Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible

• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Cool and hows all that coming along?

  Hydrogen vehicles?

  The whole initial pitch from Tesla, that basicslly got EVs conceptually over the hump into being potentially practical…

  … was Elon saying he was gonna build a whole network of infrastructure for that, charging networks.

  … and then 90% of that never happened.

  Remember when we were gonna have basically a carwash type thing but it would just do a battery swap on your car?

  Remember when he was all giddy about the SOLID METAL SNAKE that was gonna basicslly just be a robot tentacle that would automagically plug in to your charging port?

  Yeah, basically of that shit happened.

  So my point is, you run into the same fundamental problem with hydrogen, now you need to build a whole new set of infrastructure.

  … Who is going to pay for that?

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  • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ok, so use the hydrogen to make heavier fuels, you just need heat and CO2

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      … so you’re saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to … do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?

      … Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?

      I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved…

      …for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense…

      Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.

      And … synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.

      And and, for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.

      If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately ‘refined air’… you’re going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.

      It is a little more complicated than just ‘heat up CO2’.

      Unless you can point me to … somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from… ambient CO2… that you’re scrubbing from the air… demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept… and described the total amount of energy required to power this process…

      Yeah I’m calling bullshit.

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      • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        www.sciencedirect.com/…/S2212982022003808

        Yes, it requires significantly more energy than you get from burning the hydrocarbons, but the whole promise of fusion is virtually limitless clean energy with minimal nuclear waste.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    what if we abolish capitalism?

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