(Thread IKs:
Stereotype)
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:A good breakdown on why science reporting on fusion power is bullshit: 
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Oct 3, 2021 00:43
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mediaphage posted:you're not wrong, i think, though it's not all of it. Also there's the fact that the future is now more unevenly distributed than ever. When you're listing the LHC, new medical therapies and the Musk stuff, there's an asterisk attached to it noting that most of the pop isn't seeing much direct benefit or is even close enough to it that they notice or think about it much.
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Oct 3, 2021 00:46
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we either could have invented fusion and had infinite energy or we could air condition a bunch of tents in a desert halfway around the world for two decades and i think you'll be happy to know which one we did
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Oct 3, 2021 00:46
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im sure we might eventually have a fusion breakthrough but at this point it's going to just power a 10,000,000,000% increase in air conditioner usage
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Oct 3, 2021 00:46
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the solution to the planet warming uncontrollably is to ignite a tiny sun, or more likely thousands of them.
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Oct 3, 2021 00:48
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Rectal Death Adept posted:im sure we might eventually have a fusion breakthrough but at this point it's going to just power a 10,000,000,000% increase in air conditioner usage it's true with that said we are not even remotely close to anything that will actually produce useful energy in the absolute best case scenario iter will use about twice as much electricity as it will ever ever make we don't actually know if fusion will make useful electricity. and even if we'd put money at it it doesn't mean we'd have gotten any closer. damned sight better use than war though
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Oct 3, 2021 00:56
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Stereotype posted:we either could have invented fusion and had infinite energy or we could air condition a bunch of tents in a desert halfway around the world for two decades and i think you'll be happy to know which one we did  afghanistan cost $41b per year. so actually we spent the entire budget for inventing fusion 20x of course now the federal reserve invents fusion 70x per day in reverse repos 
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Oct 3, 2021 01:05
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Stereotype posted:we either could have invented fusion and had infinite energy or we could air condition a bunch of tents in a desert halfway around the world for two decades and i think you'll be happy to know which one we did for those not familiar https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning  vs. reality  my dumb opinion is that the sun is powered by fusion, and it's hot controlled fusion is a really cool pipe-dream but the actual feedback from machines that cost more than your city sports team is about 1:1.1 always has been although, speaking frankly in a science fiction kind of way if we crack the light speed barrier or fusion power or whatever we may be
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Oct 3, 2021 01:16
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Rectal Death Adept posted:im sure we might eventually have a fusion breakthrough but at this point it's going to just power a 10,000,000,000% increase in air conditioner usage Don't forget the  television bragging ads from the corporate conglomerate that funded it, speaking as if they just singlehandedly ~saved the world~ as they ensure that they're reimbursed 100,000 times over for all the "cheap, clean energy" they've loosed upon the world.
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Oct 3, 2021 01:28
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Don't forget the this... this is probably the most disgusting facet of modern media... a freaking toilet paper company https://uk.whogivesacrap.org/ claims its worlwide distribution and consumption as good for the planet/ take your loving toilet paper and shove it up the rear end of your ceo until his loving eyes pop out
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Oct 3, 2021 01:35
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Over here we're got Chevron jerking itself off over its GREEN INITIATIVES on commercial breaks. "Chevron: Doing a few decent things half-assedly, 50+ years too late. gently caress you."
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Oct 3, 2021 01:44
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Over here we're got Chevron jerking itself off over its GREEN INITIATIVES on commercial breaks. just lol, lmao
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Oct 3, 2021 01:47
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BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:for those not familiar nuclear energy was a discovery and fusion is an engineering miracle. if the input 1 can be recycled directly from the output 1.1 then you have infinite energy. i'm sure the way we would likely do it would need a bunch of coal or natural gas though, so then you're just burning coal in a different way.
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Oct 3, 2021 01:49
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it was pretty fun to learn that those giant solar towers in the desert of nevada are actually just natural gas plants that are lightly amplified by solar for a small part of the day. also that all the mirrors break constantly and are all from fossil fuels and mining and also the shade kills any desert plants that hold the soil together even a little and so you end up with huge barren dust bowls when the thing eventually irreparably breaks in 20 years away.
