What's the "meltdown" equivalent of fusion? What is the worst thing that could happen given unlikely sequence of failures? Is it possible it would go from controlled fusion to uncontrolled fusion?
The main problem being tackled is trying to get fusion to remain 'alight' - i think if any of the containment systems fail, it simply extinguishes immediately. Not a physicist, though :)
The energy content in a fusion reactor (even at the 3 GW output scale) is only a few mega joules, or in other words a few sticks of dynamite. Enough to damage the wall. Maybe enough to break the vacuum vessel. At that point the air would stop any further fusion. You might release radioactive tritium, but nothing else that should be felt outside the building.
For comparison: The total inventory of tritium would be about 500g, about 50 times the amount of tritium released by fukushima, but the other radioactive isotopes that got released there (caesium, iodine, tellurium) that are much more problematic biologically would be missing.
Once containment fails the energy which is within the reactor escapes and the reaction stops. Fusion only occurs at these insane pressures/temperatures which won't be maintained if containment fails.
I wouldn't want to be in the building when it fails.
If it uses Tritium then that's going be an environmental hazard (it's radioactive and will get everywhere).
To be honest it's all conjecture right now because we don't have a viable reactor design and failure modes will depend what exactly we build.
True, but on the other side if it gets into the water system in any significant quantities then that's going to a bad for local residents.
However I can't see that happening. You'd have to have the tanks of it very close to the reactor. That's something you'd obviously not do.
There's probably a greater risk transporting the stuff (road accidents) or in bad maintenance of the tanks or human error (emptying the tanks by accident).
It seems to me that one could avoid storing any tritium as a liquid. Tritium gas is light will generally tend to rise. Insoluble tritium salts will be less likely to enter the ground water.
Although... an inexpensive risk mitigation would be to wrap any tritiated water tanks with sodium polyacrylate. Imagine a giant diaper. Leaks would be absorbed.
It wouldn't hurt you a bit if containment failed while you're in the building. The fusion plasma is held at very high temperature but there's very little of it. It's only ever at high pressure in inertial fusion, which doesn't actually contain the plasma at all except for a tiny fraction of a second before it explodes by design.
Basically, none that we need to be concerned with.
The general idea is this: when you fuse elements, you produce heavier elements; if you wanted to fuse these new elements into even heavier ones, you'd need to input much more energy — thus it can be said in layman terms that the products of fusion are 'toxic' to the fusion itself, i.e. the more you do it the less likely it is to go on, until if finally stops (like in real-world stars). For instance, the Helium produced by the Sun is making it harder to sustain the Hydrogen fusion, which will stop before all Hydrogen is depleted.
In addition, the radioactive elements produced by fusion are much lesser than fusion, by orders of magnitude, so it's pretty much 'clean' in that regard for all intents and purposes (50 years of fission probably produced much worse than 1,000 years of fusion would).
And the fuel is available in pretty much limitless quantity — in fact, it would probably make a space industry, starting with mining hydrogen isotopes for fusion, profitable from day 1.
It's basically the closest thing we have to God's tech, and there's not much else in theoretical physics that comes close in terms of benefits in our real-world context. Fusion would essentially hand over the galaxy to us with little to no chance of failure, given enough time.
If we can pull it off, that is. Which remains to be seen, there's nothing new or groundbreaking in this article.
Worst thing is an (non-nuclear) explosion releasing some radioactive matter with small contamination. From my understanding it's similar to conventional power plant explosion and contamination is negligible (nothing like fukushima disaster). It's not possible to get uncontrolled fusion, at least for reactor designs we are considering now. It requires star scale to have uncontrolled fusion.
Fusion to higher molecular weight atoms releases energy until it turns to Iron. I don't think it is possible to have energies for fusion beyond helium however.
I would say "none" but just containment failing is not equivalent of meltdown. If left to own devices, fusion would stop. You can get some kind of explosion/fire, since you know, high energies are involved, but it would be simple thermal explosion.
There are still issues, like most fusion reactions produce neutrons, which are not great by themselves, and basically most dangerous type of radiation. They can make regular matter radioactive. But we are far from that stage when this is a problem.
