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0 pointsXorNot11y ago0 comments

Fusion energy doesn't replace oil. It doesn't substantially reduce dependence on it - oil fired power plants are uncommon compared to the quantity of coal ones, and we have a lot of coal to go through (well, not so much I guess - Australia has 400 years worth, but that's what, 5-6 generations + blasting our country into an uninhabitable wasteland?)

Fusion energy replaces coal powerplants, and probably fuel bunkers on container ships/air craft carriers. No concept is small enough or dense enough to replace oil, although cheap fusion energy would make all sorts of crazy synthetic hydrocarbon schemes viable.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

ChuckMcM11y ago· 3 in thread

Actually it can replace oil. Making long chain hydrocarbons through a process like the Fischer-Tropsch one is fairly straight forward if you have the energy. You would still have a refinery but sitting on the ocean with your fusion power plant your refinery would never need to have an oil tanker offload, instead your fusion plant would be supplying the energy to pull CO2 out of the air, hydrogen and oxygen out of the water and converting them into what the base for what ever the refinery needed.

dredmorbius11y ago

A technology I've only recently learned of, though the concept dates back 50 years.

It was first pursued by Meyer Steinberg, a nuclear physicist working at Brookhaven National Labs. The US Navy's picked it up on the basis that they 1) have a great deal of nuclear experience and 2) consume large volumes of fossil fuel.

Check my recent post history for more on the topic, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665101

ChuckMcM11y ago

That is an excellent summary. One of the more interesting developments here has been the development of zeolites for CO processing that you run through a concentrated solar facility for heat. (Zeolites suck up CO2 while cold, you ferry them to the focal point of the CSP, they outgas the CO2 which is collected, and get returned to the pile below.)

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AnthonyMouse11y ago

We're also now at the point where there exist practical fully electric cars. They're currently too expensive for everyone to own one but that's not a physics problem and is likely to change.

phreeza11y ago

Yea I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense either, but then again the oil price isn't completely determined by rational arguments...

FWIW, here is the original comment I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459658

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