Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
Selling recaptured carbon is carbon neutral as, presumably the people buying would have used other carbon. There could be knockon effects if the price of recaptured carbon is lower than non but even free recaptured carbon would not have a net carbon increase.
Sure I'm not arguing that the process will be carbon neutral if you reuse the CO2 or the other carbon captured, though pumping the CO2 into a greenhouse sure seems like a good idea. What I'm saying is it sounds like the carbon footprint of acquiring carbon through this method is less than other methods, and is therefore a better way to get carbon for industrial use than the alternatives. If you can either simply add more carbon to the atmosphere for industrial use, or provide that carbon with a lower footprint through this new method, isn't the new method better?
Alright, let's assume you have the tens of thousands of plants necessary to make a dent on the CO2 market. The new system isn't carbon neutral, but it results in less new carbon being added to the atmosphere.
But
If you take the same tens of thousands of plants and sequester the CO2 product in different products or by burying it, then you might actually make a dent on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, not just make the process of making it worse a little slower.
Nup.
Then the CO2 industries are still digging coal out of the ground faster than you can sequester it.
You need to take carbon out of the sky faster than industries are pushing it in to have any effect.
And as you have the same amount of plants in both scenarios, the amount you're taking out of the sky doesn't change unless there's some sort of efficiency increase to sequestering the carbon.
So if you want to dent the amount of atmospheric carbon, either your CO2 pulling plants need to exceed the current industrial output, or you need to limit the industrial output of CO2 so that the scrubbing plants can keep up.
Bringing that back around, you would need to supply the entire industry with recycled carbon and sequester some as well, if you want to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon.
The more you sequester, the less you need to recycle.
But in total, the amount you sequester plus the amount you recycle has to be greater than the amount the industry is emitting if you want cleaner air.
As for whether recycling makes sense, it really depends on how hard or otherwise it is to get the industry to adapt.
It would certainly be more energy efficient to simply shut down those plants that produce too much CO2.
But if we can't get their products in any other manner, it might be easier to recycle the CO2 and make the industry net CO2 neutral, than trying to come up with a substitute.
Sure I'm not arguing that the process will be carbon neutral if you reuse the CO2 or the other carbon captured, though pumping the CO2 into a greenhouse sure seems like a good idea. What I'm saying is it sounds like the carbon footprint of acquiring carbon through this method is less than other methods, and is therefore a better way to get carbon for industrial use than the alternatives. If you can either simply add more carbon to the atmosphere for industrial use, or provide that carbon with a lower footprint through this new method, isn't the new method better?
Alright, let's assume you have the tens of thousands of plants necessary to make a dent on the CO2 market. The new system isn't carbon neutral, but it results in less new carbon being added to the atmosphere.
But
If you take the same tens of thousands of plants and sequester the CO2 product in different products or by burying it, then you might actually make a dent on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, not just make the process of making it worse a little slower.
Nup.
Then the CO2 industries are still digging coal out of the ground faster than you can sequester it.
You need to take carbon out of the sky faster than industries are pushing it in to have any effect.
And as you have the same amount of plants in both scenarios, the amount you're taking out of the sky doesn't change unless there's some sort of efficiency increase to sequestering the carbon.
So if you want to dent the amount of atmospheric carbon, either your CO2 pulling plants need to exceed the current industrial output, or you need to limit the industrial output of CO2 so that the scrubbing plants can keep up.
Bringing that back around, you would need to supply the entire industry with recycled carbon and sequester some as well, if you want to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon.
The more you sequester, the less you need to recycle.
But in total, the amount you sequester plus the amount you recycle has to be greater than the amount the industry is emitting if you want cleaner air.
As for whether recycling makes sense, it really depends on how hard or otherwise it is to get the industry to adapt.
It would certainly be more energy efficient to simply shut down those plants that produce too much CO2.
But if we can't get their products in any other manner, it might be easier to recycle the CO2 and make the industry net CO2 neutral, than trying to come up with a substitute.
On that last paragraph, one significant use stated for fusion is hydrocarbon fuel synthesis. Basically, you use electrical power from a fusion plant to catalyze CO2 and water into any of a number of hydrocarbons as an energy storage medium, much like charging a battery. The trick with that is if electricity is cheap enough, you can keep all of your existing internal combustion technologies in place and flip them over into carbon-neutral technologies overnight. For some applications, hydrocarbon fuels will almost always be necessary, like large jet aircraft and anything that demands a gas turbine to achieve a sufficient power to weight ratio. In addition, your fuels will have no contaminants like sulfur or nitrogen compounds, so pollution is cut to just the carbon comes out of the vehicle.
edit: as a bonus, the US military is very interested in this idea (especially the Navy). If they could cut oilers out of the fleet, that's a huge logistical chain that they don't have to pay for anymore, which means a steady flow of research money is available toward solving this particular problem.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
Yeah the issue isn't that we can't do it, it's that we can't do it efficiently enough. And most of our power comes from stuff that dumps assloads of carbon into the atmosphere, so at best there's not even a point talking about it because of the laws of thermodynamics since there's no way we'd even get close to 1:1 out of it.
