u320

There is no reason a priori to assume fusion power will be cheap. On the contrary, everything we know about it now suggests the opposite.

For fixed infrastructure, nothing beats power lines. For mobile applications, hydrogen has numerous problems. There are other options, like batteries, ammonia, synthetic hydrocarbons etc that should be explored further.

Hydrogen doesn't even come close to deserving the title "the ultimate clean energy".

If you want to know if this has any chance of working, you should probably ask somebody who is an expert in this field and ignore the youtube videos. This goes for both Real Engineering and Thunderf00t

> The only reason to pursue this is to use zero carbon electricity to produce nearly net-zero carbon fuel.

That's the only thing they market it as

Yes, it's mostly an urban legend at this point. Really shoddy science journalism here.

Drill a new hole? Takes far fewer resources that replacing a wind turbine or solar panel (that lasts about half that time)

There was this idea going around that solar power would cause global warming, since a solar panel is typically warmer than whatever was there before it was installed. But the idea turns out to be bullshit, the warming effect is tiny compared to what the equivalent co2 from fossil fuels would cause.

The lesson is: Always. Do. The. Math. First.

I've been following Quaise for a while and I have never seen any mention of such a plan. Oil and gas is into vertical drilling and fracking, which these people have little use for so the applications aren't that similar really.

There are other geothermal startups doing more O&G-like drilling though.

The planet is expected to still be mostly molten by the time the sun swallows it, so there is a huge margin. I think people underestimate just how much energy there is down there.

Grid connections, turbines and BoP equipment reused from a coal plant is not a minor cost saving.

Yes pump water down, extract supercritical steam coming out and then just use a regular turbine.

AFAIK they aren't planning to do any fracking, and it's not obvious that it is even possible at these depths. And the drilling is far less disruptive as it is given that it is done at atmospheric pressure (no drilling fluid).

As for your second point, batteries are not cheap. Nowhere near cheap. We need solutions not pipe dreams.

Stoves uses town gas, which is a mixture of methane (either natural gas or biogas) and air. But there is no pure natural gas network.

> For example, consumer electricity and heating in Australia should be effectively free when current promised tech is rolled out. Same in Scandinavia.

No. This will NOT happen and I have no idea what made you believe something as silly. Grids cost a lot of money, there is no "magic tech" around the corner to enable this. Demand flexibility is hard, not at all cheap and nobody knows what the practical potential even is.

What would be a less questionable tool then for these use cases?

Tritium has a biological half-life in humans of 8 days. It's not a "big danger". Japan has gone out of their way to take all the precautions here, but since it's nuclear you know somebody is going to raise a stink anyway.

There are today 0 long term waste facilities in the world, so none have failed obviously. There are a lot of (non-military) medium term waste facilities (since that is all we need right now) and none of them have experienced any radiation leak.

No, this is a multichip design, Apple was clear about that. And you don't make wires out of silicon.

100 billion in renewables balanced by natural gas, to get independence from russian gas. Great idea.

I'm a proponent of fission so obviously I don't see the lithium thing as a huge problem. It's just that I don't like the "it runs on just water" takes. Honesty works better in the long run.

The fuel for DT fusion is heavy water and lithium. Everyone leaves out the lithium part for some reason. They are considerably more rare than hydrogen. But more common than uranium for sure.

It's not possible to have a runaway reaction in a light water reactor either. The major incidents (TMI and Fukushima) happened as the reactor cooled down. It's just that the power output of the decay heat is enough to cause problems.

But Helion is not using the reactions they are currently working on.

I guess the assumption is that working AWK programs will typecheck.

Rising rates. Will hurt stock markets too but sound businesses will always bounce back.

Sweden and Finland allows up to 25.5 m.

Seat suspension is for added driver comfort and does not replace regular suspension.

I'm 100% convinced this fad will pass and you will only see screen-only UIs in low-end cars. Premium cars will all have physical controls for the most important features.

There is no point of lengthening the pipeline if you don't get higher frequency from it. It would just add complexity and and a higher branch mispredict penalty.

Isn't that just pumped hydro? You would need similar masses of water.