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YLLS and GWS are that-a-way --->
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Oct 20, 2018 14:57
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Yeah, seriously, go talk about mcdonalds somewhere else On topic, I was really mad on a trip to Portugal that, despite having some of the highest costs of electricity and gas in the EU, no one had solar panels anywhere despite the constant sun and not a single cloud for the week of October that i was there
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Oct 20, 2018 15:06
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:How are those not processed foods? Processed foods aren't a real thing. It's just straight up not a thing that exists. Unless you're bashing your face directly into random objects and gnawing at them, every single thing you have ever eaten was processed in some way in order that you could eat it. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like the whole problem with processed food is that if we wanted to eat sugar or fat we had to begrudgingly accept eating a bunch of vitamins and minerals too but we increasingly figured out the cheat code that we can just mash things up and just eat the sugars and fats straight and throw away the other stuff. See this is why the processed food concept is fake. Humans figured out how to make food taste good before homo sapiens existed in all likelihood, certainly it happened before agriculture. Y'all act like flavor didn't exist until McDonald's hired an evil wizard in 1956.
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Oct 20, 2018 17:24
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qkkl posted:If you thought the Haber Process led to unprecedented population growth, just wait until we've figured out how to convert energy directly into food. Despite what playing Civilization taught us all, population growth isn't caused by increasing food production. OtherworldlyInvader fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Oct 20, 2018 |
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Oct 20, 2018 18:02
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:Despite what playing Civilization taught us all, population growth isn't caused by increasing food production. Increased food production enables additional population growth. Global population has risen by 5 billion since the Green Revolution; that growth would not have been possible without increased food production. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Oct 20, 2018 |
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Oct 20, 2018 18:12
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Phanatic posted:Increased food production enables additional population growth. Global population has risen by 5 billion since the Green Revolution; that growth would not have been possible without increased food production. Continued increases in food production will not result in increased population growth. By historical standards food is incredibly abundant and affordable in developed countries, yet birth rates in those countries have plummeted. The most effective recipe for halting population growth is something like stable access to food, women being educated & part of the professional work force, access to birth control, and lowering infant mortality rates.
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Oct 20, 2018 18:52
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Somaen posted:On topic, I was really mad on a trip to Portugal that, despite having some of the highest costs of electricity and gas in the EU, no one had solar panels anywhere despite the constant sun and not a single cloud for the week of October that i was there I saw the same thing in Israel when I was visiting recently. Everybody has solar water heaters with a tank on the roof, yet there is no solar power anywhere. Neither rooftop, commercial roof space, or generation instillations. OtherworldlyInvader posted:The most effective recipe for halting population growth is something like stable access to food, women being educated & part of the professional work force, access to birth control, and lowering infant mortality rates. All of that ties to economic opportunity. If women aren't dependent on a 'bread winner' they might not choose to stay at home having/raising kids. The more equality women have in opportunity and earning power, the less likely they are to have kids. We need to change how society expects kids to be raised and how it contributes to raising kids to accommodate this, but the current response is to do everything to try to push women back into an 'economically subservient' role.
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Oct 20, 2018 19:52
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QuarkJets posted:Often agricultural advancements are energy efficiency in an even more direct sense, since it takes energy to plant, tend to, and harvest crops Controversially, food is also a form of solar energy storage. Solar energy --> corn --> ethanol --> cars primarily.
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Oct 22, 2018 19:38
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Every source of energy that isn't nuclear or geothermal is a roundabout way of harvesting solar. Fossil fuels, modern biofuels, wind, even most hydro, the energy in the system all came from the sun originally.
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Oct 22, 2018 19:49
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Crazycryodude posted:Every source of energy that isn't nuclear or geothermal is a roundabout way of harvesting solar. Fossil fuels, modern biofuels, wind, even most hydro, the energy in the system all came from the sun originally. And if you define solar power as converting energy from stars rather than just the sun, even nuclear and geothermal are in scope.
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Oct 22, 2018 19:54
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fishmech posted:It's extremely easy to overeat while still eating vegetables. Just look at the entire western world, they're all getting fat. Yes, but it is extremely difficult to overeat while ONLY eating vegetables.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:10
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:And if you define solar power as converting energy from stars rather than just the sun, even nuclear and geothermal are in scope. Hydrogen fusion will free us from this tyranny
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Oct 22, 2018 22:25
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nm.