If we were 100% on renewables and nuclear power, it'd be a thing to talk about, though.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
NASA's historic Solar Probe Plus (SPP) mission will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun. SPP will swoop closer to the Sun’s surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions.
The spacecraft will come as close as 3.9 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before.
To perform these unprecedented investigations, the spacecraft and instruments will be protected from the Sun’s heat by a 4.5-inch-thick (11.43 cm) carbon-composite shield, which will need to withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,377 degrees Celsius).
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Most practically useful cases go from CO2 to CO (though you can with sufficient energy and a catalyst go straight to o2+elemental carbon ) then use CO to do other chemistry. Plants do some biochemical trickery to end up with o2+sugars from co+water. You can do the same with industrial processes, ending up with various organic acids or hydrocarbons and some combination of hydrogen and oxygen gasses, but either way you are still doing reverse combustion and sinking equivalent amounts of energy back in. CO2 is very energetically favorable, any recovery of the carbon locked in it is one way or another going to be energy expensive, and thus is going to be something that is only viable once we have some other energy source sufficient to run society on and have sufficient energy left over to dump into a big project.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Technically, it can be an energy win to burn something and then reverse the CO2 portion. Combustion produces CO2 and H2O. If you leave the water alone and split the CO2 you actually win slightly. You get 890kJ/mol burning methane but only 400 of that comes from the CO2 formation, so you'd burn methane and get water, oxygen and elemental carbon out if you had a way to split CO2 efficiently
You do begin to lose when burning the bigger molecules but it's a win at least for the two smallest and maybe propane as well
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Technically, it can be an energy win to burn something and then reverse the CO2 portion. Combustion produces CO2 and H2O. If you leave the water alone and split the CO2 you actually win slightly. You get 890kJ/mol burning methane but only 400 of that comes from the CO2 formation, so you'd burn methane and get water, oxygen and elemental carbon out if you had a way to split CO2 efficiently
You do begin to lose when burning the bigger molecules but it's a win at least for the two smallest and maybe propane as well
It's not just "splitting" CO2. It's also reducing the carbon. You need electrons from somewhere.
edit:
ie. "CO2 --> O2 + C" is wrong, it should be CO2 + e- --> O2 + C
NASA's historic Solar Probe Plus (SPP) mission will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun. SPP will swoop closer to the Sun’s surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions.
The spacecraft will come as close as 3.9 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before.
To perform these unprecedented investigations, the spacecraft and instruments will be protected from the Sun’s heat by a 4.5-inch-thick (11.43 cm) carbon-composite shield, which will need to withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,377 degrees Celsius).
Sure I'm not arguing that the process will be carbon neutral if you reuse the CO2 or the other carbon captured, though pumping the CO2 into a greenhouse sure seems like a good idea. What I'm saying is it sounds like the carbon footprint of acquiring carbon through this method is less than other methods, and is therefore a better way to get carbon for industrial use than the alternatives. If you can either simply add more carbon to the atmosphere for industrial use, or provide that carbon with a lower footprint through this new method, isn't the new method better?
Alright, let's assume you have the tens of thousands of plants necessary to make a dent on the CO2 market. The new system isn't carbon neutral, but it results in less new carbon being added to the atmosphere.
But
If you take the same tens of thousands of plants and sequester the CO2 product in different products or by burying it, then you might actually make a dent on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, not just make the process of making it worse a little slower.
I think you're missing the larger point. If Bob's Cola needs to get CO2 for carbonating their soft drinks. Then the quest comes down to would buying it from these plants result in using less CO2 being used to carbonate their beverages or would it at least be a wash? If it takes less C02 output for Bob's Cola if they purchase the CO2 from these plants, than the plants are a net gain even if what they are capturing gets released in the atmosphere. It would also still be worth doing if it was a wash because then at least Bob's Cola is recycling CO2 that has already been released, rather than unlocking new CO2 that was stabled stored naturally. Also a rather large boon, if a significant number of those CO2 scrubbing plants aren't being supported by efficient long term carbon storage methods.
Honestly, I would be surprised if extracting new sources of CO2 wasn't generating more CO2 than the plants.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
The ultimately goal is to find a cost efficient way to just crack the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, since that provides resources for other endeavors. The dream would be stripping the carbon and then turning it into graphene nanotubes
Going along with the mystery of Tabby's star is PDS 110, a young (~10 million years old) star 1,100 light years from earth that also has mysterious periods of immense darkening. For this star, they have a better idea about what they may be dealing with: a massive planet nearly the size of a brown dwarf orbiting at about the same period of Mars in Sol, with a ring system 0.3 AU wide aligned close to perpendicular to the orbital plane. The next transit of this object should occur between September 9th and September 30th of this year.