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Oct 3, 2021 01:50
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cold fusion is a revolution in energy generation. finally we can build all the coal mining and oil drilling equipment we want, without having to worry about the energy cost
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Oct 3, 2021 01:51
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infinite energy really needs to come with star trek replicators to save us
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Oct 3, 2021 01:55
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Stereotype posted:nuclear energy was a discovery and fusion is an engineering miracle. if the input 1 can be recycled directly from the output 1.1 then you have infinite energy. i'm sure the way we would likely do it would need a bunch of coal or natural gas though, so then you're just burning coal in a different way. we could make a fusion power plant right now. we simply need to detonate a small hydrogen bomb in a big pool of water and use the steam to turn a turbine. easy peasy
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Oct 3, 2021 01:57
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Stereotype posted:it was pretty fun to learn that those giant solar towers in the desert of nevada are actually just natural gas plants that are lightly amplified by solar for a small part of the day. also that all the mirrors break constantly and are all from fossil fuels and mining and also the shade kills any desert plants that hold the soil together even a little and so you end up with huge barren dust bowls when the thing eventually irreparably breaks in 20 years away. i mean not quite, ivanpah, for example, puts out about three and a half times as much electricity as would be produced by a gas plant burning the same amount of gas that it uses. that doesn't make this good or green or anything, though
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Oct 3, 2021 01:58
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i saw the keanu movie, you shoot lasers at water and get power
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Oct 3, 2021 02:03
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Rectal Death Adept posted:i saw the keanu movie, you shoot lasers at water and get power you shoot neutrons at a hydrogen plasma and then compress it a lot. hydrogen isotopes are much happier being helium atoms but you gotta convince them, and then as a reward they give you infinite energy.
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Oct 3, 2021 02:13
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Stereotype posted:you shoot neutrons at a hydrogen plasma and then compress it a lot. hydrogen isotopes are much happier being helium atoms but you gotta convince them, and then as a reward they give you infinite energy. All this time we've been using scientists when we should have been using salesmen.
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Oct 3, 2021 04:53
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planet dying blah blah blah
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Oct 3, 2021 05:25
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reality is a monte carlo simulation 
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Oct 3, 2021 05:32
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im going to open my mind until i can make large matter achieve quantum superposition wherever i like and instead of using that to solve the problem i will instead open a portal to jupiter to bring in hypercanes
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Oct 3, 2021 05:50
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Stereotype posted:it was pretty fun to learn that those giant solar towers in the desert of nevada are actually just natural gas plants that are lightly amplified by solar for a small part of the day. also that all the mirrors break constantly and are all from fossil fuels and mining and also the shade kills any desert plants that hold the soil together even a little and so you end up with huge barren dust bowls when the thing eventually irreparably breaks in 20 years away. iirc the spanish have gotten around this by using molten salt, where it gets so fuckin rip roarin hot that it melts blocks of salt and they use that to power turbines. The salt takes a while to get melted, like a whole day or something, but once it's all liquid it stays liquid and the plant produces power even if the mirrors aren't working at full capacity, and it keeps producing power at night. You need a fuckload of mirrors though and every little misalignment adds up. Ofc instead of doing that you could just use gas burners to keep the salt liquid.
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Oct 3, 2021 08:17
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it's unamerican to run your molten salt reactor on anything but clean coal
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Oct 3, 2021 10:56
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SniperWoreConverse posted:iirc the spanish have gotten around this by using molten salt, where it gets so fuckin rip roarin hot that it melts blocks of salt and they use that to power turbines. The salt takes a while to get melted, like a whole day or something, but once it's all liquid it stays liquid and the plant produces power even if the mirrors aren't working at full capacity, and it keeps producing power at night. You need a fuckload of mirrors though and every little misalignment adds up. yeah this is what the american ones do too, but a critical component of keeping that salt molten is natural gas. another poster mentioned that it isn't just an additional component like i had dismissively stated, it ends up being a significant fraction and produces 300% the electricity of a pure natural gas plant per volume of natural gas burned. you're still building a ton of mirrors to get that benefit, and believe it or not there isn't such thing as "empty consequence free space." not a serious solution
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Oct 3, 2021 11:41
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Stereotype posted:yeah this is what the american ones do too, but a critical component of keeping that salt molten is natural gas. yes i did say that it didn’t make it good or green specifically in terms of solar plants it doesn’t matter, pv got better quicker than anyone expected and nobody is seriously building concentrated solar anymore afaik
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Oct 3, 2021 13:15
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Stereotype posted:yeah this is what the american ones do too, but a critical component of keeping that salt molten is natural gas. your holier than though phrasing and judgemental sniping betrays a truly childish and immature understanding of what the plant was for. back in the early 2010's we had no idea that the price of solar-PV was going to plummet as fast as it did and "win" so we had to build giant proof of concept plants of the alternative (solar-thermal) to see if they would work. no one knew which (if either!) would work, so for example both solyndra *and* invanpah got funded. it didn't pan out. the reliability was just a couple % too low, and the gaps that needed gas to bridge turned out to be closer to "everyday" than "a week or two in the winter". funny enough, solyndra failed too, not because solar-pv turned out to be too expensive, but because one-time subsidized solar-pv cant compete with heavily subsidized solar-pv. in both cases however the failures are GOOD THINGS because it means we ACTUALLY TRIED and ACTUALLY SPENT SOME $ and ACTUALLY BUILT THINGS libs crying about ivanpah are the exact same thing, just the other side of the coin, as chuds complaining about solyndra. just the endless entitled baby attitude of americans that they're entitled to the end results without any of the work it takes to get there.