Well, I don't think you're wrong, but no need to be so cynical. :) This isn't like some industries where they might just pop up with a commercially viable product out of the blue and start making money. The nascent fusion industry needs support from the public in the form of public policy, research funding and investment. I wouldn't be surprised if this piece was basically fusion industry PR machine reminding us all that they still exist and could be interesting in the near future.
My understanding is that so far, it doesn't look like wind/hydro/solar can scale to our needs within the timeframe that fusion might be viable (and yes, I know, it's "always 20 years away", but hopefully that changes eventually), so it's still a worthwhile pursuit, IMO.
I don't begrudge money being spent on researching fusion. It is definitely a promising technology, but it's not coming to a power grid near you any time soon.
Even if we can figure out how to keep a reaction going with a useful energy surplus no one has any idea
a) How much a reactor will cost,
b) how long/hard will it be to build or
c) If there are any issues with the process - yes no nuclear fuel but there's still some nasty crap coming out of the reaction which you will have to deal with if you scale the technology.
Meanwhile there are a number of perfectly viable planet saving power sources - solar, wind, solar-thermal etc - already out there providing power.
Fusion is a nice idea, but it isn't the only way to save the world...
"it's not coming to a power grid near you any time soon"
"soon" is relative. The older I get, the more something a century or even two away doesn't seem that far off, and something that could arrive in 20 years seems positively near.
The Long Now project strives to get people to think more long-term, and I've heard that in some parts of Asia governments and organizations plan on far longer time horizons than is common in the West.
The world would be far better off if more of us adopted such a perspective, rather than focusing on only on what can be done now or in the next few years.
I totally agree with your sentiment in general. However, when you wake up in the middle of the night and realise your house is on fire, you don't have time to ponder the future fire prevention technologies. You need to get out of bed and start putting the fire out. "House on fire" is where we are now in regards to climate change.
No we aren't at "House on fire" state yet. Once people start dying en masse and wars are breaking out over liveable land and resources is when we have reached "House on fire" territory.
We are currently at we know we have an electrical problem in the walls that we know will cause a house fire in the future if we don't fix it.
Attibuting any specific catastrophic event to climate change is hardly possible, though. Arguably, climate change is already playing a role in conflicts around the world. The arab spring (and therefore the ongoing war in Syria) was partly triggered by discontent over food prices, which are of course closely linked to the local weather and thus climate change. Here's an article that explores this is some more detail:
That is a localized conflict. It really is a problem once the entire world is touched. If global warming will not result in large scale wars and people dying en masse it's not really a problem. It would mean global warning would only entail a reduction in quality of life not large enough to warrant violence.
Even if global warning has a death toll of 10% of the world population I don't consider that a real problem. As long as humanity can progress afterwards it's fine.
>Even if global warning has a death toll of 10% of the world population I don't consider that a real problem.
Absolutely incredible. Are you picturing your friends and family in this hypothetical 10% death toll? Or the social conditions that would result in this number (comparable to Germany in WW2)?
What is so horrifying to you about stopping global warming, that literally decimating the world's population is the less bad option?
I never said it wouldn't be horrible. But let's be honest the human species lived on after WW2. I'm not sure where you got that I think that stopping global warming is horrifying, I don't think I ever said that. Beside that point that is not what I believe.
I think it would be great if we could stop global warming. But I don't think it socially possible. The only glimmer of hope I have left is that it is only a significant reduction of the human population while the rest can move on.
> We are currently at we know we have an electrical problem in the walls that we know will cause a house fire in the future if we don't fix it.
I disagree. Permanent damage has already been dealt. To continue with the house analogy, we can probably still save a smaller or bigger part of it depending on how quick we are to put the fire down.
But irreversible damage has already been done: even if we were to stop our carbon emissions right away, sea levels would still rise quite a bit (more than 1m by 2100-2300 IIRC). Every species that goes extinct will stay extinct, forever. And many are headed down this path. Biodiversity has suffered a lot in many places.
