Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

I don't think it is accurate to say it "dissipates into the rest of the water system". Typically the hydrocarbon formations being fracked are thousands of feet below the water table, separated by thousands of feet of impermeable shale. It's the same, or more so, for disposal zones where the frack fluid that flows back is injected. For the fluid to mix with a potable aquifer, it would have to leak within a wellbore. That's possible, for sure, but it's pretty rare, can be detected through proper monitoring, and can be more or less eliminated as a risk when the well is ultimately abandoned by pumping cement down the well. You don't really need a computer model to tell you what's going to happen: the formations have been separate for millions of years, and they're probably going to continue to be separate for millions more.

I hadn't heard about them using the water for crops, that is a little more alarming to me. I suspect it's not being done quite as cavalierly as you're suggesting - they are clearly treating and testing it, as discussed in the article.

In my (maybe biased) opinion, all of this should be weighed against the alternatives. Gas is much cleaner than coal, after all. In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and also eliminate nuclear energy (in some countries at least). Some of the gap can be filled increasingly with renewables, but as recent history has shown, not all of it. Most of the gap is filled with Russian gas, which has its own issues. And overall it makes the energy supply less robust, which allowed their current energy crisis to happen, when the wind doesn't blow enough and the Russian supply has hiccups.

I don't think it's fair to paint this as oil and gas companies reaping all the benefits while everyone else pays the price: everyone benefits from lower energy prices, directly or indirectly. In my opinion, consumers bear some of the responsibility for environmental issues, as well as the producers.

Though, when 1 MJ is generated in a fraction of a second, that does mean its instantaneous output was in the MW+ range

This approach doesn't use magnets.

Do you mean a heat engine?

Because the "opposite" of air conditioning is just a heat engine (taking "hot" and "cold" source, and using the difference to generate locomotion). In fact, all engines are glorified heat engines: be it a steam turbine, ICE, geothermal, or whatever

When air gets hot, it expands. When air gets cold, it contracts. So heat up air through some mechanism (hot side) to push a piston up. To pull the piston down, either use momentum or the cold-source (cold air contracts, pulling the stuff down).

The sterling engine is the best general purpose demonstration of this, and you can buy such engines for $20 to $100 or so.

ICE engines use gasoline as the hot source. Steam engines use steam (water at 100C) to transfer the heat from the hot source to the needed locations (heat can be from nuclear, coal, or other sources)

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Air conditioning is just this process in reverse. Expand the air forcibly by applying force to the piston. This cools down the air. "Gather" the coldness through some mechanism, which heats up your air inside the A/C unit while cooling whatever is on your "cold plate".

Push the hot air and compress it down. This heats up the air even further: "transfer" the hotness through some mechanism (aka: heat something else up, like the air outside the house). This cools down the air inside your A/C unit.

Now find a fluid that's more efficient at this process than oxygen. Then realize that fluid is terrible for the Ozone layer and write a regulation for a newer, crappier fluid that's less damaging to the Earth, and you have modern A/C units.

> It seems like you’re removing energy from the air.

You're just transferring the hotness somewhere else. Go feel the air that your refrigerator outputs: its far hotter than the air inside. If you measure the energy, its the energy that was "stolen" from inside the refrigerator + the energy "spent" on the heat pump (that compression / decompression cycle takes work, and work generates heat)

We can transfer heat around, but it costs energy. Alternatively, a difference in heat can be used to gather energy, but it will "Average" the temperatures and eventually the hot-source and cold-source will be the same temperature.

We can use fuels to make the hot-source stay really, really hot for long periods of time (as long as we have a source of fuel), and that's basically the design of steam engines / heat engines.

It's still less than half what's produced by coal or oil.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

There are a limited number of locations where hydro is viable and most of them have been tapped (last I read about it at least),

I'm 100% with you on nuclear.

Regardless of cost, we need base load capabilities when the wind isn't blowing and the sun is down. Grid storage hasn't been well proven yet. People are actively fighting nuclear and the costs as well as timeliness are crazy. If there's one thing in this country worth wasting money on, it's nuclear.

If we can't get base load generation from nuclear due to all of the financial risks, NG is about all that's left to carry the load as an improvement over coal and oil.

I'd much rather have zero emission nuclear, but NG is the stop gap that we are left with until we start committing to nuclear (or we have a better round-the-clock option).