Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

As someone who follows various fusion efforts I expect the answer to the headline is 'yes' (in opposition to Betteridge's law). The trick of course is 'when'.

But like the article, I also find it sad that we've not been able to build more Gen IV projects. You want to fix climate change? Build nuclear plants. Unfortunately not a message that resonates well, although the Chinese seem to be thinking that way. Hard not too with all that coal soot in the air.

A more interesting question will be the cost of fusion energy (or even Gen IV fission) versus existing fuels. It's one thing to be "able" to make a net positive fusion generator, and something else again to make it profitable.

View on HN

China isn't thinking climate change, it's thinking "wow breathable air in cities sure would be nice"

This is a false dichotomy that keeps being restated. The air pollution is China is not primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, but due to poor regulations. If their coal plants and automobiles were modern and up to western standards , there wouldn't be any issues. The air above Beijing and Shanghai doesn't look horrible b.c of CO2, but because of soot and other particulates produced by inefficient plants and factories.

They are focusing on nuclear for reasons of energy diversification and independence. (look at how Russia has Germany by the balls right now)

Burning fossil fuels would be a lot less profitable if the long-term impacts of doing so were capitalized in.

The history of humanity is doing things that don't scale, aren't sustainable, and then figuring out how to deal with the problems created by the massive leaps forward we made, utilizing the surpluses generated by ignoring the long term impacts of our decisions.

Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.

Physics and the environment don't work that way. Our society has never been as energy-intensive as it is now, nor has its impacts been as wide.

There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world.

If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.

Deleted comment

So basically you are saying there is no upper limit to our ability to engineer our way out of the disasters we create. A lot of people, myself included, are extremely skeptical of this point of view. It seems incredibly arrogant.

No, I'm basically saying that the current CO2 problem is something we can engineer our way out of.

There are plenty of other theoretical problems that I don't think quickly engineer our way out of, like escaping an expanding sun, a sufficiently large blackhole, etc.

However for the strawman of "we can engineer our way out of anything in 20 years" I would agree with you that that is arrogant.

As I noted in the deleted post, the reason the IPCC still publishes reports is because it's a problem we can do something about. Do you disagree with this assessment? Are we beyond the point of no return?

The same goes for nuclear to be honest.

I think we need innovation in the nuclear energy sector - Thorium and Fusion cry out for investment.

They're not nearly on the same scale. There are estimates that the US has, in its entire history, produced about 56 thousand metric tonnes of high-level radioactive waste as of 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_ma...). On the other hand, the EPA estimates that in 2012 alone, the United States produced 6.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon emitted due to transportation.

Obviously, a tonne of carbon and a tonne of radioactive waste aren't really comparable. In fact, I'd argue that the radioactive waste produced by a fission power plant is better for the environment: it remains in the reactor facility, where it can be easily contained and buried in geologically stable rock formations, or reused/reprocessed to extract further energy from it.

The carbon produced by burning fossil fuels is dumped into the atmosphere, where it can't be easily collected, disposed of, or reused.

> I'd argue that the radioactive waste produced by a fission power plant is better for the environment

That's not what I was disputing. The half-life of radioactive material produced from nuclear power is what makes it's maintenance expensive.

Do you really think maintaining nuclear waste for 24,000 years is cheaper than the 25% added cost for carbon capture?

You can't blame people for not being thrilled about nuclear. At every stage people have been assured that "this design is perfectly safe" and then something happens and people die and regions are contaminated. Once bitten. Twice shy.

Seems like the far better option is to exhaust the renewables option as much as possible and then fall back to nuclear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com