Think about this: we can complain about having to deal with radioactive garbage in 100ky, but any species that disappears today will not come back, even after billions of years. And millions of would-be species from its possible ofspring won't ever be either.
Those thoughts put things in perspective. I find them daunting, and this has led a lot of people to take the "climate emergency" very seriously. Our house is already on fire. Even if we start putting it out, we know it will still continue growing at least for a bit after we start pumping water, but we'd better start ASAP.
No, mass death and wars would be "you are currently dying in the fire". There is a fire, it has already destroyed many things, but it hasn't yet reached the sofa, where we are currently sitting complacently.
Hell, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of trained physicists, chemists, material scientists, etc, who aren't even engaged in relevant work at all - they fall into neither camp.
This is the best argument for extensive research into life-span extension.
One of the megatrends of the last 200 years has been a huge increase in the time horizon deemed acceptable for investment payoff.
Generally, humans aren't willing to forgo things today for a payoff more than about half a life-span away. Today, a true long-term investor considers the 30-year return on their investment.
An investment that won't make a return for 50 years or more mostly isn't worth making.
But, if you knew you would still be healthy enough to enjoy the profits in 90 or 100 years, you might be willing to invest for the even-longer term (historical trends suggest this to be true)
Government grants are fun and all, but the way you get thing going big is to get them funded by people who are hoping to profit, not just hoping to make the world better in some way
Imagine for a moment that cryogenization technology became available tomorrow. Would that help? Should we start forcing everyone to spend 3 years in cryo sleep every year, thus extending everyone's lifespan 400%?
This is far-fetched and just sci-fi for now, but interesting to think about nevertheless: should you go into cryo sleep while you are waiting for the right job offer? Should we cryogenize refugees while we are waiting to find them some shelter after a disaster or a war happens? People surely take a lot less resources if you can stack them, and they are not moving, feeding, etc.
Something like this would require us rethinking our ethics and society, yet it would be a very welcome way to start thinking more about the future.
If you would like to read some sci-fi that plays with the idea of skipping through life via cryosleep, try The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card.
It's one of his earliest works, so it isn't as well-produced as some of his later stuff, but it explores some very interesting ideas.
(This story began life as a different novel called Hot Sleep. Having read both, I honestly can't remember which parts are in which version, but Card himself says he considers The Worthing Saga to be the official version)
(hint: in Card's story, cryotech created a dystopian, not utopian society)
That's why research is needed otherwise researching will take the research duration plus the delay imposed by people saying it won't be here anytime soon anyway.
> perfectly viable power sources like solar, wind, solar-thermal etc.
Until humanity has figured viable massively scalable long term power storage solutions we will always be at the mercy of natural phenomena (time of day, wind speed and direction etc).
Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.
> Until humanity has figured viable massively scalable long term power storage solutions we will always be at the mercy of natural phenomena (time of day, wind speed and direction etc).
I would argue we just need to make sure ongoing power needs are met - ie we can always turn the lights on. This doesn't need "scalable long term" storage - although pumped hydro, batteries, thermal salt all work well - it just needs sensible grid design so the needs at any one time are met by available power sources.
This above is obviously a "harder" problem than to just have a few big power plants you can throttle on or off but not that much harder and we already have the technology and knowledge - if not the political will - to do it.
> Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.
This is flat out wrong. many communities already exist exclusively on renewables.
> This is flat out wrong. many communities already exist exclusively on renewables.
"Communities" maybe but what about (heavy) industry like the the one required to e.g. manufacture more wind/water turbines and parts, (continue) to research more efficient technologies in the future, to sustain the growing population etc. ?
Iceland seems to do pretty well on almost exclusively renewables. And this includes Aluminium smelters which are amongst the most power-intensive heavy industries.
I too like the idea of Fusion reactors, (I am enamored with the dreamy prospect of fusion for space travel), but I think Elon Musk's observation is obligatory here:
Why spend huge sums in a fusion reactor, when we have a perfectly reliable funsion reactor right above us, the Sun, giving power at a convenient form (~500nm light -- far better than heat), at convenient power densities (not too high to overheat panels and not too low to be uneconomical), is available virtually everywhere, etc. It really is like we had already built a reactor and only need to add the last, least expensive, bit of energy harvesting.
