Humanity is on the cusp of practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion • Hacker News Board

Re: Humanity is on the cusp of practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion

#21

Post by webmaven » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

brokenmachine wrote: post #19

webmaven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this is true, then humanity is also on the cusp of being able to eliminate the impact on climate from burning fossil fuels in one generation! Depending on how you define 'generation', this may be unrealistic. Even if the whole world economy were to become carbon neutral tomorrow, it would be a while before greenhouse gasses started to go down, and that assumes we haven't already reached a tipping point for a run…

>assumes we haven't already reached a tipping point for a runaway greenhouse effect. With limitless energy, we could just make some kind of Earth AC unit.

There is really no such thing as "too cheap to meter" and certainly not "limitless" power.

If absolutely nothing else, there is a limit on the number of powerplants that can be built, and certainly on how fast they can be built.

Re: Humanity is on the cusp of practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion

#22

Post by webmaven » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

gary_0 wrote: post #9

webmaven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this is true, then humanity is also on the cusp of being able to eliminate the impact on climate from burning fossil fuels in one generation! Depending on how you define 'generation', this may be unrealistic. Even if the whole world economy were to become carbon neutral tomorrow, it would be a while before greenhouse gasses started to go down, and that assumes we haven't already reached a tipping point for a run…

Globally we have about 17,000 TWh (and increasing) of fossil fuel power generation we'll need to replace. It's gonna take a while, and that's very unfortunate.

My point was that even if it was all replaced tomorrow, the extra greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere won't go away immediately, and the extra heat trapped won't either.

Re: Humanity is on the cusp of practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion

#23

Post by brokenmachine » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #21

brokenmachine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>assumes we haven't already reached a tipping point for a runaway greenhouse effect. With limitless energy, we could just make some kind of Earth AC unit.

There is really no such thing as "too cheap to meter" and certainly not "limitless" power. If absolutely nothing else, there is a limit on the number of powerplants that can be built, and certainly on how fast they can be built.

But I thought humanity was "on the cusp of practically limitless energy"!