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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

Cheap nuclear fusion energy would be a great human achievement. I do wonder about its effects on society though. Any reading containing well reasoned speculation on that? Here's what I can think of myself.

* A cheaper, cleaner energy source might outcompete fossil fuel. Less air polution, yay!

* Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption. Think Jevons paradox[0]. The effect of that increased heat production on global warming can't be good...

* Globally stabilising geopolitical effect. Less dependence on geographically confined scarce energy resources like Middle Eastern/Siberian/Venezuelan oil, Sahara sun, ... thanks to a globally available basic resource.

Any other obvious effects I'm missing?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

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There is one effect you're missing, the part where those countries which were dependent on income from fossil fuels won't just quietly subside back into their previous state of being. While Venezuela has already dealt with the problem by self-immolation the same can not be said about two other big oil and gas exporters: the middle eastern countries and Russia. To start with the latter, Russia stands to lose not only a major source of income if the demand for natural gas were to plummet but also a lot of influence which they hitherto exert by virtue of having control over the natural gas supply for a large part of Europe. The country has the potential to replace the income from gas with income from other natural resources and from industrial output but they'll need time to gear up their economy for the switch.

The middle east is a different story. Apart from oil and gas exports the region does not have much to offer in the way of natural resources or industrial output. When - not if - oil and gas end their dominance in the energy hierarchy the region will be hit hard, also due to the fact that, in contrast to Norway, no substantial provisions have been made for this scenario. Some countries are trying to find alternative sources of income, e.g. Dubai which seems to be set to become the Las Vegas of the middle east but this scenario is only feasible as long as their is an audience which is willing and able to spend lavishly. When the oil money goes, so does that audience. Fusion energy will be a boon in the long term but in the short time it will have a destabilising effect in at least this region.

The demand for Russian natural gas will only plummet if there's a huge shift from natgas heating to electric heat, and that would take hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of Euros to accomplish.

If electricity would be free, I would convert to electric heating in a heartbeat. Replacing a gas burner with an electric coil should be pretty cheap compared to the yearly costs of heating.

The problem with that is that electricity isn't free. Even if energy production suddenly became basically free and we removed taxes and renewable energy charges, I would still pay €0.07/kWh just for using the power grid. And that's unlikely to go down since the grid would need massive upgrades to handle large but cheap fusion plants.

Using fusion would only cut the cost of electricity by about a third.

About the third goes on maintaining the grid infrastructure, a third goes on building and running the power stations, and a third on the fuel.

Fusion is great, but it's not 'electricity too cheap to meter'

There will be, whatever way the wind blows. The Netherlands is a good example here, a country which produces natural gas itself and moved from coal and oil to natural gas heating (and cooking) after natural gas was found in Slochteren in the province of Groningen in 1959 [1]. Back then all houses (with few exceptions) were connected to the natural gas distribution network. Natural gas was the mainstay of both the Dutch economy for decades to come. This is changing, rapidly. All new houses will be fossil-free in 2050, many houses already are. I bought a new house in 1995 which was not connected to the gas pipes, heating was done through surplus heat from a nearby power plant.

In Sweden - where I live now - geothermal heating using heat pumps is currently the biggest growing sector in a market where around 40% of houses uses some form of electric heating [2 (Swedish)] due to a push from the government in the '60s to move to (then cheap) electric heating.

Both Sweden and the Netherlands are highly developed countries which are in the forefront of developments so this does not mean all countries will immediately dump natural gas. It does give an idea of where developments are going though, especially seen in the light of rising tensions between gas-producing countries and those which are dependent on them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field

[2] http://www.varmemarknad.se/pdf/Varmemarknad_Sverige_sammanfa...

Point 2 is largely not an issue, solar insolation vastly outweighs human energy consumption in all forms.

CO2 is bad because it increases the energy trapped from insolation, a CO2 free power source that double energy consumption as a whole would be far better than the effects of CO2 on the atmosphere, very much a nice problem to have tbh.