Family Values fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Oct 22, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 22:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Hydrogen fusion will free us from this tyranny 20 years from practical since 1979
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Oct 22, 2018 22:49
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VideoGameVet posted:20 years from practical since 1979 Hit break even in 2014 so at some point people will need to drop that dumb joke, but the joke I was making was that fusion is the first energy source not from any star since hydrogen is at least potentially primordial to the universe and not nessisarly generated in stars.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:06
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VideoGameVet posted:20 years from practical since 1979 literally progressing faster than computer chips, just with a very ambitious goal
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Oct 22, 2018 23:08
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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suck my woke dick posted:literally progressing faster than computer chips, just with a very ambitious goal It's very important to people that fusion is fake for some reason.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:12
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I think a lot of people are just sick of "well in 20 years we'll totally have cheap practical fusion" used as an excuse to not invest in other things or worry about future energy usage.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:25
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Baronjutter posted:I think a lot of people are just sick of "well in 20 years we'll totally have cheap practical fusion" As the article points out the america's yearly spending on fusion research is less than america's yearly budget for dog halloween costumes, http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/halloween_pet_costumes_and_fusion Fusion is basically 20 years from whatever point someone decides 'hey, we should have fusion, but for real this time" and the actual projects that get any funding always make rapid progress. NIF got to get some money on the back of "maybe this research will help nuclear weapons" military funding and it went from construction completing in 2009 to the first contained break even fusion 5 years later.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:42
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suck my woke dick posted:literally progressing faster than computer chips, just with a very ambitious goal Fusion won’t be a part of transitioning our economy away from emitting greenhouse gases. We’re 20+ years away from commercially viable designs at best, and that’s hugely optimistic. That means again, ambitiously we’re building plants 30+ years from now. That’s too late to have a meaningful impact on the transition. Also it seems increasingly unlikely that capital costs would be lower than fission in the first few generations.
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Oct 23, 2018 00:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Hit break even in 2014 so at some point people will need to drop that dumb joke, but the joke I was making was that fusion is the first energy source not from any star since hydrogen is at least potentially primordial to the universe and not nessisarly generated in stars. The "break even" point you are referring to is the amount of power generated versus the amount absorbed by the target. They reached a break even where the amount released was greater than that absorbed; but this isn't the break even point most would think since it still required more energy input than it outputted for the entire system. And not by a trivial amount, either, by a lot. It released 14kJ and took 1.8MJ to do so (only a tiny fraction of this energy went to the target; about 10kJ, hence the 'break even' claim); so it required almost 130x more energy than it released. So yeah, "20 years away" is still a valid joke. And lol if you actually think the NIF cares one iota about commercial fusion.
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Oct 23, 2018 00:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Fusion is basically 20 years from whatever point someone decides 'hey, we should have fusion, but for real this time" and the actual projects that get any funding always make rapid progress.  quote:NIF got to get some money on the back of "maybe this research will help nuclear weapons" military funding and it went from construction completing in 2009 to the first contained break even fusion 5 years later.  For at least the third time in this thread, no. NIF was nowhere near close to break-even. Phanatic posted:First, if you read the article you'll see that this "breakeven" isn't really breakeven, it's just breakeven if you only consider the energy absorbed by the fuel. Which is only the tinest fraction of the actual input energy. First they have to turn electricity into 3 megajoules of infrared laser beam, which they then throw away half of converting it into 1.5 megajoules of ultraviolet laser beam, which they then throw away some of converting it into x-rays at the hohlraum, and about 15% of those x-rays actually impact the target. These are flashlamp-pumped lasers, which are very inefficient; the *input energy is 422 megajoules.* Raldikuk posted:And not by a trivial amount, either, by a lot. It released 14kJ and took 1.8MJ to do so It's way, way less efficient than that. See above. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 01:02
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Baronjutter posted:I think a lot of people are just sick of "well in 20 years we'll totally have cheap practical fusion" used as an excuse to not invest in other things or worry about future energy usage. This. And the perfect analogy is how the automobile industry used the promise of fuel-cell cars to kill California's electric car push in the 1990's. Oh yes, we have some fuel cell cars now. Just do the math on the efficiency of the entire cycle.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:07
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Are people really thinking they would put doc octopus in charge of the machines or something? There isn't an experimenter on earth that would design a thing like that to do anything but exactly cross the line of breakeven. Pointing out that it was some small number isn't some trump card super slam. Of course they built it like that. Who on earth wouldn't build it like that? I bet if they had more money they would have made the number even smaller. Who would do a first break even test as literally anything but setting it up to make a meter go up to the exact point it crosses a line then stopping? It's not a comic book.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:16
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Are people really thinking they would put doc octopus in charge of the machines or something? There isn't an experimenter on earth that would design a thing like that to do anything but exactly cross the line of breakeven. Pointing out that it was some small number isn't some trump card super slam. Of course they built it like that. Who on earth wouldn't build it like that? I bet if they had more money they would have made the number even smaller. Who would do a first break even test as literally anything but setting it up to make a meter go up to the exact point it crosses a line then stopping? It's not a comic book. Do you have any information that would lead a reasonable person to believe that they designed it to meet this specific point on purpose, but are actually capable of increasing the efficiency by more than 1000x if they choose to?
