Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky.

Archangel1313@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• drzoidberg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I explained this to my oldest when he learned about the steam engine and how cool it was. When I told him it was the peak in power he was like “but we have nuclear and gas” and I told him that nuclear power is basically just a super charged steam engine, and nuclear rods boil water better than coal or gasoline, but it’s basically a steam engine. I went over how gasoline in cars was basically the same, but instead of steam, it used tiny explosions. We watched a few how it’s made type videos.

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  • Dojan@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I remember when this was explained to me and my little mind was blown. Your comment reminded me of that moment. Thank you.

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  • olafurp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Just as a side note that gas power plants capture two types of energy, both the expansion of the burned gas and the heat. This is why they’re now more popular for new builds than oil.

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• WoodScientist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.

  There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.

  The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.

  The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.

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  • call_me_xale@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I still think nuclear (probably fission rather than fusion) has a place, at least in terms of land usage. It’s just obscenely efficient in terms of energy per resource investment. It requires many square miles and hundreds of tons of materials to match the output of a single reactor.

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    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It’s called pagrivol[(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics). And that’s before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.

      There simply isn’t a shortage of land for solar. Unless you’re talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn’t a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it’s an advantage that really doesn’t matter much in the real world.

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      • call_me_xale@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Huh, I didn’t realize the numbers worked out that well.

        I think there’s still a raw-materials issue. Extraction and transport for that much solar is doable but still a big disadvantage.

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    • mech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Solar doesn’t need to use that space exclusively. You can put solar on every roof, over every parking lot, and all grazing land. You can even put it over farmland in winter and tilt the panels out of the way during summer when there’s enough energy anyway.

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  • Iceblade02@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The days the steam engine are numbered.

    Not really. Unless there are some breakthroughs in technology that significantly lower capex & opex for grid scale energy storage, they’ll be sticking around for a long time.

    There is an asterisk on the 1TW number, and that asterisk is capacity factor. In practice it means that depending on the time of year and location, the effective output of your solar panel will be between 0-40% of label capacity .

    In my country for instance, you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time, which also happens to coincide with the peak demands (heating). Luckily, our politicians had some foresight in the 70s & 80s and built lots of hydro and nuclear power, which has been the backbone of our grid ever since (despite attempts to dismantle it).

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    • oeuf@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time

      I can confirm this. My family is off-grid and there have been extended periods the last two winters when it has simply been too dark for too long to depend on the solar without installing 50x more panels.

      Also, the problem with having larger battery capacity to span these periods is that if they don’t get fully recharged or cycled properly the batteries get damaged and eventually die. We learnt that the hard way.

      Solar is the undisputed champion for 80-90% of the year but needs the complemented with something else for the remainder, if you want uninterrupted on-demand electricity.

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      • Riverside@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        My family is off-grid and there have been extended periods the last two winters when it has simply been too dark for too long to depend on the solar without installing 50x more panels

        laughs in ultrahigh-voltage power lines connecting deserts to populated areas

        Seriously, China is already implementing this technology, we just need a few socialist revolutions and we can go full solarpunk

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  • mech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I just hope the timeline you describe can outpace the timeline racing towards neo-feudalism, world war 3, global pandemics and heat waves triggering a new migration period.

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  • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The future is one of vast energy abundance

    Wow. Isn’t it amazing that the majority of human history operated under renewable energy?

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  • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    While I agree that this is all technological possible, I just have a sinking feeling capitalism will find a way to ruin this. Probably involving the profit incentives for power companies

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    • Wander@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Sometimes things just get horrifically cheap.

      Could be pencils or shoes or lightbulbs or books a million one other things. Onetime they was rare and capitalism made them so common practically everyone into he world can have them.

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• call_me_xale@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Turns out heat engines are like… pretty good at turning arbitrary energy sources into useful work.

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• Abundance114@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Turns out there is a method of fusion power that doesn’t boil water. It generates massive electromagnetic fields that creates electricity.

  direct energy conversion in a magnetic confinement setup, specifically leveraging a field-reversed configuration

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• Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Its actually more like if a steam engine and a waterwheel had a baby, a turbine

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