Knowing how close to dawn Mercury appears in the morning sky before sunrise (and that it's periapsis is about 0.3 AU), imagine a faintly luminous disk or ellipse with that kind of width in the night sky.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Technically, it can be an energy win to burn something and then reverse the CO2 portion. Combustion produces CO2 and H2O. If you leave the water alone and split the CO2 you actually win slightly. You get 890kJ/mol burning methane but only 400 of that comes from the CO2 formation, so you'd burn methane and get water, oxygen and elemental carbon out if you had a way to split CO2 efficiently
You do begin to lose when burning the bigger molecules but it's a win at least for the two smallest and maybe propane as well
The kinetics are so insanely disfavorable that even this is not practically feasible though. For co2->c+o2 you are looking at activation temperatures of 390C with a catalyst. Most practical techniques involve high energy lasers or the like, but you are either way going to spend a lot more energy than yeild just getting to a temperature where the reaction is favorable at human time scales.
Edit: To clarify, sort of, you have two concerns here.
One is thermodynamics. CO2 has a lower energy level essentially than C+O2 (disregarding electrons here for a bit). Therefore, in the absence of an external energy source, CO2 will never decay to C + O2. You need an external energy source to make it happen at all, just like a ball on the ground will never roll uphill without a push.
The second is kinetics, which is a good bit more fidgety. Even in the presence of external heat, the reaction between c+O2 <-->CO2 is going to be a reversible one, and CO2 will be vastly favored. There are ways around this, namely to make the process irreversible, either removing O2 or C from the reaction area once produced, or in some cases using a catalyst that favors one side of the reaction. However, even when that occurs, you have a problem that there are transitional states that must be overcome which takes either time or additional energy. Basically at any point a certain amount of CO2 will be decomposing, and a lot more free carbon will be combining with oxygen to form co2, but at low temperatures this is going to be really slow. At room temperature even if you had a way to put in energy to get the CO2 to decompose and perfectly remove c and o2 from the system, you are probably going to be looking at geologic timescales to break down any significant amounts of CO2. To help with this, you need to dump even more energy into the system to raise the temperature (which will then be spent as heat and entropy essentially). Raising the temperature makes both sides of the reaction go faster, which if you remove the product you want as it is formed helps you out.
So basically to get decent reaction rates even with a favorable catalyst you need to get things hot. Like hundreds of degrees, shooting with a laser hot. Which is why cracking CO2 into c+02 is going to need $texas amounts of energy regardless of how you do it. Plants get around this by using organics and various protein catalysts (and biological catalysts are way better than anything we can do industrially now)as intermediate steps, and still dump in rather high amounts of solar energy.
Edit: correction 2, could have sworn that plants and bacteria reduce co2 to co via water prior to adding it to larger organics enzymaticaly but can't find that anywhere now, either way they dont reduce straight to c+ o2 but go through a wide variety of intermediates.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can we "crack" CO2 into just carbon and oxygen? Would it prohibitively expensive power and money-wise, or just really impractical mechanically?
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Technically, it can be an energy win to burn something and then reverse the CO2 portion. Combustion produces CO2 and H2O. If you leave the water alone and split the CO2 you actually win slightly. You get 890kJ/mol burning methane but only 400 of that comes from the CO2 formation, so you'd burn methane and get water, oxygen and elemental carbon out if you had a way to split CO2 efficiently
You do begin to lose when burning the bigger molecules but it's a win at least for the two smallest and maybe propane as well
It's not just "splitting" CO2. It's also reducing the carbon. You need electrons from somewhere.
edit:
ie. "CO2 --> O2 + C" is wrong, it should be CO2 + e- --> O2 + C
Fusion has been 10 years out for the last 40 years. Once someone actually breaks ground on a real functional commercial plant then I'll get real excited.
That's why I'm so interested in Lockheed's project. They have concrete pass/fail metrics in under five years, instead of 20. Plus, the military contracts are a steady source of funding: the size of reactor they're designing is a perfect substitute for US Naval vessel power plants. If the Navy could quit using oilers for anything but aircraft our reach would be amplified even further. Eventually, even oilers would become obsolete if you could make the fuel catalyzation plants small enough to fit on a carrier.
I think General Fusion is more likely to pan out than the Lockheed reactor.
In fact, here's my ranking of next-gen fusion projects:
1. General Fusion
2. Hellion Energy
3. Wendelstein derived stellerator
4. Tri-Alpha
5. Lockheed
6. NIF
7. ITER
General Fusion is a name I can get behind. I don't claim to understand the science behind their approach, but is there a simplified explanation to explain why you rank them as the most likely?
