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In this case, it would mean parking wind mills? Not sure how easy it is to do when they are running full tilt in gale winds but I assume it is a case of feathering the props and applying the break?
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Oct 19, 2022 09:33
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Electric Wrigglies posted:applying the break Perfect typo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
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Oct 19, 2022 17:02
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Looks like we're back to cooking with  That's +5GW since I last checked, plus wind is chugging along. At least in France and Netherlands (82% of installed capacity  if the "estimated" data can be trusted). Still about 10-12GW below this time last year so hopefully the can bring the remaining reactors back online soon.
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Oct 24, 2022 10:18
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A bit of a little update for something that most people won't find interesting. A few years ago I talked about how a battery might help our islanded site generation by allowing for much closer to the wire generation (use less "n" engines instead of "n+1") and still have no load shedding. I moved onto more other roles and covid happened and a few other things. In the meantime, at the site I left, we are now looking (as in presenting to the company board the request for ~US$65M capital funds) at installing a 50 MW solar farm and 25 MW battery into the place I was thinking an 8 MW would get us by (the facility consumes about 18MW (of currently HFO generated power) continuously right now but will double in the next couple of years. I am thinking if we place the batteries at the extremities of the reticulation (some overhead lines runs 40 km away), we can even avoid back up gen sets or even interruption for line trips. Haven't spoken to the battery gurus yet as to whether it is better to keep all the batteries close to each other. Struggling on another (grid connected) site to install solar as the local grid power provider is government owned and we started the project by getting a quote from an IPP which looked good but on them trying to get a permit, was told the only organization that can sell power in the country is the government grid so that idea fell over. We will continue to pay big costs for mostly HFO generated grid (unreliable) power there.
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Oct 26, 2022 08:17
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Struggling on another (grid connected) site to install solar as the local grid power provider is government owned and we started the project by getting a quote from an IPP which looked good but on them trying to get a permit, was told the only organization that can sell power in the country is the government grid so that idea fell over. We will continue to pay big costs for mostly HFO generated grid (unreliable) power there. It might be worth doing a hybrid off-grid setup with no feed-in to the grid just to help with costs and reliability?
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Oct 26, 2022 22:20
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So Lockheed Martin has a patent on a compact fusion reactor from 2018. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180047462A1/en It contains statements such as, "Fusion reactor 110 generates a large amount of heat from the nuclear fusion process that may be converted into various forms of power. For example, the heat generated by fusion reactor 110 may be utilized to produce steam for driving a turbine and an electrical generator, thereby producing electricity. As another example, as discussed further below in reference to FIG. 2, the heat generated by fusion reactor 110 may be utilized directly by a turbine of a turbofan or fanjet engine of an aircraft instead of a combustor." I know that fusion is a perpetual future tech, but what am I to make of this. Just the barest Googling showed the company announced a major breakthrough in '14 and then received this patent in '18. Are my biggest fears coming true, that the American military-industrial complex is proving itself actually necessary?
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Oct 27, 2022 22:36
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Ionicpsycho posted:So Lockheed Martin has a patent on a compact fusion reactor from 2018. Patents don't have to work, do they? Until one is built it's a bunch of fairy dust. Heck Yes! Loam! fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Oct 27, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 22:38
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Patents have to be capable of working(ish) to remain valid; what you don’t have to do is *prove* they work to obtain one, the USPTO pretty much takes you at your word. An article from a few years ago sums up one aspect of this problem: quote:In most contexts, making up data is forbidden — considered fraudulent or even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments to be entirely fictional. These so-called “prophetic examples” are not only explicitly permitted by both the Patent and Trademark Office and federal courts, but are considered almost equivalent to factual data in patent doctrine. Though prophetic examples are thought to be common, there are no studies of these experiments, no explanation for why fictional data are allowed in patents, and no evaluation of the practice.
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Oct 27, 2022 22:51
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There's a wiki entry on their prototypes, it doesn't seem to be a mystery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion_Reactor
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Oct 27, 2022 22:52
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Ionicpsycho posted:So Lockheed Martin has a patent on a compact fusion reactor from 2018. There's this startup called Commonwealth Fusion Systems that I'm relatively (for fusion) bullish on. They were started by some pretty levelheaded plasma physics/fusion people, and don't have the baggage of Lockheed. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25634090-100-can-a-slew-of-nuclear-fusion-start-ups-deliver-unlimited-clean-energy/
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Oct 28, 2022 00:24
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Isn't one of the big hurdles with getting fusion off the ground dealing with the crazy amounts of neutron flux generated by D-T fusion, something like a hundred times that observed in fission reactors? Seems like it would make performing maintenance on the (now highly irradiated) reactor vessel an absolute nightmare.