> Global energy consumption is roughly 15 terawatts annually. The sun provides around 174 petawatts of energy to Earth, of which 89 petawatts is absorbed by the planet.

Problem being, AFAIK, that solar farms consume vast parts of surface area compared to other forms of power gen.

I wasn’t talking about solar as a power source, he suggested that fusion would increase power usage and there waste heat.

> Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption... The effect of that increased heat production on global warming can't be good...

Electric energy being generated and turned to heat energy is an insignificant part of the global energy budget.

Solar irradiance hits the earth with about 1000W/square meter, or a total of 1.73x10^17 W aka 173 petawatts [1], non-stop. Imagine a grid of electric space heaters, all separated by just the lengths of their cords, covering every wave of the oceans, every row of the cornfields, every inch of Antarctica. That's the effect of the sun.

Global energy production averages some 0.018 petawatts. Not quite as big a difference as I would have expected, actually.

But the point stands that using less of energy types which have a side-effect of increasing the heating effect of the Sun by a little, even if it means multiplying total energy use by a lot, has a net negative effect on global warming.

[1] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant#Solar_irradiance

I'm not even sure fusion would compete with solar/batteries by the time it's practical to use it.

In my mind the #1 benefit of fusion will be industrialized space travel within the solar system.

Global warming will be solved, when we have a source of cheap electricity, it will be possible to just pull CO2 from the air.

I truly hope this is true, but when I think about the creation of some technology that lets us do this, I'm left with a roadblock I can't get around: Who is going to pay for this, when we can't even get the US to agree to cost-saving commitments to reduce CO2 output?

If we get to a grid that's ~100% renewable, we'll likely have oversized it a massive amount, like 50%-200% more energy could be produced than is needed at the time of productions, to deal with seasonal and weather variability. Let's call all that energy free, because it has zero marginal cost and would be curtailed otherwise. Who pays for the capital on the equipment to pull out CO2 from the atmosphere, and the disposal of the resulting tons of carbon?

There are at least several possibilities

1) People, who don't want to be affected by global warming. Right now nobody is affected enough to pay and it is too costly (estimates are $500/metric ton, while emission per capita is around 20 tonnes/year).

2) Captured carbon can be sold commercially for use in plastics industry, at some point it will be cheaper, than oil/gas extraction.

3) Carbon emission trading already exists, some companies even doing it voluntary, like Google. Direct air capture can piggy-back that system.

You can pull CO2 out of the air with a hay field. That's not the problem.

Fusion propulsion would be very beneficial to any space operations beyond the Earth's orbit. I think NASA have a project investigating this technology.

Mini-Self Contained Electric Charging Stations, that can charge 100-200 cars simultaneously. Better recycling of material due to energy abundance. Less Waste on Energy Transport. Tons of light pollution. Did I say, Much better recycling technologies ?

> The effect of that increased heat production on global warming can't be good.

While I'd expect energy use to go up, heat generated I think would be far too small to make a difference.

I'm dreaming here, but could we with "unlimited" power radiate this power into space ?

I'm thinking about a heat pump which would make the Earth colder, and radiate the heat to space, effectively cooling Earth (that's how indians made ice in the past) ?

A Material That Throws Heat into Space Could Soon Reinvent Air-Conditioning

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608840/a-material-that-th...

In theory that should be possible. But it seems much simpler to remove some greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, or to deploy ultrathin sunshades into orbit to decrease the brightness of the sun for part of the day.

Replacing crude oil, removing the market for Middle-Eastern oil would not cause political stability in the short to mid term. Suddenly yanking the economic rug out from under those nations would cause massive instabilty.

There is also the problem of the fossil-fuel lobby that just can't accept their source of income is going to become less relevant by the year and hopefully fades into the pages of history within the century.

Do the math on global solar flux. There is NO way we will ever make a dent in that with artificial heat.

How could you miss crypto mining? FusionEnergyCoin FTW

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