I'd put ITER at the top. They're a long term project which has been steadily working through problems. Everyone else is very very new, and while promise is good, it's not deliverables or construction activities. Unless any of those get unambiguous high-Q fusion in their prototypes, they're all very likely to run into the ITER "it'll work but we need to scale it up to make it work" area.
I'd put ITER at the top. They're a long term project which has been steadily working through problems. Everyone else is very very new, and while promise is good, it's not deliverables or construction activities. Unless any of those get unambiguous high-Q fusion in their prototypes, they're all very likely to run into the ITER "it'll work but we need to scale it up to make it work" area.
My one huge critical point against ITER is they seem to have not adapted their reactor design much between phases of the project. There's a reason the Stellarator exists, for example, and it's because of advances in computer modelling and iterative design. IMO, ITER has at best a mid-probability of successfully operating as a net-positive power plant, but doing so will require ridiculous amounts of active closed loop control to overcome the negative feedback loops we've since discovered in its design.
Ideally, we find a different design works before it finishes completion and we toss it into the heap long before then, which from my POV seems far more likely.
I'd put ITER at the top. They're a long term project which has been steadily working through problems. Everyone else is very very new, and while promise is good, it's not deliverables or construction activities. Unless any of those get unambiguous high-Q fusion in their prototypes, they're all very likely to run into the ITER "it'll work but we need to scale it up to make it work" area.
My one huge critical point against ITER is they seem to have not adapted their reactor design much between phases of the project. There's a reason the Stellarator exists, for example, and it's because of advances in computer modelling and iterative design. IMO, ITER has at best a mid-probability of successfully operating as a net-positive power plant, but doing so will require ridiculous amounts of active closed loop control to overcome the negative feedback loops we've since discovered in its design.
Ideally, we find a different design works before it finishes completion and we toss it into the heap long before then, which from my POV seems far more likely.
I don't think it's wise to underestimate the sheer significance of operating a fusion reactor which actually generates net power.
That milestone is significant - but we can't get there by constantly retooling (and scaling a stellarator design is going to be a huge project).
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Tossrocktoo weird to livetoo rare to dieRegistered Userregular
General Fusion is a name I can get behind. I don't claim to understand the science behind their approach, but is there a simplified explanation to explain why you rank them as the most likely?
I think General Fusion is the best of the lot because the science they're working from is sound, they've built prototypes at multiple scales, and they're both well funded and 100% focused on a commercial application. Big government projects (ITER, NIF, etc) are usually half as much about science and research as they are about producing an economically viable reactor. General Fusion's approach, ie using shockwaves from pneumatic rams to collapse the plasma at the center of a liquid lead vortex, is also (relatively) simple, so the engineering required is much less crazy than either tokamak / other magnetic confinement approaches, which have to have superconducting magnets, or inertial confinement approaches which take lasers big enough to kill god.
Hellion and Tri-alpha also have the commercial application focus, but I'm not as sure that Hellion's science is real. Tri-alpha has good science but it's not clear to me how they can make a viable reactor from it.
The Wendelstein is cool because it's a clear demonstration of the viability of the stellarator approach, and we're getting better at computer aided design and manufacturing all the time, so the downsides to its complexity are quickly fading. But it's still magnetic confinement, and will still suffer from eg reactor wall erosion.
From what I've heard, Lockheed's truck-based reactor is a pipe dream that they're trying to sell for government funding, not anything close to production. Fundamentally I don't trust a defense contractor to not burn billions of taxpayer dollars, especially when they will also have to do advanced scientific research along the way.
NIF is basically just a weapons research facility now, and ITER, at best, will be an astronomically expensive, outdated design that barely produces more power than it consumes.
I'd put ITER at the top. They're a long term project which has been steadily working through problems. Everyone else is very very new, and while promise is good, it's not deliverables or construction activities. Unless any of those get unambiguous high-Q fusion in their prototypes, they're all very likely to run into the ITER "it'll work but we need to scale it up to make it work" area.
My one huge critical point against ITER is they seem to have not adapted their reactor design much between phases of the project. There's a reason the Stellarator exists, for example, and it's because of advances in computer modelling and iterative design. IMO, ITER has at best a mid-probability of successfully operating as a net-positive power plant, but doing so will require ridiculous amounts of active closed loop control to overcome the negative feedback loops we've since discovered in its design.
Ideally, we find a different design works before it finishes completion and we toss it into the heap long before then, which from my POV seems far more likely.
I don't think it's wise to underestimate the sheer significance of operating a fusion reactor which actually generates net power.
