10 ms·

> Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities. What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on s

by motoboi 10y ago

> Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities. What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar? Why is so difficult to harness that source? Maybe the same obstacles make fusion so difficult to pursue.

Cerium 10y ago
Yes, we already have a clean fusion reactor with wireless power transfer to every location on earth (weaker signal at poles). All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver!
- Reason077 10y ago
  The tilt and rotation of the earth also has a blocking effect, resulting in significant seasonal and daily variations in signal strength. Weather phenomena also effects it in many areas. Still, the virtually unlimited energy available via this means is making it increasingly promising. Moving forward, storage technology will help overcome some of the limitations.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    Said variations cause significant motion in the fluid surrounding the receivers. Building alternative secondary receivers to extract this indirect energy can yield additional gains.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver! We did, and we've already hit the quantum limit of how efficient they can be. It isn't enough. Well it is enough, but there isn't an efficient method to store or transmit the captured power. Solar is awesome, but the places it is most available also happens to be where it is least needed, in general, I'm aware of Saudi Arabia. It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy. Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
  - fisherjeff 10y ago
    Not disagreeing with anything you said but it's worth pointing out that concentrated solar is competitive in terms of GHG emissions.
  - Reason077 10y ago
    It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy. ... but still tiny compared to any form of fossil fuel or biomass! Presumably the carbon footprint of solar is largely made up of fossil fuel used in the production and installation of PV panels themselves. This would decline over time as the grid, and vehicles, become greener. Eventually, new panels would be produced using energy from existing panels, closing the loop. Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient. The difference is pretty small according to the table you posted. They're all much, much better than fossil fuels.
  - sulam 10y ago
    To save some people the click -- minimum warming potential by a few less-than-randomly selected sources: Coal: 770 Gas: 410 Rooftop solar: 26 Offshore wind: 8 Nuclear: 3.7 So, the word "vastly" above might be overstating things. Solar certainly isn't the most efficient, but it's pretty damn efficient compared to anything produced by biological processes.
    - valarauca1 10y ago
      400% and 700% are a vast difference. I'm not comparing Roof Top solar to Coal or Natural Gas yes very clear winner there. I'm comparing it to Hydro-Electric, Nuclear, Tidal, and Wind where it is by far the dirtiest.
      - sulam 10y ago
        You know, I edited out a sentence that read something like "unless you're playing statistical games with percentages" because I thought to myself that this was an unfair projection of what you might be thinking. Thank you for making it clear that I was not being unfair, even in my pre-edited state. They are a small difference compared to extractive mining. Statistics rhetorical tricks aside, the world would be much better off if we were using any mix of the non-extractive power technologies, even if that mix heavily weights rooftop solar. Fundamentally the fact that rooftop solar is something I can put some money into tomorrow and see the results in six months means it is effective, which offends many people who would prefer that we spend our efforts in ineffective ways, either for ideological reasons (amusing that nuclear doesn't appeal to these types) or because they wish to maintain the status quo. Since the science shows that status quo is going to drown the island I live on inside of 75 years, I'm not a big fan of this point of view. My island is probably already dead, and the 80K people that live here need to find a new home in our or our children's lifetimes, but I am motivated to make choices that don't produce more stories like mine.
AcerbicZero 10y ago
Fusion power has a great deal more potential, whereas solar caps out fairly quickly based on distance from that big ball of fire in the sky.
grondilu 10y ago
I kind of agree. I'm no expert whatsoever but I am under the impression that the energy issues we face are more a problem of storage than production. If we could store energy cheaply and efficiently, we would not need fusion plants. We would just use solar power. And if we had fusion plants without a cheap and efficient way to store energy, there would still be energy problems like in transportation, wouldn't there? I mean the reason most cars for instance are not electric nowadays is not because we can't generate enough electricity, it's because we can't store enough electric energy in a car.
beambot 10y ago
That big fusion reactor causes global warming. Shut it down!
ctdonath 10y ago
Why is so difficult to harness that source? Because there's a hard upper limit of 1367 watts per square meter. And, practically speaking, you're not going to reach 10% of that (panel efficiency, angles, cloud cover, air transmissivity, weather, damage, dust/dirt, night/dawn/dusk, conduit resistance, storage loss, etc). That means the only way to scale up is land surface area, about 10,000 square kilometers of solar panels for 1TW power production, covering about 0.1% of the USA. (Don't get me wrong, I'm just presenting objective numbers. I'm thrilled about Tesla / Solar City pushing rooftop solar with "invisible" tiles, and think every home should be built with at least the whole roof covered with solar panels. Independence is a big deal, and having at least substantial off-grid power is important.)
- mc32 10y ago
  If we could use the concept of space elevators and instead floated solar "panels" in the sky we could achieve two things, unimpeded surface area for installation and second a sunshield to cool things off a bit and forestall climatologically induced planetary change.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    The space umbrella concept. We may have to do it eventually, seeing as climate science is drowning under a flood of irrationality and lies.
    - mc32 10y ago
      Yes, although one wonders what the impact might be on ecosystems with less energy coming in (even if we limited the sunshields to underproductive polar regions).
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar? Perhaps we should not go "all on" anything. Solar is available now, it's getting cheaper by the day, and it's very easy to install and use. But it's intermittent, requires storage, it's not portable except at low levels, and energy density is not that great. Fusion is obviously not available now. But when figured out, it would have all the strengths of classic nuclear energy without most of its weaknesses. We should keep deploying solar as fast as possible, while aggressively pushing for fusion research.
cc438 10y ago
Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a relatively average nuclear plant. The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant. That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity. Source: http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Papers/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=.pdf http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pap...
- londons_explore 10y ago
  More importantly, with fusion, energy could become significantly cheaper allowing us to do things which weren't economically viable. Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete. Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day. Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land. Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source. A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.
  - motoboi 10y ago
    I made me curious about something. Will the heat from all that electricity generation affect the environment in significant ways? At which energy usage scale humanity will be restricted by the planet environment capacity to deal with the generated heat?

