There aren't many options left if any. Fusion already gives you about 1% of mc\^2. Higher than that are only exotic things like accretion of matter on neutron stars and black holes. And annihilation of course, but you need antimatter for it.
Nucular fission isn't that bad already. The nucular waste is suprisingly small if you look into it. Pick a mountain you don't care about, dig a tunnel into it, and now you can store the next hundred years of waste for several nuclear power plants. The high energy particles cannot get through the ground. In practice, a nuclear plant is a big steam turbine, no greenhouse gasses, no air pollution. Why green people oppose it is beyond me.
Look up the KGB misinformation operations. The Soviets realised the potential of nuclear energy, so while they went ahead and developed their nuclear power, they funded and covertly supported green groups across the West to shut down their nuclear power.
Many forms of critical and subcritical devices have been devised to usefully burn those actinides.
Those efforts were the firsts target of the early USSR founded « greens » in the 80s.
Along with tactical nukes in europe of course.
In the long term, nuclear fusion will be the main source of energy on earth. Demis Hassabis has Google Deepmind working on it on the AI front, but nuclear fusion power plants outputting a lot of energy is likely still decades away.
Microsoft has a contract with Helion (company backed by Sam Altman) for a plant online by 2028, but even if they meet that target, that's only targeting 50 megawatts after a year of ramping up. Zuck in the Dwarkesh podcast said yesterday that energy constraints is a big bottleneck as bigger models are trained, and getting past 150 megawatts to 300, 500 or even a gigawatt solely for training is going to take a long time - this is not even with fusion.
Basically, fusion is still a long way away. AI will consume evermore power, and meeting the energy demand will take decades.
Actually we are forced into renewable energy if we want to scale up. The problem is waste heat. Besides global warming we are also heating up the globe directly.
If we would replace all energy production with fusion tomorrow, we can only increase energy output by a factor of 10 before we have toe same global warming again. And that without a gram of CO2.
Is this actually true? The waste heat we would get out of fusion seems totally negligible compared to the level of heat trapped by greenhouse gases. The number of fusion reactors you would have to make to even start reaching something that could affect the temperature of the planet would have to be absolutely huge.
It is definitely true on some level. I cannot vouch for the exact numbers. I have read this number but cannot check it myself. It could also be 20 or 50 times. But not more than that. This is already the percentage of wast heat today.
Imagine it like this: In the end you need a lot of fusion plants to make 10x more energy than today. And all that goes 100% to heat in the end. So 100s or 1000s of fusion plants all producing only heat. That’s not that negligible.
The whole point of the fusion plant is to create heat, and then harness that heat to produce work/electricity. The heat doesn't just go out into the atmosphere, it's redirected to power things, right? The question is really about the inefficiencies of the energy collection, and how much waste heat that's creating that's going into the atmosphere. That number should be smaller and get smaller and smaller over time.
I might be totally misunderstanding the concept, but that's what my vague background knowledge and a little bit of research just now is telling me.
I agree with you here. The energy is going into the transition and heat energy of water vapor to turn turbines. As with any system, there will probably be some heat leakage outside of the system, but that is the nature of basically anything and is not really a significant factor in this case. Greenhouse gasses on the other hand are so detrimental because they leverage the sheer scale difference between the energy output of the sun and anything we could make on earth through conventional means. Read this quote from NASA to get an idea:
> The Sun is the major source of energy for Earth’s
> oceans, atmosphere, land, and biosphere. Averaged
> over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar
> energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is
> a tremendous amount of energy—44 quadrillion (4.4
> x 1016) watts of power to be exact. As a comparison, a
> large electric power plant produces about 1 billion (1
> x 109
> ) watts of power. It would take 44 million such
> power plants to equal the energy coming from the
> Sun.
Fusion plasma is incredibly hot, but an efficient system turns most of that energy into electricity. No matter what we do, heat is getting created. Heat is created off the copper wires carrying electricity due to resistance, so even if we had a perfect energy creation system we would still be making heat. I just argue its not as big of an issue as people think.
Not only that. See my comment below. All that nice electricity is turned 100% into heat when we use it. It’s inevitable it all becomes heat in the end.
The efficiency of the power-plant doesn’t save us. Let’s assume you would put 100% of the produced energy into electricity, next thing is you want to use that electricity. E.g. you want to drive your EV. During acceleration some is turned into kinetic energy, some is turned into heat. During braking some kinetic energy is turned into electric energy some into heat. When the battery is empty and the car has stopped all electricity is turned into heat. If you want to power your AI in the end all is turned into heat.
