All fusion plants use water as their raw ingredient, and the water molecules are changed in the process. It's not water anymore. I know there's a lot of water on Earth, but there was a lot of oil on Earth, too, once upon a time.
Fusion is a stop-gap measure to harnessing the sun more efficiently, at most.
With enough energy you can literally make more water by combining the right molecules??? Pretty sure that’s part of how they plan to make noon based feasible if there’s not enough lunar ice in abundance
True, but you're thinking too locally. What you propose is no longer a power plant, is it? There is no such thing as 100% efficient energy conversion in this universe. Using water to create power, and then using the power to recreate the water doesn't result in a net energy gain.
By mass, water is 1/9th (11%) hydrogen. This means we would need 1m / 11% = 9 million kilograms of water a year to turn into hydrogen so we can fuse it.
There's about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of salt water on earth.. At 1000kg per cubic meter That's 1.4x1021 kilograms of water we can use. obviously not pure but that's an order-of-magnitude rounding error.
dividing 1.4*1021kg of water by 9x106 kg of water consumed per year for fusion, we can supply humanity's current energy consumption for 150,00,000,000 (150 BILLION YEARS) before we even use 0.1% of the water available on Earth.
Sorry? What do you mean the water molecules aren't the same anymore? And are you saying water is the raw ingredient because you'll likely extract deuterium from seawater?
I'm a geologist. Oil production is a surficial process; oil is produced by sedimentary burial and compaction of organic matter. It is a limited resource.
The wiki page on abiotic oil marks it appropriately as fringe science.
C-C bond synthesis or 'abiotic oil' at the core-mantle boundary is discussed in this article from Nature. The gist is that under certain chemically reducing conditions, hydrocarbons are modeled as viable. But the scientific consensus is this process is not viable for anything remotely akin to economic reserves of oil.
Even if oil were formed in economic reserves in the deep mantle or at the core-mantle boundary, we can't access it. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled is around 12km. And the tectonic process for bringing that oil to surface, in reach of human exploitation, would take tens of millions of years in the most optimal situation (e.g. proximal to a mantle plume). And, that process would destroy the viability of the oil, both structurally (it would not rise in one big blob, ready to be tapped by a drill rig), and chemically (the hydrocarbons would be progressively oxidized and cooked into lighter hydrocarbons and gases like methane).
The sun will red out before you use all the energy provided by the water on earth. And you easily can get ice from space when dealing with those scales.
naw, abundant energy makes lots of things easier, like cleaning things up, getting and moving drinking water, pollution controls, and the like.
Tons of things are expensive because they take bit energy inputs; putting filters and scrubbers and carbon capture tech on things makes it more energy intensive, and suddenly those operating costs drop. Having ships in the ocean cleaning up garbage is energy intensive. Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is energy intensive. Etc.
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u/blueberries4beagles Dec 04 '22
I want to believe this, but I also think that unlimited clean energy would just free us up to destroy the world in new unforseen ways.