by motoboi 10y ago

Cerium 10y ago

Yes, we already have a clean fusion reactor with wireless power transfer to every location on earth (weaker signal at poles). All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver!

Reason077 10y ago
The tilt and rotation of the earth also has a blocking effect, resulting in significant seasonal and daily variations in signal strength. Weather phenomena also effects it in many areas. Still, the virtually unlimited energy available via this means is making it increasingly promising. Moving forward, storage technology will help overcome some of the limitations.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Said variations cause significant motion in the fluid surrounding the receivers. Building alternative secondary receivers to extract this indirect energy can yield additional gains.
valarauca1 10y ago
All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver! We did, and we've already hit the quantum limit of how efficient they can be. It isn't enough. Well it is enough, but there isn't an efficient method to store or transmit the captured power. Solar is awesome, but the places it is most available also happens to be where it is least needed, in general, I'm aware of Saudi Arabia. It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy. Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
- fisherjeff 10y ago
  Not disagreeing with anything you said but it's worth pointing out that concentrated solar is competitive in terms of GHG emissions.
- Reason077 10y ago
  It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy. ... but still tiny compared to any form of fossil fuel or biomass! Presumably the carbon footprint of solar is largely made up of fossil fuel used in the production and installation of PV panels themselves. This would decline over time as the grid, and vehicles, become greener. Eventually, new panels would be produced using energy from existing panels, closing the loop. Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient. The difference is pretty small according to the table you posted. They're all much, much better than fossil fuels.
- sulam 10y ago
  To save some people the click -- minimum warming potential by a few less-than-randomly selected sources: Coal: 770 Gas: 410 Rooftop solar: 26 Offshore wind: 8 Nuclear: 3.7 So, the word "vastly" above might be overstating things. Solar certainly isn't the most efficient, but it's pretty damn efficient compared to anything produced by biological processes.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    400% and 700% are a vast difference. I'm not comparing Roof Top solar to Coal or Natural Gas yes very clear winner there. I'm comparing it to Hydro-Electric, Nuclear, Tidal, and Wind where it is by far the dirtiest.
    - sulam 10y ago
      You know, I edited out a sentence that read something like "unless you're playing statistical games with percentages" because I thought to myself that this was an unfair projection of what you might be thinking. Thank you for making it clear that I was not being unfair, even in my pre-edited state. They are a small difference compared to extractive mining. Statistics rhetorical tricks aside, the world would be much better off if we were using any mix of the non-extractive power technologies, even if that mix heavily weights rooftop solar. Fundamentally the fact that rooftop solar is something I can put some money into tomorrow and see the results in six months means it is effective, which offends many people who would prefer that we spend our efforts in ineffective ways, either for ideological reasons (amusing that nuclear doesn't appeal to these types) or because they wish to maintain the status quo. Since the science shows that status quo is going to drown the island I live on inside of 75 years, I'm not a big fan of this point of view. My island is probably already dead, and the 80K people that live here need to find a new home in our or our children's lifetimes, but I am motivated to make choices that don't produce more stories like mine.