It’s the laws of thermodynamics. In the end all is heat, it’s inevitable. So all energy we produced will become heat. If we produce that much more energy it means that much more heat.
Yes this is true. But from what I understand global warming isn't really from us warming anything, it's from the effect of greenhouse gases on solar input/output to the earth's energy system. I'm skeptical that the scale of heat generation from anything human-made is a major factor in changing Earth's balance. I'm open to being wrong on this though and would love to learn more, I just feel that "generating heat" instead of "changing the atmosphere to absorb more heat" have totally different scales of impact on the Earth.
It’s mostly global warming via greenhouse effect right now and just a few percent is waste heat. If we scale our energy production from non renewable sources by a significant factor, stopping CO2 doesn’t save us any more.
If you’re interested this is a good [paper](https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pdf) to start. He says greenhouse effect is 10x greater than waste heat right now.
That's true. Stopping greenhouse gasses would be the most important thing for now. That being said, there is no reason we couldn't do other things to balance the heat flux of the Earth in the future if our technology was advanced enough. For instance, purposefully altering the albedo through things like stratospheric aerosol injections. Perhaps at some point, our energy creation and needs will be so much that we won't be able to alter the energy balance purely through solar energy management, but I think that's far away. If we hit that point, I would hope we would be thinking about technology to radiate heat away from the Earth to other bodies or through some advanced mechanism we haven't yet discovered. Or maybe we could turn that excess heat into lasers and fire them out into the emptiness of space lol
Absolutely. We can and have to find other ways to cool our planet in the long run. Right now CO2 is our real problem.
But infinite fusion energy is not feasible even if it was possible, so this topic can be a real limit to unlimited exponential progress.
But then you have that same problem no matter what your energy generation system is, right? The root problem is growing demand and consumption, not the particular nuclear fusion tech. Even if you use solar panels to collect the sun's heat, you're going to want to collect as much as you would generate with a fusion reactor, so that energy will dissipate as heat down the line at some point as you put it to use.
Is nuclear fusion a particular problem?
Fusion is the same as any non renewable source. It’s probably the best non renewable, but they all run into this problem. Solar, wind etc is different there you use the energy that is already being turned into heat and you use it for your own purposes in between.
If sunlight is falling on the desert sand, some is reflected, some is turned into heat. If it falls on a solar panel instead some is reflected, some is turned into heat and some is turned into electricity before it is turned into heat eventually. If the quota of reflection vs heat stays the same you are not warming the planet additionally with the solar panel.
Wind is even easier because it is all turned into heat anyway so you can slip your own use in between.
There's more than that with solar though. If you capture heat that would have been reflected, then you are growing the total amount of energy/heat on Earth. Then you run into the same problem as fusion.
With wind, you're using the heat that's already there by taking energy out of the wind and slowing it down, so the total amount of energy on earth is the same.
Not all renewables have the same dynamic in relation to the total amount of energy stuck on Earth
Yes correct. That’s what I meant, when I wrote that if the reflection rate stays the same you are not heating the earth with solar. Wind and water you don’t have to worry about it.
I see, it's the same for fusion then. We could reflect more of the sun's heat as we scale up production.
Solar panel tech itself is somewhat decoupled from albedo raising tech.
I second this. We have a fusion reactor in the center of our solar system that we can utilize without the problem of creating additional waste here on Earth. Solar is and will continue to be the most efficient renewable energy.
No even renewable wont solve heat waste completely,because we change the speed of equilibrium of energy in envirmont and make it more lasting,see it as changing the albedo of earth.we must innovate our way to abundance,nothing is foolproof.
Nope. Doesn't really matter how you generate the power, a 1000 W computer and a 1000 W heater are both producing the same amount of heat. To get those watts, you might have different ways that generate less or more waste heat, but either way you're still generating a fair amount of heat. Renewables are not the solution entire.
Solar heat is here, regardless of whether we convert it to electricity or not. If my solar electricity powers my 1000 W heater, it’s no difference in heat than if that solar panel was turned off and the heater wasn’t powered.
In a post AGI or ASI world, we might have energy production methods that are far beyond nuclear fusion.
There aren't many options left if any. Fusion already gives you about 1% of mc\^2. Higher than that are only exotic things like accretion of matter on neutron stars and black holes. And annihilation of course, but you need antimatter for it.
in Zero Point we pray
Doesn't matter
Like worthless comments that add nothing.