The only thing Solar cannot compete well with are fossil fuels, which are essentially like discovering charged batteries buried in the ground (which is great, but they'll run out, and are ruining our environment), or wind/hydro in some places (where energy is begging to be harvested in the form of kinetic energy or potential).
Our salvation (for this crisis :) ) is indeed already within our reach, we only need to act...
The why is essentially density and availability. While solar is great for cheapness it has other constraints. It may still be more expensive in kWHr cost but it would certainly have its uses.
One way of harvesting solar energy that's technically possible but is not even on the horizon, as far as I know, is using giant mirrors or lenses out in space to focus sunlight down to Earth.
If it weren't for its potential use as a weapon, I'd look forward to seeing it put in practice.
'but it's not coming to a power grid near you any time soon'
- there's about 5 companies aiming for ~2030 commercial fusion; so not terribly long - ok, most of them wont get there, but maybe if one does even a few years late?
I think at least some of them have (a) & (b) in mind - (c) is probably harder.
Fusion reactions produce lots of neutrons, and neutrons weaken metal, in many cases within a few hours.
It may be that a "successful" fusion reactor is still a failure because it can run for only a few hours, days, or weeks before it has to be scrapped and completely rebuilt.
I watched a presentation by the article's author, about MIT's ARC reactor design. He said they would replace the inner wall of the reactor once per year. In operation that would be surrounded by molten FLiBe salt, which would absorb the neutrons and breed tritium fuel. The inner wall would be 3D-printed, and the superconducting coils would be hinged so the reactor could easily open up; MIT has already tested joints in modern superconducting tape.
MIT spun off the company Commonwealth to commercialize the idea.
Actually, it's too late to save the planet. The best we can do is adapt to the new climate as it rapidly emerges. Let's devote what time we have left as a species to making the best possible use of the energy provided by that great fusion reactor in the sky, the Sun.
Millions of people starving or mass migrating due to changes in food supplies are bound to cause a bit (lot) of conflict.
A few degrees change in temperature can dramatically alter weather patterns, the places that used to be good for growing crops may no longer be so. Sure we can adapt and move farms, but the years until that infrastructure gets rebuilt may not be pretty. It only takes 1 person with a red button to end it all.
I would not be so sure about that. There are a variety of scenarios where climate change breaks the food web, e..g., ocean acidification (which is happening much faster & in greater amounts than anticipated). While not extincting all life, & some humans plausibly survive, it is normal for populations to collapse to 10% of previous under conditions losing only down to 80% of previous feed stock -- when down to <10% of feed stock, how many survive?
The key to surviving climate change is having the energy resources to do so. Resource depletion is happening at roughly the same speed as climate change is impacting us.
We do not live in a sustainable way. Nobody would seriously argue with that claim, but the implication is that our way of life is unsustainable. Extinction is a bit extreme but the way we live, our global civilization, is not one that can be sustained. We're showing absolutely zero signs of seriously slowing the pace of our resource consumption or waste production. Only time will tell what it looks like when we go from unsustainable to the consequences of that. But given that without hydrocarbons our biosphere can probably only support about 1 billion humans... we're in for a rough time.
But is this just saving the planet from only the most pressing symptom of human over population? If we do get an abundance of cheap clean energy, what then?
An abundance of clean energy would solve a pretty huge amount of our problems for quite a while. That's not to say that everything would be great forever...but we'd have a whole lot more breathing room to figure things out.
I'm not really sure what you mean by that. Firstly, we are part of the natural world as much as anything else is. Secondly, having access to clean and abundant energy would allow us to do a lot of things to preserve the other parts of the natural world that we are currently not doing because it's too expensive.
If it turns out that the only way to bring down carbon emissions is to make low carbon energy much cheaper, then why would anyone think that we'd spend our newfound wealth on cleaning up our act in other matters?
There are a multitude of cases of human over-expansion proving catastrophic for other natural environments which have nothing at all to do with climate change yet have been totally eclipsed by the issue. I don't know why anyone would think that much cheaper energy would help those cases rather than make them worse.
