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His Divine Shadow posted:Goons nowadays seems to think it's cool to think fusion is non viable and that it's gonna remain so. Yes to (a), no to (b). Fusion isn't a single invention but requires multiple breakthroughs across a range of fields, particularly materials science. None of these are impossible, but given their diverse nature they're unlikely to all happen at once. We're therefore most likely to chip away at these angles for several decades before advances in varying fields get to a point where you can make a viable reactor. This is, in fact, exactly how international collaboration around fusion is structured - not just through ITER, but through projects like IFMIF. However, even when all these advances come through, there's no way that commercial fusion won't be highly capital intensive for a very a long time, and if you want a highly capital intensive always on low carbon source of power, just build fission plant.
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Aug 27, 2021 07:04
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His Divine Shadow posted:Goons nowadays seems to think it's cool to think fusion is non viable and that it's gonna remain so. I first heard "20 years away" when I was a Physics Undergrad in the late 1970's. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns but this hasn't been a really good trend.
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Aug 27, 2021 07:09
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Aethernet posted:Yes to (a), no to (b). Fusion isn't a single invention but requires multiple breakthroughs across a range of fields, particularly materials science. None of these are impossible, but given their diverse nature they're unlikely to all happen at once. We're therefore most likely to chip away at these angles for several decades before advances in varying fields get to a point where you can make a viable reactor. Sure, but it just seems to me it's like cool to just slag on fusion research nowadays. Like it seems to me some people are implying we should just stop bothering with it.
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Aug 27, 2021 07:18
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"nowadays" Fusion power always being 30 years away is a joke that's probably been around for longer than you've been alive lol
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Aug 27, 2021 07:31
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QuarkJets posted:"nowadays" Those people have always existed, but it mostly seemed they where a mix of fossil fuel advocates and old boomers. Young people always seemed to be more optimistic. Maybe it's a sign of the forums population ageing into their 40s.
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Aug 27, 2021 07:38
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His Divine Shadow posted:Goons nowadays seems to think it's cool to think fusion is non viable and that it's gonna remain so. Honestly thought I'd clicked into the yugioh thread for five seconds. Barring any technological groundbreaking breakthroughs I'm confident with putting it into the fantasy isle. We have a lot of technologies accessible today that we're already under-utilizing.
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Aug 27, 2021 07:39
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His Divine Shadow posted:Sure, but it just seems to me it's like cool to just slag on fusion research nowadays. Like it seems to me some people are implying we should just stop bothering with it. There's a happy middleground between 'fusion is dumb' and 'fusion will solve all our problems' where most sensible people are, I think.
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Aug 27, 2021 08:07
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Fusion good but we should've thrown like half a trillion dollars extra at making it happen 20 years ago to make the fusion in 20 years thing actually viable. at the current funding level there aren't enough fusion scientists and the fusion scientists that exist are wasting too much time writing hopeless grant applications for side projects instead of actually making fusion power viable. Since we didn't throw half a trillion dollars at the problem (that kind of money is reserved for contractors involved in occupying desert countries) fusion is now a bit late for actually doing anything about climate change so subsidising fission is more of a short term priority. No reason other than neoliberalism's death throes that we couldn't double or triple fusion funding at the same time though.
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Aug 27, 2021 09:46
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Fusion is good. Barring some insane development, we may or may not live long enough to see a first practical energy application out of it. Sad, but that is what will happen. Fission is good. Barring some insane development, fission is going the way of coal, and will become more and more irrelevant as times passes by. Sad, but that is what will happen.
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Aug 27, 2021 11:13
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His Divine Shadow posted:Those people have always existed, but it mostly seemed they where a mix of fossil fuel advocates and old boomers. 
