1587
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
1587 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
59419 readers
2993 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ah well, it figures they have a tradeoff like that. Maybe they’ll be limited to remote locations then.
Like so many things, it will come down to cost. It’s fortunate that renewables are getting so much cheaper because we pretty much are betting on them by being so reluctant to expand nuclear. Hopefully batteries and other energy storage technologies keep advancing rapidly.
All thermal generation will cause direct global warming via waste heat if used to excess.
Fossil fuels have an order of magnitude or two more thermal forcing via GHG, so it's largely irrelevant there, but solar can produce a couple orders of magnitude more energy than the world uses now without significant land use. As such fusion (with the exception of p-B or He3 direct conversion with no steam engine which is a bit more scifi) hits thermal limits before solar hits land limits.
Intuitively you can frame this as "a small fraction of the amount of sunlight that hits the planet is the amount of energy that changes the planet's temperature" which is basically a tautology.