AcerbicZero 10y ago

Fusion power has a great deal more potential, whereas solar caps out fairly quickly based on distance from that big ball of fire in the sky.

grondilu 10y ago

I kind of agree. I'm no expert whatsoever but I am under the impression that the energy issues we face are more a problem of storage than production. If we could store energy cheaply and efficiently, we would not need fusion plants. We would just use solar power. And if we had fusion plants without a cheap and efficient way to store energy, there would still be energy problems like in transportation, wouldn't there? I mean the reason most cars for instance are not electric nowadays is not because we can't generate enough electricity, it's because we can't store enough electric energy in a car.

beambot 10y ago

That big fusion reactor causes global warming. Shut it down!

ctdonath 10y ago

Why is so difficult to harness that source? Because there's a hard upper limit of 1367 watts per square meter. And, practically speaking, you're not going to reach 10% of that (panel efficiency, angles, cloud cover, air transmissivity, weather, damage, dust/dirt, night/dawn/dusk, conduit resistance, storage loss, etc). That means the only way to scale up is land surface area, about 10,000 square kilometers of solar panels for 1TW power production, covering about 0.1% of the USA. (Don't get me wrong, I'm just presenting objective numbers. I'm thrilled about Tesla / Solar City pushing rooftop solar with "invisible" tiles, and think every home should be built with at least the whole roof covered with solar panels. Independence is a big deal, and having at least substantial off-grid power is important.)

mc32 10y ago
If we could use the concept of space elevators and instead floated solar "panels" in the sky we could achieve two things, unimpeded surface area for installation and second a sunshield to cool things off a bit and forestall climatologically induced planetary change.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  The space umbrella concept. We may have to do it eventually, seeing as climate science is drowning under a flood of irrationality and lies.
  - mc32 10y ago
    Yes, although one wonders what the impact might be on ecosystems with less energy coming in (even if we limited the sunshields to underproductive polar regions).

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar? Perhaps we should not go "all on" anything. Solar is available now, it's getting cheaper by the day, and it's very easy to install and use. But it's intermittent, requires storage, it's not portable except at low levels, and energy density is not that great. Fusion is obviously not available now. But when figured out, it would have all the strengths of classic nuclear energy without most of its weaknesses. We should keep deploying solar as fast as possible, while aggressively pushing for fusion research.

cc438 10y ago

Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a relatively average nuclear plant. The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant. That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity. Source: http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Papers/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=.pdf http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pap...

londons_explore 10y ago
More importantly, with fusion, energy could become significantly cheaper allowing us to do things which weren't economically viable. Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete. Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day. Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land. Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source. A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.
- motoboi 10y ago
  I made me curious about something. Will the heat from all that electricity generation affect the environment in significant ways? At which energy usage scale humanity will be restricted by the planet environment capacity to deal with the generated heat?