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>"Let me make it very clear: fusion is, if you simply look at the carbon dioxide goals we have, fusion would be too late to bring those carbon dioxide emissions
by crimsonalucard 9y ago
>"Let me make it very clear: fusion is, if you simply look at the carbon dioxide goals we have, fusion would be too late to bring those carbon dioxide emissions down at the rate that we need. If renewables do the job, fusion could become part of a network of dispatchable power generation units. However, if renewables don’t do the job, fusion will be too late to prevent serious damage. In that scenario, we would find ourselves in a bad situation for a period of time that extends beyond when the first fusion reactors come on line."
This quote is so telling on the limits of technology. So many people think of fusion as a technological miracle that can save the world. Here we have a man telling the world that we're fucked if we just sit on our asses waiting for this miracle.
- pirocks 9y agoCouldn't you just pump co2 out of the atmosphere if you had sufficient energy/money ?
- Eerie 9y agoYou totally could pump it out, and I suspect that's what humanity will have to do, as clearly we are not going to stop pumping it in for a while...
- crimsonalucard 9y agopump it where?
- ItsDeathball 9y agoSeveral options: pump it back down the oil wells it came from, use fast-growing juvenile trees to "pump" it into house frames and libraries, use algae to "pump" it into useful plastics, or, if you have infinite money, bottle it and shoot it at Mars to thicken the atmosphere.
- dredmorbius 9y agoFix it to some stable form. Hydrocarbons, limestone, solid carbon ...
- sliken 9y agoIdeally into solid carbon bricks that could be used as a building material and last practically forever.
- dredmorbius 9y agoOut of the ocean might make far more sense, as the energy costs are lower. There's exchange from atmosphere to oceans.
- saalweachter 9y agoThere's a similar pipeline for food; the people who think about such things say we need to increase our food supply by 85% in the next 50 years. It takes about 35 years for a new piece of agricultural technology to go from the lab to ubiquitous, so we are really looking to have those technological advancements in the next ~15 years.
- mcherm 9y agoMaybe the problem that needs to be solved is the amount of time that it takes to bring an invention from "proof of concept" to "widespread use". In fact, maybe there has been significant progress on that particular issue just in the past couple of decades. I see new technology adoption curves that outpace anything we used to see.