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Oct 28, 2022 02:13
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Ionicpsycho posted:So Lockheed Martin has a patent on a compact fusion reactor from 2018. The whole point of modern patents is to be so generic in your claims and description that (a) you can claim infringement over the most things possible and (b) skilled practitioners of the art cannot tell just what it is your patent actually does, while not being so generic that some underpaid overworked patent clerk rejects your patent. It means nothing. It's just a patent.
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Oct 28, 2022 02:19
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Wibla posted:It might be worth doing a hybrid off-grid setup with no feed-in to the grid just to help with costs and reliability? Yeah, I agree but now that the government owned corp has cottoned onto the plan, they are putting in roadblocks for any solar. Industrial scale non-government users pay way over the odds for power (0.251 USD/kwhr) in the country and any reduction in industrial use reduces the amount of revenue available to cross subsidize. I notice in another thread that it's going to be new nuclear plants for Poland. One US designed and likely the other one Korean. Poland has reasonable connections to Scandinavian hydro?
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Nov 3, 2022 12:39
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I notice in another thread that it's going to be new nuclear plants for Poland. One US designed and likely the other one Korean. Poland has reasonable connections to Scandinavian hydro?
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Nov 3, 2022 13:01
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Bloody Pom posted:Isn't one of the big hurdles with getting fusion off the ground dealing with the crazy amounts of neutron flux generated by D-T fusion, something like a hundred times that observed in fission reactors? Seems like it would make performing maintenance on the (now highly irradiated) reactor vessel an absolute nightmare. Each fission process releases a fast neutron that cannot be confined like the hot bulk plasma. These are most certainly capable of activating the reactor walls. The current favoured research is that you would blanket the inner walls of the reactor with Lithium which would capture the neutron and break down into Helium and Tritium, creating a continuous supply of the latter for further reactions. However, this still means that fusion power plants would generate radioactive waste. Although the decay time to safe levels is on the order of hundreds of years rather than hundreds of thousands for fission plant.
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Nov 4, 2022 09:23
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Bloody Pom posted:Isn't one of the big hurdles with getting fusion off the ground dealing with the crazy amounts of neutron flux generated by D-T fusion, something like a hundred times that observed in fission reactors? Seems like it would make performing maintenance on the (now highly irradiated) reactor vessel an absolute nightmare. That's not really the bottleneck yet. As mentioned earlier, lithium plating should theoretically work and have advantageous side effects for breeding more input material, since tritium just doesn't naturally exist (and ceases to exists after 12 years). Even if the lithium plan doesn't work out, there are materials like lead which can deal with fast neutrons quite well. The problem there is more the transformation of these fast neutrons to usable heat energy in order to boil water. Also, you know keeping the plasma stable in the first place. Ideally without spending 10 times the amount on magnetic confinement. ITER is a weird project. It takes an incredibly long time to built it, because it's absolutely massive since in theory the bigger those reactors are, the better they work. On the other hand, much of the hardware (like perhaps most importantly the giant magnets) is already obsolete tech. It kind of feels like you'd decide to build a super powered computer array with a million machines in 2005 and spent the next decade collecting funding to purchase those machines with those exact 2005 specifications. That being said, I genuinely believe that there is significant progress happening in the field. It's just so incredibly slow because plasma science is so much harder than taking some radioactive materials, putting them into water and watch it boil away. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Nov 4, 2022 |
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Nov 4, 2022 19:17
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I hear computational plasma scientists are a hot hire right now.
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Nov 4, 2022 19:48
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in a well actually posted:I hear computational plasma scientists are a hot hire right now.
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Nov 4, 2022 20:36
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cat botherer posted:I'd hope they're well-compensated, because they're charged with a very difficult job. Okay, this kind of polarizing belief is just repellent.
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Nov 4, 2022 20:51
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Kalman posted:Okay, this kind of polarizing belief is just repellent. Yeah, they should be paid a wage which is barely above the costs of living with a constant threat of termination over their head, to motivate them to continue to do extraordinary good work, or else... It's The American Way!