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Oct 3, 2021 13:45
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MightyBigMinus posted:your holier than though phrasing and judgemental sniping betrays a truly childish and immature understanding of what the plant was for. All of green energy is a sham. The only thing that is going to work is massive reductions in consumption. Which of course is never gonna happen so roll coal.  To think that some kind of new energy source could ever be enough for this demonic cracker nation. lol. lmao.
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Oct 3, 2021 13:58
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Stereotype posted:yeah this is what the american ones do too, but a critical component of keeping that salt molten is natural gas. Rip, I had assumed the decently built ones at least didn't need gas in normal operation
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Oct 3, 2021 14:22
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I'm reading 2052 because it was recommended in this thread and there's a whole lot of "we didn't do that and things are worse now" since this was published in 2012
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Oct 3, 2021 14:35
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mediaphage posted:yes i did say that it didn’t make it good or green It has potential in some post-collapse situations mind, where the fabrication is too scarce for modern PV tech.
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Oct 3, 2021 14:43
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StratGoatCom posted:It has potential in some post-collapse situations mind, where the fabrication is too scarce for modern PV tech. if we have the infrastructure to build and maintain NG installations and power plants, we can produce thermal batteries that can accomplish the same thing in this scenario
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Oct 3, 2021 14:54
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mediaphage posted:
trying desperately and mostly failing to match a 65 year old soviet rocket design is not 'pretty interesting things'
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Oct 3, 2021 15:12
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If they manage to land it that's pretty interesting. If it blows the gently caress up that's exciting too
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Oct 3, 2021 15:19
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MightyBigMinus posted:in both cases however the failures are GOOD THINGS because it means we ACTUALLY TRIED and ACTUALLY SPENT SOME $ and ACTUALLY BUILT THINGS This. I watched that docu when it came out. It dedicates a bunch of time to biofuels and it's basically right about those, and it also points out some of the worst instances of hypocrisy/grift in "green" tech. But it's wrong (or actively deceptive) on many of the details wrt. solar and wind. From memory, their conclusion (we need to rethink society and draw down consumption) isn't wrong, but they get there by way of "nothing green will ever work!" A more correct take would be something like "there are green solutions that work (even (or maybe especially?) ancient windmills were indisputably energy positive, for instance), but they won't scale in the timeframe we've been dealt (by ourselves), or get a big enough ROI that we can fairly keep living as comfortably/carelessly as we currently do in western societies in the short term." There's an extremely large amount of money being thrown at low- or negative-ROI fossil fuel activities, idiotic defense tech, etc. We should be using it on projects that have even a tiny chance of making things better instead, and when they don't, at least add to the things we can cross off our list. e: I should add that what I think ought to happen and what I think will happen are very different things.
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Oct 3, 2021 15:20
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mediaphage posted:if we have the infrastructure to build and maintain NG installations and power plants, we can produce thermal batteries that can accomplish the same thing in this scenario I was talking about just that
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Oct 3, 2021 15:52
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atelier morgan posted:trying desperately and mostly failing to match a 65 year old soviet rocket design is not 'pretty interesting things' lol ok
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Oct 3, 2021 16:05
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anything musk touches is guaranteed to be an incredibly expensive boondoggle that sucks up public money and fails to make the world's problems even a tiny bit better
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Oct 3, 2021 16:48
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