131–140 of 240 posts
Edit: I think this is what I meant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the war in Iraq $1 trillion :(
$1 trillion is not a lot of money for the US. the Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest spending on US public debt will hit $915 billion in 2028[1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-on-a-course-to-spend-more-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fusion is notoriously underfunded. More money means you can buy better gear, hire more workers, complete projects faster and run multiple parallel sites to complete various goals at the same time. Of course there is some point where adding more funding will not advance the speed as much anymore but I doubt were even close to that point at the moment.
Why is it so underfunded? The first country to build one will be taking a big step to reducing their dependence on other countries for energy. I can understand big oil exporters not wanting to push it too much (although it's unlikely to come into fruition for the current generation of politians), but for others isn't it a no brainer?
- Oil/coal/natural gas lobbyists and interests which hinder tax payer funded research.
- The fact that there is no guarantee we will ever figure it out and no idea whatsoever as to how much it will cost to figure it out. Investors like returns, in their lifetime, leaving largely tax payer funded research as the greatest source of funds... see above.
And then with government-funded research... if a government figures out fusion, what do you do with it? Do you license it to private industry? Do you make state-owned power plants?
If you give it to private it industry, it's going to get to other nations. If it gets to other nations, you lose non-electrical power and create potential strategic issues, which means you are motivated NOT to share the technology.
It sucks.
I wish we could all just get along, fund stuff like this and space exploration, and get over petty politics before our species goes extinct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "100M degrees" (Kelvin) Off topic, but this distinction made me laugh. Like the difference between Kelvin and Celsius would throw everything off.
Well, there is almost certainly somebody that read the number and thought about Fahrenheit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the plasma "escapes" the confinement and contacts anything (ie. the walls of the Tokamak) it rapidly cools down to temperatures below where fusion can happen. Sounds relieving. I used to think that «if the plasma "escapes" the confinement and contacts anything (ie. the walls of the Tokamak) it rapidly…» disintegrates everything around or, when the power is huge enough, causes an apocalypse…
At those temperatures, it will disintegrate whatever it touches. It's just that, unlike fission, fusion is unstable[1] so it quickly fizzles out, and damage will be local. [1] Unstable in the sense that it is hard to maintain fusion conditions, not in the Hollywood sense that it blows up if you look at it sideways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there is almost certainly somebody that read the number and thought about Fahrenheit.
Do scientists use farenheit? Genuine question
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any idea on how much money we're spending on this? Also, I can imagine it's a joint project only partially because we can share the cost, I imagine another reason to work together is so that no one country gets this technology first.
Initial budget was €5bn. Current budget is four times that and with completion nowhere near estimates of the final cost are as high as $60bn. Go figure. If by "we" you mean US's share, that's 9% of total costs. China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US are paying 9% each and EU is paying 46%.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except Wikipedia seems to put the barrier significantly higher, at 100 keV: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_fusion#Tempera...
A system of particles in thermal equilibrium will contain a small fraction whose kinetic energy exceeds the average by a factor of 10. Also, the energy available in the center-of-mass frame of two colliding particles is higher if they happen to be moving in opposite directions. That could give you another factor of up to 2. In any event, I don't think you want your fuel fusing all at once!