> If it turns out that the only way to bring down carbon emissions is to make low carbon energy much cheaper, then why would anyone think that we'd spend our newfound wealth on cleaning up our act in other matters?
Humans are consistently willing to devote some percentage of their wealth to nature preservation. That percentage is probably more or less fixed. Therefore bringing down the cost of doing so substantially increases the amount of nature preservation that can be achieved.
The birth rates seem to be declining in the developed countries, to the point where we might have to worry about underpopulation rather than overpopulation as the markets stop growing and the older part of the population begins to strain welfare systems.
Problem is that population growth in developing nations is continuing to be explosive which isn't helped by developed nations "providing aid" which interferes with the natural limitations on population growth (i.e. food ressources within reach are insufficient => population can't reliably grow).
It amazes me that we are still talking about Malthus. There has been a Malthus in every generation since the one to actually carry the name, and they've ways had "compelling" arguments...
...and always, life has gotten better and resource starvation has always gotten rarer...
I used to think its roots lay in some kind of biblical fetish for armageddon. I have no qualifications in this area though so this is just my armchair-psychologist theory.
Oh that and often weird racism about how many people live in poor countries.
It can't just be those two things, though, because it's really big in the U.S. right now on the political left, and especially that part of the far-left that relentlessly mock the right for both their religion and their supposed racism/"whiteness".
In some ways, it's an anti-economic-growth, anti-capitalist sentiment that portrays the great conflict of the world as between "the world" and "human economic activity"
But there's a lot to unpack in the question "Why won't Malthus die" that I won't claim to understand at all.
I suspect other parts of it has to do with tribalistic mentalities and the Morton's fork.
If others have things you want then they are stealing from you. If others are poor then they are a threat because they might want to take what you have.
Belief in the neccessity of one's actions is one hell of a drug that sticks a magnet onto their moral compass ensuring it always points to "correct".
The whole debate is predicated on the belief that we are running out of earth's capacity to accommodate our waste CO2, so it doesn't make any sense to mockingly cry "Malthusian" at the suggestion that further capacity issues lie beyond.
It might be running out of capacity to do so without changing in ways we care about. Possibly.
But I do note that there is a distinct lack of interest in any attempts to solve that problem other than shrinking the population or dismantling our economies or ending any semblance of liberty.
Indeed, most of the proposals are so extreme and draconian that they would lead to much more misery and death than simply doing nothing.
Nobody is interested in even considering alternatives. Research to solve the problem is ongoing, but barely funded at all -- and yet tons of things are possible.
Sure, fusion is interesting.
But, other things are too. Safe and plentiful fission power would help, and is available today.
Work on the chemistry of photosynthesis is promising -- imagine a truly carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel (the carbon in the fuel having come out of the air through artificial "plants"), but is barely funded at all.
Direct carbon sequestration is an expensive, but possible, option (probably cheaper than just rolling society back to the middle ages!)
But 99.9% of the energy is instead spent on terrible fantasies like "fundamentally restructuring" the economy away from profit and liberty.
Because there is no desire to actually work the problem. Just like the original Malthus didn't care about the plight of the "surplus population," but instead had a political axe to grind.
>> ''In contrast to its international competitors, the United States brings a worldview that favors early involvement of industry in technology development and a greater appetite for tackling technology risk if it leads to commercial viability.''
As an aside, fusion technology feels like a good testbed for what economic model is best for the democratization of a public good. Is government investment in the ITER countries a better accelerator than the American model
of private companies being allowed to take advantage of research in govt institutions? I suppose we will know in a few decades when fusion contributes to the power grid.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadFor comparison: The total inventory of tritium would be about 500g, about 50 times the amount of tritium released by fukushima, but the other radioactive isotopes that got released there (caesium, iodine, tellurium) that are much more problematic biologically would be missing.
I wouldn't want to be in the building when it fails.
If it uses Tritium then that's going be an environmental hazard (it's radioactive and will get everywhere).
To be honest it's all conjecture right now because we don't have a viable reactor design and failure modes will depend what exactly we build.
