but at what cost?
calling it the “holy grail” like it’s some mythical unreachable thing. The sun’s been doing it for the earth since before there were life to use its energy.
Also, calling it a race implies that both parties are actually trying.
One party is in a solo race is produce as much dirty energy as possible so treat printers and surveillance algorithms can get that much bigger.
The Holy Grail of energy needs to be so many things. A non exhaustive list:
- Clean/low environmental impact
- Cheap
- Fast to build
- Reliable output and able to load-follow
- Universally applicable (geography)
- Safe
- Large scale
Solar and wind don’t tick all of these boxes, but neither do fission, fusion, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any other source. That’s why we’re in this predicament.
The thing about fusion is it doesn’t actually bring anything new to the table. It’s supposed to be fission but without any radioactive waste, but this isn’t actually true. The beryllium cladding in the core of the tokamak (Chinese reactors use this design iirc) becomes irradiated, and when replaced produces a volume of low-level waste far higher than a fission reactor does through its normal operation. And it’s going to be way more expensive simply by virtue of being novel to boot.
I think we could do better than the sun if we really tried. Compost emits more energy per volume than the sun’s core, there’s just way more core to emit energy
so what I’m hearing is that we just need to compost the sun
and when china makes a breakthrough it will be declared “cheating” by the west
Can’t believe the Chinese hacked physics, smh
Funny you mention this. Hitler didn’t want research into nuclear energy/weapons to be done and dismissed it as “Jew physics.” He literally thought Jewish people like Einstein were just making shit up regarding things like General Relativity or splitting the atom.
The parallels to current America are almost too on-the-nose.
They stole it from the future!
They’re undercutting our freedom (to exploit)!
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