That milestone is significant - but we can't get there by constantly retooling (and scaling a stellarator design is going to be a huge project).
Funny enough, this article on the stellarator and fusion in general fleshes out a lot of the current state of the field. I think in the end I'm a little more toward your line of thinking than I was initially, but it definitely looks like future coil architecture will aim for better passive characteristics like what a stellarator offers rather than relying entirely on active control in a vanilla torus.
Quite separately, it looks like we may be getting flying cars after all. Though in this case, they won't be aimed so much for personal ownership as much as being a pricier commuter service, like private helicopters but more accessible.
I would *love* to be in traffic and just flip everyone the bird as my ride turned into a VTOL and skimmed about 20 feet in the air as I got home in about 25 minutes compared to a 1hr;15min commute.
I would *love* to be in traffic and just flip everyone the bird as my ride turned into a VTOL and skimmed about 20 feet in the air as I got home in about 25 minutes compared to a 1hr;15min commute.
It's not impossible that we may get there eventually, but I'd bet personal flying vehicles will be limited to about the range of a Nissan Leaf purely because of design constraints. Plus, there won't be as much demand for that sort of thing with really good self-driving cars.
Flying cars run into the issue of needing more energy simply because they need to generate lift.
And I have no idea how they'd be regulated. Drones have been bad enough on that front (the FAA got a little nuts there)
That's easy enough - they are aircraft, get your pilot's license. There are even aircraft classifications already for lightweight low-performance craft for which you don't need the full license but a restricted one will do
And they're not as inefficient as you might think, you can get up to 20 mpg on a basic non-turboprop aircraft. Which isn't that bad, especially since you can take a more direct route
Flying cars run into the issue of needing more energy simply because they need to generate lift.
And I have no idea how they'd be regulated. Drones have been bad enough on that front (the FAA got a little nuts there)
That's easy enough - they are aircraft, get your pilot's license. There are even aircraft classifications already for lightweight low-performance craft for which you don't need the full license but a restricted one will do
That stops being "easy enough" really quickly when they're taking off and landing from residential neighborhoods or within, oh, fifty thousand kilometers of an elementary school.
Honestly, given the crazy risk aversion in North America it's pretty much a moot point. If significant steps start being taken towards an economically viable flying car as something other than an art piece or individual project, we'll get a huge, panicky media blitz about terrorist applications, and they'll be outlawed - possibly effectively, probably explicitly - immediately afterwards.
Flying cars run into the issue of needing more energy simply because they need to generate lift.
And I have no idea how they'd be regulated. Drones have been bad enough on that front (the FAA got a little nuts there)
That's easy enough - they are aircraft, get your pilot's license. There are even aircraft classifications already for lightweight low-performance craft for which you don't need the full license but a restricted one will do
That stops being "easy enough" really quickly when they're taking off and landing from residential neighborhoods or within, oh, fifty thousand kilometers of an elementary school.
Honestly, given the crazy risk aversion in North America it's pretty much a moot point. If significant steps start being taken towards an economically viable flying car as something other than an art piece or individual project, we'll get a huge, panicky media blitz about terrorist applications, and they'll be outlawed - possibly effectively, probably explicitly - immediately afterwards.
It's Not Going To Happen.
Pilots licenses are not remotely as simple as drivers licenses. Upon quick lookup, there's no way a flying car falls under ultralight or light-sport aircraft, so you would need a full private pilot's license. And good luck with that.
You also run into issues with flight lanes in some places. MSP airport is smack in the middle of the Twin Cities metro for instance.
Flying cars run into the issue of needing more energy simply because they need to generate lift.
And I have no idea how they'd be regulated. Drones have been bad enough on that front (the FAA got a little nuts there)
That's easy enough - they are aircraft, get your pilot's license. There are even aircraft classifications already for lightweight low-performance craft for which you don't need the full license but a restricted one will do
That stops being "easy enough" really quickly when they're taking off and landing from residential neighborhoods or within, oh, fifty thousand kilometers of an elementary school.
Honestly, given the crazy risk aversion in North America it's pretty much a moot point. If significant steps start being taken towards an economically viable flying car as something other than an art piece or individual project, we'll get a huge, panicky media blitz about terrorist applications, and they'll be outlawed - possibly effectively, probably explicitly - immediately afterwards.
It's Not Going To Happen.
Pilots licenses are not remotely as simple as drivers licenses. Upon quick lookup, there's no way a flying car falls under ultralight or light-sport aircraft, so you would need a full private pilot's license. And good luck with that.
so what you're saying is, traffic will be very light when commuting in a flying car? :P
Flying cars run into the issue of needing more energy simply because they need to generate lift.