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Aug 27, 2021 12:47
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Dante80 posted:Fission is good. Barring some insane development, fission is going the way of coal, and will become more and more irrelevant as times passes by. Sad, but that is what will happen. To have a zero-carbon energy supply we need either: 1. Fission for base load with renewables filling out the rest 2. Insane development in battery storage plus renewables 3. Ridiculous overbuilding of renewables Is there a way I'm not aware of? 'Cause at the moment we seem to be heading down "Renewables with the base load provided by coal and gas because we're too scared of nuclear" street
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Aug 27, 2021 12:55
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His Divine Shadow posted:Sure, but it just seems to me it's like cool to just slag on fusion research nowadays. Like it seems to me some people are implying we should just stop bothering with it. Research is good. Ignoring other existing solutions based on pie in the sky research projections is bad. The unfortunate reality is that there's no good reason to assume fusion will be viable at an industrial scale before climate change is even more baked in than it is today. And there's no way to know how fast it can be scaled from that point. If human society is still chugging along in 2121 there's a decent chance fusion will be the primary power source. But that's going to be a hard target without other non carbon emitting energy sources in the interim.
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Aug 27, 2021 12:58
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Gort posted:
My comment was about what is happening and what will continue to happen. Not what "should" happen. Hence the "sad" part too.
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Aug 27, 2021 13:06
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Research is good. Ignoring other existing solutions based on pie in the sky research projections is bad. Yes that is true, Fusion won't play a role in stopping climate change. But it's still a very worthwhile goal to work towards.
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Aug 27, 2021 13:09
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Fusion is cool and would basically be a straight-up solution to a lot of the world's problems. Mass amounts of carbon-free energy with no environmental impact or proliferation concerns. The appeal is pretty apparent. It absolutely deserves more research funding than it is getting. But it's also very apparent that the public policy focus needs to be on the only immediately-deployable green technologies available: wind, solar, hydro, thermal, and fission.
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Aug 27, 2021 13:11
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Dante80 posted:Fission is good. Barring some insane development, fission is going the way of coal, and will become more and more irrelevant as times passes by. Sad, but that is what will happen. I don't see this happening, I think even if Fusion became available, Fission will probably be around for the long run just because it is the densest and most reliable form of energy we have right now.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:23
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There's this famous chart that usually gets brought up: I don't know how realistic this is, because it looks like those Itanium sales projections, but it's clearly underfunded if we're expecting to see anything out of it.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:42
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I want more fusion research funding. Like a lot more, but I’m not excited about fusion really. Does ANYONE think that we could roll out meaningful amounts of fusion power generation by 2050? Does anyone here think that we don’t need to have already nearly completely decarbonized our energy production by 2050? Fusion could end up opening up a ton of new opportunities with huge amounts of cheap clean energy, but it’s too late to hope for it to have any effect on decarbonizing our current energy economy.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:56
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One of the biggest problems with fusion development is that it's clear that our materials technology just isn't up to the task yet. So either we need to bootstrap a program using tools that just aren't up to the job, or we need to develop an entire generation of technological research. To make a moon landing comparison, it's basically the Apollo program or the Artemis program. And while Apollo was really great, it also proved fundamentally unsustainable to maintain that level of funding. We had to wait 50 years for rocket and computer science to develop to the point that the Artemis program was feasible.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:59
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We don't need fusion. We have fission. Build fission until fusion is viable. Stop crying about costs related to doing what needs to be done.
