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Isn't it counterproductive to turn it into fuel to be burned? It seems like that would leave us at best at no net new carbon dioxide, when we really should be sucking CO2 out and sequestering it away. How about we turn it into bricks or something...
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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.
Fission was first done in 1938, by 1956 there was a commercial reactor.
Given that sort of time frame and the fact that fusion research was well underway it seemed that a decade or two was all that was needed.
Then you had breakthroughs with Tokomaks and so on, each time it seemed that fusion was potentially close.
There's a really good book called 'The Sun in a Bottle' that goes into more detail.
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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.
To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'. 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…
Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be further along, and better off, if less scare and more education were available about it.
Solar energy, the production, usage, maintenance and storage of panels, wiring, and battery banks are now a safety concern given that more than 25 people a year have died in Australia alone just installing and maintaining them (cleaning them). This is only the roofing aspect of it. What about the production and storage of batteries, the materials and chemicals used to produce panels, etc...
Roofing claims more deaths worldwide than nuclear energy has by many orders of magnitude. I believe this bias is due mainly to fear and ignorance, and the contemporary phenomenon of zero-risk. We don't apply the same risk analysis to nuclear that we do to other fields.
An example of how this is coming to bite us back is the discovery of the benefits of certain germs after most developed nations embraced anti-septics to an extreme (hand sanitizers, strong kitchen and bathroom cleaners to name two). The biome and snot are in!
Even Fukushima was a confluence of old reactors, on a seaboard and a tsunami which claimed almost all of the fatalities if you allow for theoretically higher rates of thyroid cancer and others. Taking a middle position, or better a geometric mean of Greenpeace's and others maximum claims vs. the nuclear industry's playing down of casualties in the three (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) major nuclear incidents to date, you arrive at a very safe industry that has operated for over 50 years in over 30 countries.
Fission reactors that don't need water cooling would allay any need to be near seaboards or water, and their shutdown on failure makes them even safer with no reliance on an outside water source or power as a potential risk.
The number of students studying nuclear science tripled from 2004 to 2013, yet the labor statistics show a -4% job growth vs. environmental sciences 11% growth, or a 15% spread. The nuclear engineer job pays roughly 33% more. I still think it is our best bet to date, but I am not saying like others, just pick one. Let's keep at the alternative 'green' energy-producing technologies and nuclear, not either/or.
"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…
If you had actually read the whole article before commenting you would know the answer to these questions. Your questions about efficiency are however valid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe. Yes, and they have been saying that for 50 years . . .
"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…
> as usual, the PR is excessive 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.
There are startups in this area. Here's HyperSolar. They have their own proprietary "nanoparticle" technology.[2] They announced success in 2012. No product yet.
That's why reports of "breakthroughs" in this area have to be viewed skeptically. There have been a lot of claimed breakthroughs that didn't pan out.
This problem looks more like a long, slow slog to something that works well enough to use. Silicon solar cells were like that. Efficiency has slowly improved since the 1950s. Manufacturing processes have slowly improved. There was no "breakthrough"; the curves of efficiency and cost per unit over time are smooth, not discontinuous.
[1] http://phys.org/news/2015-09-efficiency-solar-hydrogen-produ... [2] http://www.hypersolar.com/application.php
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Probably also worth noting that syngas is the primary input for the Haber-Bosch method used to generate the ammonia feedstock for most of our synthetic fertilizers. If you just take the CO and pump it underground then you are actually producing fertilizer for agriculture using a carbon negative process.
> ... take the CO and pump it underground then you are actually producing fertilizer for agriculture Interesting. How does the CO fertilize the plants?
At the end, you'd just oxidize the CO back to CO2 before release, like a catalytic converter does, or use the CO as a chemical building block to produce hydrocarbons.
1. tungsten diselenide
2. an ionic fluid called ethyl-methyl-imidazolium tetrafluoroborate
Just offhand I see selenium in #1, and fluorine and boron going into #2. There's some expense there, and some handling and exposure dangers. If you have a lot of these cells around, are there public health dangers either in handling or in disposing/recycling old ones?
Isn't it counterproductive to turn it into fuel to be burned? It seems like that would leave us at best at no net new carbon dioxide, when we really should be sucking CO2 out and sequestering it away. How about we turn it into bricks or something...
That said, for a little while at least, having liquid fuels is inherently given a bonus relative to electricity only. Of course, you can just make those from the original fossil fuel sources as well...
Honestly it seems like a bit of a mess since each team solving problems locally rarely has all the expertise needed to see the impact globally. I certainly don't, though I've been studying it for many years.
I very much appreciate that things like the CA-GREET models have been trying hard to make it easier to apply wide systems analysis expertise to understand a small part of the overall system without spending years doing the math. But probably it will end up needing to be solved by AlphaGo...