Comment on A new cooling technology freezes food without warming the climate

• Sidyctism2@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The headline reads “A new cooling technology freezes food without warming the climate”. It doesnt mention the lack of (gaseous) refrigerent.
  The thing about machines that make them bad for the environment in general is the fact that they use up energy, which is nowadays still mostly created in a process that also releases massive amounts of CO2.
  Its unlikely that the environmental impact of the gaseous refrigerent is as big as the impact of the CO2 that is created to run the fridge over its lifetime. It makes sense then to assume this fridge doesnt use power, since right now thats the only way it could cool without heating up the planet.

  Im not saying this tech isnt interesting, but the headline is total BS

  source

  • BussyCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Old school refrigerants were absolutely horrendous ghg even modern ones are pretty bad with R134 being 1430x worse of a ghg than CO2

    If we can reduce that, that’s good! And metals like titanium are recyclable so yes initially extracting them is bad but the full lifecycle isn’t as terrible

    source

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Modern refrigerants don’t use R134

      source

      • BussyCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        www.freon.com/en/…/residential-refrigeration

        R134 was the “safe” refrigerant to replace R-12 because R12 is 11000x more potent of a ghg than co2

        There are some new refrigeration units that use R600 but the vast majority of refrigerators are still R134

        R600 being a highly flammable gas (it’s butane) has slowed its rollout a lot. Hence why a solid state non volatile refrigerant is still a cool development

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