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Aug 27, 2021 15:23
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Speaking of Fission https://twitter.com/W_Nuclear_News/status/1431225549440131073?s=20
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Aug 27, 2021 15:35
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His Divine Shadow posted:Goons nowadays seems to think it's cool to think fusion is non viable and that it's gonna remain so. *Commercial* fusion is non-viable and is gonna remain so. Fusion might have some niche applications where we don’t care that it’s completely uneconomical, similar to how RTGs and naval reactors are today. A suitable material to build the reactor out of might not even exist. A suitable facility to *test* materials to see if they’re suitable to build a reactor out of doesn’t currently exist. We have millions of years of fissile fuels around, and renewables are getting t cheaper all the time: making fusion commercial has a shitload of competition and it’s difficult to see a compelling case for it, even if all the theoretical and engineering and materials problems are solved. ICF in particular. I’ll quote myself from earlier in the thread: The laser target is frozen D-T contained within a copper-doped beryllium capsule that needs to be spherical to micron tolerances, and the surfaces of that sphere need to be smooth to *nanometer* tolerances. The beryllium must be precisely 150 microns thick, and a 5-micron hole is laser-drilled through it. The capsule in turns rests within an equally-precisely made hohlraum comprised of a gold/uranium alloy. Each one of these precision assemblies costs tens of thousands of dollars to make, assembly of the various parts also must be done to micron tolerances. And out of this, if fusion works perfectly and every bit of the fuel is used, you can expect a maximum possible energy output of 45 megajoules. That's 12.5 kilowatt-hours of energy; if you can manage the miraculous feat of 100% efficiently converting that back into electricity, you could sell that electricity for about $1.25. And they'd need to burn ~15 of these fuel elements per second, each and every second, which means they'd need to get the fabrication cost down the order of 10 cents per, a reduction of several orders of magnitude. No, that’s never gonna result in commercially-viable fusion power. Kaal posted:Fusion is cool and would basically be a straight-up solution to a lot of the world's problems. Mass amounts of carbon-free energy with no environmental impact or proliferation concerns. See, this is what I mean. The environmental impact of fission reactors is far, far less than the environmental impact of other things, and concerns about them are mainly political: people are scared of it. But fusion is insanely neutronic, way more so than fission is, and it will activate the hell out of the reactor vessel, so you still have nuclear waste to deal with. The people who won't let fission happen because radioactive waste is bad aren't likely to let fusion happen, either. And if you're concerned about proliferation (which is a laugh, the entire world sat and watched North Korea develop not just nuclear reactors but ICBMs and did nothing to stop it, pardon me if I think 'but proliferation' is just an excuse to justify doing nothing), there are fission reactors that are non-proliferating, and nothing's stopping us from building them but the said aforementioned FUD. mobby_6kl posted:There's this famous chart that usually gets brought up: Three points: 1. Chart's made by a guy whose income is based on funding Tokamak research. 2. It's now 2021. Extrapolate that chart, and now integrate and see when the total area under the curve equals the total area under the "by 2005" line. 3. Geoffrey has *no idea* how much money it would take to achieve commercial fusion, or even if it is a problem that will go away if you throw enough money at it. Engineering problems are like that, but fusion is by no means simply an engineering problem. Might as well redraw this chart and say "Well, if we'd spent X money instead of Y money where X is a quantity greater than Y, we'd have cured cancer in 2005!" The chart is utterly meaningless. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Aug 27, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 16:21
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Phanatic posted:A suitable facility to *test* materials to see if they’re suitable to build a reactor out of doesn’t currently exist. Not entirely true, there's a couple test facilities for testing fusion reactor materials. https://www.ornl.gov/division/mstd/program/fusion-materials Including various tokamaks around the world used for testing exposure to plasma and neutron bombardment. They do exist, its the funding to keep it going that is constantly in doubt. But as we've already said: Fission is here, now, and entirely viable. We should be using it.
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Aug 27, 2021 16:37
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CommieGIR posted:Not entirely true, there's a couple test facilities for testing fusion reactor materials. Fusion is way more neutronic than these facilities (which do a lot of testing that has nothing to do with nuclear fusion reactors), and the neutrons from D:T are 14 MeV as compared to about 2 MeV for a fission neutron. Which is the whole point behind IFMIF: a dedicated neutron accelerator that is intended to produce a neutron flux similar to that seen in an operating D:T plant, specifically to explore materials for that purpose in that regime. I mean, there are papers detailing effects of 8 displacements per atom at the ORNL facilities, but a commercial fusion reactor will need to withstand 15 dpa per year of operation. ITER will generate 2 dpa over its entire lifetime, for reference, and the various tokamaks you refer to generate far less. None of these are really suitable. IFMIF is even further behind schedule than ITER.
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Aug 27, 2021 16:49
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Phanatic posted:Fusion is way more neutronic than these facilities (which do a lot of testing that has nothing to do with nuclear fusion reactors), and the neutrons from D:T are 14 MeV as compared to about 2 MeV for a fission neutron. Which is the whole point behind IFMIF: a dedicated neutron accelerator that is intended to produce a neutron flux similar to that seen in an operating D:T plant, specifically to explore materials for that purpose in that regime. I mean, there are papers detailing effects of 8 displacements per atom at the ORNL facilities, but a commercial fusion reactor will need to withstand 15 dpa per year of operation. ITER will generate 2 dpa over its entire lifetime, for reference, and the various tokamaks you refer to generate far less. None of these are really suitable. Yes, but that's not the same as saying the facilities don't exist: They do, they just are not yet at the levels needed for a power reactor. Which, again, is partially a funding problem.