However I can't see that happening. You'd have to have the tanks of it very close to the reactor. That's something you'd obviously not do.
There's probably a greater risk transporting the stuff (road accidents) or in bad maintenance of the tanks or human error (emptying the tanks by accident).
Although... an inexpensive risk mitigation would be to wrap any tritiated water tanks with sodium polyacrylate. Imagine a giant diaper. Leaks would be absorbed.
The general idea is this: when you fuse elements, you produce heavier elements; if you wanted to fuse these new elements into even heavier ones, you'd need to input much more energy — thus it can be said in layman terms that the products of fusion are 'toxic' to the fusion itself, i.e. the more you do it the less likely it is to go on, until if finally stops (like in real-world stars). For instance, the Helium produced by the Sun is making it harder to sustain the Hydrogen fusion, which will stop before all Hydrogen is depleted.
In addition, the radioactive elements produced by fusion are much lesser than fusion, by orders of magnitude, so it's pretty much 'clean' in that regard for all intents and purposes (50 years of fission probably produced much worse than 1,000 years of fusion would).
And the fuel is available in pretty much limitless quantity — in fact, it would probably make a space industry, starting with mining hydrogen isotopes for fusion, profitable from day 1.
It's basically the closest thing we have to God's tech, and there's not much else in theoretical physics that comes close in terms of benefits in our real-world context. Fusion would essentially hand over the galaxy to us with little to no chance of failure, given enough time.
If we can pull it off, that is. Which remains to be seen, there's nothing new or groundbreaking in this article.
There are still issues, like most fusion reactions produce neutrons, which are not great by themselves, and basically most dangerous type of radiation. They can make regular matter radioactive. But we are far from that stage when this is a problem.
Nothing really new from a tech standpoint, or what am I missing?
My understanding is that so far, it doesn't look like wind/hydro/solar can scale to our needs within the timeframe that fusion might be viable (and yes, I know, it's "always 20 years away", but hopefully that changes eventually), so it's still a worthwhile pursuit, IMO.
Even if we can figure out how to keep a reaction going with a useful energy surplus no one has any idea
a) How much a reactor will cost,
b) how long/hard will it be to build or
c) If there are any issues with the process - yes no nuclear fuel but there's still some nasty crap coming out of the reaction which you will have to deal with if you scale the technology.
Meanwhile there are a number of perfectly viable planet saving power sources - solar, wind, solar-thermal etc - already out there providing power.
Fusion is a nice idea, but it isn't the only way to save the world...
"soon" is relative. The older I get, the more something a century or even two away doesn't seem that far off, and something that could arrive in 20 years seems positively near.
The Long Now project strives to get people to think more long-term, and I've heard that in some parts of Asia governments and organizations plan on far longer time horizons than is common in the West.
The world would be far better off if more of us adopted such a perspective, rather than focusing on only on what can be done now or in the next few years.
We are currently at we know we have an electrical problem in the walls that we know will cause a house fire in the future if we don't fix it.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/conflicts-affected-...
Even if global warning has a death toll of 10% of the world population I don't consider that a real problem. As long as humanity can progress afterwards it's fine.
Absolutely incredible. Are you picturing your friends and family in this hypothetical 10% death toll? Or the social conditions that would result in this number (comparable to Germany in WW2)?
What is so horrifying to you about stopping global warming, that literally decimating the world's population is the less bad option?
I think it would be great if we could stop global warming. But I don't think it socially possible. The only glimmer of hope I have left is that it is only a significant reduction of the human population while the rest can move on.
I disagree. Permanent damage has already been dealt. To continue with the house analogy, we can probably still save a smaller or bigger part of it depending on how quick we are to put the fire down.
But irreversible damage has already been done: even if we were to stop our carbon emissions right away, sea levels would still rise quite a bit (more than 1m by 2100-2300 IIRC). Every species that goes extinct will stay extinct, forever. And many are headed down this path. Biodiversity has suffered a lot in many places.
Think about this: we can complain about having to deal with radioactive garbage in 100ky, but any species that disappears today will not come back, even after billions of years. And millions of would-be species from its possible ofspring won't ever be either.