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Nov 4, 2022 21:02
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cant cook creole bream posted:since tritium just doesn't naturally exist (and ceases to exists after 12 years) Just wanted to point out to other readers that 12 years is the half-life of tritium; for any given sample, you'll have roughly half of it remaining after that time. The decay process is always happening, so every day you lose a little bit of fuel, and you're losing more fuel while the sample is fresh than when the sample is older (1/2^n)
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Nov 4, 2022 21:07
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cant cook creole bream posted:Yeah, they should be paid a wage which is barely above the costs of living with a constant threat of termination over their head, to motivate them to continue to do extraordinary good work, or else... 
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Nov 4, 2022 21:11
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QuarkJets posted:Just wanted to point out to other readers that 12 years is the half-life of tritium; for any given sample, you'll have roughly half of it remaining after that time. The decay process is always happening, so every day you lose a little bit of fuel, and you're losing more fuel while the sample is fresh than when the sample is older (1/2^n) Sorry, thanks for specifying my reductive statement. Mathematically, tritium would never truly disappear and only half it's amount ad infinitum. Or more logically, until literally one particle is left. Of course, the same applies for fission waste with a half-life of thousands of years...
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Nov 4, 2022 21:16
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Yes the problem with "easy" D-T fusion is that most of the energy is released in the neutrons. But water is a great way to suck the thermal energy out of fast neutrons. Water is also a great way to store and transport heat. Even if you have to bury the entire inner wall of a reactor vessel every 5 years thats still a huge reduction in high level waste compared to fission, which itself produces little enough high level waste that it isn't a problem. There is also the future possibly of Aneutronic B-p fusion, which is well beyond the current goals of plasma research but is a physical possibility, but only 10x more difficult. In the meantime we have math for many different blends of He3/Li/D fuels that at least minimize neutron production. In fission 2.4% of the thermal energy starts as neutrons. Its not an unachievable feat of materials science to account for them.
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Nov 5, 2022 04:51
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cant cook creole bream posted:Yeah, they should be paid a wage which is barely above the costs of living with a constant threat of termination over their head, to motivate them to continue to do extraordinary good work, or else... … it was a magnetic confinement joke, my friend.
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Nov 5, 2022 05:38
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M_Gargantua posted:Yes the problem with "easy" D-T fusion is that most of the energy is released in the neutrons. But water is a great way to suck the thermal energy out of fast neutrons. Water is also a great way to store and transport heat. Even if you have to bury the entire inner wall of a reactor vessel every 5 years thats still a huge reduction in high level waste compared to fission, which itself produces little enough high level waste that it isn't a problem. I also have to imagine if the radioactivity is a problem maybe there's a way to make a use of it once we get there.
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Nov 5, 2022 16:54
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Have the french been able to restart any reactors yet?
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Nov 9, 2022 14:00
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Apparently at least some, they're now up to ~30GW from ~24 a few months ago: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source (I just realized its Wednesday vs Friday but that doesn't make a differene.
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Nov 9, 2022 14:36
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Bedshaped posted:
You cannot blanket the inner wall with lithium; lithium is completely mechanically incapable of acting as a plasma-facing component; it's a soft metal that melts at only slightly above the boiling point of water; the radiant energy alone coming off the plasma would vaporize your lithium blanket, sputter it all off into the plasma, and shut down the reaction. The idea is that you surround the reactor vessel itself, which is made out of something else entirely(*), with lithium, which absorbs neutrons and heat and melts and you circulate it as your coolant. (*) - we have no real idea what because nothing we know of can withstand this sort of neutron bombardment, which is so intense we don't even have a good materials testing regime for it yet. M_Gargantua posted:Yes the problem with "easy" D-T fusion is that most of the energy is released in the neutrons. But water is a great way to suck the thermal energy out of fast neutrons. Water is also a great way to store and transport heat. Even if you have to bury the entire inner wall of a reactor vessel every 5 years Then you can't have commercial fusion power. quote:thats still a huge reduction in high level waste compared to fission, which itself produces little enough high level waste that it isn't a problem. It is most certainly a problem. It's not a technical problem or an engineering problem but it is absolutely a political problem. Assumptions that the same NIMBYs who are such an obstacle in the path of fission build-out will accept the high-level waste produced by fusion are just that: assumptions. quote:Its not an unachievable feat of materials science to account for them. That is also an assumption. Not only are there orders of magnitude fewer neutrons released per power generated in a fission plant than in the fusion plant, D:T fusion neutrons are far more energetic than those released by a fission fuel atom (14.1 MeV as compared to 2-3). Saying that a solution exists is handwaving: materials problems are frequently intractable and do not go away just because you throw more money at them. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 15:52
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Phanatic posted:You cannot blanket the inner wall with lithium; lithium is completely mechanically incapable of acting as a plasma-facing component; it's a soft metal that melts at only slightly above the boiling point of water; the radiant energy alone coming off the plasma would vaporize your lithium blanket, sputter it all off into the plasma, and shut down the reaction. The idea is that you surround the reactor vessel itself, which is made out of something else entirely(*), with lithium, which absorbs neutrons and heat and melts and you circulate it as your coolant.