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Oct 23, 2018 01:35
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lol not only is fusion energy underfunded (you see, increasing research funding by X will increase technological progress by X, just like in Roller Coaster Tycoon), but also the scientists aren’t trying hard enough
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Oct 23, 2018 01:37
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Are people really thinking they would put doc octopus in charge of the machines or something? There isn't an experimenter on earth that would design a thing like that to do anything but exactly cross the line of breakeven. Pointing out that it was some small number isn't some trump card super slam. Of course they built it like that. Who on earth wouldn't build it like that? I bet if they had more money they would have made the number even smaller. Who would do a first break even test as literally anything but setting it up to make a meter go up to the exact point it crosses a line then stopping? It's not a comic book. I am having trouble parsing this so correct me if I am wrong, but it seems your takeaway was that by me pointing out 14kJ were released from 1.8MJ (which as Phantic points out is actually closer to 422MJ) is that "14kJ is a small number"? Because it is fine that it "starts small enough" that on the order of kJ are released. The problem is that it took on the order of MJ (and almost TJ!) to have a release on the order of kJ. This itself is fine as far as experiments go; progress needs to be made and small steps need to be taken. What isn't fine is portraying that as the "breakeven" point. However, clearly, inputting 422MJ (or even the 1.8MJ that I incorrectly cited earlier) and having 14kJ released is NOT breakeven and nowhere close to it.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:49
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The cost curves for wind, solar, and batteries are so good, fusion won't play a very big role in electrical generation, even if it arrived tomorrow. Renewables are just too cheap. That said, in solidarity with the fusion fans, here's (I believe) one of the two best 1 hour long videos on the topic of fusion that's been made in the last decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk TL;DW: Output scales faster with magnetic field stength than size, so how about we take completely standard small tokamak designs and just use these not-even-that-new-anymore superconducting materials to really ramp up field strength? And it looks like they've acquired the necessary research funding: http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309
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Oct 23, 2018 01:58
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Are people really thinking they would put doc octopus in charge of the machines or something? There isn't an experimenter on earth that would design a thing like that to do anything but exactly cross the line of breakeven. The didn't exactly cross the line of breakeven. They didn't come close to breakeven. They got 14 kilojoules of fusion energy out of 422 megajoules of input energy. That's not Q = 1, that's Q = .00003. What about this do you not understand? crazypenguin posted:And it looks like they've acquired the necessary research funding: http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309 Great, now all they need to do is solve the fundamental materials problems and find some unobtanium that can withstand more than a hundred neutron displacements per atom, plus two orders of magnitude more dpa via atomic mixing, all while withstanding a thermal flux of 10 megawatts/square meter and not sputtering off into the plasma while maintaining mechanical integrity for the design lifetime of a power plant. 
Phanatic fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 02:03
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Phanatic posted:The didn't exactly cross the line of breakeven. They didn't come close to breakeven. They got 14 kilojoules of fusion energy out of 422 megajoules of input energy. That's not Q = 1, that's Q = .00003. Like what sort of rock star supervillian would ever not do it that way? Like are you imagining elon musk running this and saying "hey, this hasn't ever worked even once but for our literal first experiment where the hydrogen releases more energy than it absorbs lets have it create 422 megajoules of energy, lets build the entire power plant as experiment number one on this"
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Oct 23, 2018 04:01
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like what sort of rock star supervillian would ever not do it that way? Like are you imagining elon musk running this and saying "hey, this hasn't ever worked even once but for our literal first experiment where the hydrogen releases more energy than it absorbs lets have it create 422 megajoules of energy, lets build the entire power plant as experiment number one on this" It outputting at least as was inputted would be required to call it breakeven. 14kJ << 422MJ (over 30,000x smaller in fact!) Thus they did not hit breakeven. If they could actually have it release more energy than was inputted they could also do it at smaller scales; it isn't like they can crank the efficiency up by 30,000x and just chose not to. Is there a reason you believe they can? Like you Kramered into here to try and point out how the people saying Fusion is 20 years out are wrong because they've already reached breakeven. That claim rests on isolating down to the target mass itself and ignoring everything else. The reason they didn't (and haven't still!) get 422MJ out isn't because they cleverly designed it to only work on a super small-scale of 10kJ but because they can't. It's simply not possible with what they're working with. Competing fusion designs are also significantly below breakeven and are likely to remain so. There is no design that can possibly go commercial within 20years. So the joke lives on. Edit: and that's 30,000x to make it breakeven. It would need to be 1.8 million times as efficient to be commercially viable.