And I have no idea how they'd be regulated. Drones have been bad enough on that front (the FAA got a little nuts there)
That's easy enough - they are aircraft, get your pilot's license. There are even aircraft classifications already for lightweight low-performance craft for which you don't need the full license but a restricted one will do
That stops being "easy enough" really quickly when they're taking off and landing from residential neighborhoods or within, oh, fifty thousand kilometers of an elementary school.
Honestly, given the crazy risk aversion in North America it's pretty much a moot point. If significant steps start being taken towards an economically viable flying car as something other than an art piece or individual project, we'll get a huge, panicky media blitz about terrorist applications, and they'll be outlawed - possibly effectively, probably explicitly - immediately afterwards.
It's Not Going To Happen.
For just a few thousand you can get far enough into a flight school program to legally fly solo (you just need some ground school + some simulator hours + some dual flight hours), for a few hundred more you can rent a plane and crash it wherever you want anyway. Background checks are only required for non-citizens and hey you can always steal a plane from a small aerodrome. Not every airport is commercial with transport security
Or, you can take one of those "experience flying a plane" things where you don't need a license or anything at all, overpower the instructor and do whatever you want
Or, if your attack can be carried out by an ultralight, they're cheap and have zero requirements at all
Flying cars don't really change that much on the planes-as-terrorism front
Realistically though, the problem is crowding. Aircraft are moving quickly and don't have huge maneuverability or really good visibility. And major cities are often in controlled airspace because of the local airport. You can't just add 20000 aircraft to track in a single city and that is only a small fraction of the potential numbers
Posts
These things seem promising.
edit: Here's a similar technology.
Nup.
Then the CO2 industries are still digging coal out of the ground faster than you can sequester it.
You need to take carbon out of the sky faster than industries are pushing it in to have any effect.
And as you have the same amount of plants in both scenarios, the amount you're taking out of the sky doesn't change unless there's some sort of efficiency increase to sequestering the carbon.
So if you want to dent the amount of atmospheric carbon, either your CO2 pulling plants need to exceed the current industrial output, or you need to limit the industrial output of CO2 so that the scrubbing plants can keep up.
Bringing that back around, you would need to supply the entire industry with recycled carbon and sequester some as well, if you want to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon.
The more you sequester, the less you need to recycle.
But in total, the amount you sequester plus the amount you recycle has to be greater than the amount the industry is emitting if you want cleaner air.
As for whether recycling makes sense, it really depends on how hard or otherwise it is to get the industry to adapt.
It would certainly be more energy efficient to simply shut down those plants that produce too much CO2.
But if we can't get their products in any other manner, it might be easier to recycle the CO2 and make the industry net CO2 neutral, than trying to come up with a substitute.
On that last paragraph, one significant use stated for fusion is hydrocarbon fuel synthesis. Basically, you use electrical power from a fusion plant to catalyze CO2 and water into any of a number of hydrocarbons as an energy storage medium, much like charging a battery. The trick with that is if electricity is cheap enough, you can keep all of your existing internal combustion technologies in place and flip them over into carbon-neutral technologies overnight. For some applications, hydrocarbon fuels will almost always be necessary, like large jet aircraft and anything that demands a gas turbine to achieve a sufficient power to weight ratio. In addition, your fuels will have no contaminants like sulfur or nitrogen compounds, so pollution is cut to just the carbon comes out of the vehicle.
edit: as a bonus, the US military is very interested in this idea (especially the Navy). If they could cut oilers out of the fleet, that's a huge logistical chain that they don't have to pay for anymore, which means a steady flow of research money is available toward solving this particular problem.
You can, but its an energy intensive process. There's a reason we burn carbon to form CO2 for energy, to undo that process you would have to put at least the energy in that you got out, but realistically more like 3x as much due to inefficiencies.
Not impossible, plants can manage it, but the world is already running pretty much near capacity for plants and green algae.
Now if some post scarcity energy technology like high temperature superconductors or cheap fusion were developed, then yeah, you probably could have that as an option, but I wouldn't bet civilization on the odds that we might discover magic.
If we were 100% on renewables and nuclear power, it'd be a thing to talk about, though.
Following up on this from a different (satirical) perspective, why send robots when humans need jobs still?
That's more or less literally the reverse of combustion -- so all the energy you get from, for instance, a campfire or a coal plant needs to go back in the bottle, so to speak.
The more common goal is CO2 to simple hydrocarbons like methanol or ethanol, which in theory reduces or supplants fossil fuel demand. I guess the global warming argument would be that you can leave oil buried if you don't need it, thus reducing circulating carbon.
I don't see how there could be a profit in using energy to bury carbon, or even CO2. It would have to be a government sponsored initiative.
