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Hobo Erotica posted:There is enough energy contained in a meter squared of sunlight to melt steel. *twitch* This is not a sentence that makes sense. That aside, FUSION  Pros: a hundred years from now, it might be the energy source we've always wanted. Cheap, clean, unlimited power. Cons: the earliest a prototype reactor could come online is DEMO in 2033, the capital costs are ENORMOUS, the current feasible fuel mixes irradiate the lining so there's actually decent amount of waste, it can't be scaled down, and in all likelihood it's always going to be fifty years away. THORIUM  Pros: like uranium fission! But without the proliferation concerns, because a Th-232 bomb would go off in your hands before it was even half done, and without the scarcity concerns bec- well Jakiri already addressed this. Cons: it's a massive pain in the rear end. It's a pain to fabricate, it's a pain to control, it's a pain to dispose of. And as the big proliferation concern nowadays is dirty bombs rather than full-blown nukes, it isn't much better than uranium in that respect either. - What I'm saying is that there are no magic bullets. Any time you see a miracle-energy story on Reddit or in New Scientist, you should be incredibly skeptical. The best solution by far is traditional fission base-load with as much geographically appropriate solar/wind/tidal as the grid can take. Unfortunately private nuclear power is a recipe for disaster, and modern political thinking does not allow for a repetition of France's incredible success with EdF. coffeetable fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Sep 4, 2012 |
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Sep 4, 2012 15:36
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Hobo Erotica posted:Cheers, I'll chuck this in the OP, unless office Thug has some objections or wants to clean it up. Go with whatever Thug says. I know considerable (considerably) less about thorium than I do fusion, and mainly just wanted to knock it down a bit because People On The Internet tend to be such big fans. Sorry for being so willfully misinformed Thug, and thank you for calling me out on it. Will endeavour be better educated next time  e: As to the sentence I was twitching about Hobo, the problem is that you're comparing power density to temperature. There's enough power in a square centimeter of sunlight to melt steel should it be sufficiently concentrated. A better comparison would be that 1m^2 of sunlight could boil a cup of coffee in 90 seconds. (roughly) coffeetable fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Sep 5, 2012 |
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Sep 5, 2012 00:59
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If you want a fusion-related thing to get excited about, the Wendelstein 7-X magnets are working nicely. The W7X is the largest stellarator yet. Compared to tokamaks, stellarators use much more complex geometries to achieve more stable magnetic fields. First plasma is scheduled for later this year. Over at ITER, construction's begun on the basement of the tokamak complex. First plasma was expected in 2020, but there'll be revised estimate in November (2022 or 2023 are most likely). As for practicality: the most optimistic plans for a commercial reactor have electricity generation in 2050, which I interpret as '2060 at the earliest'. So for the foreseeable future, it's renewables or bust. coffeetable fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 09:29
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phanatic are you a very enthusiastic amateur or an actual fusion/nuclear physics/whatever researcher (from my amateur perspective, your post history could easily read as either)
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Aug 11, 2015 15:27
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