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Aug 27, 2021 16:50
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suck my woke dick posted:Fusion good but we should've thrown like half a trillion dollars extra at making it happen 20 years ago to make the fusion in 20 years thing actually viable. at the current funding level there aren't enough fusion scientists and the fusion scientists that exist are wasting too much time writing hopeless grant applications for side projects instead of actually making fusion power viable. Ok I have some personal experience in this area so I just want to clarify some things: the field of fusion research is pretty well-funded, especially relative to other scientific disciplines, and more money only partially solves the overall "create a viable fusion power plant" problem. Many of the problems of the last 50 years have been in the fundamentals: even our ability to accurately model such complex systems is still evolving, in no small part because this is frontier research. More money in fusion research is good, but no matter how much you spend it probably still does not result in a viable fusion reactor in 20 years (and by viable I mean as a government-run public-good power plant, not even necessarily producing enough energy to entice the commercial sector)
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Aug 27, 2021 16:52
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CommieGIR posted:Yes, but that's not the same as saying the facilities don't exist: They do, they just are not yet at the levels needed for a power reactor. Which, again, is partially a funding problem. I said *suitable* facilities do not exist. "They're not at the levels needed for a power reactor" means they're not suitable for that purpose.
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Aug 27, 2021 16:54
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Like when ITER was planned its projected ability to produce net power was extremely speculative. It's first and foremost a research project
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Aug 27, 2021 16:55
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Yeah, I am in general very suspicious of the popular idea that all technological problems, which don’t on their face violate basic 0th order physics principles, can be solved by throwing more money at them. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Aug 27, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 16:55
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QuarkJets posted:Like when ITER was planned its projected ability to produce net power was extremely speculative. It's first and foremost a research project Yes, definitely. A lot of people seem to think it's build ITER, and then commercial fusion is next. ITER's going to get to Q=10, and a fusion output of 500MW, which means that 50MW of thermal power will be delivered to the plasma. But you put thermal power into the plasma with big oscillating EM fields and particle injectors, which will draw well in excess of 50MW of electrical power, so the actual engineering gain is lower than that. And ITER won't be turning any of that 500MW of fusion power into electricity at all. And it's only intended to sustain a fusion reaction for 8 minutes at a time. It'd say ITER is exclusively a research project.
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Aug 27, 2021 17:14
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https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1431337289519616005?s=20
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Aug 27, 2021 21:24
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Fusion research is useful if only because it helps us advance material sciences, which has wide applications outside of power generation. In the near-term though? Build ALLLLLL the fission plants 
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Aug 27, 2021 22:49
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Gort posted:To have a zero-carbon energy supply we need either: Even with options 2 or 3, solar panels are built in places with coal power then shipped across the world on container ships burning incredibly dirty fuel. You also need some kind of streamlined eminent domain laws to get around the NIMBY's, and a reform of existing environmental laws to avoid getting stuck in delays due to environmental impact report hell. Plus you're going to need long transmission lines from the places where the renewable power is generated to the cities where it's actually used, which are also problematic in places like California during fire season. But you are correct as to where we're heading
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Aug 28, 2021 03:05
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Option 1 isn’t available here in Australia so a mix of 2/3 is where we are headed. We are looking at other potential storage solutions including new pumped storage hydro (I.e. not based on existing rivers) and hydrogen storage. Community batteries, V2G, dispatchable demand (such as desal) also get talked about. Granted, our grid is orders of magnitude smaller, but general feeling is that we’ll get there with renewables. Of course our govt is throwing money at fossil fuels including “clean gas”.
