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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

I like how in the media publications for carbon capturing they always forget to mention that these things need a ton of energy to run.

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This ton of energy on top what we already consume can be indeed obtained from nuclear [0], without spending a lot of additional material.

[0] https://medium.com/climate-conscious/nuclear-powered-carbon-...

They do mention it, just not directly:

> Right now we have excess green energy that we just throw away. We can store this excess renewable energy in chemicals.

The idea is that it can be used to store excess energy from green sources

unless we price carbon high enough this excess energy is just going to get burnt into bitcoin

Depends on the relative value of mining and fuel manufacturing.

If people were willing to work through the issues with nuclear power, running a bunch of nuclear plants to power the scrubbers would be semi-reasonable.

It's far more reasonable to use solar than nuclear for this, solar has leapfrogged nuclear now.

The carbon capture startup founder of Carbon Engineering talks about how he got this wrong, and how they switched their plans from using nuclear to solar. Here's a talk from two years ago on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYopOt9siLg

Note that many disagree with his optimism on the carbon capture side of things, but the solar is generally accepted by technologists.

What is a technologist?

I'm using it to mean somebody who studies the technologies in the field. It would include both analysts and those who are actively performing research in industry and academia.

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