Those thoughts put things in perspective. I find them daunting, and this has led a lot of people to take the "climate emergency" very seriously. Our house is already on fire. Even if we start putting it out, we know it will still continue growing at least for a bit after we start pumping water, but we'd better start ASAP.
Longer term vision is still required.
Hell, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of trained physicists, chemists, material scientists, etc, who aren't even engaged in relevant work at all - they fall into neither camp.
One of the megatrends of the last 200 years has been a huge increase in the time horizon deemed acceptable for investment payoff.
Generally, humans aren't willing to forgo things today for a payoff more than about half a life-span away. Today, a true long-term investor considers the 30-year return on their investment.
An investment that won't make a return for 50 years or more mostly isn't worth making.
But, if you knew you would still be healthy enough to enjoy the profits in 90 or 100 years, you might be willing to invest for the even-longer term (historical trends suggest this to be true)
Government grants are fun and all, but the way you get thing going big is to get them funded by people who are hoping to profit, not just hoping to make the world better in some way
Imagine for a moment that cryogenization technology became available tomorrow. Would that help? Should we start forcing everyone to spend 3 years in cryo sleep every year, thus extending everyone's lifespan 400%?
This is far-fetched and just sci-fi for now, but interesting to think about nevertheless: should you go into cryo sleep while you are waiting for the right job offer? Should we cryogenize refugees while we are waiting to find them some shelter after a disaster or a war happens? People surely take a lot less resources if you can stack them, and they are not moving, feeding, etc.
Something like this would require us rethinking our ethics and society, yet it would be a very welcome way to start thinking more about the future.
It's one of his earliest works, so it isn't as well-produced as some of his later stuff, but it explores some very interesting ideas.
(This story began life as a different novel called Hot Sleep. Having read both, I honestly can't remember which parts are in which version, but Card himself says he considers The Worthing Saga to be the official version)
(hint: in Card's story, cryotech created a dystopian, not utopian society)
That's why research is needed otherwise researching will take the research duration plus the delay imposed by people saying it won't be here anytime soon anyway.
> perfectly viable power sources like solar, wind, solar-thermal etc.
Until humanity has figured viable massively scalable long term power storage solutions we will always be at the mercy of natural phenomena (time of day, wind speed and direction etc). Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.
I would argue we just need to make sure ongoing power needs are met - ie we can always turn the lights on. This doesn't need "scalable long term" storage - although pumped hydro, batteries, thermal salt all work well - it just needs sensible grid design so the needs at any one time are met by available power sources.
This above is obviously a "harder" problem than to just have a few big power plants you can throttle on or off but not that much harder and we already have the technology and knowledge - if not the political will - to do it.
> Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.
This is flat out wrong. many communities already exist exclusively on renewables.
"Communities" maybe but what about (heavy) industry like the the one required to e.g. manufacture more wind/water turbines and parts, (continue) to research more efficient technologies in the future, to sustain the growing population etc. ?
Wind/solar and hydro/geothermal really should be described by different words. Using "renewables" for both causes a lot of confusion.
Why spend huge sums in a fusion reactor, when we have a perfectly reliable funsion reactor right above us, the Sun, giving power at a convenient form (~500nm light -- far better than heat), at convenient power densities (not too high to overheat panels and not too low to be uneconomical), is available virtually everywhere, etc. It really is like we had already built a reactor and only need to add the last, least expensive, bit of energy harvesting.
The only thing Solar cannot compete well with are fossil fuels, which are essentially like discovering charged batteries buried in the ground (which is great, but they'll run out, and are ruining our environment), or wind/hydro in some places (where energy is begging to be harvested in the form of kinetic energy or potential).
Our salvation (for this crisis :) ) is indeed already within our reach, we only need to act...
So, that's sort of the point of fusion. It's clean energy with no need for storage.
If it weren't for its potential use as a weapon, I'd look forward to seeing it put in practice.
https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR2LwDYcozvpGCOa3bIi2ieMbj...
Do you think it's worthwhile to discourage humanity from attempting new things because there are existing sub optimal alternatives?
