Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
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Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#2When you realize it's usually not a physics or even economic problem, but a social problem.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#3Web Archive link since the site isn't responding: https://web.archive.org/web/20220622142155/https://briangitt...
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#4When you realize it's usually not a physics or even economic problem, but a social problem.
The main social issue is that green energy is better used as marketing than to really do something about the ever rising levels of emissions.
After all, most people don't care to read the actual facts on supposedly new, superior technology, they just endorse it because it's supposed to be green.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#5> I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safestand most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
It releases less radioactivity than coal, just to make things clear.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#6I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal.
Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep.
Geothermal energy exists under every point on Earth, in quantities far greater than we could ever use, in the form of heat which can be used to run steam turbines that existing power plants already have.
The problem is that this energy lies deeper than we have ever dug. If we could dig deeper, we might be able to replace the fuel burning part of most existing fossil fuel power plants with geothermal steam. Deep boring is a hard problem to be sure, but is it harder than fusion? Seems unlikely!
Anyway, this startup https://www.quaise.energy/ was on HN a while ago, and while I have no idea if their specific technology works, it seems like we ought to be allocating at least a medium size fraction of the fusion research budget to deep bore geothermal research instead.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#7Love ten principles, but it’s always going to be specific insights to specific people. Answering ten questions is again seeking the utopian solution. Some people may be happy with just getting three of the right questions. There is no silver bullet and we will tackle climate change, but not by 10 questions but 1,000,000 little questions everywhere.
The default should be let’s not burn things. While we deploy the nuclear powered negative CO2 technologies
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#8Everyone talks about how many lives climate change will ruin, but not enough talk about how many lives are lifted out of poverty from energy abundance from fossil fuels.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#9Reading that is a sad reminder of why people make such poor decisions. He’s still arguing about things in the abstract without a basis in the underlying mechanics of these systems. And the sad thing is he’s effective at convincing people.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#10No post body was provided.