Well, if we want more drinking water we might start boiling salt water with electricity.

That's a very obsolete desalination technique.

A cup of water with salt added doesn't get noticeably warm since there's just not much entropy difference in salt water vs fresh water. These days you can reverse the process at very low electricity cost with reverse osmosis.

I know at some point we’re going to find that reverse osmosis is devastating from a microplastics perspective. I’m basing this on nothing except the process is essentially forcing water at very high pressure through plastic membranes.

> microplastics

On grand scheme of pollution, microplastics is basically a fad.

We haven't solved 10 different things that kill us every day. And haven't even started solving 10 another things that is also killing us. After that we can start worry about microplastics.

99+ missed calls from millimeter wave bored geothermal

That's many years from even attempting to make power. They've done what, a couple inches wide hole to 100 feet?

First power hit the grid a few weeks ago

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fervo-cape-station-geothermal

It's still small scale but it's up and running and the site has plenty more capacity that can be added on bit by bit.

That has nothing to do with millimeter wave boring.

My country is geothermal wonder and basically only does 10% of our power via geothermal.

We have water, decent legal system, safety, talent, infinite power. Could be printing money with datacenter buildouts. Instead in upcoming election good portion of promises is anti-AI.

Thought you lived in NZ, not IS (wonderest) or CA, US? (both with the same problem - ahead of NZ)

Or as Bill Mckibben observed "for 10's of thousands of years, humanity has burned things to produce energy. The period of fire is coming to an end".

I think fire is still involved in the creation of solar energy though... Just not man-made fire.

That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.

Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.

When I really think about that it’s incredible that such a phenomenon is actually very common in the universe.

Touché. You are technically correct... (the best kind)

I take respite that colloquially what I said is still valid.

That's why I hope Helion Fusion does well. The system they are developing sends power to a device that captures power directly no boiling water.

wasn't there recently papers claiming helion fusion's design is literally incapable of producing energy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB4hB9QJX8

Yes. They argue Helion screwed up computing the rate of energy flow from fast ions to cool electrons. I have not seen a good rejoinder from Helion, which is a very bad sign.

Given this, and given the apparent failure of Zap's scheme to scale, I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.

> I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.

if by "now" you mean schedules proposed by all those fusion startups, then you should've known better the moment they became "viral" in a very fake way (same for quantum computers)

for a more serious timeline, ITER is coming online early 30s, add a decade to get to more-than-even tokamak and another decade for something "commercial"

and by then it will be just in time to support operations on the Moon, I guess

> if by "now" you mean schedules proposed by all those fusion startups

No, I mean the impossible economics of their schemes. For example, the ARC reactor is about 40x the volume and mass of a fission reactor of the same thermal power output. It cannot possibly be competitive as a source of heat with a fission reactor. And fission is not competitive with renewables. So fusion is doubly cursed economically.

Except for solar collection that boils water to generate power.

China just finished building some but it's a dead end technology.

It first lost to PV for daylight generation, then it fell back on storing the heat for use generating after sunset but cheap batteries made that obsolete too.

It's not even competitive to use mirrors to get sunlight to heat water. PV is cheaper for that.

“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”

Magical runes.

There could still be a great future in that from stored thermal energy from renewables. I harp on this a lot here; the estimated cost for 600 C heat available with 100% capacity factor is $3-5/GJ, just from resistive PV heat.

Not going to happen.