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Aug 28, 2021 04:52
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QuarkJets posted:Ok I have some personal experience in this area so I just want to clarify some things: the field of fusion research is pretty well-funded, especially relative to other scientific disciplines, and more money only partially solves the overall "create a viable fusion power plant" problem. Many of the problems of the last 50 years have been in the fundamentals: even our ability to accurately model such complex systems is still evolving, in no small part because this is frontier research. More money in fusion research is good, but no matter how much you spend it probably still does not result in a viable fusion reactor in 20 years (and by viable I mean as a government-run public-good power plant, not even necessarily producing enough energy to entice the commercial sector) Ok then. Why is ITER construction a loving mess where suppliers from every major contributor want to try making fusion reactor parts to establish domestic expertise, meaning half the time parts literally don't fit because some idiot ignored part of the spec or had lovely QC? Just provide enough money for the major partners to build like 5 big fusion reactors so they can all get their absolutely vital suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 28, 2021 10:36
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Just throwing literal cargo ships full of cash at a problem eventually has diminishing returns (some experiments are going to take as long as they take no matter what), but "fusion is funded better than the description of new fungus gnat species" isn't an argument. There is no reason to waste any time when the waiting period could be shortened by money, and there is no reason not to run more experiments in parallel rather than in sequence unless they all directly depend on each others results. Things like "we need to wait until there is some better way to do the testing for fusion reactor wall parts" is exactly the kind of problem we can solve with more money. Need to zap some fancy armor plate to test if that fancy armor plate will stand up to 20 years of zapping in a fusion reactor? Don't loving wait until ITER has operated for a decade, just build a dedicated radiation source which only exists to zap a large number of samples without any attempt to also be a fusion reactor. Anyone who shows up with a piece of material and a proposal that's not an obvious scam gets to stick it in the zapper. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Aug 28, 2021 |
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Aug 28, 2021 10:51
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Option 1 isn’t available here in Australia so a mix of 2/3 is where we are headed. Speaking of storage, I hadn't seen this news in thread. Tesla's Megapack in Victoria caught fire during testing. Tesla Megapack caught fire at Victorian Big Battery site in Australia
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Aug 28, 2021 13:58
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suck my woke dick posted:Just throwing literal cargo ships full of cash at a problem eventually has diminishing returns (some experiments are going to take as long as they take no matter what), but "fusion is funded better than the description of new fungus gnat species" isn't an argument. There is no reason to waste any time when the waiting period could be shortened by money, and there is no reason not to run more experiments in parallel rather than in sequence unless they all directly depend on each others results. Last year the US plasma physics community came together and said that even with unlimited Congressional funding the 2040s would be an ambitious timeline for a small productive reactor, and that timeline is contingent on the timely completion of ITER plus multiple other breakthroughs in plasma physics and materials science. The completion of ITER is necessary just for the advancements in plasma physics research that it will likely bring, but it's not a bottleneck; numerous other key advancements need to be made that aren't even dependent on ITER. I agree with the sentiment to give fusion research all of the money but like I said before, this is frontier research. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Aug 28, 2021 |
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Aug 28, 2021 17:08
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QuarkJets posted:Last year the US plasma physics came together and said that even with unlimited Congressional funding the 2040s would be an ambitious timeline for a small productive reactor, and that timeline is contingent on the timely completion of ITER plus multiple other breakthroughs in plasma physics and materials science. The completion of ITER is necessary just for the advancements in plasma physics research that it will likely bring, but it's not a bottleneck; numerous other key advancements need to be made that aren't even dependent on ITER.
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Aug 28, 2021 22:02
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Grouchio posted:Would you say last week's breakthrough is akin to creating the world's first computer chip? Or are we not even there yet? It did take 18 years between the first computer chip and the Apple II after all. Last week's news pertains solely to inertial confinement fusion, which is a super loving cool idea (what if we create a star using a shitload of lasers???) but isn't given much traction as a likely candidate for commercially-viable fusion; more scientists prefer the tokamak concept (squeeze a donut of high energy plasma with super powerful magnets). What they achieved last week was a record in terms of raw energy produced. That's definitely not first computer chip territory; that would be a prototype reactor that actually produces much more energy than it consumes and turning that excess into electricity, which the NIF is still nowhere close to accomplishing.
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Aug 28, 2021 23:56
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