Most practically useful cases go from CO2 to CO (though you can with sufficient energy and a catalyst go straight to o2+elemental carbon ) then use CO to do other chemistry. Plants do some biochemical trickery to end up with o2+sugars from co+water. You can do the same with industrial processes, ending up with various organic acids or hydrocarbons and some combination of hydrogen and oxygen gasses, but either way you are still doing reverse combustion and sinking equivalent amounts of energy back in. CO2 is very energetically favorable, any recovery of the carbon locked in it is one way or another going to be energy expensive, and thus is going to be something that is only viable once we have some other energy source sufficient to run society on and have sufficient energy left over to dump into a big project.
Technically, it can be an energy win to burn something and then reverse the CO2 portion. Combustion produces CO2 and H2O. If you leave the water alone and split the CO2 you actually win slightly. You get 890kJ/mol burning methane but only 400 of that comes from the CO2 formation, so you'd burn methane and get water, oxygen and elemental carbon out if you had a way to split CO2 efficiently
You do begin to lose when burning the bigger molecules but it's a win at least for the two smallest and maybe propane as well
It's not just "splitting" CO2. It's also reducing the carbon. You need electrons from somewhere.
edit:
ie. "CO2 --> O2 + C" is wrong, it should be CO2 + e- --> O2 + C
To be fair, being launched into the sun makes for one hell of a viking funeral.
I think you're missing the larger point. If Bob's Cola needs to get CO2 for carbonating their soft drinks. Then the quest comes down to would buying it from these plants result in using less CO2 being used to carbonate their beverages or would it at least be a wash? If it takes less C02 output for Bob's Cola if they purchase the CO2 from these plants, than the plants are a net gain even if what they are capturing gets released in the atmosphere. It would also still be worth doing if it was a wash because then at least Bob's Cola is recycling CO2 that has already been released, rather than unlocking new CO2 that was stabled stored naturally. Also a rather large boon, if a significant number of those CO2 scrubbing plants aren't being supported by efficient long term carbon storage methods.
Honestly, I would be surprised if extracting new sources of CO2 wasn't generating more CO2 than the plants.
The ultimately goal is to find a cost efficient way to just crack the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, since that provides resources for other endeavors. The dream would be stripping the carbon and then turning it into graphene nanotubes
Knowing how close to dawn Mercury appears in the morning sky before sunrise (and that it's periapsis is about 0.3 AU), imagine a faintly luminous disk or ellipse with that kind of width in the night sky.
The kinetics are so insanely disfavorable that even this is not practically feasible though. For co2->c+o2 you are looking at activation temperatures of 390C with a catalyst. Most practical techniques involve high energy lasers or the like, but you are either way going to spend a lot more energy than yeild just getting to a temperature where the reaction is favorable at human time scales.
Edit: To clarify, sort of, you have two concerns here.
One is thermodynamics. CO2 has a lower energy level essentially than C+O2 (disregarding electrons here for a bit). Therefore, in the absence of an external energy source, CO2 will never decay to C + O2. You need an external energy source to make it happen at all, just like a ball on the ground will never roll uphill without a push.
The second is kinetics, which is a good bit more fidgety. Even in the presence of external heat, the reaction between c+O2 <-->CO2 is going to be a reversible one, and CO2 will be vastly favored. There are ways around this, namely to make the process irreversible, either removing O2 or C from the reaction area once produced, or in some cases using a catalyst that favors one side of the reaction. However, even when that occurs, you have a problem that there are transitional states that must be overcome which takes either time or additional energy. Basically at any point a certain amount of CO2 will be decomposing, and a lot more free carbon will be combining with oxygen to form co2, but at low temperatures this is going to be really slow. At room temperature even if you had a way to put in energy to get the CO2 to decompose and perfectly remove c and o2 from the system, you are probably going to be looking at geologic timescales to break down any significant amounts of CO2. To help with this, you need to dump even more energy into the system to raise the temperature (which will then be spent as heat and entropy essentially). Raising the temperature makes both sides of the reaction go faster, which if you remove the product you want as it is formed helps you out.
So basically to get decent reaction rates even with a favorable catalyst you need to get things hot. Like hundreds of degrees, shooting with a laser hot. Which is why cracking CO2 into c+02 is going to need $texas amounts of energy regardless of how you do it. Plants get around this by using organics and various protein catalysts (and biological catalysts are way better than anything we can do industrially now)as intermediate steps, and still dump in rather high amounts of solar energy.
Edit: correction 2, could have sworn that plants and bacteria reduce co2 to co via water prior to adding it to larger organics enzymaticaly but can't find that anywhere now, either way they dont reduce straight to c+ o2 but go through a wide variety of intermediates.
No. C(+4 oxidation state)O2(-4 oxidation state) --> C(0 oxidation state) + O2 (0 oxidation state). No electrons needed.
I think General Fusion is more likely to pan out than the Lockheed reactor.