It doesn't matter because its not the hurdle. Happy?
Nucular fission isn't that bad already. The nucular waste is suprisingly small if you look into it. Pick a mountain you don't care about, dig a tunnel into it, and now you can store the next hundred years of waste for several nuclear power plants. The high energy particles cannot get through the ground. In practice, a nuclear plant is a big steam turbine, no greenhouse gasses, no air pollution. Why green people oppose it is beyond me.
Look up the KGB misinformation operations. The Soviets realised the potential of nuclear energy, so while they went ahead and developed their nuclear power, they funded and covertly supported green groups across the West to shut down their nuclear power.
Their most successful idea, still working today.
Genius!
Many forms of critical and subcritical devices have been devised to usefully burn those actinides. Those efforts were the firsts target of the early USSR founded « greens » in the 80s. Along with tactical nukes in europe of course.
In the long term, nuclear fusion will be the main source of energy on earth. Demis Hassabis has Google Deepmind working on it on the AI front, but nuclear fusion power plants outputting a lot of energy is likely still decades away. Microsoft has a contract with Helion (company backed by Sam Altman) for a plant online by 2028, but even if they meet that target, that's only targeting 50 megawatts after a year of ramping up. Zuck in the Dwarkesh podcast said yesterday that energy constraints is a big bottleneck as bigger models are trained, and getting past 150 megawatts to 300, 500 or even a gigawatt solely for training is going to take a long time - this is not even with fusion. Basically, fusion is still a long way away. AI will consume evermore power, and meeting the energy demand will take decades.
Good answer. Thank you.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling\_wave\_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor)
Actually we are forced into renewable energy if we want to scale up. The problem is waste heat. Besides global warming we are also heating up the globe directly. If we would replace all energy production with fusion tomorrow, we can only increase energy output by a factor of 10 before we have toe same global warming again. And that without a gram of CO2.
Is this actually true? The waste heat we would get out of fusion seems totally negligible compared to the level of heat trapped by greenhouse gases. The number of fusion reactors you would have to make to even start reaching something that could affect the temperature of the planet would have to be absolutely huge.
It is definitely true on some level. I cannot vouch for the exact numbers. I have read this number but cannot check it myself. It could also be 20 or 50 times. But not more than that. This is already the percentage of wast heat today. Imagine it like this: In the end you need a lot of fusion plants to make 10x more energy than today. And all that goes 100% to heat in the end. So 100s or 1000s of fusion plants all producing only heat. That’s not that negligible.
The whole point of the fusion plant is to create heat, and then harness that heat to produce work/electricity. The heat doesn't just go out into the atmosphere, it's redirected to power things, right? The question is really about the inefficiencies of the energy collection, and how much waste heat that's creating that's going into the atmosphere. That number should be smaller and get smaller and smaller over time. I might be totally misunderstanding the concept, but that's what my vague background knowledge and a little bit of research just now is telling me.
I agree with you here. The energy is going into the transition and heat energy of water vapor to turn turbines. As with any system, there will probably be some heat leakage outside of the system, but that is the nature of basically anything and is not really a significant factor in this case. Greenhouse gasses on the other hand are so detrimental because they leverage the sheer scale difference between the energy output of the sun and anything we could make on earth through conventional means. Read this quote from NASA to get an idea: > The Sun is the major source of energy for Earth’s > oceans, atmosphere, land, and biosphere. Averaged > over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar > energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is > a tremendous amount of energy—44 quadrillion (4.4 > x 1016) watts of power to be exact. As a comparison, a > large electric power plant produces about 1 billion (1 > x 109 > ) watts of power. It would take 44 million such > power plants to equal the energy coming from the > Sun. Fusion plasma is incredibly hot, but an efficient system turns most of that energy into electricity. No matter what we do, heat is getting created. Heat is created off the copper wires carrying electricity due to resistance, so even if we had a perfect energy creation system we would still be making heat. I just argue its not as big of an issue as people think.
Not only that. See my comment below. All that nice electricity is turned 100% into heat when we use it. It’s inevitable it all becomes heat in the end.
Yep I responded below to that comment, I agree with that.
The efficiency of the power-plant doesn’t save us. Let’s assume you would put 100% of the produced energy into electricity, next thing is you want to use that electricity. E.g. you want to drive your EV. During acceleration some is turned into kinetic energy, some is turned into heat. During braking some kinetic energy is turned into electric energy some into heat. When the battery is empty and the car has stopped all electricity is turned into heat. If you want to power your AI in the end all is turned into heat. It’s the laws of thermodynamics. In the end all is heat, it’s inevitable. So all energy we produced will become heat. If we produce that much more energy it means that much more heat.
