; people will actually pay you to get rid of them. And we have a lot of them (this is kind of the problem in the first place). If you look at something like the exhaust from an oxyfuel turbine, you can get 70/30 N2/CO2 with relatively high purity. For this reason, I'm always skeptical of atmospheric capture projects. It's just got to be more efficient to capture…