Software eats the world and delivers itself as the message. It’s eating the world in new and fantastic ways. HelionEnergy.com uses software to control processes for magnetic field configuration(MFC). Scientists theorized MFC for nuclear fusion power generation in the 1950s. The technology of the time didn’t allow for such fine grained control.
ZapEnergy.com uses software for diagnostics through spectroscopy and to control the high frequency pulses zapping nuclei together into fusion.
Nuclear reaction destroys a small bit of matter to produce the energy. The software “eats” a small bit of matter with every nuclear reaction.
Meanwhile datacenters demand more and more power. Google has gotten themselves off CO2 dependency, with their zero carbon datacenters. Amazon, Alibaba, Azure and other cloud providers are following suite.
Helion and Zap are trying to do fusion. Fusion has had the unfortunate tagline of 30 years away for the last 60 years. Lawrence Livermore National Labs recently got fusion to the break-even point. Helion and Zap claim they can do it later this year of 2024, and can commercialize it in the following few years.
Meanwhile NuScalePower.com started delivering modular small modular fission reactors years ago. Our descendants will unfortunately have to deal with nuclear waste from fission reactors for centuries.
Renewables, solar panels, wind, tidal, and geothermal, have limits on how much land they occupy. The presences of an endangered species blocked the development of one solar project.
Next week I’ll discuss a different renewable that does not occupy land.