this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Incorrect, if you aren't a bitch about it. Fuse that gasoline!
I was thinking the same thing. It's unfair compare chemical energy to nuclear energy. Coal still kind of sucks, but the hydrogen in the others could definitely be used in fusion...
It is perfectly fair in the context of "fuel", a resource used to produce energy. Whether energy is generated via chemical or nuclear reaction is irrelavent in this case.
Yup. If, for example, you're designing a deep space mission, where every gram counts, there's a conversation to be had about whether it's cost effective (and appropriate risk) to send nuclear reactors and fuel aboard those spacecraft.
Or using modern engineering, whether an aircraft carrier should be powered by nuclear fission or internal combustion of hydrocarbons.
Usually space craft have relatively light power needs so why bother with a whole-ass nuclear reactor when an RTG is smaller, lighter, and has no moving parts? They're a pretty common choice for space probes, for example.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/plutonium.png
We're actually running into shortages of Plutonium 238. Which is seriously compromising deep space missions.
Coal still has carbon in it. Carbon does have a lot of excess energy per nucleus. Just gotta turn it into iron.
That's true, but there is far more energy to gain by fusing hydrogen compared to carbon. I'm not sure how it compares to uranium though. I suspect it might be similar. (I mean, obviously in practice you wouldn't / couldn't actually get the energy from fusing carbon - but we can still compare hypothetically. ... also, I'm sure we could get a clear answer by looking it up; but this is one of those things where thinking about it is probably more interesting than knowing the answer.)
Carbon and uranium are pretty comparable. Look up binding energy per nucleon.
If we're counting future technology, my money are on iron man style reactor. Don't need to fuze shit, infinite energy.
Except the Ironman style reactor is pure science fiction, whereas hydrogen fusion is real, but still has issues of energy capture, which several groups are working on.
There are two promising avenues, one is a direct physical capture, as in fusion is initiated with huge pistons that are physically moved by the fusion explosion,
And the other cool one is direct magnetic coupling.
I expect both to take off long before the tokamak style does.
But fission power is already here, and much easier to set up. Molten Salt Thorium is also promising. And once some corrosion issues are solved, could power the earth at current levels for the next thousand years.
All while producing an isotope of actinium that produces only alpha radiation. Which is super useful in killing cancer cells.
Well, they suggested fuzing gazoline, not me.
Asterisk. A big one. There is no real life prototypes of energy-positive reactors yet. There are several promising pre-prototypes that are almost ready, just need to fix some engineering issues. And it would not be a problem if the whole field wasn't in this state since the sixtieth.
Fission. As in uranium and Thorium.
We've had energy positive fission since the 1950s.