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Nov 9, 2022 16:09
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mobby_6kl posted:Apparently at least some, they're now up to ~30GW from ~24 a few months ago: EDF publishes detailed informations about reactor outages there: https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group...-edf-t-00085800
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Nov 9, 2022 17:32
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Infinite Karma posted:That's a great point actually. Isn't lithium also diamagnetic? Would that mean you could magnetically bottle liquid/gaseous/ionized lithium to the inside of the reactor wall and keep it in place as a neutron absorber? You're talking about having such fine control over the magnetic fields within an operating fusion reactor that not only are you keeping the plasma confined and dense enough to fuse, but also using additional magnetic fields to keep a layer of lithium confined to a layer just inside the reactor vessel? Moreover, this layer of lithium will be thick and dense enough to effectively shield the reactor vessel from neutron damage? I just want to be clear what you're talking about here: You're basically talking about not only building a function nuclear fusion reactor in which fusion reactions take place inside a magnetically confined plasma, but you are also talking about effectively building the reactor vessel itself out of fluid lithium which is also magnetically confined, even though it is at best very weakly diamagnetic.
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Nov 9, 2022 17:57
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Phanatic posted:You cannot blanket the inner wall with lithium; lithium is completely mechanically incapable of acting as a plasma-facing component; it's a soft metal that melts at only slightly above the boiling point of water; the radiant energy alone coming off the plasma would vaporize your lithium blanket, sputter it all off into the plasma, and shut down the reaction. The idea is that you surround the reactor vessel itself, which is made out of something else entirely(*), with lithium, which absorbs neutrons and heat and melts and you circulate it as your coolant. The lithium would be fixed in something else. This is one of the aims of ITER to test the different blanket candidates; lithium enriched ceramics, alloys of lithium-metal, pebble bed etc. https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/2572
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Nov 9, 2022 18:05
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Molten lithium also presents some more quotidian engineering problems, like making sure it never contacts air. Or water.
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Nov 10, 2022 00:00
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I reckon if fusion becomes feasible it will follow a similar trajectory to photo-voltaics. Uneconomical niche uses (space stations, interplanetary travel, military?) and then after decades of research there will be a materials and/or manufacturing breakthrough that makes it suddenly widespread. By that stage we will have either already solved wide scale low-carbon energy generation, or society will have collapsed.
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Nov 10, 2022 06:58
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Capt.Whorebags posted:I reckon if fusion becomes feasible it will follow a similar trajectory to photo-voltaics. Uneconomical niche uses (space stations, interplanetary travel, military?) and then after decades of research there will be a materials and/or manufacturing breakthrough that makes it suddenly widespread. I feel like your scale is opposite. If fusion ever becomes viable in any scenario, it will start as absolutely fuckoff massive structures which would be impossible to meet your stated use cases. Material/manufacturing/whatever, breakthroughs would be what allows size to come down, opening up more uses.
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Nov 10, 2022 16:38
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Doom Rooster posted:I feel like your scale is opposite. If fusion ever becomes viable in any scenario, it will start as absolutely fuckoff massive structures which would be impossible to meet your stated use cases. Most recent fusion test designs have been getting smaller though.
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Nov 10, 2022 17:26
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Raenir Salazar posted:Most recent fusion test designs have been getting smaller though.
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Nov 10, 2022 17:31
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Exactly, basically there's no reason to assume a first gen "practical" fusion reactor facility be any larger than an existing nuclear facility accounting for research and development add ons.
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Nov 11, 2022 00:09
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Raenir Salazar posted:Exactly, basically there's no reason to assume a first gen "practical" fusion reactor facility be any larger than an existing nuclear facility accounting for research and development add ons. I would consider most existing nuclear facilities to be massive fuckoff structures not exactly suitable for shipping to/building in space for use attached to a space station or rocket for interplanetary travel. If the definition of "existing nuclear facilities" you are using is something like a nuclear submarine reactor, then fine, I will happily  for the first practical fusion reactor being nowhere near that small.
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Nov 11, 2022 00:54
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