In fact, here's my ranking of next-gen fusion projects:
1. General Fusion
2. Hellion Energy
3. Wendelstein derived stellerator
4. Tri-Alpha
5. Lockheed
6. NIF
7. ITER
My one huge critical point against ITER is they seem to have not adapted their reactor design much between phases of the project. There's a reason the Stellarator exists, for example, and it's because of advances in computer modelling and iterative design. IMO, ITER has at best a mid-probability of successfully operating as a net-positive power plant, but doing so will require ridiculous amounts of active closed loop control to overcome the negative feedback loops we've since discovered in its design.
Ideally, we find a different design works before it finishes completion and we toss it into the heap long before then, which from my POV seems far more likely.
I don't think it's wise to underestimate the sheer significance of operating a fusion reactor which actually generates net power.
That milestone is significant - but we can't get there by constantly retooling (and scaling a stellarator design is going to be a huge project).
I think General Fusion is the best of the lot because the science they're working from is sound, they've built prototypes at multiple scales, and they're both well funded and 100% focused on a commercial application. Big government projects (ITER, NIF, etc) are usually half as much about science and research as they are about producing an economically viable reactor. General Fusion's approach, ie using shockwaves from pneumatic rams to collapse the plasma at the center of a liquid lead vortex, is also (relatively) simple, so the engineering required is much less crazy than either tokamak / other magnetic confinement approaches, which have to have superconducting magnets, or inertial confinement approaches which take lasers big enough to kill god.
Hellion and Tri-alpha also have the commercial application focus, but I'm not as sure that Hellion's science is real. Tri-alpha has good science but it's not clear to me how they can make a viable reactor from it.
The Wendelstein is cool because it's a clear demonstration of the viability of the stellarator approach, and we're getting better at computer aided design and manufacturing all the time, so the downsides to its complexity are quickly fading. But it's still magnetic confinement, and will still suffer from eg reactor wall erosion.
From what I've heard, Lockheed's truck-based reactor is a pipe dream that they're trying to sell for government funding, not anything close to production. Fundamentally I don't trust a defense contractor to not burn billions of taxpayer dollars, especially when they will also have to do advanced scientific research along the way.
NIF is basically just a weapons research facility now, and ITER, at best, will be an astronomically expensive, outdated design that barely produces more power than it consumes.
Funny enough, this article on the stellarator and fusion in general fleshes out a lot of the current state of the field. I think in the end I'm a little more toward your line of thinking than I was initially, but it definitely looks like future coil architecture will aim for better passive characteristics like what a stellarator offers rather than relying entirely on active control in a vanilla torus.
Quite separately, it looks like we may be getting flying cars after all. Though in this case, they won't be aimed so much for personal ownership as much as being a pricier commuter service, like private helicopters but more accessible.
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It's not impossible that we may get there eventually, but I'd bet personal flying vehicles will be limited to about the range of a Nissan Leaf purely because of design constraints. Plus, there won't be as much demand for that sort of thing with really good self-driving cars.
And I have no idea how they'd be regulated. Drones have been bad enough on that front (the FAA got a little nuts there)
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That's easy enough - they are aircraft, get your pilot's license. There are even aircraft classifications already for lightweight low-performance craft for which you don't need the full license but a restricted one will do
And they're not as inefficient as you might think, you can get up to 20 mpg on a basic non-turboprop aircraft. Which isn't that bad, especially since you can take a more direct route
That stops being "easy enough" really quickly when they're taking off and landing from residential neighborhoods or within, oh, fifty thousand kilometers of an elementary school.
Honestly, given the crazy risk aversion in North America it's pretty much a moot point. If significant steps start being taken towards an economically viable flying car as something other than an art piece or individual project, we'll get a huge, panicky media blitz about terrorist applications, and they'll be outlawed - possibly effectively, probably explicitly - immediately afterwards.
It's Not Going To Happen.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Pilots licenses are not remotely as simple as drivers licenses. Upon quick lookup, there's no way a flying car falls under ultralight or light-sport aircraft, so you would need a full private pilot's license. And good luck with that.
You also run into issues with flight lanes in some places. MSP airport is smack in the middle of the Twin Cities metro for instance.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
so what you're saying is, traffic will be very light when commuting in a flying car? :P
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
For just a few thousand you can get far enough into a flight school program to legally fly solo (you just need some ground school + some simulator hours + some dual flight hours), for a few hundred more you can rent a plane and crash it wherever you want anyway. Background checks are only required for non-citizens and hey you can always steal a plane from a small aerodrome. Not every airport is commercial with transport security
Or, you can take one of those "experience flying a plane" things where you don't need a license or anything at all, overpower the instructor and do whatever you want
Or, if your attack can be carried out by an ultralight, they're cheap and have zero requirements at all
Flying cars don't really change that much on the planes-as-terrorism front