Or are you just trying to sound contrarian for internet points?
(Despite what you're saying being the safest, most boring, done to death, remarks on fusion)
Fusion reactions produce lots of neutrons, and neutrons weaken metal, in many cases within a few hours.
It may be that a "successful" fusion reactor is still a failure because it can run for only a few hours, days, or weeks before it has to be scrapped and completely rebuilt.
MIT spun off the company Commonwealth to commercialize the idea.
And nuclear fission first, if you want to be realistic.
Millions of people starving or mass migrating due to changes in food supplies are bound to cause a bit (lot) of conflict.
A few degrees change in temperature can dramatically alter weather patterns, the places that used to be good for growing crops may no longer be so. Sure we can adapt and move farms, but the years until that infrastructure gets rebuilt may not be pretty. It only takes 1 person with a red button to end it all.
We do not live in a sustainable way. Nobody would seriously argue with that claim, but the implication is that our way of life is unsustainable. Extinction is a bit extreme but the way we live, our global civilization, is not one that can be sustained. We're showing absolutely zero signs of seriously slowing the pace of our resource consumption or waste production. Only time will tell what it looks like when we go from unsustainable to the consequences of that. But given that without hydrocarbons our biosphere can probably only support about 1 billion humans... we're in for a rough time.
If it turns out that the only way to bring down carbon emissions is to make low carbon energy much cheaper, then why would anyone think that we'd spend our newfound wealth on cleaning up our act in other matters?
There are a multitude of cases of human over-expansion proving catastrophic for other natural environments which have nothing at all to do with climate change yet have been totally eclipsed by the issue. I don't know why anyone would think that much cheaper energy would help those cases rather than make them worse.
Humans are consistently willing to devote some percentage of their wealth to nature preservation. That percentage is probably more or less fixed. Therefore bringing down the cost of doing so substantially increases the amount of nature preservation that can be achieved.
Many dont realise that it's projected to max out at 10bn and then we will have a perpetual declining population / demographic crises.
...and always, life has gotten better and resource starvation has always gotten rarer...
and still, Malthus won't die.
Oh that and often weird racism about how many people live in poor countries.
It can't just be those two things, though, because it's really big in the U.S. right now on the political left, and especially that part of the far-left that relentlessly mock the right for both their religion and their supposed racism/"whiteness".
In some ways, it's an anti-economic-growth, anti-capitalist sentiment that portrays the great conflict of the world as between "the world" and "human economic activity"
But there's a lot to unpack in the question "Why won't Malthus die" that I won't claim to understand at all.
If others have things you want then they are stealing from you. If others are poor then they are a threat because they might want to take what you have.
Belief in the neccessity of one's actions is one hell of a drug that sticks a magnet onto their moral compass ensuring it always points to "correct".
It might be running out of capacity to do so without changing in ways we care about. Possibly.
But I do note that there is a distinct lack of interest in any attempts to solve that problem other than shrinking the population or dismantling our economies or ending any semblance of liberty.
Indeed, most of the proposals are so extreme and draconian that they would lead to much more misery and death than simply doing nothing.
Nobody is interested in even considering alternatives. Research to solve the problem is ongoing, but barely funded at all -- and yet tons of things are possible.
Sure, fusion is interesting.
But, other things are too. Safe and plentiful fission power would help, and is available today.
Work on the chemistry of photosynthesis is promising -- imagine a truly carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel (the carbon in the fuel having come out of the air through artificial "plants"), but is barely funded at all.
Direct carbon sequestration is an expensive, but possible, option (probably cheaper than just rolling society back to the middle ages!)
But 99.9% of the energy is instead spent on terrible fantasies like "fundamentally restructuring" the economy away from profit and liberty.
Because there is no desire to actually work the problem. Just like the original Malthus didn't care about the plight of the "surplus population," but instead had a political axe to grind.
As an aside, fusion technology feels like a good testbed for what economic model is best for the democratization of a public good. Is government investment in the ITER countries a better accelerator than the American model of private companies being allowed to take advantage of research in govt institutions? I suppose we will know in a few decades when fusion contributes to the power grid.