It’s a pop science article… they usually don’t cover things like life cycle analysis. It is however a first of its kind plant that makes its net effects less important as it kind of works as a proof of concept. It’s a relatively small scale plant that if it does work, great, lets build more of them; if it doesn’t work, that sucks, can we modify them in any way to make them work.
It is taking two ingredients that usually have to take extra energy to be able to dispose of them and combining them together to make electricity. That is really cool, and there is no reason to be overly negative about it because it might be bad based on info that you don’t have
Humanius@lemmy.world 2 days ago
While I agree that the cost of operation is a valid concern, the same argument could have been used against renewable energies like wind and solar only 30 to 40 years ago.
The price of these energie sources has come down a lot since, for a large part thanks to the modern day widespread use. We have a lot of experience generating power this way which drives down cost, and increases yield.
Novel techniques like the one described in the article don’t yet benefit from that experience and scale. And if we don’t try new things every now and then thet never will.
That is not to say all novel techniques will be equally fruitful, but if you don’t occasionally try new things you will never learn.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 2 days ago
Fair point.