Related papers: Why carbon dioxide makes stellarators so important
Much emotion is expended on the dangers of carbon dioxide, but solutions require reason and recognition of facts: (1) The cost of developing options is approximately a thousand times less than their deployment. (2) Timescales involve two…
Stellarator plasmas are externally controlled to a degree unparalleled by any other fusion concept, magnetic or inertial. This control is largely through the magnetic fields produced by external coils. The development of fusion energy could…
Future accelerators and experiments for energy-frontier particle physics will be built and operated during a period in which society must also address the climate change emergency by significantly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. The…
There are many published estimates of the social cost of carbon. Some are clear outliers, the result of poorly constrained models. Percentile winsorizing is an option, but I here propose conceptual winsorizing: The social cost of carbon is…
The stellar astronomy has always been considered the fundamental source of knowledge about the basic building blocks of the universe - the stars. It has proved correctness of many physical theories - like e.g. the idea of nuclear fusion in…
Fusion energy, the process that uses the same reaction that powers the sun and the stars, offers the promise of virtually unlimited, carbon-free energy and is approaching reality. Recently, there's been a dramatic global increase in the…
Stellarators are a prospective class of fusion-based power plants that confine a hot plasma with three-dimensional magnetic fields. Typically framed as a PDE-constrained optimization problem, stellarator design is a time-consuming process…
The demand for computing is continuing to grow exponentially. This growth will translate to exponential growth in computing's energy consumption unless improvements in its energy-efficiency can outpace increases in its demand. Yet, after…
The social cost of carbon is the damage avoided by slightly reducing carbon dioxide emissions. It is a measure of the desired intensity of climate policy. The social cost of carbon is highly uncertain because of the long and complex…
Fusion energy is often regarded as a long-term solution to the world's energy needs. However, even after solving the critical research challenges, engineering and materials science will still impose significant constraints on the…
Unless there is immediate, unprecedented, reduction in global demand for carbon-intensive energy and products, then capture and permanent storage of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually will be needed before mid-century to…
The process of carbon burning is vital to understanding late stage stellar evolution of massive stars and the conditions of certain supernovae. Carbon burning is a complex problem, involving quantum tunnelling and nuclear molecular states.…
Carbon dioxide is a chemically active molecule that plays a vital role in Earth's ecosphere. CO$_2$ affects the acidity of seawater and has multiple negative effects on marine organisms. It is also a fundamental component of the…
Although dust is widely found in astrophysics, forming dust is surprisingly difficult. The proper combination of low temperature (<2000 K) and high density is mainly found in the winds of late-type giant and supergiant stars which, as a…
The carbon footprint of astronomical research is an increasingly topical issue. From a comparison of existing literature, we infer an annual per capita carbon footprint of several tens of tonnes of CO$_2$ equivalents for an average person…
The current emissions from computing are almost 4% of the world total. This is already more than emissions from the airline industry and are projected to rise steeply over the next two decades. By 2040 emissions from computing alone will…
Gas expulsion or gas retention is a central issue in most of the models for multiple stellar populations and light element anti-correlations in globular clusters. The success of the residual matter expulsion or its retention within young…
The bulk of the carbon in our universe is produced in the triple-alpha process in helium-burning red giant stars. We calculated the change of the triple-alpha reaction rate in a microscopic 12-nucleon model of the C-12 nucleus and looked…
How stars are born from clouds of gas is a rich physics problem whose solution will inform our understanding of not just stars but also planets, galaxies, and the universe itself. Star formation is stupendously inefficient. Take the Milky…
The fossil-fuel induced contribution to further warming over the 21st century will be determined largely by integrated CO2 emissions over time rather than the precise timing of the emissions, with a relation of near-proportionality between…