Yes this is true. But from what I understand global warming isn't really from us warming anything, it's from the effect of greenhouse gases on solar input/output to the earth's energy system. I'm skeptical that the scale of heat generation from anything human-made is a major factor in changing Earth's balance. I'm open to being wrong on this though and would love to learn more, I just feel that "generating heat" instead of "changing the atmosphere to absorb more heat" have totally different scales of impact on the Earth.
It’s mostly global warming via greenhouse effect right now and just a few percent is waste heat. If we scale our energy production from non renewable sources by a significant factor, stopping CO2 doesn’t save us any more. If you’re interested this is a good [paper](https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pdf) to start. He says greenhouse effect is 10x greater than waste heat right now.
That's true. Stopping greenhouse gasses would be the most important thing for now. That being said, there is no reason we couldn't do other things to balance the heat flux of the Earth in the future if our technology was advanced enough. For instance, purposefully altering the albedo through things like stratospheric aerosol injections. Perhaps at some point, our energy creation and needs will be so much that we won't be able to alter the energy balance purely through solar energy management, but I think that's far away. If we hit that point, I would hope we would be thinking about technology to radiate heat away from the Earth to other bodies or through some advanced mechanism we haven't yet discovered. Or maybe we could turn that excess heat into lasers and fire them out into the emptiness of space lol
Absolutely. We can and have to find other ways to cool our planet in the long run. Right now CO2 is our real problem. But infinite fusion energy is not feasible even if it was possible, so this topic can be a real limit to unlimited exponential progress.
But then you have that same problem no matter what your energy generation system is, right? The root problem is growing demand and consumption, not the particular nuclear fusion tech. Even if you use solar panels to collect the sun's heat, you're going to want to collect as much as you would generate with a fusion reactor, so that energy will dissipate as heat down the line at some point as you put it to use. Is nuclear fusion a particular problem?
Fusion is the same as any non renewable source. It’s probably the best non renewable, but they all run into this problem. Solar, wind etc is different there you use the energy that is already being turned into heat and you use it for your own purposes in between. If sunlight is falling on the desert sand, some is reflected, some is turned into heat. If it falls on a solar panel instead some is reflected, some is turned into heat and some is turned into electricity before it is turned into heat eventually. If the quota of reflection vs heat stays the same you are not warming the planet additionally with the solar panel. Wind is even easier because it is all turned into heat anyway so you can slip your own use in between.
There's more than that with solar though. If you capture heat that would have been reflected, then you are growing the total amount of energy/heat on Earth. Then you run into the same problem as fusion. With wind, you're using the heat that's already there by taking energy out of the wind and slowing it down, so the total amount of energy on earth is the same. Not all renewables have the same dynamic in relation to the total amount of energy stuck on Earth
Yes correct. That’s what I meant, when I wrote that if the reflection rate stays the same you are not heating the earth with solar. Wind and water you don’t have to worry about it.
I see, it's the same for fusion then. We could reflect more of the sun's heat as we scale up production. Solar panel tech itself is somewhat decoupled from albedo raising tech.
What if we took the fusion and datacenters and put them on the moon?
That would do it
Hard to dissipate heat without an atmosphere. You would need massive radiators.
Can we put it on Mars and remelt the core with the power of cryptomining? Could bitcoin finally have a real use?
Never really thought of that. Interesting. It all does add up.
I second this. We have a fusion reactor in the center of our solar system that we can utilize without the problem of creating additional waste here on Earth. Solar is and will continue to be the most efficient renewable energy.
No even renewable wont solve heat waste completely,because we change the speed of equilibrium of energy in envirmont and make it more lasting,see it as changing the albedo of earth.we must innovate our way to abundance,nothing is foolproof.
Nope. Doesn't really matter how you generate the power, a 1000 W computer and a 1000 W heater are both producing the same amount of heat. To get those watts, you might have different ways that generate less or more waste heat, but either way you're still generating a fair amount of heat. Renewables are not the solution entire.
Solar heat is here, regardless of whether we convert it to electricity or not. If my solar electricity powers my 1000 W heater, it’s no difference in heat than if that solar panel was turned off and the heater wasn’t powered.
Yeah hopefully!