Scientists in California make a significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.
Does Nuclear count as Green Energy? I feel like it should, since it doesn't really pollute and lasts a lot.
Scientists in California shooting nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder holding a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn have taken another step in the quest for fusion energy, which, if mastered, could provide the world with a near-limitless source of clean power.
This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the “robustness” of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied.
As the climate crisis accelerates, and the urgency of ditching planet-heating fossil fuels increases, the prospect of an abundant source of safe, clean energy is tantalizing.
Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and other stars, involves smashing two or more atoms together to form a denser one, in a process that releases huge amounts of energy.
In December, the US Department of Energy announced a $42 million investment in a program bringing together multiple institutions, including LLNL, to establish “hubs” focused on advancing fusion.
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Fusion has basically nothing to do with climate change. Even if Fusion were cracked tomorrow, the scale out would be such that you couldn't meaningfully supply a lot of base load power before you'd need to be net neutral. My take is that fusion, when available, alongside solar, would be used for carbon dioxide removal.
Technically the same goes for fission, as new reactors take well over a decade to build nowadays, which is too late for our climate goals and typically diverts resources away from renewables.
Yeah good point. The numbers are a bit closer for fission though. Like phase one we can do renewables but electrification needs way more power than available currently. E.g. green hydrogen. There are valid scale up scenarios where fission is part of the picture, but almost none of them make sense under capitalism.
You have to differentiate between fusion and fission, the first one is no doubt, while looking at the time spans these projects took previously it will not save the global Energy supply in the short term.
Fission is difficult to tell, since the reactors have lots of concrete to build (that creates CO2) and humanity has not found any way to get rid of the waste and contaminated building materials.
It might be "greenish" but probably not sustainable (also there is a limited amount of and political problems with digging up the needed radioactive materials)
Fusion is definitely green if it works, because it would come to a similar factor of energy as solar, but fission is not, the stuff you need is extremely harmful to the environment itself and mining it as well, also you need to build a gigantic structure for it wich is also a shit load of CO2. And then you have to store the waste for basically eternity...
Debating whether or not fission is green has given the fossil fuel industry free rein over energy production for the last 60 years.
We could have a Fukushima every year and a Chernobyl every 5 and it would pale in comparison to the loss of life and habitable land we’d be giving up to climate change.
We could have a Chernobyl every 5 years and losing less lives than we do through the lung diseases caused by the air pollution or oil vehicles. There was a study in France showing that (every 5 years is a low estimate, actual numbers hinted at 2-3 years).
Thorium-salt breeder reactors have been effectively ignored by most major nuclear energy players for 60 years now, and they solve most of these problems...but nobody is building them. Likely the fossil fuel industry is behind that.
Counterpoint: every nuclear disaster in history, and all the waste nuclear power has ever produced, is absolutely miniscule compared to the damage burning fossil fuels has already done and will continue to do in the coming decades.
Every oil spill, every mountain ripped open to pull out coal, every jet airplane, every bunker-fueled container ship, every single ICE automobile, all combining to make the atmosphere worse and worse...the oceans are rising and getting more acidic. Wild species are going extinct by the thousands. Weather has gotten worse and more extreme.
The damage may literally be incalculable. Millions of people have already died from the cancers and natural disasters fossil fuels have caused.
The death toll of nuclear energy? Thousands at most.
Nuclear energy may not be perfect but it is a far better alternative.
Bro the alternative is actually green energy, the entire fucking world agreed that fossil is not good. And no, nuclear isn't green, it isn't safe (given the toxicity of the waste and the storage problem, and overlooking potential risks in operational errors and natural Desasters) it takes a fucking decade and longer to build a reactor also its absolutely not economical and makes countries dependent on others again (mainly Russia, wich is also the main exporter of fission material)
We can build more actually green energy in the same time and that energy is basically free.