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Oct 23, 2018 04:21
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Revive that Project Plowshare scheme from back in the Cold War to dig a really big cave, fill it with water, set off fusion bombs in it, and then use the ocean you just flashed into steam to generate power. There, commercial fusion done.
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Oct 23, 2018 04:41
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Raldikuk posted:Edit: and that's 30,000x to make it breakeven. It would need to be 1.8 million times as efficient to be commercially viable. I think you have a really fundamental misunderstanding on how things are tested and how experiments are run. When nasa tests a new fuel do you think nasa builds a whole spaceship and launches a whole mission to see how it works or do you think they start with burning a gram of it and then doing the math to figure out the thrust it'd provide?
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Oct 23, 2018 04:43
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crazypenguin posted:The cost curves for wind, solar, and batteries are so good, fusion won't play a very big role in electrical generation, even if it arrived tomorrow. Has there been any real development with batteries? Last time I looked into things pumped hydro storage, a technology more than a century old, was significantly better than any battery.
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Oct 23, 2018 05:47
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Smiling Demon posted:Has there been any real development with batteries? Last time I looked into things pumped hydro storage, a technology more than a century old, was significantly better than any battery. If there had been big shifts in batteries you'd see it in everything else that needs batteries. They remain cumbersome things for the purpose, just as pumped hydro won't work in landscapes that can't do regular hydro without massive expense.
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Oct 23, 2018 06:07
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fishmech posted:If there had been big shifts in batteries you'd see it in everything else that needs batteries. They remain cumbersome things for the purpose, just as pumped hydro won't work in landscapes that can't do regular hydro without massive expense. That doesn't strictly follow, although it would be a decent indicator. Many of the batteries we use daily are optimized for mobility. For grid level systems you can use things that would be otherwise prohibitive, eg liquid metal batteries that are both heavy and hot. But as I said, last I looked into it no significant progress had been made. Mostly it has been an endless stream of press releases promoting lithium ion batteries, which on account of their limited life span are probably a dead end technology for dealing with the grid.
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Oct 23, 2018 07:54
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Smiling Demon posted:That doesn't strictly follow, although it would be a decent indicator. Many of the batteries we use daily are optimized for mobility. For grid level systems you can use things that would be otherwise prohibitive, eg liquid metal batteries that are both heavy and hot. But as I said, last I looked into it no significant progress had been made. Depends on the purpose of the energy storage. Mass storage that can be bought online for long periods (hours) continuous Supply is probably better with pumped storage. Battery storage is excellent for the short term supply corrections to balance the supply to load.
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Oct 23, 2018 11:41
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Smiling Demon posted:Has there been any real development with batteries? Last time I looked into things pumped hydro storage, a technology more than a century old, was significantly better than any battery. ab-so-lutely  depending on how you do the math tesla is currently shipping car packs at about $175 - 200/kwh. they claim they'll hit $100/kwh by the end of this year. of course they will not, they never hit any date they claim, but realistically we're looking at $100/kwh by 2020. StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 19:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think you have a really fundamental misunderstanding on how things are tested and how experiments are run. I think you're trolling and know full well that your original claim was false, because it was pointed out to you in detail how inaccurate it was and now you're retreating to "of *course* they weren't even trying to hit breakeven."
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Oct 23, 2018 19:49
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Smiling Demon posted:Has there been any real development with batteries? Last time I looked into things pumped hydro storage, a technology more than a century old, was significantly better than any battery. In the automotive space, VW and others have a large investment in solid-state battery solutions (slated for cars in 2025), rechargeable zinc-air batteries may become a real thing, prices for LiOn are approaching $100/kw-h capacity years ahead of schedule. In the backup area, 'flow' batteries are becoming a thing. Oh and Elon's big powerwall in Australia appears to be working out nicely. https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia-reduced-grid-service-cost/
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Oct 23, 2018 23:34
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